bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Vector Quantized Approach for Text to Speech Synthesis on Real-World Spontaneous Speech
Authors: Chen Li-Wei , Watanabe Shinji , Rudnicky Alexander
Published: June 2023

Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems trained on reading or acted corpora have achieved near human-level naturalness. The diversity of human speech, however, often goes beyond the coverage of these corpora. We believe the ability to handle such diversity is crucial for AI systems to achieve human-level communication. Our work explores the use of more abundant real-world data for building speech synthesizers. We train TTS systems using real-world speech from YouTube and podcasts. We observe the mismatch between training and inference alignments in mel-spectrogram based autoregressive models, leading to unintelligible synthesis, and demonstrate that learned discrete codes within multiple code groups effectively resolves this issue. We introduce our MQTTS system whose architecture is designed for multiple code generation and monotonic alignment, along with the use of a clean silence prompt to improve synthesis quality. We conduct ablation analyses to identify the efficacy of our methods. We show that MQTTS outperforms existing TTS systems in several objective and subjective measures.
Learning to Memorize Entailment and Discourse Relations for Persona-Consistent Dialogues
Authors: Chen Ruijun , Wang Jin , Yu Liang-Chih , Zhang Xuejie
Published: June 2023

Maintaining engagement and consistency is particularly important in dialogue systems. Existing works have improved the performance of dialogue systems by intentionally learning interlocutor personas with sophisticated network structures. One issue with this approach is that it requires more personal corpora with annotations. Additionally, these models typically perform the next utterance prediction to generate a response but neglect the discourse coherence in the entire conversation. To address these issues, this study proposes a method of learning to memorize entailment and discourse relations for persona-consistent dialogue tasks. Entailment text pairs in natural language inference dataset were applied to learn latent entailment relations as external memories by premise-to-hypothesis generation task. Furthermore, an internal memory with a similar architecture was applied to the discourse information in the dialogue. Placing orthogonality restrictions on these two memory spaces ensures that the latent entailment relations remain dialogue-independent. Both memories collaborate to obtain entailment and discourse representation for the generation, allowing a deeper understanding of both consistency and coherence. Experiments on two large public datasets, PersonaChat and DSTC7-AVSD, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Both automatic and human evaluations indicate that the proposed model outperforms several strong baselines in terms of both persona consistency and response coherence. Our source code is availabled at https://github.com/Chenrj233/LMEDR.
Cogito Ergo Summ: Abstractive Summarization of Biomedical Papers via Semantic Parsing Graphs and Consistency Rewards
Authors: Frisoni Giacomo , Italiani Paolo , Salvatori Stefano , Moro Gianluca
Published: June 2023

The automatic synthesis of biomedical publications catalyzes a profound research interest elicited by literature congestion. Current sequence-to-sequence models mainly rely on the lexical surface and seldom consider the deep semantic interconnections between the entities mentioned in the source document. Such superficiality translates into fabricated, poorly informative, redundant, and near-extractive summaries that severely restrict their real-world application in biomedicine, where the specialized jargon and the convoluted facts further emphasize task complexity. To fill this gap, we argue that the summarizer should acquire semantic interpretation over input, exploiting structured and unambiguous representations to capture and conserve the most relevant parts of the text content. This paper presents CogitoErgoSumm, the first framework for biomedical abstractive summarization equipping large pre-trained language models with rich semantic graphs. Precisely, we infuse graphs from two complementary semantic parsing techniques with different goals and granularities—Event Extraction and Abstract Meaning Representation, also designing a reward signal to maximize information content preservation through reinforcement learning. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the CDSR dataset show that our solution achieves competitive performance according to multiple metrics, despite using 2.5x fewer parameters. Results and ablation studies indicate that our joint text-graph model generates more enlightening, readable, and consistent summaries. Code available at: https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/cogito-ergo-summ.
Denoising Pre-training for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Curriculum Learning
Authors: Geng Xiang , Zhang Yu , Li Jiahuan , Huang Shujian , Yang Hao , Tao Shimin , Chen Yimeng , Xie Ning , Chen Jiajun
Published: June 2023

Quality estimation (QE) aims to assess the quality of machine translations when reference translations are unavailable. QE plays a crucial role in many real-world applications of machine translation. Because labeled QE data are usually limited in scale, recent research, such as DirectQE, pre-trains QE models with pseudo QE data and obtains remarkable performance. However, there tends to be inevitable noise in the pseudo data, hindering models from learning QE accurately. Our study shows that the noise mainly comes from the differences between pseudo and real translation outputs. To handle this problem, we propose CLQE, a denoising pre-training framework for QE based on curriculum learning. More specifically, we propose to measure the degree of noise in the pseudo QE data with some metrics based on statistical or distributional features. With the guidance of these metrics, CLQE gradually pre-trains the QE model using data from cleaner to noisier. Experiments on various benchmarks reveal that CLQE outperforms DirectQE and other strong baselines. We also show that with our framework, pre-training converges faster than directly using the pseudo data. We make our CLQE code available (https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe).
Instance Smoothed Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding
Authors: He Hongliang , Zhang Junlei , Lan Zhenzhong , Zhang Yue
Published: June 2023

Contrastive learning-based methods, such as unsup-SimCSE, have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances in learning unsupervised sentence embeddings. However, in previous studies, each embedding used for contrastive learning only
derived from one sentence instance, and we call these embeddings instance-level embeddings. In other words, each embedding is regarded as a unique class of its own, which may hurt the generalization performance. In this study, we propose IS-CSE (instance smoothing contrastive sentence embedding) to smooth the boundaries of embeddings in the feature space. Specifically, we retrieve embeddings from a dynamic memory buffer according to the semantic similarity to get a positive embedding group. Then embeddings in the group are aggregated by a self-attention operation to produce a smoothed instance embedding for further analysis. We evaluate our method on standard semantic text similarity (STS) tasks and achieve an average of 78.30%, 79.47%, 77.73%, and 79.42% Spearman’s correlation on the base of BERT-base, BERT-large, RoBERTa-base, and RoBERTa-large respectively, a 2.05%, 1.06%, 1.16% and 0.52% improvement compared to unsup-SimCSE.
COCA: COllaborative CAusal Regularization for Audio-Visual Question Answering
Authors: Lao Mingrui , Pu Nan , Liu Yu , He Kai , Bakker Erwin M. , Lew Michael S.
Published: June 2023

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a sophisticated QA task, which aims at answering textual questions over given video-audio pairs with comprehensive multimodal reasoning. Through detailed causal-graph analyses and careful inspections of their learning processes, we reveal that AVQA models are not only prone to over-exploit prevalent language bias, but also suffer from additional joint-modal biases caused by the shortcut relations between textual-auditory/visual co-occurrences and dominated answers. In this paper, we propose a COllabrative CAusal (COCA) Regularization to remedy this more challenging issue of data biases.
Specifically, a novel Bias-centered Causal Regularization (BCR) is proposed to alleviate specific shortcut biases by intervening bias-irrelevant causal effects, and further introspect the predictions of AVQA models in counterfactual and factual scenarios. Based on the fact that the dominated bias impairing model robustness for different samples tends to be different, we introduce a Multi-shortcut Collaborative Debiasing (MCD) to measure how each sample suffers from different biases, and dynamically adjust their debiasing concentration to different shortcut correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness as well as backbone-agnostic ability of our COCA strategy, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale MUSIC-AVQA dataset.
Online Noisy Continual Relation Learning
Authors: Li Guozheng , Wang Peng , Luo Qiqing , Liu Yanhe , Ke Wenjun
Published: June 2023

Recent work for continual relation learning has achieved remarkable progress. However, most existing methods only focus on tackling catastrophic forgetting to improve performance in the existing setup, while continually learning relations in the real-world must overcome many other challenges. One is that the data possibly comes in an online streaming fashion with data distributions gradually changing and without distinct task boundaries. Another is that noisy labels are inevitable in real-world, as relation samples may be contaminated by label inconsistencies or labeled with distant supervision. In this work, therefore, we propose a novel continual relation learning framework that simultaneously addresses both online and noisy relation learning challenges. Our framework contains three key modules: (i) a sample separated online purifying module that divides the online data stream into clean and noisy samples, (ii) a self-supervised online learning module that circumvents inferior training signals caused by noisy data, and (iii) a semi-supervised offline finetuning module that ensures the participation of both clean and noisy samples. Experimental results on FewRel, TACRED and NYT-H with real-world noise demonstrate that our framework greatly outperforms the combinations of the state-of-the-art online continual learning and noisy label learning methods.
Graphix-T5: Mixing Pre-trained Transformers with Graph-Aware Layers for Text-to-SQL Parsing
Authors: Li Jinyang , Hui Binyuan , Cheng Reynold , Qin Bowen , Ma Chenhao , Huo Nan , Huang Fei , Du Wenyu , Si Luo , Li Yongbin
Published: June 2023

The task of text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language questions into executable SQL queries, has garnered increasing attention in recent years. One of the major challenges in text-to-SQL parsing is domain generalization, i.e., how to generalize well to unseen databases. Recently, the pre-trained text-to-text transformer model, namely T5, though not specialized for text-to-SQL parsing, has achieved state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks targeting domain generalization. In this work, we explore ways to further augment the pre-trained T5 model with specialized components for text-to-SQL parsing. Such components are expected to introduce structural inductive bias into text-to-SQL parsers thus improving the model’s capacity on (potentially multi-hop) reasoning, which is critical for generating structure-rich SQLs. To this end, we propose a new architecture GRAPHIX-T5, a mixed model with the standard pre-trained transformer model augmented by specially-designed graph-aware layers. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of GRAPHIX-T5 across four text-to-SQL benchmarks: SPIDER, SYN, REALISTIC and DK. GRAPHIX-T5 surpasses all other T5-based parsers with a significant margin, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Notably, GRAPHIX-T5-large reaches performance superior to the original T5-large by 5.7% on exact match (EM) accuracy and 6.6% on execution accuracy (EX). This even outperforms the T5-3B by 1.2% on EM and 1.5% on EX
Low Resource Quantitative Information Extraction via Structure Searching and Prefix-Based Text Generation
Authors: Li Tongliang , Wang Zixiang , Li Zhoujun
Published: June 2023

Quantitative information plays an important part in the financial and data analysis areas. Prior work relied on pattern-matching methods and complex hand-crafted rules to extract quantitative information due to the lack of labeled data. Such methods can be unstable and difficult to scale to the open domain. In this paper, we study quantitative information extraction in the low-resource setting. We propose a search-based approach by searching from the syntactic structures to acquire basic training data. The search process is simple yet effective. Then, a prefix-based text-to-text generation method is employed to extract the quantitative information. The prefix design can fully leverage pre-trained language models for text generation to serve the information extraction purpose. Experimental results show that our approaches achieves high performance with a limited amount of labeled data. The extraction result could further boost the performance of other tasks such as quantitative reasoning.
Heterogeneous-Branch Collaborative Learning for Dialogue Generation
Authors: Li Yiwei , Feng Shaoxiong , Sun Bin , Li Kan
Published: June 2023

With the development of deep learning, advanced dialogue generation methods usually require a greater amount of computational resources. One promising approach to obtaining a high-performance and lightweight model is knowledge distillation, which relies heavily on the pre-trained powerful teacher. Collaborative learning, also known as online knowledge distillation, is an effective way to conduct one-stage group distillation in the absence of a well-trained large teacher model. However, previous work has a severe branch homogeneity problem due to the same training objective and the independent identical training sets. To alleviate this problem, we consider the dialogue attributes in the training of network branches. Each branch learns the attribute-related features based on the selected subset. Furthermore, we propose a dual group-based knowledge distillation method, consisting of positive distillation and negative distillation, to further diversify the features of different branches in a steadily and interpretable way. The proposed approach significantly improves branch heterogeneity and outperforms state-of-the-art collaborative learning methods on two widely used open-domain dialogue datasets.
Effective Open Intent Classification with K-center Contrastive Learning and Adjustable Decision Boundary
Authors: Liu Xiaokang , Li Jianquan , Mu Jingjing , Yang Min , Xu Ruifeng , Wang Benyou
Published: June 2023

Open intent classification, which aims to correctly classify the known intents into their corresponding classes while identifying the new unknown (open) intents, is an essential but challenging task in dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce novel K-center contrastive learning and adjustable decision boundary learning (CLAB) to improve the effectiveness of open intent classification. First, we pre-train a feature encoder on the labeled training instances, which transfers knowledge from known intents to unknown intents. Specifically, we devise a K-center contrastive learning algorithm to learn discriminative and balanced intent features, improving the generalization of the model for recognizing open intents. Second, we devise an adjustable decision boundary learning method with expanding and shrinking (ADBES) to determine the suitable decision conditions. Concretely, we learn a decision boundary for each known intent class, which consists of a decision center and the radius of the decision boundary. We then expand the radius of the decision boundary to accommodate more in-class instances if the out-of-class instances are far from the decision boundary; otherwise, we shrink the radius of the decision boundary. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for open intent classification.For reproducibility, we submit the code at: https://github.com/lxk00/CLAP
Hierarchical Event Grounding
Authors: Ou Jiefu , Pratapa Adithya , Gupta Rishubh , Mitamura Teruko
Published: June 2023

Event grounding aims at linking mention references in text corpora to events from a knowledge base (KB). Previous work on this task focused primarily on linking to a single KB event, thereby overlooking the hierarchical aspects of events. Events in documents are typically described at various levels of spatio-temporal granularity. These hierarchical relations are utilized in downstream tasks of narrative understanding and schema construction. In this work, we present an extension to the event grounding task that requires tackling hierarchical event structures from the KB. Our proposed task involves linking a mention reference to a set of event labels from a subevent hierarchy in the KB. We propose a retrieval methodology that leverages event hierarchy through an auxiliary hierarchical loss. On an automatically created multilingual dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical loss against retrieve and re-rank baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate the systems' ability to aid hierarchical discovery among unseen events. Code is available at https://github.com/JefferyO/Hierarchical-Event-Grounding
Improving Interpretability via Explicit Word Interaction Graph Layer
Authors: Sekhon Arshdeep , Chen Hanjie , Shrivastava Aman , Wang Zhe , Ji Yangfeng , Qi Yanjun
Published: June 2023

Recent NLP literature has seen growing interest in improving model interpretability. Along this direction, we propose a trainable neural network layer that learns a global interaction graph between words and then selects more informative words using the learned word interactions. Our layer, we call WIGRAPH, can plug into any neural network-based NLP text classifiers right after its word embedding layer. Across multiple SOTA NLP models and various NLP datasets, we demonstrate that adding the WIGRAPH layer substantially improves NLP models' interpretability and enhances models' prediction performance at the same time.
A Latent-Variable Model for Intrinsic Probing
Authors: Stańczak Karolina , Torroba Hennigen Lucas , Williams Adina , Cotterell Ryan , Augenstein Isabelle
Published: June 2023

The success of pre-trained contextualized representations has prompted researchers to analyze them for the presence of linguistic information.
Indeed, it is natural to assume that these pre-trained representations do encode some level of linguistic knowledge as they have brought about large empirical improvements on a wide variety of NLP tasks, which suggests they are learning true linguistic generalization.
In this work, we focus on intrinsic probing, an analysis technique where the goal is not only to identify whether a representation encodes a linguistic attribute but also to pinpoint where this attribute is encoded.
We propose a novel latent-variable formulation for constructing intrinsic probes and derive a tractable variational approximation to the log-likelihood.
Our results show that our model is versatile and yields tighter mutual information estimates than two intrinsic probes previously proposed in the literature.
Finally, we find empirical evidence that pre-trained representations
develop a cross-lingually entangled notion of morphosyntax.
Reducing Sentiment Bias in Pre-trained Sentiment Classification via Adaptive Gumbel Attack
Authors: Tian Jiachen , Chen Shizhan , Zhang Xiaowang , Wang Xin , Feng Zhiyong
Published: June 2023

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have recently enabled rapid progress on sentiment classification under the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, where the fine-tuning phase aims to transfer the factual knowledge learned by PLMs to sentiment classification. However, current fine-tuning methods ignore the risk that PLMs cause the problem of sentiment bias, that is, PLMs tend to inject positive or negative sentiment from the contextual information of certain entities (or aspects) into their word embeddings, leading them to establish spurious correlations with labels. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Gumbel-attacked classifier that immunes sentiment bias from an adversarial-attack perspective. Due to the complexity and diversity of sentiment bias, we construct multiple Gumbel-attack expert networks to generate various noises from mixed Gumbel distribution constrained by mutual information minimization, and design an adaptive training framework to synthesize complex noise by confidence-guided controlling the number of expert networks. Finally, we capture these noises that effectively simulate sentiment bias based on the feedback of the classifier, and then propose a multi-channel parameter updating algorithm to strengthen the classifier to recognize these noises by fusing the parameters between the classifier and each expert network. Experimental results illustrate that our method significantly reduced sentiment bias and improved the performance of sentiment classification.
Identify Event Causality with Knowledge and Analogy
Authors: Wu Sifan , Zhao Ruihui , Zheng Yefeng , Pei Jian , Liu Bang
Published: June 2023

Event causality identification (ECI) aims to identify the
causal relationship between events, which plays a crucial role
in deep text understanding. Due to the diversity of real-world
causality events and difficulty in obtaining sufficient training
data, existing ECI approaches have poor generalizability and
struggle to identify the relation between seldom seen events.
In this paper, we propose to utilize both external knowledge
and internal analogy to improve ECI. On the one hand, we
utilize a commonsense knowledge graph called ConceptNet
to enrich the description of an event sample and reveal the
commonalities or associations between different events. On
the other hand, we retrieve similar events as analogy exam-
ples and glean useful experiences from such analogous neigh-
bors to better identify the relationship between a new event
pair. By better understanding different events through exter-
nal knowledge and making an analogy with similar events, we
can alleviate the data sparsity issue and improve model gener-
alizability. Extensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets
show that our model outperforms other baseline methods by
around 18% on the F1-value on average
Nested Named Entity Recognition as Building Local Hypergraphs
Authors: Yan Yukun , Cai Bingling , Song Sen
Published: June 2023

Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Based on the sequence labeling paradigm for flat named entity recognition, multiple methods have been developed to handle the nested structures. However, they either require fixed recognition order or introduce complex hypergraphs. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model named Local Hypergraph Builder Network (LHBN) that builds multiple simpler local hypergraphs to capture named entities instead of a single complex full-size hypergraph. The proposed model has three main properties: (1) The named entities that share boundaries are captured in the same local hypergraph. (2) The boundary information is enhanced by building local hypergraphs. (3) The hypergraphs can be built bidirectionally to take advantage of the identification direction preference of different named entities. Experiments illustrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on four widely used nested named entity recognition datasets: ACE04, ACE05, GENIA, and KBP17. The code is available at https://github.com/yanyk13/local-hypergraph-building-network.git.
What Does Your Face Sound Like? 3D Face Shape towards Voice
Authors: Yang Zhihan , Wu Zhiyong , Shan Ying , Jia Jia
Published: June 2023

Face-based speech synthesis provides a practical solution to generate voices from human faces. However, directly using 2D face images leads to the problems of uninterpretability and entanglement. In this paper, to address the issues, we introduce 3D face shape which (1) has an anatomical relationship between voice characteristics, partaking in the "bone conduction" of human timbre production, and (2) is naturally independent of irrelevant factors by excluding the blending process. We devise a three-stage framework to generate speech from 3D face shapes. Fully considering timbre production in anatomical and acquired terms, our framework incorporates three additional relevant attributes including face texture, facial features, and demographics. Experiments and subjective tests demonstrate our method can generate utterances matching faces well, with good audio quality and voice diversity. We also explore and visualize how the voice changes with the face. Case studies show that our method upgrades the face-voice inference to personalized custom-made voice creating, revealing a promising prospect in virtual human and dubbing applications.
FiTs: Fine-Grained Two-Stage Training for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering
Authors: Ye Qichen , Cao Bowen , Chen Nuo , Xu Weiyuan , Zou Yuexian
Published: June 2023

Knowledge-aware question answering (KAQA) requires the model to answer questions over a knowledge base, which is essential for both open-domain QA and domain-specific QA, especially when language models alone cannot provide all the knowledge needed.
Despite the promising result of recent KAQA systems which tend to integrate linguistic knowledge from pre-trained language models (PLM) and factual knowledge from knowledge graphs (KG) to answer complex questions, a bottleneck exists in effectively fusing the representations from PLMs and KGs because of (i) the semantic and distributional gaps between them, and (ii) the difficulties in joint reasoning over the provided knowledge from both modalities.
To address the above two problems, we propose a Fine-grained Two-stage training framework (FiTs) to boost the KAQA system performance: The first stage aims at aligning representations from the PLM and the KG, thus bridging the modality gaps between them, named knowledge adaptive post-training. The second stage, called knowledge-aware fine-tuning, aims to improve the model's joint reasoning ability based on the aligned representations.
In detail, we fine-tune the post-trained model via two auxiliary self-supervised tasks in addition to the QA supervision.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks in the commonsense reasoning (i.e., CommonsenseQA, OpenbookQA) and medical question answering (i.e., MedQA-USMILE) domains.
Transferable Post-hoc Calibration on Pretrained Transformers in Noisy Text Classification
Authors: Zhang Jun , Yao Wen , Chen Xiaoqian , Feng Ling
Published: June 2023

Recent work has demonstrated that pretrained transformers are overconfident in text classification tasks, which can be calibrated by the famous post-hoc calibration method temperature scaling (TS). Character or word spelling mistakes are frequently encountered in real applications and greatly threaten transformer model safety. Research on calibration under noisy settings is rare, and we focus on this direction. Based on a toy experiment, we discover that TS performs poorly when the datasets are perturbed by slight noise, such as swapping the characters, which results in distribution shift. We further utilize two metrics, predictive uncertainty and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), to measure the distribution shift between clean and noisy datasets, based on which we propose a simple yet effective transferable TS method for calibrating models dynamically. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods under noisy settings, we construct a benchmark consisting of four noise types and five shift intensities based on the QNLI, AG-News, and Emotion tasks. Experimental results on the noisy benchmark show that (1) the metrics are effective in measuring distribution shift and (2) transferable TS can significantly decrease the expected calibration error (ECE) compared with the competitive baseline ensemble TS by approximately 46.09%.
MPMQA: Multimodal Question Answering on Product Manuals
Authors: Zhang Liang , Hu Anwen , Zhang Jing , Hu Shuo , Jin Qin
Published: June 2023

Visual contents, such as illustrations and images, play a big role in product manual understanding. Existing Product Manual Question Answering (PMQA) datasets tend to ignore visual contents and only retain textual parts.
In this work, to emphasize the importance of multimodal contents, we propose a Multimodal Product Manual Question Answering (MPMQA) task. For each question, MPMQA requires the model not only to process multimodal contents but also to provide multimodal answers. To support MPMQA, a large-scale dataset PM209 is constructed with human annotations, which contains 209 product manuals from 27 well-known consumer electronic brands. Human annotations include 6 types of semantic regions for manual contents and 22,021 pairs of question and answer. Especially, each answer consists of a textual sentence and related visual regions from manuals. Taking into account the length of product manuals and the fact that a question is always related to a small number of pages, MPMQA can be naturally split into two subtasks: retrieving most related pages and then generating multimodal answers. We further propose a unified model that can perform these two subtasks all together and achieve comparable performance with multiple task-specific models. The PM209 dataset is available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MPMQA.
Improving End-to-End Speech Translation by Leveraging Auxiliary Speech and Text Data
Authors: Zhang Yuhao , Xu Chen , Hu Bojie , Zhang Chunliang , Xiao Tong , Zhu Jingbo
Published: June 2023

We present a method for introducing a text encoder into pre-trained end-to-end speech translation systems. It enhances the ability of adapting one modality (i.e., source-language speech) to another (i.e., source-language text). Thus, the speech translation model can learn from both unlabeled and labeled data, especially when the source-language text data is abundant. Beyond this, we present a denoising method to build a robust text encoder that can deal with both normal and noisy text data. Our system sets new state-of-the-arts on the MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and LibriSpeech En-Fr tasks.
An Ensemble Distillation Framework for Sentence Embeddings with Multilingual Round-Trip Translation
Authors: Zong Tianyu , Zhang Likun
Published: June 2023

In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised contrastive learning framework to improve state-of-the-art sentence embeddings. First, we train a set of contrastive submodels which take multilingual round-trip translation(RTT) as data augmentation. The RTT naturally changes the length of the same sentence and replaces Synonyms simultaneously. Then we incorporate them into a single model through knowledge distillation. Specifically, it takes an input sentence and predicts the ensemble output of all submodels via a contrastive objective. Thus we preserve nearly the same semantic expressiveness as the ensemble model without increasing the test cost. We evaluate our framework on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. Experimental results show the advantage of our framework that we achieve an average of 79.27% Spearman's correlation, a 3.02% improvement compared to the previous best results using BERT-base.
Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts
Authors: Basu Chandrayee , Vasu Rosni , Yasunaga Michihiro , Yang Qian
Published: June 2023

Automatic medical text simplification can assist providers with patient-friendly communication and make medical texts more accessible, thereby improving health literacy. But curating a quality corpus for this task requires the supervision of medical experts. In this work, we present Med-EASi (Medical dataset for Elaborative and Abstractive Simplification), a uniquely crowdsourced and finely annotated dataset for supervised simplification of short medical texts. Its expert-layman-AI collaborative annotations facilitate controllability over text simplification by marking four kinds of textual transformations: elaboration, replacement, deletion, and insertion. To learn medical text simplification, we fine-tune T5-large with four different styles of input-output combinations, leading to two control-free and two controllable versions of the model. We add two types of controllability into text simplification, by using a multi-angle training approach: position-aware, which uses in-place annotated inputs and outputs, and position-agnostic, where the model only knows the contents to be edited, but not their positions. Our results show that our fine-grained annotations improve learning compared to the unannotated baseline. Furthermore, our position-aware control enhances the model's ability to generate better simplification than the position-agnostic version. The data and code are available at https://github.com/Chandrayee/CTRL-SIMP.
On the Challenges of Using Reinforcement Learning in Precision Drug Dosing: Delay and Prolongedness of Action Effects
Authors: Basu Sumana , Legault Marc-André , Romero-Soriano Adriana , Precup Doina
Published: June 2023

Drug dosing is an important application of AI, which can be formulated as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem. In this paper, we identify two major challenges of using RL for drug dosing: delayed and prolonged effects of administering medications, which break the Markov assumption of the RL framework. We focus on prolongedness and define PAE-POMDP (Prolonged Action Effect-Partially Observable Markov Decision Process), a subclass of POMDPs in which the Markov assumption does not hold specifically due to prolonged effects of actions. Motivated by the pharmacology literature, we propose a simple and effective approach to converting drug dosing PAE-POMDPs into MDPs, enabling the use of the existing RL algorithms to solve such problems. We validate the proposed approach on a toy task, and a challenging glucose control task, for which we devise a clinically-inspired reward function. Our results demonstrate that: (1) the proposed method to restore the Markov assumption leads to significant improvements over a vanilla baseline; (2) the approach is competitive with recurrent policies which may inherently capture the prolonged affect of actions; (3) it is remarkably more time and memory efficient than the recurrent baseline and hence more suitable for real-time dosing control systems; and (4) it exhibits favourable qualitative behavior in our policy analysis.
Physics Guided Neural Networks for Time-Aware Fairness: An Application in Crop Yield Prediction
Authors: He Erhu , Xie Yiqun , Liu Licheng , Chen Weiye , Jin Zhenong , Jia Xiaowei
Published: June 2023

This paper proposes a physics-guided neural network model to predict crop yield and maintain the fairness over space. Failures to preserve the spatial fairness in predicted maps of crop yields can result in biased policies and intervention strategies in the distribution of assistance or subsidies in supporting individuals at risk. Existing methods for fairness enforcement are not designed for capturing the complex physical processes that underlie the crop growing process, and thus are unable to produce good predictions over large regions under different weather conditions and soil properties. More importantly, the fairness is often degraded when existing methods are applied to different years due to the change of weather conditions and farming practices. To address these issues, we propose a physics-guided neural network model, which leverages the physical knowledge from existing physics-based models to guide the extraction of representative physical information and discover the temporal data shift across years. In particular, we use a reweighting strategy to discover the relationship between training years and testing years using the physics-aware representation. Then the physics-guided neural network will be refined via a bi-level optimization process based on the reweighted fairness objective. The proposed method has been evaluated using real county-level crop yield data and simulated data produced by a physics-based model. The results demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the predictive performance and preserve the spatial fairness when generalized to different years.
Taxonomizing and Measuring Representational Harms: A Look at Image Tagging
Authors: Katzman Jared , Wang Angelina , Scheuerman Morgan , Blodgett Su Lin , Laird Kristen , Wallach Hanna , Barocas Solon
Published: June 2023

In this paper, we examine computational approaches for measuring the "fairness" of image tagging systems, finding that they cluster into five distinct categories, each with its own analytic foundation. We also identify a range of normative concerns that are often collapsed under the terms "unfairness," "bias," or even "discrimination" when discussing problematic cases of image tagging. Specifically, we identify four types of representational harms that can be caused by image tagging systems, providing concrete examples of each. We then consider how different computational measurement approaches map to each of these types, demonstrating that there is not a one-to-one mapping. Our findings emphasize that no single measurement approach will be definitive and that it is not possible to infer from the use of a particular measurement approach which type of harm was intended to be measured. Lastly, equipped with this more granular understanding of the types of representational harms that can be caused by image tagging systems, we show that attempts to mitigate some of these types of harms may be in tension with one another.
A Composite Multi-Attention Framework for Intraoperative Hypotension Early Warning
Authors: Lu Feng , Li Wei , Zhou Zhiqiang , Song Cheng , Sun Yifei , Zhang Yuwei , Ren Yufei , Liao Xiaofei , Jin Hai , Luo Ailin , Zomaya Albert Y.
Published: June 2023

Intraoperative hypotension (IOH) events warning plays a crucial role in preventing postoperative complications, such as postoperative delirium and mortality. Despite significant efforts, two fundamental problems limit its wide clinical use. The well-established IOH event warning systems are often built on proprietary medical devices that may not be available in all hospitals. The warnings are also triggered mainly through a predefined IOH event that might not be suitable for all patients. This work proposes a composite multi-attention (CMA) framework to tackle these problems by conducting short-term predictions on user-definable IOH events using vital signals in a low sampling rate with demographic characteristics. Our framework leverages a multi-modal fusion network to make four vital signals and three demographic characteristics as input modalities. For each modality, a multi-attention mechanism is used for feature extraction for better model training. Experiments on two large-scale real-world data sets show that our method can achieve up to 94.1% accuracy on IOH events early warning while the signals sampling rate is reduced by 3000 times. Our proposal CMA can achieve a mean absolute error of 4.50 mm Hg in the most challenging 15-minute mean arterial pressure prediction task and the error reduction by 42.9% compared to existing solutions.
EINNs: Epidemiologically-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Rodríguez Alexander , Cui Jiaming , Ramakrishnan Naren , Adhikari Bijaya , Prakash B. Aditya
Published: June 2023

We introduce EINNs, a framework crafted for epidemic forecasting that builds upon the theoretical grounds provided by mechanistic models as well as the data-driven expressibility afforded by AI models, and their capabilities to ingest heterogeneous information. Although neural forecasting models have been successful in multiple tasks, predictions well-correlated with epidemic trends and long-term predictions remain open challenges. Epidemiological ODE models contain mechanisms that can guide us in these two tasks; however, they have limited capability of ingesting data sources and modeling composite signals. Thus, we propose to leverage work in physics-informed neural networks to learn latent epidemic dynamics and transfer relevant knowledge to another neural network which ingests multiple data sources and has more appropriate inductive bias. In contrast with previous work, we do not assume the observability of complete dynamics and do not need to numerically solve the ODE equations during training. Our thorough experiments on all US states and HHS regions for COVID-19 and influenza forecasting showcase the clear benefits of our approach in both short-term and long-term forecasting as well as in learning the mechanistic dynamics over other non-trivial alternatives.
ERASER: AdvERsArial Sensitive Element Remover for Image Privacy Preservation
Authors: Yang Guang , Cao Juan , Wang Danding , Qi Peng , Li Jintao
Published: June 2023

The daily practice of online image sharing enriches our lives, but also raises a severe issue of privacy leakage. To mitigate the privacy risks during image sharing, some researchers modify the sensitive elements in images with visual obfuscation methods including traditional ones like blurring and pixelating, as well as generative ones based on deep learning. However, images processed by such methods may be recovered or recognized by models, which cannot guarantee privacy. Further, traditional methods make the images very unnatural with low image quality. Although generative methods produce better images, most of them suffer from insufficiency in the frequency domain, which influences image quality. Therefore, we propose the AdvERsArial Sensitive Element Remover (ERASER) to guarantee both image privacy and image quality. 1) To preserve image privacy, for the regions containing sensitive elements, ERASER guarantees enough difference after being modified in an adversarial way. Specifically, we take both the region and global content into consideration with a Prior Transformer and obtain the corresponding region prior and global prior. Based on the priors, ERASER is trained with an adversarial Difference Loss to make the content in the regions different. As a result, ERASER can reserve the main structure and change the texture of the target regions for image privacy preservation. 2) To guarantee the image quality, ERASER improves the frequency insufficiency of current generative methods. Specifically, the region prior and global prior are processed with Fast Fourier Convolution to capture characteristics and achieve consistency in both pixel and frequency domains. Quantitative analyses demonstrate that the proposed ERASER achieves a balance between image quality and image privacy preservation, while qualitative analyses demonstrate that ERASER indeed reduces the privacy risk from the visual perception aspect.
Accelerating Inverse Learning via Intelligent Localization with Exploratory Sampling
Authors: Bi Sirui , Fung Victor , Zhang Jiaxin
Published: June 2023

In the scope of "AI for Science", solving inverse problems is a longstanding challenge in materials and drug discovery, where the goal is to determine the hidden structures given a set of desirable properties. Deep generative models are recently proposed to solve inverse problems, but these are currently struggling in expensive forward operators, precisely localizing the exact solutions and fully exploring the parameter spaces without missing solutions. In this work, we propose a novel approach (called iPage) to accelerate the inverse learning process by leveraging probabilistic inference from deep invertible models and deterministic optimization via fast gradient descent. Given a target property, the learned invertible model provides a posterior over the parameter space; we identify these posterior samples as an intelligent prior initialization which enables us to narrow down the search space. We then perform gradient descent to calibrate the inverse solutions within a local region. Meanwhile, a space-filling sampling is imposed on the latent space to better explore and capture all possible solutions. We evaluate our approach on three benchmark tasks and create two datasets of real-world applications from quantum chemistry and additive manufacturing and find our method achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art baseline methods. The iPage code is available at https://github.com/jxzhangjhu/MatDesINNe.
Ensemble-in-One: Ensemble Learning within Random Gated Networks for Enhanced Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Cai Yi , Ning Xuefei , Yang Huazhong , Wang Yu
Published: June 2023

Adversarial attacks have threatened modern deep learning systems by crafting adversarial examples with small perturbations to fool the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To alleviate that, ensemble training methods are proposed to facilitate better adversarial robustness by diversifying the vulnerabilities among the sub-models, simultaneously maintaining comparable natural accuracy as standard training. Previous practices also demonstrate that enlarging the ensemble can improve the robustness. However, conventional ensemble methods are with poor scalability, owing to the rapidly increasing complexity when containing more sub-models in the ensemble. Moreover, it is usually infeasible to train or deploy an ensemble with substantial sub-models, owing to the tight hardware resource budget and latency requirement. In this work, we propose Ensemble-in-One (EIO), a simple but effective method to efficiently enlarge the ensemble with a random gated network (RGN). EIO augments a candidate model by replacing the parametrized layers with multi-path random gated blocks (RGBs) to construct an RGN. The scalability is significantly boosted because the number of paths exponentially increases with the RGN depth. Then by learning from the vulnerabilities of numerous other paths within the RGN, every path obtains better adversarial robustness. Our experiments demonstrate that EIO consistently outperforms previous ensemble training methods with smaller computational overheads, simultaneously achieving better accuracy-robustness trade-offs than adversarial training methods under black-box transfer attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/cai-y13/Ensemble-in-One.git
Correct-by-Construction Reinforcement Learning of Cardiac Pacemakers from Duration Calculus Requirements
Authors: Dole Kalyani , Gupta Ashutosh , Komp John , Krishna Shankaranarayanan , Trivedi Ashutosh
Published: June 2023

As the complexity of pacemaker devices continues to grow, the importance of capturing its functional correctness requirement formally cannot be overestimated. The pacemaker system specification document by \emph{Boston Scientific} provides a widely accepted set of specifications for pacemakers.
As these specifications are written in a natural language, they are not amenable for automated verification, synthesis, or reinforcement learning of pacemaker systems. This paper presents a formalization of these requirements for a dual-chamber pacemaker in \emph{duration calculus} (DC), a highly expressive real-time specification language.
The proposed formalization allows us to automatically translate pacemaker requirements into executable specifications as stopwatch automata, which can be used to enable simulation, monitoring, validation, verification and automatic synthesis of pacemaker systems.
The cyclic nature of the pacemaker-heart closed-loop system results in DC requirements that compile to a decidable subclass of stopwatch automata. We present shield reinforcement learning (shield RL), a shield synthesis based reinforcement learning algorithm, by automatically constructing safety envelopes from DC specifications.