pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ViWOZ: A Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Dataset For Low-resource Language
Authors: Phi Nguyen Van, Tung Cao Hoang, Dung Nguyen Manh, Quan Nguyen Minh, Long Tran Quoc
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Most of the current task-oriented dialogue systems (ToD), despite having interesting results, are designed for a handful of languages like Chinese and English. Therefore, their performance in low-resource languages is still a significant problem due to the absence of a standard dataset and evaluation policy. To address this problem, we proposed ViWOZ, a fully-annotated Vietnamese task-oriented dialogue dataset. ViWOZ is the first multi-turn, multi-domain tasked oriented dataset in Vietnamese, a low-resource language. The dataset consists of a total of 5,000 dialogues, including 60,946 fully annotated utterances. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive benchmark of both modular and end-to-end models in low-resource language scenarios. With those characteristics, the ViWOZ dataset enables future studies on creating a multilingual task-oriented dialogue system.
Augmenting Document Representations for Dense Retrieval with Interpolation and Perturbation
Authors: Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Ju Hwang, Jong C. Park
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Information Retrieval, Passage Retrieval, Retrieval

Dense retrieval models, which aim at retrieving the most relevant document for an input query on a dense representation space, have gained considerable attention for their remarkable success. Yet, dense models require a vast amount of labeled training data for notable performance, whereas it is often challenging to acquire query-document pairs annotated by humans. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective Document Augmentation for dense Retrieval (DAR) framework, which augments the representations of documents with their interpolation and perturbation. We validate the performance of DAR on retrieval tasks with two benchmark datasets, showing that the proposed DAR significantly outperforms relevant baselines on the dense retrieval of both the labeled and unlabeled documents.
ReACC: A Retrieval-Augmented Code Completion Framework
Authors: Shuai Lu, Nan Duan, Hojae Han, Daya Guo, Seung-won Hwang, Alexey Svyatkovskiy
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Code Completion, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Code completion, which aims to predict the following code token(s) according to the code context, can improve the productivity of software development. Recent work has proved that statistical language modeling with transformers can greatly improve the performance in the code completion task via learning from large-scale source code datasets. However, current approaches focus only on code context within the file or project, i.e. internal context. Our distinction is utilizing "external" context, inspired by human behaviors of copying from the related code snippets when writing code. Specifically, we propose a retrieval-augmented code completion framework, leveraging both lexical copying and referring to code with similar semantics by retrieval. We adopt a stage-wise training approach that combines a source code retriever and an auto-regressive language model for programming language. We evaluate our approach in the code completion task in Python and Java programming languages, achieving a state-of-the-art performance on CodeXGLUE benchmark.
DEPTS: Deep Expansion Learning for Periodic Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Wei Fan, Shun Zheng, Xiaohan Yi, Wei Cao, Yanjie Fu, Jiang Bian, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Scheduling, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Periodic time series (PTS) forecasting plays a crucial role in a variety of industries to foster critical tasks, such as early warning, pre-planning, resource scheduling, etc. However, the complicated dependencies of the PTS signal on its inherent periodicity as well as the sophisticated composition of various periods hinder the performance of PTS forecasting. In this paper, we introduce a deep expansion learning framework, DEPTS, for PTS forecasting. DEPTS starts with a decoupled formulation by introducing the periodic state as a hidden variable, which stimulates us to make two dedicated modules to tackle the aforementioned two challenges. First, we develop an expansion module on top of residual learning to perform a layer-by-layer expansion of those complicated dependencies. Second, we introduce a periodicity module with a parameterized periodic function that holds sufficient capacity to capture diversified periods. Moreover, our two customized modules also have certain interpretable capabilities, such as attributing the forecasts to either local momenta or global periodicity and characterizing certain core periodic properties, e.g., amplitudes and frequencies. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of DEPTS on handling PTS. In most cases, DEPTS achieves significant improvements over the best baseline. Specifically, the error reduction can even reach up to 20% for a few cases. Finally, all codes are publicly available.
An Introduction to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning and Review of its Application to Autonomous Mobility
Authors: Lukas M. Schmidt, Johanna Brosig, Axel Plinge, Bjoern M. Eskofier, Christopher Mutschler
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Many scenarios in mobility and traffic involve multiple different agents that need to cooperate to find a joint solution. Recent advances in behavioral planning use Reinforcement Learning to find effective and performant behavior strategies. However, as autonomous vehicles and vehicle-to-X communications become more mature, solutions that only utilize single, independent agents leave potential performance gains on the road. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a research field that aims to find optimal solutions for multiple agents that interact with each other. This work aims to give an overview of the field to researchers in autonomous mobility. We first explain MARL and introduce important concepts. Then, we discuss the central paradigms that underlie MARL algorithms, and give an overview of state-of-the-art methods and ideas in each paradigm. With this background, we survey applications of MARL in autonomous mobility scenarios and give an overview of existing scenarios and implementations.
Can you even tell left from right? Presenting a new challenge for VQA
Authors: Sai Raam Venkatraman, Rishi Rao, S. Balasubramanian, Chandra Sekhar Vorugunti, R. Raghunatha Sarma
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering (VQA) needs a means of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of models. One aspect of such an evaluation is the evaluation of compositional generalisation, or the ability of a model to answer well on scenes whose scene-setups are different from the training set. Therefore, for this purpose, we need datasets whose train and test sets differ significantly in composition. In this work, we present several quantitative measures of compositional separation and find that popular datasets for VQA are not good evaluators. To solve this, we present Uncommon Objects in Unseen Configurations (UOUC), a synthetic dataset for VQA. UOUC is at once fairly complex while also being well-separated, compositionally. The object-class of UOUC consists of 380 clasess taken from 528 characters from the Dungeons and Dragons game. The train set of UOUC consists of 200,000 scenes; whereas the test set consists of 30,000 scenes. In order to study compositional generalisation, simple reasoning and memorisation, each scene of UOUC is annotated with up to 10 novel questions. These deal with spatial relationships, hypothetical changes to scenes, counting, comparison, memorisation and memory-based reasoning. In total, UOUC presents over 2 million questions. UOUC also finds itself as a strong challenge to well-performing models for VQA. Our evaluation of recent models for VQA shows poor compositional generalisation, and comparatively lower ability towards simple reasoning. These results suggest that UOUC could lead to advances in research by being a strong benchmark for VQA.
What's in the Black Box? The False Negative Mechanisms Inside Object Detectors
Authors: Dimity Miller, Peyman Moghadam, Mark Cox, Matt Wildie, Raja Jurdak
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Translation

In object detection, false negatives arise when a detector fails to detect a target object. To understand why object detectors produce false negatives, we identify five 'false negative mechanisms', where each mechanism describes how a specific component inside the detector architecture failed. Focusing on two-stage and one-stage anchor-box object detector architectures, we introduce a framework for quantifying these false negative mechanisms. Using this framework, we investigate why Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet fail to detect objects in benchmark vision datasets and robotics datasets. We show that a detector's false negative mechanisms differ significantly between computer vision benchmark datasets and robotics deployment scenarios. This has implications for the translation of object detectors developed for benchmark datasets to robotics applications. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/fn_mechanisms
Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue
Authors: Maximillian Chen, Weiyan Shi, Feifan Yan, Ryan Hou, Jingwen Zhang, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Complex conversation settings such as persuasion involve communicating changes in attitude or behavior, so users' perspectives need to be addressed, even when not directly related to the topic. In this work, we contribute a novel modular dialogue system framework that seamlessly integrates factual information and social content into persuasive dialogue. Our framework is generalizable to any dialogue tasks that have mixed social and task contents. We conducted a study that compared user evaluations of our framework versus a baseline end-to-end generation model. We found our framework was evaluated more favorably in all dimensions including competence and friendliness, compared to the end-to-end model which does not explicitly handle social content or factual questions.
Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Tejas Gokhale, Swaroop Mishra, Man Luo, Bhavdeep Singh Sachdeva, Chitta Baral
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering

Data modification, either via additional training datasets, data augmentation, debiasing, and dataset filtering, has been proposed as an effective solution for generalizing to out-of-domain (OOD) inputs, in both natural language processing and computer vision literature. However, the effect of data modification on adversarial robustness remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of common data modification strategies and evaluate not only their in-domain and OOD performance, but also their adversarial robustness (AR). We also present results on a two-dimensional synthetic dataset to visualize the effect of each method on the training distribution. This work serves as an empirical study towards understanding the relationship between generalizing to unseen domains and defending against adversarial perturbations. Our findings suggest that more data (either via additional datasets or data augmentation) benefits both OOD accuracy and AR. However, data filtering (previously shown to improve OOD accuracy on natural language inference) hurts OOD accuracy on other tasks such as question answering and image classification. We provide insights from our experiments to inform future work in this direction.
Contrastive Learning of Sociopragmatic Meaning in Social Media
Authors: Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Ganesh Jawahar
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Recent progress in representation and contrastive learning in NLP has not widely considered the class of \textit{sociopragmatic meaning} (i.e., meaning in interaction within different language communities). To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework for learning task-agnostic representations transferable to a wide range of sociopragmatic tasks (e.g., emotion, hate speech, humor, sarcasm). Our framework outperforms other contrastive learning frameworks for both in-domain and out-of-domain data, across both the general and few-shot settings. For example, compared to two popular pre-trained language models, our method obtains an improvement of $11.66$ average $F_1$ on $16$ datasets when fine-tuned on only $20$ training samples per dataset.Our code is available at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/infodcl
Multilingual Mix: Example Interpolation Improves Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yong Cheng, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao, Pidong Wang, Wolfgang Macherey
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Decoder, Inductive Bias, Machine Translation, Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation models are trained to maximize the likelihood of a mix of examples drawn from multiple language pairs. The dominant inductive bias applied to these models is a shared vocabulary and a shared set of parameters across languages; the inputs and labels corresponding to examples drawn from different language pairs might still reside in distinct sub-spaces. In this paper, we introduce multilingual crossover encoder-decoder (mXEncDec) to fuse language pairs at an instance level. Our approach interpolates instances from different language pairs into joint `crossover examples' in order to encourage sharing input and output spaces across languages. To ensure better fusion of examples in multilingual settings, we propose several techniques to improve example interpolation across dissimilar languages under heavy data imbalance. Experiments on a large-scale WMT multilingual dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly improves quality on English-to-Many, Many-to-English and zero-shot translation tasks (from +0.5 BLEU up to +5.5 BLEU points). Results on code-switching sets demonstrate the capability of our approach to improve model generalization to out-of-distribution multilingual examples. We also conduct qualitative and quantitative representation comparisons to analyze the advantages of our approach at the representation level.
Do Language Models Plagiarize?
Authors: Jooyoung Lee, Thai Le, Jinghui Chen, Dongwon Lee
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Memorization, Text Generation

Past literature has illustrated that language models (LMs) often memorize parts of training instances and reproduce them in natural language generation (NLG) processes. However, it is unclear to what extent LMs "reuse" a training corpus. For instance, models can generate paraphrased sentences that are contextually similar to training samples. In this work, therefore, we study three types of plagiarism (i.e., verbatim, paraphrase, and idea) among GPT-2 generated texts, in comparison to its training data, and further analyze the plagiarism patterns of fine-tuned LMs with domain-specific corpora which are extensively used in practice. Our results suggest that (1) three types of plagiarism widely exist in LMs beyond memorization, (2) both size and decoding methods of LMs are strongly associated with the degrees of plagiarism they exhibit, and (3) fine-tuned LMs' plagiarism patterns vary based on their corpus similarity and homogeneity. Given that a majority of LMs' training data is scraped from the Web without informing content owners, their reiteration of words, phrases, and even core ideas from training sets into generated texts has ethical implications. Their patterns are likely to exacerbate as both the size of LMs and their training data increase, raising concerns about indiscriminately pursuing larger models with larger training corpora. Plagiarized content can also contain individuals' personal and sensitive information. These findings overall cast doubt on the practicality of current LMs in mission-critical writing tasks and urge more discussions around the observed phenomena. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/Brit7777/LM-plagiarism.
Online Task Assignment Problems with Reusable Resources
Authors: Hanna Sumita, Shinji Ito, Kei Takemura, Daisuke Hatano, Takuro Fukunaga, Naonori Kakimura, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Task 2

We study online task assignment problem with reusable resources, motivated by practical applications such as ridesharing, crowdsourcing and job hiring. In the problem, we are given a set of offline vertices (agents), and, at each time, an online vertex (task) arrives randomly according to a known time-dependent distribution. Upon arrival, we assign the task to agents immediately and irrevocably. The goal of the problem is to maximize the expected total profit produced by completed tasks. The key features of our problem are (1) an agent is reusable, i.e., an agent comes back to the market after completing the assigned task, (2) an agent may reject the assigned task to stay the market, and (3) a task may accommodate multiple agents. The setting generalizes that of existing work in which an online task is assigned to one agent under (1). In this paper, we propose an online algorithm that is $1/2$-competitive for the above setting, which is tight. Moreover, when each agent can reject assigned tasks at most $\Delta$ times, the algorithm is shown to have the competitive ratio $\Delta/(3\Delta-1)\geq 1/3$. We also evaluate our proposed algorithm with numerical experiments.
Distraction is All You Need for Fairness
Authors: Mehdi Yazdani-Jahromi, Amirarsalan Rajabi, Ali Khodabandeh Yalabadi, Aida Tayebi, Ozlem Ozmen Garibay
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Classification, Decision Making, Fairness

Bias in training datasets must be managed for various groups in classification tasks to ensure parity or equal treatment. With the recent growth in artificial intelligence models and their expanding role in automated decision-making, ensuring that these models are not biased is vital. There is an abundance of evidence suggesting that these models could contain or even amplify the bias present in the data on which they are trained, inherent to their objective function and learning algorithms; Many researchers direct their attention to this issue in different directions, namely, changing data to be statistically independent, adversarial training for restricting the capabilities of a particular competitor who aims to maximize parity, etc. These methods result in information loss and do not provide a suitable balance between accuracy and fairness or do not ensure limiting the biases in training. To this end, we propose a powerful strategy for training deep learning models called the Distraction module, which can be theoretically proven effective in controlling bias from affecting the classification results. This method can be utilized with different data types (e.g., Tabular, images, graphs, etc.). We demonstrate the potency of the proposed method by testing it on UCI Adult and Heritage Health datasets (tabular), POKEC-Z, POKEC-N and NBA datasets (graph), and CelebA dataset (vision). Using state-of-the-art methods proposed in the fairness literature for each dataset, we exhibit our model is superior to these proposed methods in minimizing bias and maintaining accuracy.
Accelerating Stochastic Probabilistic Inference
Authors: Minta Liu, Suliang Bu
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Second-order methods, Stochastic Optimization, Variational Inference

Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization, following noisy estimates of the natural gradient. However, almost all the state-of-the-art SVI algorithms are based on first-order optimization algorithm and often suffer from poor convergence rate. In this paper, we bridge the gap between second-order methods and stochastic variational inference by proposing a second-order based stochastic variational inference approach. In particular, firstly we derive the Hessian matrix of the variational objective. Then we devise two numerical schemes to implement second-order SVI efficiently. Thorough empirical evaluations are investigated on both synthetic and real dataset to backup both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Agile Maneuvers in Legged Robots: a Predictive Control Approach
Authors: Carlos Mastalli, Wolfgang Merkt, Guiyang Xin, Jaehyun Shim, Michael Mistry, Ioannis Havoutis, Sethu Vijayakumar
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00

Planning and execution of agile locomotion maneuvers have been a longstanding challenge in legged robotics. It requires to derive motion plans and local feedback policies in real-time to handle the nonholonomy of the kinetic momenta. To achieve so, we propose a hybrid predictive controller that considers the robot's actuation limits and full-body dynamics. It combines the feedback policies with tactile information to locally predict future actions. It converges within a few milliseconds thanks to a feasibility-driven approach. Our predictive controller enables ANYmal robots to generate agile maneuvers in realistic scenarios. A crucial element is to track the local feedback policies as, in contrast to whole-body control, they achieve the desired angular momentum. To the best of our knowledge, our predictive controller is the first to handle actuation limits, generate agile locomotion maneuvers, and execute optimal feedback policies for low level torque control without the use of a separate whole-body controller.
Physical Neural Cellular Automata for 2D Shape Classification
Authors: Kathryn Walker, Rasmus Berg Palm, Rodrigo Moreno Garcia, Andres Faina, Kasper Stoy, Sebastian Risi
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Materials with the ability to self-classify their own shape have the potential to advance a wide range of engineering applications and industries. Biological systems possess the ability not only to self-reconfigure but also to self-classify themselves to determine a general shape and function. Previous work into modular robotics systems has only enabled self-recognition and self-reconfiguration into a specific target shape, missing the inherent robustness present in nature to self-classify. In this paper we therefore take advantage of recent advances in deep learning and neural cellular automata, and present a simple modular 2D robotic system that can infer its own class of shape through the local communication of its components. Furthermore, we show that our system can be successfully transferred to hardware which thus opens opportunities for future self-classifying machines. Code available at https://github.com/kattwalker/projectcube. Video available at https://youtu.be/0TCOkE4keyc.