pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Scientific Document Representations with Citation Embeddings
Authors: Malte Ostendorff, Nils Rethmeier, Isabelle Augenstein, Bela Gipp, Georg Rehm
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Citation Prediction, Contrastive Learning, Document Classification, Document Embedding, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Representation Learning

Learning scientific document representations can be substantially improved through contrastive learning objectives, where the challenge lies in creating positive and negative training samples that encode the desired similarity semantics. Prior work relies on discrete citation relations to generate contrast samples. However, discrete citations enforce a hard cut-off to similarity. This is counter-intuitive to similarity-based learning, and ignores that scientific papers can be very similar despite lacking a direct citation - a core problem of finding related research. Instead, we use controlled nearest neighbor sampling over citation graph embeddings for contrastive learning. This control allows us to learn continuous similarity, to sample hard-to-learn negatives and positives, and also to avoid collisions between negative and positive samples by controlling the sampling margin between them. The resulting method SciNCL outperforms the state-of-the-art on the SciDocs benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it can train (or tune) models sample-efficiently, and that it can be combined with recent training-efficient methods. Perhaps surprisingly, even training a general-domain language model this way outperforms baselines pretrained in-domain.
FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows
Authors: Jianqiao Zhao, Yanyang Li, Wanyu Du, Yangfeng Ji, Dong Yu, Michael R. Lyu, LiWei Wang
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Evaluation

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.
Source Code Summarization with Structural Relative Position Guided Transformer
Authors: Zi Gong, Cuiyun Gao, Yasheng Wang, Wenchao Gu, Yun Peng, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Summarization, Position, Source Code Summarization

Source code summarization aims at generating concise and clear natural language descriptions for programming languages. Well-written code summaries are beneficial for programmers to participate in the software development and maintenance process. To learn the semantic representations of source code, recent efforts focus on incorporating the syntax structure of code into neural networks such as Transformer. Such Transformer-based approaches can better capture the long-range dependencies than other neural networks including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), however, most of them do not consider the structural relative correlations between tokens, e.g., relative positions in Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), which is beneficial for code semantics learning. To model the structural dependency, we propose a Structural Relative Position guided Transformer, named SCRIPT. SCRIPT first obtains the structural relative positions between tokens via parsing the ASTs of source code, and then passes them into two types of Transformer encoders. One Transformer directly adjusts the input according to the structural relative distance; and the other Transformer encodes the structural relative positions during computing the self-attention scores. Finally, we stack these two types of Transformer encoders to learn representations of source code. Experimental results show that the proposed SCRIPT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by at least 1.6%, 1.4% and 2.8% with respect to BLEU, ROUGE-L and METEOR on benchmark datasets, respectively. We further show that how the proposed SCRIPT captures the structural relative dependencies.
Semantic Matching from Different Perspectives
Authors: Weijie Liu, Tao Zhu, Weiquan Mao, Zhe Zhao, Weigang Guo, Xuefeng Yang, Qi Ju
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Text Matching, text similarity

In this paper, we pay attention to the issue which is usually overlooked, i.e., \textit{similarity should be determined from different perspectives}. To explore this issue, we release a Multi-Perspective Text Similarity (MPTS) dataset, in which sentence similarities are labeled from twelve perspectives. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experimental analysis on this task by retrofitting some famous text matching models. Finally, we obtain several conclusions and baseline models, laying the foundation for the following investigation of this issue. The dataset and code are publicly available at Github\footnote{\url{https://github.com/autoliuweijie/MPTS}
BiFSMN: Binary Neural Network for Keyword Spotting
Authors: Haotong Qin, Xudong Ma, Yifu Ding, Xiaoyang Li, Yang Zhang, Yao Tian, Zejun Ma, Jie Luo, Xianglong Liu
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Keyword Spotting

The deep neural networks, such as the Deep-FSMN, have been widely studied for keyword spotting (KWS) applications. However, computational resources for these networks are significantly constrained since they usually run on-call on edge devices. In this paper, we present BiFSMN, an accurate and extreme-efficient binary neural network for KWS. We first construct a High-frequency Enhancement Distillation scheme for the binarization-aware training, which emphasizes the high-frequency information from the full-precision network's representation that is more crucial for the optimization of the binarized network. Then, to allow the instant and adaptive accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at runtime, we also propose a Thinnable Binarization Architecture to further liberate the acceleration potential of the binarized network from the topology perspective. Moreover, we implement a Fast Bitwise Computation Kernel for BiFSMN on ARMv8 devices which fully utilizes registers and increases instruction throughput to push the limit of deployment efficiency. Extensive experiments show that BiFSMN outperforms existing binarization methods by convincing margins on various datasets and is even comparable with the full-precision counterpart (e.g., less than 3% drop on Speech Commands V1-12). We highlight that benefiting from the thinnable architecture and the optimized 1-bit implementation, BiFSMN can achieve an impressive 22.3x speedup and 15.5x storage-saving on real-world edge hardware. Our code is released at https://github.com/htqin/BiFSMN.
A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation
Authors: Yixuan Su, Tian Lan, Yan Wang, Dani Yogatama, Lingpeng Kong, Nigel Collier
Date: 2022-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Text Generation

Text generation is of great importance to many natural language processing applications. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g. beam search) of neural language models often lead to degenerate solutions -- the generated text is unnatural and contains undesirable repetitions. Existing approaches introduce stochasticity via sampling or modify training objectives to decrease probabilities of certain tokens (e.g., unlikelihood training). However, they often lead to solutions that lack coherence. In this work, we show that an underlying reason for model degeneration is the anisotropic distribution of token representations. We present a contrastive solution: (i) SimCTG, a contrastive training objective to calibrate the model's representation space, and (ii) a decoding method -- contrastive search -- to encourage diversity while maintaining coherence in the generated text. Extensive experiments and analyses on three benchmarks from two languages demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art text generation methods as evaluated by both human and automatic metrics.
Multimodal Depression Classification Using Articulatory Coordination Features And Hierarchical Attention Based Text Embeddings
Authors: Nadee Seneviratne, Carol Espy-Wilson
Date: 2022-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Multimodal depression classification has gained immense popularity over the recent years. We develop a multimodal depression classification system using articulatory coordination features extracted from vocal tract variables and text transcriptions obtained from an automatic speech recognition tool that yields improvements of area under the receiver operating characteristics curve compared to uni-modal classifiers (7.5% and 13.7% for audio and text respectively). We show that in the case of limited training data, a segment-level classifier can first be trained to then obtain a session-wise prediction without hindering the performance, using a multi-stage convolutional recurrent neural network. A text model is trained using a Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN). The multimodal system is developed by combining embeddings from the session-level audio model and the HAN text model
Uni-Retriever: Towards Learning The Unified Embedding Based Retriever in Bing Sponsored Search
Authors: Jianjin Zhang, Zheng Liu, Weihao Han, Shitao Xiao, Ruicheng Zheng, Yingxia Shao, Hao Sun, Hanqing Zhu, Premkumar Srinivasan, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
Date: 2022-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Embedding based retrieval (EBR) is a fundamental building block in many web applications. However, EBR in sponsored search is distinguished from other generic scenarios and technically challenging due to the need of serving multiple retrieval purposes: firstly, it has to retrieve high-relevance ads, which may exactly serve user's search intent; secondly, it needs to retrieve high-CTR ads so as to maximize the overall user clicks. In this paper, we present a novel representation learning framework Uni-Retriever developed for Bing Search, which unifies two different training modes knowledge distillation and contrastive learning to realize both required objectives. On one hand, the capability of making high-relevance retrieval is established by distilling knowledge from the ``relevance teacher model''. On the other hand, the capability of making high-CTR retrieval is optimized by learning to discriminate user's clicked ads from the entire corpus. The two training modes are jointly performed as a multi-objective learning process, such that the ads of high relevance and CTR can be favored by the generated embeddings. Besides the learning strategy, we also elaborate our solution for EBR serving pipeline built upon the substantially optimized DiskANN, where massive-scale EBR can be performed with competitive time and memory efficiency, and accomplished in high-quality. We make comprehensive offline and online experiments to evaluate the proposed techniques, whose findings may provide useful insights for the future development of EBR systems. Uni-Retriever has been mainstreamed as the major retrieval path in Bing's production thanks to the notable improvements on the representation and EBR serving quality.
Semantic-Oriented Unlabeled Priming for Large-Scale Language Models
Authors: Yanchen Liu, Timo Schick, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2022-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Due to the high costs associated with finetuning large language models, various recent works propose to adapt them to specific tasks without any parameter updates through in-context learning. Unfortunately, for in-context learning there is currently no way to leverage unlabeled data, which is often much easier to obtain in large quantities than labeled examples. In this work, we therefore investigate ways to make use of unlabeled examples to improve the zero-shot performance of pretrained language models without any finetuning: We introduce Semantic-Oriented Unlabeled Priming (SOUP), a method that classifies examples by retrieving semantically similar unlabeled examples, assigning labels to them in a zero-shot fashion, and then using them for in-context learning. We also propose bag-of-contexts priming, a new priming strategy that is more suitable for our setting and enables the usage of more examples than fit into the context window.
USTED: Improving ASR with a Unified Speech and Text Encoder-Decoder
Authors: Bolaji Yusuf, Ankur Gandhe, Alex Sokolov
Date: 2022-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Improving end-to-end speech recognition by incorporating external text data has been a longstanding research topic. There has been a recent focus on training E2E ASR models that get the performance benefits of external text data without incurring the extra cost of evaluating an external language model at inference time. In this work, we propose training ASR model jointly with a set of text-to-text auxiliary tasks with which it shares a decoder and parts of the encoder. When we jointly train ASR and masked language model with the 960-hour Librispeech and Opensubtitles data respectively, we observe WER reductions of 16% and 20% on test-other and test-clean respectively over an ASR-only baseline without any extra cost at inference time, and reductions of 6% and 8% compared to a stronger MUTE-L baseline which trains the decoder with the same text data as our model. We achieve further improvements when we train masked language model on Librispeech data or when we use machine translation as the auxiliary task, without significantly sacrificing performance on the task itself.
A multi-task semi-supervised framework for Text2Graph & Graph2Text
Authors: Oriol Domingo, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Carlos Escolano
Date: 2022-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Generation

The Artificial Intelligence industry regularly develops applications that mostly rely on Knowledge Bases, a data repository about specific, or general, domains, usually represented in a graph shape. Similar to other databases, they face two main challenges: information ingestion and information retrieval. We approach these challenges by jointly learning graph extraction from text and text generation from graphs. The proposed solution, a T5 architecture, is trained in a multi-task semi-supervised environment, with our collected non-parallel data, following a cycle training regime. Experiments on WebNLG dataset show that our approach surpasses unsupervised state-of-the-art results in text-to-graph and graph-to-text. More relevantly, our framework is more consistent across seen and unseen domains than supervised models. The resulting model can be easily trained in any new domain with non-parallel data, by simply adding text and graphs about it, in our cycle framework.
Improving Contextual Coherence in Variational Personalized and Empathetic Dialogue Agents
Authors: Jing Yang Lee, Kong Aik Lee, Woon Seng Gan
Date: 2022-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Response Generation

In recent years, latent variable models, such as the Conditional Variational Auto Encoder (CVAE), have been applied to both personalized and empathetic dialogue generation. Prior work have largely focused on generating diverse dialogue responses that exhibit persona consistency and empathy. However, when it comes to the contextual coherence of the generated responses, there is still room for improvement. Hence, to improve the contextual coherence, we propose a novel Uncertainty Aware CVAE (UA-CVAE) framework. The UA-CVAE framework involves approximating and incorporating the aleatoric uncertainty during response generation. We apply our framework to both personalized and empathetic dialogue generation. Empirical results show that our framework significantly improves the contextual coherence of the generated response. Additionally, we introduce a novel automatic metric for measuring contextual coherence, which was found to correlate positively with human judgement.
Metadata-Induced Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Label Text Classification
Authors: Yu Zhang, Zhihong Shen, Chieh-Han Wu, Boya Xie, Junheng Hao, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Jiawei Han
Date: 2022-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Multi Label Text Classification, Multi-Label Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Text Classification

Large-scale multi-label text classification (LMTC) aims to associate a document with its relevant labels from a large candidate set. Most existing LMTC approaches rely on massive human-annotated training data, which are often costly to obtain and suffer from a long-tailed label distribution (i.e., many labels occur only a few times in the training set). In this paper, we study LMTC under the zero-shot setting, which does not require any annotated documents with labels and only relies on label surface names and descriptions. To train a classifier that calculates the similarity score between a document and a label, we propose a novel metadata-induced contrastive learning (MICoL) method. Different from previous text-based contrastive learning techniques, MICoL exploits document metadata (e.g., authors, venues, and references of research papers), which are widely available on the Web, to derive similar document-document pairs. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets show that: (1) MICoL significantly outperforms strong zero-shot text classification and contrastive learning baselines; (2) MICoL is on par with the state-of-the-art supervised metadata-aware LMTC method trained on 10K-200K labeled documents; and (3) MICoL tends to predict more infrequent labels than supervised methods, thus alleviates the deteriorated performance on long-tailed labels.
Stochastic models of Jaya and semi-steady-state Jaya algorithms
Authors: Uday K. Chakraborty
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00

We build stochastic models for analyzing Jaya and semi-steady-state Jaya algorithms. The analysis shows that for semi-steady-state Jaya (a) the maximum expected value of the number of worst-index updates per generation is a paltry 1.7 regardless of the population size; (b) regardless of the population size, the expectation of the number of best-index updates per generation decreases monotonically with generations; (c) exact upper bounds as well as asymptotics of the expected best-update counts can be obtained for specific distributions; the upper bound is 0.5 for normal and logistic distributions, $\ln 2$ for the uniform distribution, and $e^{-\gamma} \ln 2$ for the exponential distribution, where $\gamma$ is the Euler-Mascheroni constant; the asymptotic is $e^{-\gamma} \ln 2$ for logistic and exponential distributions and $\ln 2$ for the uniform distribution (the asymptotic cannot be obtained analytically for the normal distribution). The models lead to the derivation of computational complexities of Jaya and semi-steady-state Jaya. The theoretical analysis is supported with empirical results on a benchmark suite. The insights provided by our stochastic models should help design new, improved population-based search/optimization heuristics.
Robust Estimation of Discrete Distributions under Local Differential Privacy
Authors: Julien Chhor, Flore Sentenac
Date: 2022-02-14 00:00:00

Although robust learning and local differential privacy are both widely studied fields of research, combining the two settings is just starting to be explored. We consider the problem of estimating a discrete distribution in total variation from $n$ contaminated data batches under a local differential privacy constraint. A fraction $1-\epsilon$ of the batches contain $k$ i.i.d. samples drawn from a discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ elements. To protect the users' privacy, each of the samples is privatized using an $\alpha$-locally differentially private mechanism. The remaining $\epsilon n $ batches are an adversarial contamination. The minimax rate of estimation under contamination alone, with no privacy, is known to be $\epsilon/\sqrt{k}+\sqrt{d/kn}$, up to a $\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}$ factor. Under the privacy constraint alone, the minimax rate of estimation is $\sqrt{d^2/\alpha^2 kn}$. We show that combining the two constraints leads to a minimax estimation rate of $\epsilon\sqrt{d/\alpha^2 k}+\sqrt{d^2/\alpha^2 kn}$ up to a $\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}$ factor, larger than the sum of the two separate rates. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm achieving this bound, as well as a matching information theoretic lower bound.
Improved analysis for a proximal algorithm for sampling
Authors: Yongxin Chen, Sinho Chewi, Adil Salim, Andre Wibisono
Date: 2022-02-13 00:00:00

We study the proximal sampler of Lee, Shen, and Tian (2021) and obtain new convergence guarantees under weaker assumptions than strong log-concavity: namely, our results hold for (1) weakly log-concave targets, and (2) targets satisfying isoperimetric assumptions which allow for non-log-concavity. We demonstrate our results by obtaining new state-of-the-art sampling guarantees for several classes of target distributions. We also strengthen the connection between the proximal sampler and the proximal method in optimization by interpreting the proximal sampler as an entropically regularized Wasserstein proximal method, and the proximal point method as the limit of the proximal sampler with vanishing noise.
A Group-Equivariant Autoencoder for Identifying Spontaneously Broken Symmetries
Authors: Devanshu Agrawal, Adrian Del Maestro, Steven Johnston, James Ostrowski
Date: 2022-02-13 00:00:00

We introduce the group-equivariant autoencoder (GE-autoencoder) -- a deep neural network (DNN) method that locates phase boundaries by determining which symmetries of the Hamiltonian have spontaneously broken at each temperature. We use group theory to deduce which symmetries of the system remain intact in all phases, and then use this information to constrain the parameters of the GE-autoencoder such that the encoder learns an order parameter invariant to these ``never-broken'' symmetries. This procedure produces a dramatic reduction in the number of free parameters such that the GE-autoencoder size is independent of the system size. We include symmetry regularization terms in the loss function of the GE-autoencoder so that the learned order parameter is also equivariant to the remaining symmetries of the system. By examining the group representation by which the learned order parameter transforms, we are then able to extract information about the associated spontaneous symmetry breaking. We test the GE-autoencoder on the 2D classical ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Ising models, finding that the GE-autoencoder (1) accurately determines which symmetries have spontaneously broken at each temperature; (2) estimates the critical temperature in the thermodynamic limit with greater accuracy, robustness, and time-efficiency than a symmetry-agnostic baseline autoencoder; and (3) detects the presence of an external symmetry-breaking magnetic field with greater sensitivity than the baseline method. Finally, we describe various key implementation details, including a new method for extracting the critical temperature estimate from trained autoencoders and calculations of the DNN initialization and learning rate settings required for fair model comparisons.