nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing
Authors: Tao Yu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Xi Victoria Lin, bailin wang, Yi Chern Tan, Xinyi Yang, Dragomir Radev, richard socher, Caiming Xiong

We present GraPPa, an effective pre-training approach for table semantic parsing that learns a compositional inductive bias in the joint representations of textual and tabular data. We construct synthetic question-SQL pairs over high-quality tables via a synchronous context-free grammar (SCFG). We pre-train our model on the synthetic data to inject important structural properties commonly found in semantic parsing into the pre-training language model. To maintain the model's ability to represent real-world data, we also include masked language modeling (MLM) on several existing table-related datasets to regularize our pre-training process.  Our proposed pre-training strategy is much data-efficient. When incorporated with strong base semantic parsers, GraPPa achieves new state-of-the-art results on four popular fully supervised and weakly supervised table semantic parsing tasks.
PAC Prediction Sets Under Covariate Shift
Authors: Sangdon Park, Edgar Dobriban, Insup Lee, Osbert Bastani

An important challenge facing modern machine learning is how to rigorously quantify the uncertainty of model predictions. Conveying uncertainty is especially important when there are changes to the underlying data distribution that might invalidate the predictive model. Yet, most existing uncertainty quantification algorithms break down in the presence of such shifts. We propose a novel approach that addresses this challenge by constructing \emph{probably approximately correct (PAC)} prediction sets in the presence of covariate shift. Our approach focuses on the setting where there is a covariate shift from the source distribution (where we have labeled training examples) to the target distribution (for which we want to quantify uncertainty). Our algorithm assumes given importance weights that encode how the probabilities of the training examples change under the covariate shift. In practice, importance weights typically need to be estimated; thus, we extend our algorithm to the setting where we are given confidence intervals for the importance weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on covariate shifts based on DomainNet and ImageNet. Our algorithm satisfies the PAC constraint, and gives prediction sets with the smallest average normalized size among approaches that always satisfy the PAC constraint.
On Evaluation Metrics for Graph Generative Models
Authors: Rylee Thompson, Boris Knyazev, Elahe Ghalebi, Jungtaek Kim, Graham W. Taylor

In image generation, generative models can be evaluated naturally by visually inspecting model outputs. However, this is not always the case for graph generative models (GGMs), making their evaluation challenging. Currently, the standard process for evaluating GGMs suffers from three critical limitations: i) it does not produce a single score which makes model selection challenging, ii) in many cases it fails to consider underlying edge and node features, and iii) it is prohibitively slow to perform. In this work, we mitigate these issues by searching for \emph{scalar, domain-agnostic, and scalable metrics} for evaluating and ranking GGMs. To this end, we study existing GGM metrics and neural-network-based metrics emerging from generative models of images that use embeddings extracted from a task-specific network. Motivated by the power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to extract meaningful graph representations \emph{without any training}, we introduce several metrics based on the features extracted by an untrained random GNN. We design experiments to thoroughly test and objectively score metrics on their ability to measure the diversity and fidelity of generated graphs, as well as their sample and computational efficiency. Depending on the quantity of samples, we recommend one of two metrics from our collection of random-GNN-based metrics. We show these two metrics to be more expressive than pre-existing and alternative random-GNN-based metrics using our objective scoring. While we focus on applying these metrics to GGM evaluation, in practice this enables the ability to easily compute the dissimilarity between any two sets of graphs \emph{regardless of domain}. Our code is released at: https://github.com/uoguelph-mlrg/GGM-metrics.
SphereFace2: Binary Classification is All You Need for Deep Face Recognition
Authors: Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu, Adrian Weller, Bhiksha Raj, Rita Singh

State-of-the-art deep face recognition methods are mostly trained with a softmax-based multi-class classification framework. Despite being popular and effective, these methods still have a few shortcomings that limit empirical performance. In this paper, we start by identifying the discrepancy between training and evaluation in the existing multi-class classification framework and then discuss the potential limitations caused by the "competitive" nature of softmax normalization. Motivated by these limitations, we propose a novel binary classification training framework, termed SphereFace2. In contrast to existing methods, SphereFace2 circumvents the softmax normalization, as well as the corresponding closed-set assumption. This effectively bridges the gap between training and evaluation, enabling the representations to be improved individually by each binary classification task. Besides designing a specific well-performing loss function, we summarize a few general principles for this "one-vs-all" binary classification framework so that it can outperform current competitive methods. Our experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that SphereFace2 can consistently outperform state-of-the-art deep face recognition methods.
Inductive Matrix Completion Based on Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Muhan Zhang, Yixin Chen

We propose an inductive matrix completion model without using side information. By factorizing the (rating) matrix into the product of low-dimensional latent embeddings of rows (users) and columns (items), a majority of existing matrix completion methods are transductive, since the learned embeddings cannot generalize to unseen rows/columns or to new matrices. To make matrix completion inductive, most previous works use content (side information), such as user's age or movie's genre, to make predictions. However, high-quality content is not always available, and can be hard to extract. Under the extreme setting where not any side information is available other than the matrix to complete, can we still learn an inductive matrix completion model? In this paper, we propose an Inductive Graph-based Matrix Completion (IGMC) model to address this problem. IGMC trains a graph neural network (GNN) based purely on 1-hop subgraphs around (user, item) pairs generated from the rating matrix and maps these subgraphs to their corresponding ratings. It achieves highly competitive performance with state-of-the-art transductive baselines. In addition, IGMC is inductive -- it can generalize to users/items unseen during the training (given that their interactions exist), and can even transfer to new tasks. Our transfer learning experiments show that a model trained out of the MovieLens dataset can be directly used to predict Douban movie ratings with surprisingly good performance. Our work demonstrates that: 1) it is possible to train inductive matrix completion models without using side information while achieving similar or better performances than state-of-the-art transductive methods; 2) local graph patterns around a (user, item) pair are effective predictors of the rating this user gives to the item; and 3) Long-range dependencies might not be necessary for modeling recommender systems.
A STRUCTURED SELF-ATTENTIVE SENTENCE EMBEDDING
Authors: Zhouhan Lin, Minwei Feng, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Mo Yu, Bing Xiang, Bowen Zhou, Yoshua Bengio

This paper proposes a new model for extracting an interpretable sentence embedding by introducing self-attention. Instead of using a vector, we use a 2-D matrix to represent the embedding, with each row of the matrix attending on a different part of the sentence. We also propose a self-attention mechanism and a special regularization term for the model. As a side effect, the embedding comes with an easy way of visualizing what specific parts of the sentence are encoded into the embedding. We evaluate our model on 3 different tasks: author profiling, sentiment classification and textual entailment. Results show that our model yields a significant performance gain compared to other sentence embedding methods in all of the 3 tasks.
Structured Neural Summarization
Authors: Patrick Fernandes, Miltiadis Allamanis, Marc Brockschmidt

Summarization of long sequences into a concise statement is a core problem in natural language processing, requiring non-trivial understanding of the input. Based on the promising results of graph neural networks on highly structured data, we develop a framework to extend existing sequence encoders with a graph component that can reason about long-distance relationships in weakly structured data such as text. In an extensive evaluation, we show that the resulting hybrid sequence-graph models outperform both pure sequence models as well as pure graph models on a range of summarization tasks.
Learning sparse relational transition models
Authors: Victoria Xia, Zi Wang, Kelsey Allen, Tom Silver, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

We present a representation for describing transition models in complex uncertain domains using relational rules.  For any action, a rule selects a set of relevant objects and computes a distribution over properties of just those objects in the resulting state given their properties in the previous state.  An iterative greedy algorithm is used to construct a set of deictic references that determine which objects are relevant in any given state.   Feed-forward neural networks are used to learn the transition distribution on the relevant objects' properties.  This strategy is demonstrated to be both more versatile and more sample efficient than learning a monolithic transition model in a simulated domain in which a robot pushes stacks of objects on a cluttered table.
Multilingual Alignment of Contextual Word Representations
Authors: Steven Cao, Nikita Kitaev, Dan Klein

We propose procedures for evaluating and strengthening contextual embedding alignment and show that they are useful in analyzing and improving multilingual BERT. In particular, after our proposed alignment procedure, BERT exhibits significantly improved zero-shot performance on XNLI compared to the base model, remarkably matching pseudo-fully-supervised translate-train models for Bulgarian and Greek. Further, to measure the degree of alignment, we introduce a contextual version of word retrieval and show that it correlates well with downstream zero-shot transfer. Using this word retrieval task, we also analyze BERT and find that it exhibits systematic deficiencies, e.g. worse alignment for open-class parts-of-speech and word pairs written in different scripts, that are corrected by the alignment procedure. These results support contextual alignment as a useful concept for understanding large multilingual pre-trained models.
A Class of Short-term Recurrence Anderson Mixing Methods and Their Applications
Authors: Fuchao Wei, Chenglong Bao, Yang Liu

Anderson mixing (AM) is a powerful acceleration method for fixed-point iterations, but its computation requires storing many historical iterations. The extra memory footprint can be prohibitive when solving high-dimensional problems in a resource-limited machine. To reduce the memory overhead, we propose a novel class of short-term recurrence AM methods (ST-AM). The ST-AM methods only store two previous iterations with cheap corrections. We prove that the basic version of ST-AM is equivalent to the full-memory AM in strongly convex quadratic optimization, and with minor changes it has local linear convergence for solving general nonlinear fixed-point problems. We further analyze the convergence properties of the regularized ST-AM for nonconvex (stochastic) optimization. Finally, we apply ST-AM to several applications including solving root-finding problems and training neural networks. Experimental results show that ST-AM is competitive with the long-memory AM and outperforms many existing optimizers.
Accelerating SGD with momentum for over-parameterized learning
Authors: Chaoyue Liu, Mikhail Belkin

Nesterov SGD is widely used for training modern neural networks and other machine learning models. Yet, its advantages over SGD have not been theoretically clarified. Indeed, as we show  in this paper, both theoretically and empirically, Nesterov SGD with any parameter selection does not in general provide acceleration over ordinary SGD. Furthermore, Nesterov SGD may diverge for step sizes that ensure convergence of ordinary SGD. This is in contrast to the classical results in the deterministic setting, where the same step size ensures accelerated convergence of the Nesterov's method over optimal gradient descent.

To address the non-acceleration issue, we  introduce a compensation term to Nesterov SGD. The resulting  algorithm, which we call MaSS, converges  for same step sizes as SGD. We prove that MaSS obtains an accelerated convergence rates over SGD for any mini-batch size in the linear setting.  For full batch, the convergence rate of MaSS matches the well-known accelerated rate of the Nesterov's method. 

We also analyze the  practically important question of the dependence of the convergence rate and  optimal hyper-parameters on the mini-batch size, demonstrating three distinct regimes: linear scaling, diminishing returns and saturation.

Experimental evaluation of MaSS for several standard  architectures of deep networks, including ResNet and convolutional networks, shows improved performance over SGD, Nesterov SGD  and Adam.
Building Dynamic Knowledge Graphs from Text using Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Rajarshi Das, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Xingdi Yuan, Adam Trischler, Andrew McCallum

We propose a neural machine-reading model that constructs dynamic knowledge graphs from procedural text. It builds these graphs recurrently for each step of the described procedure, and uses them to track the evolving states of participant entities. We harness and extend a recently proposed machine reading comprehension(MRC) model to query for entity states, since these states are generally communicated in spans of text and MRC models perform well in extracting entity-centric spans.   The  explicit,  structured,  and  evolving  knowledge  graph  representations that our model constructs can be used in downstream question answering tasks to improve machine comprehension of text, as we demonstrate empirically.  On two comprehension tasks from the recently proposed  ProPara dataset,  our model achieves state-of-the-art results. We further show that our model is competitive on the Recipes dataset, suggesting it may be generally applicable.
Which Shortcut Cues Will DNNs Choose? A Study from the Parameter-Space Perspective
Authors: Luca Scimeca, Seong Joon Oh, Sanghyuk Chun, Michael Poli, Sangdoo Yun

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often rely on easy–to–learn discriminatory features, or cues, that are not necessarily essential to the problem at hand. For example, ducks in an image may be recognized based on their typical background scenery, such as lakes or streams. This phenomenon, also known as shortcut learning, is emerging as a key limitation of the current generation of machine learning models. In this work, we introduce a set of experiments to deepen our understanding of shortcut learning and its implications. We design a training setup with several shortcut cues, named WCST-ML, where each cue is equally conducive to the visual recognition problem at hand. Even under equal opportunities, we observe that (1) certain cues are preferred to others, (2) solutions biased to the easy–to–learn cues tend to converge to relatively flat minima on the loss surface, and (3) the solutions focusing on those preferred cues are far more abundant in the parameter space. We explain the abundance of certain cues via their Kolmogorov (descriptional) complexity: solutions corresponding to Kolmogorov-simple cues are abundant in the parameter space and are thus preferred by DNNs. Our studies are based on the synthetic dataset DSprites and the face dataset UTKFace. In our WCST-ML, we observe that the inborn bias of models leans toward simple cues, such as color and ethnicity. Our findings emphasize the importance of active human intervention to remove the inborn model biases that may cause negative societal impacts.
Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training
Authors: Shiv Shankar*, Vihari Piratla*, Soumen Chakrabarti, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Preethi Jyothi, Sunita Sarawagi

We present CROSSGRAD , a method to use multi-domain training data to learn a classifier that generalizes to new domains. CROSSGRAD does not need an adaptation phase via labeled or unlabeled data, or domain features in the new domain. Most existing domain adaptation methods attempt to erase domain signals using techniques like domain adversarial training. In contrast, CROSSGRAD is free to use domain signals for predicting labels, if it can prevent overfitting on training domains. We conceptualize the task in a Bayesian setting, in which a sampling step is implemented as data augmentation, based on domain-guided perturbations of input instances. CROSSGRAD jointly trains a label and a domain classifier on examples perturbed by loss gradients of each other’s objectives. This enables us to directly perturb inputs, without separating and re-mixing domain signals while making various distributional assumptions. Empirical evaluation on three different applications where this setting is natural establishes that
 (1) domain-guided perturbation provides consistently better generalization to unseen domains, compared to generic instance perturbation methods, and 
(2) data augmentation is a more stable and accurate method than domain adversarial training.
Equi-normalization of Neural Networks
Authors: Pierre Stock, Benjamin Graham, Rémi Gribonval, Hervé Jégou

Modern neural networks are over-parametrized. In particular, each rectified linear hidden unit can be modified by a multiplicative factor by adjusting input and out- put weights, without changing the rest of the network. Inspired by the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, we introduce a fast iterative method for minimizing the l2 norm of the weights, equivalently the weight decay regularizer. It provably converges to a unique solution. Interleaving our algorithm with SGD during training improves the test accuracy. For small batches, our approach offers an alternative to batch- and group- normalization on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet with a ResNet-18.
Critical Points of Linear Neural Networks: Analytical Forms and Landscape Properties
Authors: Yi Zhou, Yingbin Liang

Due to the success of deep learning to solving a variety of challenging machine learning tasks, there is a rising interest in understanding loss functions for training neural networks from a theoretical aspect. Particularly, the properties of critical points and the landscape around them are of importance to determine the convergence performance of optimization algorithms. In this paper, we provide a necessary and sufficient characterization of the analytical forms for the critical points (as well as global minimizers) of the square loss functions for linear neural networks. We show that the analytical forms of the critical points characterize the values of the corresponding loss functions as well as the necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve global minimum. Furthermore, we exploit the analytical forms of the critical points to characterize the landscape properties for the loss functions of linear neural networks and shallow ReLU networks. One particular conclusion is that: While the loss function of linear networks has no spurious local minimum, the loss function of one-hidden-layer nonlinear networks with ReLU activation function does have local minimum that is not global minimum.
StructBERT: Incorporating Language Structures into Pre-training for Deep Language Understanding
Authors: Wei Wang, Bin Bi, Ming Yan, Chen Wu, Jiangnan Xia, Zuyi Bao, Liwei Peng, Luo Si

Recently, the pre-trained language model, BERT (and its robustly optimized version RoBERTa), has attracted a lot of attention in natural language understanding (NLU), and achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in various NLU tasks, such as sentiment classification, natural language inference, semantic textual similarity and question answering. Inspired by the linearization exploration work of Elman, we extend BERT to a new model, StructBERT, by incorporating language structures into pre-training. Specifically, we pre-train StructBERT with two auxiliary tasks to make the most of the sequential order of words and sentences, which leverage language structures at the word and sentence levels, respectively. As a result, the new model is adapted to different levels of language understanding required by downstream tasks.

The StructBERT with structural pre-training gives surprisingly good empirical results on a variety of downstream tasks, including pushing the state-of-the-art on the GLUE benchmark to 89.0 (outperforming all published models at the time of model submission), the F1 score on SQuAD v1.1 question answering to 93.0, the accuracy on SNLI to 91.7.
When is a Convolutional Filter Easy to Learn?
Authors: Simon S. Du, Jason D. Lee, Yuandong Tian

We analyze the convergence of (stochastic) gradient descent algorithm for learning a convolutional filter with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function. Our analysis does not rely on any specific form of the input distribution and our proofs only use the definition of ReLU, in contrast with previous works that are restricted to standard Gaussian input. We show that (stochastic) gradient descent with random initialization can learn the convolutional filter in polynomial time and the convergence rate depends on the smoothness of the input distribution and the closeness of patches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first recovery guarantee of gradient-based algorithms for convolutional filter on non-Gaussian input distributions. Our theory also justifies the two-stage learning rate strategy in deep neural networks. While our focus is theoretical, we also present experiments that justify our theoretical findings.
HTLM: Hyper-Text Pre-Training and Prompting of Language Models
Authors: Armen Aghajanyan, Dmytro Okhonko, Mike Lewis, Mandar Joshi, Hu Xu, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer

We introduce HTLM, a hyper-text language model trained on a large-scale web crawl. Modeling hyper-text has a number of advantages: (1) it is easily gathered at scale, (2) it provides rich document-level and end-task-adjacent supervision (e.g. 'class' and 'id' attributes often encode document category information), and (3) it allows for new structured prompting that follows the established semantics of HTML (e.g. to do zero-shot summarization by infilling '<title>' tags for a webpage that contains the input text).  We show that pretraining with a BART-style denoising loss directly on simplified HTML provides highly effective transfer for a wide range of end tasks and supervision levels. HTLM matches or exceeds the performance of comparably sized text-only LMs for zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning for classification benchmarks, while also setting new state-of-the-art performance levels for zero-shot summarization. We also find that hyper-text prompts provide more value to HTLM, in terms of data efficiency, than plain text prompts do for existing LMs, and that HTLM is highly effective at auto-prompting itself, by simply generating the most likely hyper-text formatting for any available training data. We will release all code and models to support future HTLM research.