pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding and Countering Stereotypes: A Computational Approach to the Stereotype Content Model
Authors: Kathleen C. Fraser, Isar Nejadgholi, Svetlana Kiritchenko
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5

Stereotypical language expresses widely-held beliefs about different social categories. Many stereotypes are overtly negative, while others may appear positive on the surface, but still lead to negative consequences. In this work, we present a computational approach to interpreting stereotypes in text through the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), a comprehensive causal theory from social psychology. The SCM proposes that stereotypes can be understood along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. We present a method for defining warmth and competence axes in semantic embedding space, and show that the four quadrants defined by this subspace accurately represent the warmth and competence concepts, according to annotated lexicons. We then apply our computational SCM model to textual stereotype data and show that it compares favourably with survey-based studies in the psychological literature. Furthermore, we explore various strategies to counter stereotypical beliefs with anti-stereotypes. It is known that countering stereotypes with anti-stereotypical examples is one of the most effective ways to reduce biased thinking, yet the problem of generating anti-stereotypes has not been previously studied. Thus, a better understanding of how to generate realistic and effective anti-stereotypes can contribute to addressing pressing societal concerns of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.
Defending Democracy: Using Deep Learning to Identify and Prevent Misinformation
Authors: Anusua Trivedi, Alyssa Suhm, Prathamesh Mahankal, Subhiksha Mukuntharaj, Meghana D. Parab, Malvika Mohan, Meredith Berger, Arathi Sethumadhavan, Ashish Jaiman, Rahul Dodhia
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Misinformation

The rise in online misinformation in recent years threatens democracies by distorting authentic public discourse and causing confusion, fear, and even, in extreme cases, violence. There is a need to understand the spread of false content through online networks for developing interventions that disrupt misinformation before it achieves virality. Using a Deep Bidirectional Transformer for Language Understanding (BERT) and propagation graphs, this study classifies and visualizes the spread of misinformation on a social media network using publicly available Twitter data. The results confirm prior research around user clusters and the virality of false content while improving the precision of deep learning models for misinformation detection. The study further demonstrates the suitability of BERT for providing a scalable model for false information detection, which can contribute to the development of more timely and accurate interventions to slow the spread of misinformation in online environments.
Dynamics of specialization in neural modules under resource constraints
Authors: Gabriel Béna, Dan F. M. Goodman
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Open-Ended Question Answering

It has long been believed that the brain is highly modular both in terms of structure and function, although recent evidence has led some to question the extent of both types of modularity. We used artificial neural networks to test the hypothesis that structural modularity is sufficient to guarantee functional specialization, and find that in general, this doesn't necessarily hold. We then systematically tested which features of the environment and network do lead to the emergence of specialization. We used a simple toy environment, task and network, allowing us precise control, and show that in this setup, several distinct measures of specialization give qualitatively similar results. We further find that in this setup (1) specialization can only emerge in environments where features of that environment are meaningfully separable, (2) specialization preferentially emerges when the network is strongly resource-constrained, and (3) these findings are qualitatively similar across the different variations of network architectures that we tested, but that the quantitative relationships depend on the precise architecture. Finally, we show that functional specialization varies dynamically across time, and demonstrate that these dynamics depend on both the timing and bandwidth of information flow in the network. We conclude that a static notion of specialization, based on structural modularity, is likely too simple a framework for understanding intelligence in situations of real-world complexity, from biology to brain-inspired neuromorphic systems. We propose that thoroughly stress testing candidate definitions of functional modularity in simplified scenarios before extending to more complex data, network models and electrophysiological recordings is likely to be a fruitful approach.
Learning Elastic Embeddings for Customizing On-Device Recommenders
Authors: Tong Chen, Hongzhi Yin, Yujia Zheng, Zi Huang, Yang Wang, Meng Wang
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In today's context, deploying data-driven services like recommendation on edge devices instead of cloud servers becomes increasingly attractive due to privacy and network latency concerns. A common practice in building compact on-device recommender systems is to compress their embeddings which are normally the cause of excessive parameterization. However, despite the vast variety of devices and their associated memory constraints, existing memory-efficient recommender systems are only specialized for a fixed memory budget in every design and training life cycle, where a new model has to be retrained to obtain the optimal performance while adapting to a smaller/larger memory budget. In this paper, we present a novel lightweight recommendation paradigm that allows a well-trained recommender to be customized for arbitrary device-specific memory constraints without retraining. The core idea is to compose elastic embeddings for each item, where an elastic embedding is the concatenation of a set of embedding blocks that are carefully chosen by an automated search function. Correspondingly, we propose an innovative approach, namely recommendation with universally learned elastic embeddings (RULE). To ensure the expressiveness of all candidate embedding blocks, RULE enforces a diversity-driven regularization when learning different embedding blocks. Then, a performance estimator-based evolutionary search function is designed, allowing for efficient specialization of elastic embeddings under any memory constraint for on-device recommendation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets reveal the superior performance of RULE under tight memory budgets.
A General Method for Event Detection on Social Media
Authors: Yihong Zhang, Masumi Shirakawa, Takahiro Hara
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Word Embeddings

Event detection on social media has attracted a number of researches, given the recent availability of large volumes of social media discussions. Previous works on social media event detection either assume a specific type of event, or assume certain behavior of observed variables. In this paper, we propose a general method for event detection on social media that makes few assumptions. The main assumption we make is that when an event occurs, affected semantic aspects will behave differently from its usual behavior. We generalize the representation of time units based on word embeddings of social media text, and propose an algorithm to detect events in time series in a general sense. In the experimental evaluation, we use a novel setting to test if our method and baseline methods can exhaustively catch all real-world news in the test period. The evaluation results show that when the event is quite unusual with regard to the base social media discussion, it can be captured more effectively with our method. Our method can be easily implemented and can be treated as a starting point for more specific applications.
Cross-language Sentence Selection via Data Augmentation and Rationale Training
Authors: Yanda Chen, Chris Kedzie, Suraj Nair, Petra Galuščáková, Rui Zhang, Douglas W. Oard, Kathleen McKeown
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Retrieval, Sentence, Translation, Word Alignment

This paper proposes an approach to cross-language sentence selection in a low-resource setting. It uses data augmentation and negative sampling techniques on noisy parallel sentence data to directly learn a cross-lingual embedding-based query relevance model. Results show that this approach performs as well as or better than multiple state-of-the-art machine translation + monolingual retrieval systems trained on the same parallel data. Moreover, when a rationale training secondary objective is applied to encourage the model to match word alignment hints from a phrase-based statistical machine translation model, consistent improvements are seen across three language pairs (English-Somali, English-Swahili and English-Tagalog) over a variety of state-of-the-art baselines.
Facade-X: an opinionated approach to SPARQL anything
Authors: Enrico Daga, Luigi Asprino, Paul Mulholland, Aldo Gangemi
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00

The Semantic Web research community understood since its beginning how crucial it is to equip practitioners with methods to transform non-RDF resources into RDF. Proposals focus on either engineering content transformations or accessing non-RDF resources with SPARQL. Existing solutions require users to learn specific mapping languages (e.g. RML), to know how to query and manipulate a variety of source formats (e.g. XPATH, JSON-Path), or to combine multiple languages (e.g. SPARQL Generate). In this paper, we explore an alternative solution and contribute a general-purpose meta-model for converting non-RDF resources into RDF: Facade-X. Our approach can be implemented by overriding the SERVICE operator and does not require to extend the SPARQL syntax. We compare our approach with the state of art methods RML and SPARQL Generate and show how our solution has lower learning demands and cognitive complexity, and it is cheaper to implement and maintain, while having comparable extensibility and efficiency.
Solving Schrödinger Bridges via Maximum Likelihood
Authors: Francisco Vargas, Pierre Thodoroff, Neil D. Lawrence, Austen Lamacraft
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The Schr\"odinger bridge problem (SBP) finds the most likely stochastic evolution between two probability distributions given a prior stochastic evolution. As well as applications in the natural sciences, problems of this kind have important applications in machine learning such as dataset alignment and hypothesis testing. Whilst the theory behind this problem is relatively mature, scalable numerical recipes to estimate the Schr\"odinger bridge remain an active area of research. We prove an equivalence between the SBP and maximum likelihood estimation enabling direct application of successful machine learning techniques. We propose a numerical procedure to estimate SBPs using Gaussian process and demonstrate the practical usage of our approach in numerical simulations and experiments.
Shape-Preserving Dimensionality Reduction : An Algorithm and Measures of Topological Equivalence
Authors: Byeongsu Yu, Kisung You
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

We introduce a linear dimensionality reduction technique preserving topological features via persistent homology. The method is designed to find linear projection $L$ which preserves the persistent diagram of a point cloud $\mathbb{X}$ via simulated annealing. The projection $L$ induces a set of canonical simplicial maps from the Rips (or \v{C}ech) filtration of $\mathbb{X}$ to that of $L\mathbb{X}$. In addition to the distance between persistent diagrams, the projection induces a map between filtrations, called filtration homomorphism. Using the filtration homomorphism, one can measure the difference between shapes of two filtrations directly comparing simplicial complexes with respect to quasi-isomorphism $\mu_{\operatorname{quasi-iso}}$ or strong homotopy equivalence $\mu_{\operatorname{equiv}}$. These $\mu_{\operatorname{quasi-iso}}$ and $\mu_{\operatorname{equiv}}$ measures how much portion of corresponding simplicial complexes is quasi-isomorphic or homotopy equivalence respectively. We validate the effectiveness of our framework with simple examples.
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Kernel Regression
Authors: Abdulkadir Canatar, Blake Bordelon, Cengiz Pehlevan
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, regression

In real word applications, data generating process for training a machine learning model often differs from what the model encounters in the test stage. Understanding how and whether machine learning models generalize under such distributional shifts have been a theoretical challenge. Here, we study generalization in kernel regression when the training and test distributions are different using methods from statistical physics. Using the replica method, we derive an analytical formula for the out-of-distribution generalization error applicable to any kernel and real datasets. We identify an overlap matrix that quantifies the mismatch between distributions for a given kernel as a key determinant of generalization performance under distribution shift. Using our analytical expressions we elucidate various generalization phenomena including possible improvement in generalization when there is a mismatch. We develop procedures for optimizing training and test distributions for a given data budget to find best and worst case generalizations under the shift. We present applications of our theory to real and synthetic datasets and for many kernels. We compare results of our theory applied to Neural Tangent Kernel with simulations of wide networks and show agreement. We analyze linear regression in further depth.
Provably Strict Generalisation Benefit for Invariance in Kernel Methods
Authors: Bryn Elesedy
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

It is a commonly held belief that enforcing invariance improves generalisation. Although this approach enjoys widespread popularity, it is only very recently that a rigorous theoretical demonstration of this benefit has been established. In this work we build on the function space perspective of Elesedy and Zaidi arXiv:2102.10333 to derive a strictly non-zero generalisation benefit of incorporating invariance in kernel ridge regression when the target is invariant to the action of a compact group. We study invariance enforced by feature averaging and find that generalisation is governed by a notion of effective dimension that arises from the interplay between the kernel and the group. In building towards this result, we find that the action of the group induces an orthogonal decomposition of both the reproducing kernel Hilbert space and its kernel, which may be of interest in its own right.
PCA Initialization for Approximate Message Passing in Rotationally Invariant Models
Authors: Marco Mondelli, Ramji Venkataramanan
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

We study the problem of estimating a rank-$1$ signal in the presence of rotationally invariant noise-a class of perturbations more general than Gaussian noise. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) provides a natural estimator, and sharp results on its performance have been obtained in the high-dimensional regime. Recently, an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm has been proposed as an alternative estimator with the potential to improve the accuracy of PCA. However, the existing analysis of AMP requires an initialization that is both correlated with the signal and independent of the noise, which is often unrealistic in practice. In this work, we combine the two methods, and propose to initialize AMP with PCA. Our main result is a rigorous asymptotic characterization of the performance of this estimator. Both the AMP algorithm and its analysis differ from those previously derived in the Gaussian setting: at every iteration, our AMP algorithm requires a specific term to account for PCA initialization, while in the Gaussian case, PCA initialization affects only the first iteration of AMP. The proof is based on a two-phase artificial AMP that first approximates the PCA estimator and then mimics the true AMP. Our numerical simulations show an excellent agreement between AMP results and theoretical predictions, and suggest an interesting open direction on achieving Bayes-optimal performance.
Bridging the Gap Between Target Networks and Functional Regularization
Authors: Alexandre Piché, Valentin Thomas, Rafael Pardinas, Joseph Marino, Gian Maria Marconi, Christopher Pal, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning

Bootstrapping is behind much of the successes of deep Reinforcement Learning. However, learning the value function via bootstrapping often leads to unstable training due to fast-changing target values. Target Networks are employed to stabilize training by using an additional set of lagging parameters to estimate the target values. Despite the popularity of Target Networks, their effect on the optimization is still misunderstood. In this work, we show that they act as an implicit regularizer which can be beneficial in some cases, but also have disadvantages such as being inflexible and can result in instabilities, even when vanilla TD(0) converges. To overcome these issues, we propose an explicit Functional Regularization alternative that is flexible and a convex regularizer in function space and we theoretically study its convergence. We conduct an experimental study across a range of environments, discount factors, and off-policiness data collections to investigate the effectiveness of the regularization induced by Target Networks and Functional Regularization in terms of performance, accuracy, and stability. Our findings emphasize that Functional Regularization can be used as a drop-in replacement for Target Networks and result in performance improvement. Furthermore, adjusting both the regularization weight and the network update period in Functional Regularization can result in further performance improvements compared to solely adjusting the network update period as typically done with Target Networks. Our approach also enhances the ability to networks to recover accurate $Q$-values.
Fundamental tradeoffs between memorization and robustness in random features and neural tangent regimes
Authors: Elvis Dohmatob
Date: 2021-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

This work studies the (non)robustness of two-layer neural networks in various high-dimensional linearized regimes. We establish fundamental trade-offs between memorization and robustness, as measured by the Sobolev-seminorm of the model w.r.t the data distribution, i.e the square root of the average squared $L_2$-norm of the gradients of the model w.r.t the its input. More precisely, if $n$ is the number of training examples, $d$ is the input dimension, and $k$ is the number of hidden neurons in a two-layer neural network, we prove for a large class of activation functions that, if the model memorizes even a fraction of the training, then its Sobolev-seminorm is lower-bounded by (i) $\sqrt{n}$ in case of infinite-width random features (RF) or neural tangent kernel (NTK) with $d \gtrsim n$; (ii) $\sqrt{n}$ in case of finite-width RF with proportionate scaling of $d$ and $k$; and (iii) $\sqrt{n/k}$ in case of finite-width NTK with proportionate scaling of $d$ and $k$. Moreover, all of these lower-bounds are tight: they are attained by the min-norm / least-squares interpolator (when $n$, $d$, and $k$ are in the appropriate interpolating regime). All our results hold as soon as data is log-concave isotropic, and there is label-noise, i.e the target variable is not a deterministic function of the data / features. We empirically validate our theoretical results with experiments. Accidentally, these experiments also reveal for the first time, (iv) a multiple-descent phenomenon in the robustness of the min-norm interpolator.
The Earth Mover's Pinball Loss: Quantiles for Histogram-Valued Regression
Authors: Florian List
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Although ubiquitous in the sciences, histogram data have not received much attention by the Deep Learning community. Whilst regression and classification tasks for scalar and vector data are routinely solved by neural networks, a principled approach for estimating histogram labels as a function of an input vector or image is lacking in the literature. We present a dedicated method for Deep Learning-based histogram regression, which incorporates cross-bin information and yields distributions over possible histograms, expressed by $\tau$-quantiles of the cumulative histogram in each bin. The crux of our approach is a new loss function obtained by applying the pinball loss to the cumulative histogram, which for 1D histograms reduces to the Earth Mover's distance (EMD) in the special case of the median ($\tau = 0.5$), and generalizes it to arbitrary quantiles. We validate our method with an illustrative toy example, a football-related task, and an astrophysical computer vision problem. We show that with our loss function, the accuracy of the predicted median histograms is very similar to the standard EMD case (and higher than for per-bin loss functions such as cross-entropy), while the predictions become much more informative at almost no additional computational cost.
A Scalable Second Order Method for Ill-Conditioned Matrix Completion from Few Samples
Authors: Christian Kümmerle, Claudio Mayrink Verdun
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Low-Rank Matrix Completion, Matrix Completion

We propose an iterative algorithm for low-rank matrix completion that can be interpreted as an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm, a saddle-escaping smoothing Newton method or a variable metric proximal gradient method applied to a non-convex rank surrogate. It combines the favorable data-efficiency of previous IRLS approaches with an improved scalability by several orders of magnitude. We establish the first local convergence guarantee from a minimal number of samples for that class of algorithms, showing that the method attains a local quadratic convergence rate. Furthermore, we show that the linear systems to be solved are well-conditioned even for very ill-conditioned ground truth matrices. We provide extensive experiments, indicating that unlike many state-of-the-art approaches, our method is able to complete very ill-conditioned matrices with a condition number of up to $10^{10}$ from few samples, while being competitive in its scalability.