pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CommerceMM: Large-Scale Commerce MultiModal Representation Learning with Omni Retrieval
Authors: Licheng Yu, Jun Chen, Animesh Sinha, Mengjiao MJ Wang, Hugo Chen, Tamara L. Berg, Ning Zhang
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

We introduce CommerceMM - a multimodal model capable of providing a diverse and granular understanding of commerce topics associated to the given piece of content (image, text, image+text), and having the capability to generalize to a wide range of tasks, including Multimodal Categorization, Image-Text Retrieval, Query-to-Product Retrieval, Image-to-Product Retrieval, etc. We follow the pre-training + fine-tuning training regime and present 5 effective pre-training tasks on image-text pairs. To embrace more common and diverse commerce data with text-to-multimodal, image-to-multimodal, and multimodal-to-multimodal mapping, we propose another 9 novel cross-modal and cross-pair retrieval tasks, called Omni-Retrieval pre-training. The pre-training is conducted in an efficient manner with only two forward/backward updates for the combined 14 tasks. Extensive experiments and analysis show the effectiveness of each task. When combining all pre-training tasks, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on 7 commerce-related downstream tasks after fine-tuning. Additionally, we propose a novel approach of modality randomization to dynamically adjust our model under different efficiency constraints.
Explaining Reject Options of Learning Vector Quantization Classifiers
Authors: André Artelt, Johannes Brinkrolf, Roel Visser, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Quantization

While machine learning models are usually assumed to always output a prediction, there also exist extensions in the form of reject options which allow the model to reject inputs where only a prediction with an unacceptably low certainty would be possible. With the ongoing rise of eXplainable AI, a lot of methods for explaining model predictions have been developed. However, understanding why a given input was rejected, instead of being classified by the model, is also of interest. Surprisingly, explanations of rejects have not been considered so far. We propose to use counterfactual explanations for explaining rejects and investigate how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations of different reject options for an important class of models, namely prototype-based classifiers such as learning vector quantization models.
Learning to Solve Routing Problems via Distributionally Robust Optimization
Authors: Yuan Jiang, Yaoxin Wu, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00

Recent deep models for solving routing problems always assume a single distribution of nodes for training, which severely impairs their cross-distribution generalization ability. In this paper, we exploit group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) to tackle this issue, where we jointly optimize the weights for different groups of distributions and the parameters for the deep model in an interleaved manner during training. We also design a module based on convolutional neural network, which allows the deep model to learn more informative latent pattern among the nodes. We evaluate the proposed approach on two types of well-known deep models including GCN and POMO. The experimental results on the randomly synthesized instances and the ones from two benchmark dataset (i.e., TSPLib and CVRPLib) demonstrate that our approach could significantly improve the cross-distribution generalization performance over the original models.
Eliciting Best Practices for Collaboration with Computational Notebooks
Authors: Luigi Quaranta, Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00

Despite the widespread adoption of computational notebooks, little is known about best practices for their usage in collaborative contexts. In this paper, we fill this gap by eliciting a catalog of best practices for collaborative data science with computational notebooks. With this aim, we first look for best practices through a multivocal literature review. Then, we conduct interviews with professional data scientists to assess their awareness of these best practices. Finally, we assess the adoption of best practices through the analysis of 1,380 Jupyter notebooks retrieved from the Kaggle platform. Findings reveal that experts are mostly aware of the best practices and tend to adopt them in their daily work. Nonetheless, they do not consistently follow all the recommendations as, depending on specific contexts, some are deemed unfeasible or counterproductive due to the lack of proper tool support. As such, we envision the design of notebook solutions that allow data scientists not to have to prioritize exploration and rapid prototyping over writing code of quality.
Few-shot semantic segmentation via mask aggregation
Authors: Wei Ao, Shunyi Zheng, Yan Meng
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to recognize novel classes with only very few labelled data. This challenging task requires mining of the relevant relationships between the query image and the support images. Previous works have typically regarded it as a pixel-wise classification problem. Therefore, various models have been designed to explore the correlation of pixels between the query image and the support images. However, they focus only on pixel-wise correspondence and ignore the overall correlation of objects. In this paper, we introduce a mask-based classification method for addressing this problem. The mask aggregation network (MANet), which is a simple mask classification model, is proposed to simultaneously generate a fixed number of masks and their probabilities of being targets. Then, the final segmentation result is obtained by aggregating all the masks according to their locations. Experiments on both the PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets show that our method performs comparably to the state-of-the-art pixel-based methods. This competitive performance demonstrates the potential of mask classification as an alternative baseline method in few-shot semantic segmentation. Our source code will be made available at https://github.com/TinyAway/MANet.
Case law retrieval: problems, methods, challenges and evaluations in the last 20 years
Authors: Daniel Locke, Guido Zuccon
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Case law retrieval is the retrieval of judicial decisions relevant to a legal question. Case law retrieval comprises a significant amount of a lawyer's time, and is important to ensure accurate advice and reduce workload. We survey methods for case law retrieval from the past 20 years and outline the problems and challenges facing evaluation of case law retrieval systems going forward. Limited published work has focused on improving ranking in ad-hoc case law retrieval. But there has been significant work in other areas of case law retrieval, and legal information retrieval generally. This is likely due to legal search providers being unwilling to give up the secrets of their success to competitors. Most evaluations of case law retrieval have been undertaken on small collections and focus on related tasks such as question-answer systems or recommender systems. Work has not focused on Cranfield style evaluations and baselines of methods for case law retrieval on publicly available test collections are not present. This presents a major challenge going forward. But there are reasons to question the extent of this problem, at least in a commercial setting. Without test collections to baseline approaches it cannot be known whether methods are promising. Works by commercial legal search providers show the effectiveness of natural language systems as well as query expansion for case law retrieval. Machine learning is being applied to more and more legal search tasks, and undoubtedly this represents the future of case law retrieval.
Holistic Adversarial Robustness of Deep Learning Models
Authors: Pin-Yu Chen, Sijia Liu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Deep Learning

Adversarial robustness studies the worst-case performance of a machine learning model to ensure safety and reliability. With the proliferation of deep-learning-based technology, the potential risks associated with model development and deployment can be amplified and become dreadful vulnerabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of research topics and foundational principles of research methods for adversarial robustness of deep learning models, including attacks, defenses, verification, and novel applications.
Unsupervised word-level prosody tagging for controllable speech synthesis
Authors: Yiwei Guo, Chenpeng Du, Kai Yu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Although word-level prosody modeling in neural text-to-speech (TTS) has been investigated in recent research for diverse speech synthesis, it is still challenging to control speech synthesis manually without a specific reference. This is largely due to lack of word-level prosody tags. In this work, we propose a novel approach for unsupervised word-level prosody tagging with two stages, where we first group the words into different types with a decision tree according to their phonetic content and then cluster the prosodies using GMM within each type of words separately. This design is based on the assumption that the prosodies of different type of words, such as long or short words, should be tagged with different label sets. Furthermore, a TTS system with the derived word-level prosody tags is trained for controllable speech synthesis. Experiments on LJSpeech show that the TTS model trained with word-level prosody tags not only achieves better naturalness than a typical FastSpeech2 model, but also gains the ability to manipulate word-level prosody.
A Survey of Neural Trojan Attacks and Defenses in Deep Learning
Authors: Jie Wang, Ghulam Mubashar Hassan, Naveed Akhtar
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) relies heavily on deep learning - a technology that is becoming increasingly popular in real-life applications of AI, even in the safety-critical and high-risk domains. However, it is recently discovered that deep learning can be manipulated by embedding Trojans inside it. Unfortunately, pragmatic solutions to circumvent the computational requirements of deep learning, e.g. outsourcing model training or data annotation to third parties, further add to model susceptibility to the Trojan attacks. Due to the key importance of the topic in deep learning, recent literature has seen many contributions in this direction. We conduct a comprehensive review of the techniques that devise Trojan attacks for deep learning and explore their defenses. Our informative survey systematically organizes the recent literature and discusses the key concepts of the methods while assuming minimal knowledge of the domain on the readers part. It provides a comprehensible gateway to the broader community to understand the recent developments in Neural Trojans.
G-Mixup: Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification
Authors: Xiaotian Han, Zhimeng Jiang, Ninghao Liu, Xia Hu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Graph Classification

This work develops \emph{mixup for graph data}. Mixup has shown superiority in improving the generalization and robustness of neural networks by interpolating features and labels between two random samples. Traditionally, Mixup can work on regular, grid-like, and Euclidean data such as image or tabular data. However, it is challenging to directly adopt Mixup to augment graph data because different graphs typically: 1) have different numbers of nodes; 2) are not readily aligned; and 3) have unique typologies in non-Euclidean space. To this end, we propose $\mathcal{G}$-Mixup to augment graphs for graph classification by interpolating the generator (i.e., graphon) of different classes of graphs. Specifically, we first use graphs within the same class to estimate a graphon. Then, instead of directly manipulating graphs, we interpolate graphons of different classes in the Euclidean space to get mixed graphons, where the synthetic graphs are generated through sampling based on the mixed graphons. Extensive experiments show that $\mathcal{G}$-Mixup substantially improves the generalization and robustness of GNNs.
Fairness Amidst Non-IID Graph Data: A Literature Review
Authors: Wenbin Zhang, Shuigeng Zhou, Toby Walsh, Jeremy C. Weiss
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Graph Classification, Graph Generation

The growing importance of understanding and addressing algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a surge in research on AI fairness, which often assumes that the underlying data is independent and identically distributed (IID). However, real-world data frequently exists in non-IID graph structures that capture connections among individual units. To effectively mitigate bias in AI systems, it is essential to bridge the gap between traditional fairness literature, designed for IID data, and the prevalence of non-IID graph data. This survey reviews recent advancements in fairness amidst non-IID graph data, including the newly introduced fair graph generation and the commonly studied fair graph classification. In addition, available datasets and evaluation metrics for future research are identified, the limitations of existing work are highlighted, and promising future directions are proposed.
On Tracking Dialogue State by Inheriting Slot Values in Mentioned Slot Pools
Authors: Zhoujian Sun, Zhengxing Huang, Nai Ding
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is a component of the task-oriented dialogue system. It is responsible for extracting and managing slot values according to dialogue utterances, where each slot represents an essential part of the information to accomplish a task, and slot value is updated recurrently in each dialogue turn. However, many DST models cannot update slot values appropriately. These models may repeatedly inherit wrong slot values extracted in previous turns, resulting in the fail of the entire DST task. They cannot update indirectly mentioned slots well, either. This study designed a model with a mentioned slot pool (MSP) to tackle the update problem. The MSP is a slot-specific memory that records all mentioned slot values that may be inherited, and our model updates slot values according to the MSP and the dialogue context. Our model rejects inheriting the previous slot value when it predicates the value is wrong. Then, it re-extracts the slot value from the current dialogue context. As the contextual information accumulates with the dialogue progress, the new value is more likely to be correct. It also can track the indirectly mentioned slot by picking a value from the MSP. Experimental results showed our model reached state-of-the-art DST performance on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.2 datasets.
Integrating AI Planning with Natural Language Processing: A Combination of Explicit and Tacit Knowledge
Authors: Kebing Jin, Hankz Hankui Zhuo
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Natural language processing (NLP) aims at investigating the interactions between agents and humans, processing and analyzing large amounts of natural language data. Large-scale language models play an important role in current natural language processing. However, the challenges of explainability and complexity come along with the developments of language models. One way is to introduce logical relations and rules into natural language processing models, such as making use of Automated Planning. Automated planning (AI planning) focuses on building symbolic domain models and synthesizing plans to transit initial states to goals based on domain models. Recently, there have been plenty of works related to these two fields, which have the abilities to generate explicit knowledge, e.g., preconditions and effects of action models, and learn from tacit knowledge, e.g., neural models, respectively. Integrating AI planning and natural language processing effectively improves the communication between human and intelligent agents. This paper outlines the commons and relations between AI planning and natural language processing, argues that each of them can effectively impact on the other one by five areas: (1) planning-based text understanding, (2) planning-based natural language processing, (3) planning-based explainability, (4) text-based human-robot interaction, and (5) applications. We also explore some potential future issues between AI planning and natural language processing. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first work that addresses the deep connections between AI planning and Natural language processing.
Transformers in Time Series: A Survey
Authors: Qingsong Wen, Tian Zhou, Chaoli Zhang, Weiqi Chen, Ziqing Ma, Junchi Yan, Liang Sun
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Survey, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Transformers have achieved superior performances in many tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, which also triggered great interest in the time series community. Among multiple advantages of Transformers, the ability to capture long-range dependencies and interactions is especially attractive for time series modeling, leading to exciting progress in various time series applications. In this paper, we systematically review Transformer schemes for time series modeling by highlighting their strengths as well as limitations. In particular, we examine the development of time series Transformers in two perspectives. From the perspective of network structure, we summarize the adaptations and modifications that have been made to Transformers in order to accommodate the challenges in time series analysis. From the perspective of applications, we categorize time series Transformers based on common tasks including forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification. Empirically, we perform robust analysis, model size analysis, and seasonal-trend decomposition analysis to study how Transformers perform in time series. Finally, we discuss and suggest future directions to provide useful research guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to comprehensively and systematically summarize the recent advances of Transformers for modeling time series data. We hope this survey will ignite further research interests in time series Transformers.
Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework
Authors: Xu Ma, Can Qin, Haoxuan You, Haoxi Ran, Yun Fu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: 3D Point Cloud Classification, Point Cloud Segmentation, Supervised Only 3D Point Cloud Classification

Point cloud analysis is challenging due to irregularity and unordered data structure. To capture the 3D geometries, prior works mainly rely on exploring sophisticated local geometric extractors using convolution, graph, or attention mechanisms. These methods, however, incur unfavorable latency during inference, and the performance saturates over the past few years. In this paper, we present a novel perspective on this task. We notice that detailed local geometrical information probably is not the key to point cloud analysis -- we introduce a pure residual MLP network, called PointMLP, which integrates no sophisticated local geometrical extractors but still performs very competitively. Equipped with a proposed lightweight geometric affine module, PointMLP delivers the new state-of-the-art on multiple datasets. On the real-world ScanObjectNN dataset, our method even surpasses the prior best method by 3.3% accuracy. We emphasize that PointMLP achieves this strong performance without any sophisticated operations, hence leading to a superior inference speed. Compared to most recent CurveNet, PointMLP trains 2x faster, tests 7x faster, and is more accurate on ModelNet40 benchmark. We hope our PointMLP may help the community towards a better understanding of point cloud analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/ma-xu/pointMLP-pytorch.
Learning to Mitigate AI Collusion on Economic Platforms
Authors: Gianluca Brero, Nicolas Lepore, Eric Mibuari, David C. Parkes
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Algorithmic pricing on online e-commerce platforms raises the concern of tacit collusion, where reinforcement learning algorithms learn to set collusive prices in a decentralized manner and through nothing more than profit feedback. This raises the question as to whether collusive pricing can be prevented through the design of suitable "buy boxes," i.e., through the design of the rules that govern the elements of e-commerce sites that promote particular products and prices to consumers. In this paper, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can also be used by platforms to learn buy box rules that are effective in preventing collusion by RL sellers. For this, we adopt the methodology of Stackelberg POMDPs, and demonstrate success in learning robust rules that continue to provide high consumer welfare together with sellers employing different behavior models or having out-of-distribution costs for goods.
A Survey on Model Compression and Acceleration for Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Canwen Xu, Julian McAuley
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression

Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, the high energy cost and long inference delay prevent Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) from seeing broader adoption including for edge and mobile computing. Efficient NLP research aims to comprehensively consider computation, time and carbon emission for the entire life-cycle of NLP, including data preparation, model training and inference. In this survey, we focus on the inference stage and review the current state of model compression and acceleration for pretrained language models, including benchmarks, metrics and methodology.
A Survey on Dynamic Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing
Authors: Canwen Xu, Julian McAuley
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic neural networks, Mixture-of-Experts, Survey

Effectively scaling large Transformer models is a main driver of recent advances in natural language processing. Dynamic neural networks, as an emerging research direction, are capable of scaling up neural networks with sub-linear increases in computation and time by dynamically adjusting their computational path based on the input. Dynamic neural networks could be a promising solution to the growing parameter numbers of pretrained language models, allowing both model pretraining with trillions of parameters and faster inference on mobile devices. In this survey, we summarize progress of three types of dynamic neural networks in NLP: skimming, mixture of experts, and early exit. We also highlight current challenges in dynamic neural networks and directions for future research.