bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Complementary Attention Gated Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Duan Jinghai , Wang Le , Long Chengjiang , Zhou Sanping , Zheng Fang , Shi Liushuai , Hua Gang
Published: July 2022

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial in many practical applications due to the diversity of pedestrian movements, such as social interactions and individual motion behaviors. With similar observable trajectories and social environments, different pedestrians may make completely different future decisions. However, most existing methods only focus on the frequent modal of the trajectory and thus are difficult to generalize to the peculiar scenario, which leads to the decline of the multimodal fitting ability when facing similar scenarios. In this paper, we propose a complementary attention gated network (CAGN) for pedestrian trajectory prediction, in which a dual-path architecture including normal and inverse attention is proposed to capture both frequent and peculiar modals in spatial and temporal patterns, respectively. Specifically, a complementary block is proposed to guide normal and inverse attention, which are then be summed with learnable weights to get attention features by a gated network. Finally, multiple trajectory distributions are estimated based on the fused spatio-temporal attention features due to the multimodality of future trajectory. Experimental results on benchmark datasets, i.e., the ETH, and the UCY, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 13.8% in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 10.4% in Final Displacement Error (FDE). Code will be available at https://github.com/jinghaiD/CAGN
PatchUp: A Feature-Space Block-Level Regularization Technique for Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Faramarzi Mojtaba , Amini Mohammad , Badrinaaraayanan Akilesh , Verma Vikas , Chandar Sarath
Published: July 2022

Large capacity deep learning models are often prone to a high generalization gap when trained with a limited amount of labeled training data. A recent class of methods to address this problem uses various ways to construct a new training sample by mixing a pair (or more) of training samples. We propose PatchUp, a hidden state block-level regularization technique for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), that is applied on selected contiguous blocks of feature maps from a random pair of samples. Our approach improves the robustness of CNN models against the manifold intrusion problem that may occur in other state-of-the-art mixing approaches. Moreover, since we are mixing the contiguous block of features in the hidden space, which has more dimensions than the input space, we obtain more diverse samples for training towards different dimensions. Our experiments on CIFAR10/100, SVHN, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet using ResNet architectures including PreActResnet18/34, WRN-28-10, ResNet101/152 models show that PatchUp improves upon, or equals, the performance of current state-of-the-art regularizers for CNNs. We also show that PatchUp can provide a better generalization to deformed samples and is more robust against adversarial attacks.
Predicting Physical World Destinations for Commands Given to Self-Driving Cars
Authors: Grujicic Dusan , Deruyttere Thierry , Moens Marie-Francine , Blaschko Matthew B.
Published: July 2022

In recent years, we have seen significant steps taken in the development of self-driving cars. Multiple companies are starting to roll out impressive systems that work in a variety of settings. These systems can sometimes give the impression that full self-driving is just around the corner and that we would soon build cars without even a steering wheel. The increase in the level of autonomy and control given to an AI provides an opportunity for new modes of human-vehicle interaction. However, surveys have shown that giving more control to an AI in self-driving cars is accompanied by a degree of uneasiness by passengers. In an attempt to alleviate this issue, recent works have taken a natural language-oriented approach by allowing the passenger to give commands that refer to specific objects in the visual scene. Nevertheless, this is only half the task as the car should also understand the physical destination of the command, which is what we focus on in this paper. We propose an extension in which we annotate the 3D destination that the car needs to reach after executing the given command and evaluate multiple different baselines on predicting this destination location. Additionally, we introduce a model that outperforms the prior works adapted for this particular setting.
Delving into the Local: Dynamic Inconsistency Learning for DeepFake Video Detection
Authors: Gu Zhihao , Chen Yang , Yao Taiping , Ding Shouhong , Li Jilin , Ma Lizhuang
Published: July 2022

The rapid development of facial manipulation techniques has aroused public concerns in recent years. Existing deepfake video detection approaches attempt to capture the discrim- inative features between real and fake faces based on tem- poral modelling. However, these works impose supervisions on sparsely sampled video frames but overlook the local mo- tions among adjacent frames, which instead encode rich in- consistency information that can serve as an efficient indica- tor for DeepFake video detection. To mitigate this issue, we delves into the local motion and propose a novel sampling unit named snippet which contains a few successive videos frames for local temporal inconsistency learning. Moreover, we elaborately design an Intra-Snippet Inconsistency Module (Intra-SIM) and an Inter-Snippet Interaction Module (Inter- SIM) to establish a dynamic inconsistency modelling frame- work. Specifically, the Intra-SIM applies bi-directional tem- poral difference operations and a learnable convolution ker- nel to mine the short-term motions within each snippet. The Inter-SIM is then devised to promote the cross-snippet infor- mation interaction to form global representations. The Intra- SIM and Inter-SIM work in an alternate manner and can be plugged into existing 2D CNNs. Our method outperforms the state of the art competitors on four popular benchmark dataset, i.e., FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, DFDC and Wild- Deepfake. Besides, extensive experiments and visualizations are also presented to further illustrate its effectiveness.
Divide-and-Regroup Clustering for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification
Authors: Hu Zhengdong , Sun Yifan , Yang Yi , Zhou Jianguang
Published: July 2022

Clustering is important for domain adaptive person re-identification(re-ID). A majority of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods conduct clustering on the target domain and then use the generated pseudo labels for adaptive training. Albeit important, the clustering pipeline adopted by current literature is quite standard and lacks consideration for two characteristics of re-ID, i.e., 1) a single person has various feature distribution in multiple cameras. 2) a person’s occurrence in the same camera are usually temporally continuous. We argue that the multi-camera distribution hinders clustering because it enlarges the intra-class distances. In contrast, the temporal continuity prior is beneficial, because it offers clue for distinguishing some look-alike person (who are temporally far away from each other). These two insight motivate us to propose a novel Divide-And-Regroup Clustering (DARC) pipeline for re-ID UDA. Specifically, DARC divides the unlabeled data into multiple camera-specific groups and conducts local clustering within each camera. Afterwards, it regroups those local clusters potentially belonging to the same person into a unity. Through this divide-and-regroup pipeline, DARC avoids directly clustering across multiple cameras and focuses on the feature distribution within each individual camera. Moreover, during the local clustering, DARC uses the temporal continuity prior to distinguish some look-alike person and thus reduces false positive pseudo labels. Consequentially, DARC effectively reduces clustering errors and improves UDA. Importantly, we show that DARC is compatible to many pseudo label-based UDA methods and brings general improvement. Based on a recent UDA method, DARC advances the state of the art (e.g, 85.1% mAP on MSMT-to-Market and 83.1% mAP on PersonX-to-Market).
Towards Versatile Pedestrian Detector with Multisensory-Matching and Multispectral Recalling Memory
Authors: Kim Jung Uk , Park Sungjune , Ro Yong Man
Published: July 2022

Recently, automated surveillance cameras can change a visible sensor and a thermal sensor for all-day operation. However, existing single-modal pedestrian detectors mainly focus on detecting pedestrians in only one specific modality (i.e., visible or thermal), so they cannot cope with other modal inputs. In addition, recent multispectral pedestrian detectors have shown remarkable performance by adopting multispectral modalities, but they also have limitations in practical applications (e.g., different Field-of-View (FoV) and frame rate). In this paper, we introduce a versatile pedestrian detector that shows robust detection performance in any single modality. We propose a multisensory-matching contrastive loss to reduce the difference between the visual representation of pedestrians in the visible and thermal modalities. Moreover, for the robust detection on a single modality, we design a Multispectral Recalling (MSR) Memory. The MSR Memory enhances the visual representation of the single modal features by recalling that of the multispectral modalities. To guide the MSR Memory to store the multispectral modal contexts, we introduce a multispectral recalling loss. It enables the pedestrian detector to encode more discriminative features with a single input modality. We believe our method is a step forward detector that can be applied to a variety of real-world applications. The comprehensive experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
NaturalInversion: Data-Free Image Synthesis Improving Real-World Consistency
Authors: Kim Yujin , Park Dogyun , Kim Dohee , Kim Suhyun
Published: July 2022

We introduce NaturalInversion, a novel model inversion-based method to synthesize images that agrees well with the original data distribution without using real data. In NaturalInversion, we propose: (1) a Feature Transfer Pyramid which uses enhanced image prior of the original data by combining the multi-scale feature maps extracted from the pre-trained classifier, (2) a one-to-one approach generative model where only one batch of images are synthesized by one generator to bring the non-linearity to optimization and to ease the overall optimizing process, (3) learnable Adaptive Channel Scaling parameters which are end-to-end trained to scale the output image channel to utilize the original image prior further. With our NaturalInversion, we synthesize images from classifiers trained on CIFAR-10/100 and show that our images are more consistent with original data distribution than prior works by visualization and additional analysis. Furthermore, our synthesized images outperform prior works on various applications such as knowledge distillation and pruning, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.
From Good to Best: Two-Stage Training for Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Chen Nuo , Shou Linjun , Gong Ming , Pei Jian
Published: July 2022

Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (xMRC) is a challenging task due to the lack of training data in low-resource languages. Recent approaches use training data only in a resource-rich language (such as English) to fine-tune large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained language models, which transfer knowledge from resource-rich languages (source) to low-resource languages (target). Due to the big difference between languages, the model fine-tuned only by the source language may not perform well for target languages. In our study, we make an interesting observation that while the top 1 result predicted by the previous approaches may often fail to hit the ground-truth answer, there are still good chances for the correct answer to be contained in the set of top k predicted results. Intuitively, the previous approaches have empowered the model certain level of capability to roughly distinguish good answers from bad ones. However, without sufficient training data, it is not powerful enough to capture the nuances between the accurate answer and those approximate ones. Based on this observation, we develop a two-stage approach to enhance the model performance. The first stage targets at recall; we design a hard-learning (HL) algorithm to maximize the likelihood that the top k predictions contain the accurate answer. The second stage focuses on precision, where an answer-aware contrastive learning (AA-CL) mechanism is developed to learn the minute difference between the accurate answer and other candidates. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines on two cross-lingual MRC benchmark datasets.
Novelty Controlled Paraphrase Generation with Retrieval Augmented Conditional Prompt Tuning
Authors: Chowdhury Jishnu Ray , Zhuang Yong , Wang Shuyi
Published: July 2022

Paraphrase generation is a fundamental and long-standing task in natural language processing. In this paper, we concentrate on two contributions to the task: (1) we propose Retrieval Augmented Prompt Tuning (RAPT) as a parameter-efficient method to adapt large pre-trained language models for paraphrase generation; (2) we propose Novelty Conditioned RAPT (NC-RAPT) as a simple model-agnostic method of using specialized prompt tokens for controlled paraphrase generation with varying levels of lexical novelty. By conducting extensive experiments on four datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches for retaining the semantic content of the original text while inducing lexical novelty in the generation.
Retrieve, Caption, Generate: Visual Grounding for Enhancing Commonsense in Text Generation Models
Authors: Feng Steven Y. , Lu Kevin , Tao Zhuofu , Alikhani Malihe , Mitamura Teruko , Hovy Eduard , Gangal Varun
Published: July 2022

We investigate the use of multimodal information contained in images as an effective method for enhancing the commonsense of Transformer models for text generation. We perform experiments using BART and T5 on concept-to-text generation, specifically the task of generative commonsense reasoning, or CommonGen. We call our approach VisCTG: Visually Grounded Concept-to-Text Generation. VisCTG involves captioning images representing appropriate everyday scenarios, and using these captions to enrich and steer the generation process. Comprehensive evaluation and analysis demonstrate that VisCTG noticeably improves model performance while successfully addressing several issues of the baseline generations, including poor commonsense, fluency, and specificity.
Dual Task Framework for Improving Persona-Grounded Dialogue Dataset
Authors: Kim Minju , Kwak Beong-woo , Kim Youngwook , Lee Hong-in , Hwang Seung-won , Yeo Jinyoung
Published: July 2022

This paper introduces a simple yet effective data-centric approach for the task of improving persona-conditioned dialogue agents. Prior model-centric approaches unquestioningly depend on the raw crowdsourced benchmark datasets such as Persona-Chat. In contrast, we aim to fix annotation artifacts in benchmarking, which is orthogonally applicable to any dialogue model. Specifically, we augment relevant personas to improve dialogue dataset/agent, by leveraging the primal-dual structure of the two tasks, predicting dialogue responses and personas based on each other. Experiments on Persona-Chat show that our approach outperforms pre-trained LMs by an 11.7 point gain in terms of accuracy.
CINS: Comprehensive Instruction for Few-Shot Learning in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Authors: Mi Fei , Wang Yasheng , Li Yitong
Published: July 2022

As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is high, a major challenge is to learn different tasks with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. To better utilize the power of PLMs, this paper proposes Comprehensive Instruction (CINS) that exploits PLMs with extra task-specific instructions. We design a schema (definition, constraint, prompt) of instructions and their customized realizations for three important downstream tasks in ToD, ie. intent classification, dialog state tracking, and natural language generation. A sequence-to-sequence model (T5) is adopted to solve these three tasks in a unified framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on these ToD tasks in realistic few-shot learning scenarios with small validation data. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed CINS approach consistently improves techniques that finetune PLMs with raw input or short prompt.
Weakly Supervised Neuro-Symbolic Module Networks for Numerical Reasoning over Text
Authors: Saha Amrita , Joty Shafiq , Hoi Steven C.H.
Published: July 2022

Neural Module Networks (NMNs) have been quite successful in incorporating explicit reasoning as learnable modules in various question answering tasks, including the most generic form of numerical reasoning over text in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). However to achieve this, contemporary Neural Module Networks models obtain strong supervision in form of specialized program annotation from the QA pairs through various heuristic parsing and exhaustive computation of all possible discrete operations on discrete arguments. Consequently they fail to generalize to more open-ended settings without such supervision. Hence, we propose Weakly Supervised Neuro-Symbolic Module Network (WNSMN) trained with answers as the sole supervision for numerical reasoning based MRC. WNSMN learns to execute a noisy heuristic program obtained from the dependency parse of the query, as discrete actions over both neural and symbolic reasoning modules and trains it end-to-end in a reinforcement learning framework with discrete reward from answer matching. On the subset of DROP having numerical answers, WNSMN outperforms NMN by 32% and the reasoning-free generative language model GenBERT by 8% in exact match accuracy under comparable weakly supervised settings. This showcases the effectiveness of modular networks that can handle explicit discrete reasoning over noisy programs in an end-to-end manner.
Procedural Text Understanding via Scene-Wise Evolution
Authors: Tang Jialong , Lin Hongyu , Liao Meng , Lu Yaojie , Han Xianpei , Sun Le , Xie Weijian , Xu Jin
Published: July 2022

Procedural text understanding requires machines to reason about entity states within the dynamical narratives. Current procedural text understanding approaches are commonly entity-wise, which separately track each entity and independently predict different states of each entity. Such an entity-wise paradigm does not consider the interaction between entities and their states. In this paper, we propose a new scene-wise paradigm for procedural text understanding, which jointly tracks states of all entities in a scene-by-scene manner. Based on this paradigm, we propose Scene Graph Reasoner (SGR), which introduces a series of dynamically evolving scene graphs to jointly formulate the evolution of entities, states and their associations throughout the narrative. In this way, the deep interactions between all entities and states can be jointly captured and simultaneously derived from scene graphs. Experiments show that SGR not only achieves the new state-of-the-art performance but also significantly accelerates the speed of reasoning.
Hybrid Autoregressive Inference for Scalable Multi-Hop Explanation Regeneration
Authors: Valentino Marco , Thayaparan Mokanarangan , Ferreira Deborah , Freitas André
Published: July 2022

Regenerating natural language explanations in the scientific domain has been proposed as a benchmark to evaluate complex multi-hop and explainable inference. In this context, large language models can achieve state-of-the-art performance when employed as cross-encoder architectures and fine-tuned on human-annotated explanations. However, while much attention has been devoted to the quality of the explanations, the problem of performing inference efficiently is largely under studied. Cross-encoders, in fact, are intrinsically not scalable, possessing limited applicability to real-world scenarios that require inference on massive facts banks. To enable complex multi-hop reasoning at scale, this paper focuses on bi-encoder architectures, investigating the problem of scientific explanation regeneration at the intersection of dense and sparse models. Specifically, we present SCAR (for Scalable Autoregressive Inference), a hybrid framework that iteratively combines a Transformer-based bi-encoder with a sparse model of explanatory power, designed to leverage explicit inference patterns in the explanations. Our experiments demonstrate that the hybrid framework significantly outperforms previous sparse models, achieving performance comparable with that of state-of-the-art cross-encoders while being approx 50 times faster and scalable to corpora of millions of facts. Further analyses on semantic drift and multi-hop question answering reveal that the proposed hybridisation boosts the quality of the most challenging explanations, contributing to improved performance on downstream inference tasks.
Mastering the Explicit Opinion-Role Interaction: Syntax-Aided Neural Transition System for Unified Opinion Role Labeling
Authors: Wu Shengqiong , Fei Hao , Li Fei , Zhang Meishan , Liu Yijiang , Teng Chong , Ji Donghong
Published: July 2022

Unified opinion role labeling (ORL) aims to detect all possible opinion structures of 'opinion-holder-target' in one shot, given a text. The existing transition-based unified method, unfortunately, is subject to longer opinion terms and fails to solve the term overlap issue. Current top performance has been achieved by employing the span-based graph model, which however still suffers from both high model complexity and insufficient interaction among opinions and roles. In this work, we investigate a novel solution by revisiting the transition architecture, and augmenting it with a pointer network (PointNet). The framework parses out all opinion structures in linear-time complexity, meanwhile breaks through the limitation of any length of terms with PointNet. To achieve the explicit opinion-role interactions, we further propose a unified dependency-opinion graph (UDOG), co-modeling the syntactic dependency structure and the partial opinion-role structure. We then devise a relation-centered graph aggregator (RCGA) to encode the multi-relational UDOG, where the resulting high-order representations are used to promote the predictions in the vanilla transition system. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the MPQA benchmark. Analyses further demonstrate the superiority of our methods on both efficacy and efficiency.
Probing Word Syntactic Representations in the Brain by a Feature Elimination Method
Authors: Zhang Xiaohan , Wang Shaonan , Lin Nan , Zhang Jiajun , Zong Chengqing
Published: July 2022

Neuroimaging studies have identified multiple brain regions that are associated with semantic and syntactic processing when comprehending language. However, existing methods cannot explore the neural correlates of fine-grained word syntactic features, such as part-of-speech and dependency relations. This paper proposes an alternative framework to study how different word syntactic features are represented in the brain.
To separate each syntactic feature, we propose a feature elimination method, called Mean Vector Null space Projection (MVNP). This method can remove a specific feature from word representations, resulting in one-feature-removed representations. Then we respectively associate one-feature-removed and the original word vectors with brain imaging data to explore how the brain represents the removed feature.
This paper for the first time studies the cortical representations of multiple fine-grained syntactic features simultaneously and suggests some possible contributions of several brain regions to the complex division of syntactic processing. These findings indicate that the brain foundations of syntactic information processing might be broader than those suggested by classical studies.
Unsupervised Sentence Representation via Contrastive Learning with Mixing Negatives
Authors: Zhang Yanzhao , Zhang Richong , Mensah Samuel , Liu Xudong , Mao Yongyi
Published: July 2022

Unsupervised sentence representation learning is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. Recently, contrastive learning has made great success on this task. Existing constrastive learning based models usually apply random sampling to select negative examples for training. Previous work in computer vision has shown that hard negative examples help contrastive learning to achieve faster convergency and better optimization for representation learning. However, the importance of hard negatives in contrastive learning for sentence representation is yet to be explored. In this study, we prove that hard negatives are essential for maintaining strong gradient signals in the training process while random sampling negative examples is ineffective for sentence representation. Accordingly, we present a contrastive model, MixCSE, that extends the current state-of-the-art SimCSE by continually constructing hard negatives via mixing both positive and negative features. The superior performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated via empirical studies on Semantic Textual Similarity datasets and Transfer task datasets.
Conditional Synthetic Data Generation for Robust Machine Learning Applications with Limited Pandemic Data
Authors: Prasanna Das Hari , Tran Ryan , Singh Japjot , Yue Xiangyu , Tison Geoffrey , Sangiovanni-Vincentelli Alberto , Spanos Costas J.
Published: July 2022

Background: At the onset of a pandemic, such as COVID-19, data with proper labeling/attributes corresponding to the new disease might be unavailable or sparse. Machine Learning (ML) models trained with the available data, which is limited in quantity and poor in diversity, will often be biased and inaccurate. At the same time, ML algorithms designed to fight pandemics must have good performance and be developed in a time-sensitive manner. To tackle the challenges of limited data, and label scarcity in the available data, we propose generating conditional synthetic data, to be used alongside real data for developing robust ML models. Methods: We present a hybrid model consisting of a conditional generative flow and a classifier for conditional synthetic data generation. The classifier decouples the feature representation for the condition, which is fed to the flow to extract the local noise. We generate synthetic data by manipulating the local noise with fixed conditional feature representation. We also propose a semi-supervised approach to generate synthetic samples in the absence of labels for a majority of the available data. Results: We performed conditional synthetic generation for chest computed tomography (CT) scans corresponding to normal, COVID-19, and pneumonia afflicted patients. We show that our method significantly outperforms existing models both on qualitative and quantitative performance, and our semi-supervised approach can efficiently synthesize conditional samples under label scarcity. As an example of downstream use of synthetic data, we show improvement in COVID-19 detection from CT scans with conditional synthetic data augmentation.
CODE: Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Expert Linking
Authors: Chen Bo , Zhang Jing , Zhang Xiaokang , Tang Xiaobin , Cai Lingfan , Chen Hong , Li Cuiping , Zhang Peng , Tang Jie
Published: July 2022

Expert finding, a popular service provided by many online websites such as Expertise Finder, LinkedIn, and AMiner, is beneficial to seeking candidate qualifications, consultants, and collaborators. However, its quality is suffered from lack of ample sources of expert information. This paper employs AMiner as the basis with an aim at linking any external experts to the counterparts on AMiner. As it is infeasible to acquire sufficient linkages from arbitrary external sources, we explore the problem of zero-shot expert linking. In this paper, we propose CODE, which first pre-trains an expert linking model by contrastive learning on AMiner such that it can capture the representation and matching patterns of experts without supervised signals, then it is fine-tuned between AMinerand external sources to enhance the model’s transferability in an adversarial manner. For evaluation, we first design two intrinsic tasks, author identification and paper clustering, to validate the representation and matching capability endowed by contrastive learning. Then the final external expert linking performance on two genres of external sources also implies the superiority of adversarial fine-tuning method. Additionally, we show the online deployment of CODE, and continuously improve its online performance via active learning.
Has CEO Gender Bias Really Been Fixed? Adversarial Attacking and Improving Gender Fairness in Image Search
Authors: Feng Yunhe , Shah Chirag
Published: July 2022

Gender bias is one of the most common and well-studied demographic biases in information retrieval, and in general in AI systems. After discovering and reporting that gender bias for certain professions could change searchers' worldviews, mainstreaming image search engines, such as Google, quickly took action to correct and fix such a bias. However, given the nature of these systems, viz., being opaque, it is unclear if they addressed unequal gender representation and gender stereotypes in image search results systematically and in a sustainable way. In this paper, we propose adversarial attack queries composed of professions and countries (e.g., 'CEO United States') to investigate whether gender bias is thoroughly mitigated by image search engines. Our experiments on Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex Image Search show that the proposed attack can trigger high levels of gender bias in image search results very effectively. To defend against such attacks and mitigate gender bias, we design and implement three novel re-ranking algorithms -- epsilon-greedy algorithm, relevance-aware swapping algorithm, and fairness-greedy algorithm, to re-rank returned images for given image queries. Experiments on both simulated (three typical gender distributions) and real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed algorithms can mitigate gender bias effectively.
Gender and Racial Stereotype Detection in Legal Opinion Word Embeddings
Authors: Matthews Sean , Hudzina John , Sepehr Dawn
Published: July 2022

Studies have shown that some Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems encode and replicate harmful biases with potential adverse ethical effects in our society. In this article, we propose an approach for identifying gender and racial stereotypes in word embeddings trained on judicial opinions from U.S. case law. Embeddings containing stereotype information may cause harm when used by downstream systems for classification, information extraction, question answering, or other machine learning systems used to build legal research tools. We first explain how previously proposed methods for identifying these biases are not well suited for use with word embeddings trained on legal opinion text. We then propose a domain adapted method for identifying gender and racial biases in the legal domain. Our analyses using these methods suggest that racial and gender biases are encoded into word embeddings trained on legal opinions. These biases are not mitigated by exclusion of historical data, and appear across multiple large topical areas of the law. Implications for downstream systems that use legal opinion word embeddings and suggestions for potential mitigation strategies based on our observations are also discussed.
IS-Count: Large-Scale Object Counting from Satellite Images with Covariate-Based Importance Sampling
Authors: Meng Chenlin , Liu Enci , Neiswanger Willie , Song Jiaming , Burke Marshall , Lobell David , Ermon Stefano
Published: July 2022

Object detection in high-resolution satellite imagery is emerging as a scalable alternative to on-the-ground survey data collection in many environmental and socioeconomic monitoring applications. However, performing object detection over large geographies can still be prohibitively expensive due to the high cost of purchasing imagery and compute. Inspired by traditional survey data collection strategies, we propose an approach to estimate object count statistics over large geographies through sampling. Given a cost budget, our method selects a small number of representative areas by sampling from a learnable proposal distribution. Using importance sampling, we are able to accurately estimate object counts after processing only a small fraction of the images compared to an exhaustive approach. We show empirically that the proposed framework achieves strong performance on estimating the number of buildings in the United States and Africa, cars in Kenya, brick kilns in Bangladesh, and swimming pools in the U.S., while requiring as few as 0.01% of satellite images compared to an exhaustive approach.
DevianceNet: Learning to Predict Deviance from a Large-Scale Geo-Tagged Dataset
Authors: Park Jin-Hwi , Park Young-Jae , Lee Junoh , Jeon Hae-Gon
Published: July 2022

Understanding how a city’s physical appearance and environmental surroundings impact society traits, such as safety, is an essential issue in social artificial intelligence. To demonstrate the relationship, most existing studies utilize subjective human perceptual attributes, categorization only for a few violent crimes, and images taken from still shot images. These lead to difficulty in identifying location-specific characteristics for urban safety. In this work, to address this problem, we propose a large-scale dataset and a novel method by adopting a concept of “Deviance" which explains behaviors violating social norms, both formally (e.g. crime) and informally (e.g. civil complaints). We first collect a geo-tagged dataset consisting of incident report data for seven metropolitan cities, with corresponding sequential images around incident sites obtained from Google street view. We also design a convolutional neural network that learns spatio-temporal visual attributes of deviant streets. Experimental results show that our framework can reliably recognize real-world deviance in various cities. Furthermore, we analyze which visual attribute is important for deviance identification and severity estimation. We have released our dataset and source codes at our project page: https://deviance-project.github.io/DevianceNet/
LIMREF: Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Rule-Based Explanations for Forecasting, with an Application to Electricity Smart Meter Data
Authors: Rajapaksha Dilini , Bergmeir Christoph
Published: July 2022

Accurate electricity demand forecasts play a key role in sustainable power systems. To enable better decision-making especially for demand flexibility of the end-user, it is necessary to provide not only accurate but also understandable and actionable forecasts. To provide accurate forecasts Global Forecasting Models (GFM) that are trained across time series have shown superior results in many demand forecasting competitions and real-world applications recently, compared with univariate forecasting approaches. We aim to fill the gap between the accuracy and the interpretability in global forecasting approaches.
In order to explain the global model forecasts, we propose Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Rule-based Explanations for Forecasting (LIMREF), which is a local explainer framework that produces k-optimal impact rules for a particular forecast, considering the global forecasting model as a black-box model, in a model-agnostic way. It provides different types of rules which explain the forecast of the global model and the counterfactual rules, which provide actionable insights for potential changes to obtain different outputs for given instances. We conduct experiments using a large-scale electricity demand dataset with exogenous features such as temperature and calendar effects. Here, we evaluate the quality of the explanations produced by the LIMREF framework in terms of both qualitative and quantitative aspects such as accuracy, fidelity and comprehensibility, and benchmark those against other local explainers.
ReforesTree: A Dataset for Estimating Tropical Forest Carbon Stock with Deep Learning and Aerial Imagery
Authors: Reiersen Gyri , Dao David , Lütjens Björn , Klemmer Konstantin , Amara Kenza , Steinegger Attila , Zhang Ce , Zhu Xiaoxiang
Published: July 2022

Forest biomass is a key influence for future climate, and the world urgently needs highly scalable financing schemes, such as carbon offsetting certifications, to protect and restore forests. Current manual forest carbon stock inventory methods of measuring single trees by hand are time, labour, and cost intensive and have been shown to be subjective. They can lead to substantial overestimation of the carbon stock and ultimately distrust in forest financing. The potential for impact and scale of leveraging advancements in machine learning and remote sensing technologies is promising, but needs to be of high quality in order to replace the current forest stock protocols for certifications.

In this paper, we present ReforesTree, a benchmark dataset of forest carbon stock in six agro-forestry carbon offsetting sites in Ecuador. Furthermore, we show that a deep learning-based end-to-end model using individual tree detection from low cost RGB-only drone imagery is accurately estimating forest carbon stock within official carbon offsetting certification standards. Additionally, our baseline CNN model outperforms state-of-the-art satellite-based forest biomass and carbon stock estimates for this type of small-scale, tropical agro-forestry sites. We present this dataset to encourage machine learning research in this area to increase accountability and transparency of monitoring, verification and reporting (MVR) in carbon offsetting projects, as well as scaling global reforestation financing through accurate remote sensing.
Market Design for Drone Traffic Management
Authors: Seuken Sven , Friedrich Paul , Dierks Ludwig
Published: July 2022

The rapid development of drone technology is leading to more and more use cases being proposed. In response, regulators are drawing up drone traffic management frameworks. However, to design solutions that are efficient, fair, simple, non-manipulable, and scalable, we need market design and AI expertise. To this end, we introduce the drone traffic management problem as a new research challenge to the market design and AI communities. We present five design desiderata that we have derived from our interviews with stakeholders from the regulatory side as well as from public and private enterprises. Finally, we provide an overview of the solution space to point out possible directions for future research.
Matching Market Design with Constraints
Authors: Aziz Haris , Biró Péter , Yokoo Makoto
Published: July 2022

Two-sided matching is an important research area that has had a major impact on the design of real-world matching markets. One consistent feature in many of the real-world applications is that they impose new feasibility constraints that lead to research challenges. We survey developments in the field of two-sided matching with various constraints, including those based on regions, diversity, multi-dimensional capacities, and matroids.
Target Languages (vs. Inductive Biases) for Learning to Act and Plan
Authors: Geffner Hector
Published: July 2022

Recent breakthroughs in AI have shown the remarkable power of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. These developments, however, have been tied to specific tasks, and progress in out-of-distribution generalization has been limited. While it is assumed that these limitations can be overcome by incorporating suitable inductive biases, the notion of inductive biases itself is often left vague and does not provide meaningful guidance. In the paper, I articulate a different learning approach where representations do not emerge from biases in a neural architecture but are learned over a given target language with a known semantics. The basic ideas are implicit in mainstream AI where representations have been encoded in languages ranging from fragments of first-order logic to probabilistic structural causal models. The challenge is to learn from data the representations that have traditionally been crafted by hand. Generalization is then a result of the semantics of the language. The goals of this paper are to make these ideas explicit, to place them in a broader context where the design of the target language is crucial, and to illustrate them in the context of learning to act and plan. For this, after a general discussion, I consider learning representations of actions, general policies, and subgoals ("intrinsic rewards"). In these cases, learning is formulated as a combinatorial problem but nothing prevents the use of deep learning techniques instead. Indeed, learning representations over languages with a known semantics provides an account of what is to be learned, while learning representations with neural nets provides a complementary account of how representations can be learned. The challenge and the opportunity is to bring the two together.
Prior-Guided Transfer Learning for Enhancing Item Representation in E-commerce
Authors: Li Heng-Yi , Ni Yabo , Zeng Anxiang , Yu Han , Miao Chunyan
Published: July 2022

Item representation learning is crucial for search and recommendation tasks in e-commerce. In e-commerce, the instances (e.g., items, users) in different domains are always related. Such instance relationship across domains contains useful local information for transfer learning. However, existing transfer learning based approaches did not leverage this knowledge. In this paper, we report on our experience designing and deploying Prior-Guided Transfer Learning (PGTL) to bridge this gap. It utilizes the instance relationship across domains to extract prior knowledge for the target domain and leverages it to guide the fine-grained transfer learning for e-commerce item representation learning tasks. Rather than directly transferring knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, the prior knowledge can serve as a bridge to link both domains and enhance knowledge transfer, especially when the domain distribution discrepancy is large. Since its deployment on the Taiwanese portal of Taobao in Aug 2020, PGTL has significantly improved the item exposure rate and item click-through rate compared to previous approaches
Harvest – a System for Creating Structured Rate Filing Data from Filing PDFs
Authors: Tekin Ender , You Qian , Conathan Devin M. , Fung Glenn M. , Kneubuehl Thomas S.
Published: July 2022

We present a machine-learning-guided process that can efficiently extract factor tables from unstructured rate filing documents. Our approach combines multiple deep-learning-based models that work in tandem to create structured representations of tabular data present in unstructured documents such as pdf files. This process combines CNN's to detect tables, language-based models to extract table metadata and conventional computer vision techniques to improve the accuracy of tabular data on the machine-learning side. The extracted tabular data is validated through an intuitive user interface. This process, which we call Harvest, significantly reduces the time needed to extract tabular information from PDF files, enabling analysis of such data at a speed and scale that was previously unattainable.
Automatic Product Copywriting for E-commerce
Authors: Zhang Xueying , Zou Yanyan , Zhang Hainan , Zhou Jing , Diao Shiliang , Chen Jiajia , Ding Zhuoye , He Zhen , He Xueqi , Xiao Yun , Long Bo , Yu Han , Wu Lingfei
Published: July 2022

Product copywriting is a critical component of e-commerce recommendation platforms. It aims to attract users' interest and improve user experience by highlighting product characteristics with textual descriptions. In this paper, we report our experience deploying the proposed Automatic Product Copywriting Generation (APCG) system into the JD.com e-commerce product recommendation platform. It consists of two main components: 1) natural language generation, which is built from a transformer-pointer network and a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model based on millions of training data from our in-house platform; and 2) copywriting quality control, which is based on both automatic evaluation and human screening. For selected domains, the models are trained and updated daily with the updated training data. In addition, the model is also used as a real-time writing assistant tool on our live broadcast platform. The APCG system has been deployed in JD.com since Feb 2021. By Sep 2021, it has generated 2.53 million product descriptions, and improved the overall averaged click-through rate (CTR) and the Conversion Rate (CVR) by 4.22% and 3.61%, compared to baselines, respectively on a year-on-year basis. The accumulated Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) made by our system is improved by 213.42%, compared to the number in Feb 2021.
A Tale of Color Variants: Representation and Self-Supervised Learning in Fashion E-commerce
Authors: Dutta Ujjal Kr , Repakula Sandeep , Parmar Maulik , Ravi Abhinav
Published: July 2022

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.