pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dealing with Semantic Underspecification in Multimodal NLP
Authors: Sandro Pezzelle
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00

Intelligent systems that aim at mastering language as humans do must deal with its semantic underspecification, namely, the possibility for a linguistic signal to convey only part of the information needed for communication to succeed. Consider the usages of the pronoun they, which can leave the gender and number of its referent(s) underspecified. Semantic underspecification is not a bug but a crucial language feature that boosts its storage and processing efficiency. Indeed, human speakers can quickly and effortlessly integrate semantically-underspecified linguistic signals with a wide range of non-linguistic information, e.g., the multimodal context, social or cultural conventions, and shared knowledge. Standard NLP models have, in principle, no or limited access to such extra information, while multimodal systems grounding language into other modalities, such as vision, are naturally equipped to account for this phenomenon. However, we show that they struggle with it, which could negatively affect their performance and lead to harmful consequences when used for applications. In this position paper, we argue that our community should be aware of semantic underspecification if it aims to develop language technology that can successfully interact with human users. We discuss some applications where mastering it is crucial and outline a few directions toward achieving this goal.
Improving Long Context Document-Level Machine Translation
Authors: Christian Herold, Hermann Ney
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Level Machine Translation, Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Document-level context for neural machine translation (NMT) is crucial to improve the translation consistency and cohesion, the translation of ambiguous inputs, as well as several other linguistic phenomena. Many works have been published on the topic of document-level NMT, but most restrict the system to only local context, typically including just the one or two preceding sentences as additional information. This might be enough to resolve some ambiguous inputs, but it is probably not sufficient to capture some document-level information like the topic or style of a conversation. When increasing the context size beyond just the local context, there are two challenges: (i) the~memory usage increases exponentially (ii) the translation performance starts to degrade. We argue that the widely-used attention mechanism is responsible for both issues. Therefore, we propose a constrained attention variant that focuses the attention on the most relevant parts of the sequence, while simultaneously reducing the memory consumption. For evaluation, we utilize targeted test sets in combination with novel evaluation techniques to analyze the translations in regards to specific discourse-related phenomena. We find that our approach is a good compromise between sentence-level NMT vs attending to the full context, especially in low resource scenarios.
RRWKV: Capturing Long-range Dependencies in RWKV
Authors: Leilei Wang
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Owing to the impressive dot-product attention, the Transformers have been the dominant architectures in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) architecture follows a non-transformer architecture to eliminate the drawbacks of dot-product attention, where memory and computational complexity exhibits quadratic scaling with sequence length. Although RWKV has exploited a linearly tensor-product attention mechanism and achieved parallelized computations by deploying the time-sequential mode, it fails to capture long-range dependencies because of its limitation on looking back at previous information, compared with full information obtained by direct interactions in the standard transformer. Therefore, the paper devises the Retrospected Receptance Weighted Key Value (RRWKV) architecture via incorporating the retrospecting ability into the RWKV to effectively absorb information, which maintains memory and computational efficiency as well.
Robot Task Planning Based on Large Language Model Representing Knowledge with Directed Graph Structures
Authors: Yue Zhen, Sheng Bi, Lu Xing-tong, Pan Wei-qin, Shi Hai-peng, Chen Zi-rui, Fang Yi-shu
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Robot Task Planning, Task Planning

Traditional robot task planning methods face challenges when dealing with highly unstructured environments and complex tasks. We propose a task planning method that combines human expertise with an LLM and have designed an LLM prompt template, Think_Net_Prompt, with stronger expressive power to represent structured professional knowledge. We further propose a method to progressively decompose tasks and generate a task tree to reduce the planning volume for each task, and we have designed a strategy to decouple robot task planning. By dividing different planning entities and separating the task from the actual machine binding process, the task planning process becomes more flexible. Research results show that our method performs well in handling specified code formats, understanding the relationship between tasks and subtasks, and extracting parameters from text descriptions. However, there are also problems such as limited complexity of task logic handling, ambiguity in the quantity of parts and the precise location of assembly. Improving the precision of task description and cognitive structure can bring certain improvements. https://github.com/NOMIzy/Think_Net_Prompt
Is AI the better programming partner? Human-Human Pair Programming vs. Human-AI pAIr Programming
Authors: Qianou Ma, Tongshuang Wu, Kenneth Koedinger
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

The emergence of large-language models (LLMs) that excel at code generation and commercial products such as GitHub's Copilot has sparked interest in human-AI pair programming (referred to as "pAIr programming") where an AI system collaborates with a human programmer. While traditional pair programming between humans has been extensively studied, it remains uncertain whether its findings can be applied to human-AI pair programming. We compare human-human and human-AI pair programming, exploring their similarities and differences in interaction, measures, benefits, and challenges. We find that the effectiveness of both approaches is mixed in the literature (though the measures used for pAIr programming are not as comprehensive). We summarize moderating factors on the success of human-human pair programming, which provides opportunities for pAIr programming research. For example, mismatched expertise makes pair programming less productive, therefore well-designed AI programming assistants may adapt to differences in expertise levels.
Bayesian Optimization of Expensive Nested Grey-Box Functions
Authors: Wenjie Xu, Yuning Jiang, Bratislav Svetozarevic, Colin N. Jones
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

We consider the problem of optimizing a grey-box objective function, i.e., nested function composed of both black-box and white-box functions. A general formulation for such grey-box problems is given, which covers the existing grey-box optimization formulations as special cases. We then design an optimism-driven algorithm to solve it. Under certain regularity assumptions, our algorithm achieves similar regret bound as that for the standard black-box Bayesian optimization algorithm, up to a constant multiplicative term depending on the Lipschitz constants of the functions considered. We further extend our method to the constrained case and discuss special cases. For the commonly used kernel functions, the regret bounds allow us to derive a convergence rate to the optimal solution. Experimental results show that our grey-box optimization method empirically improves the speed of finding the global optimal solution significantly, as compared to the standard black-box optimization algorithm.
Gradient-Informed Quality Diversity for the Illumination of Discrete Spaces
Authors: Raphael Boige, Guillaume Richard, Jérémie Dona, Thomas Pierrot, Antoine Cully
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Drug Discovery, Image Generation, Protein Design

Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms have been proposed to search for a large collection of both diverse and high-performing solutions instead of a single set of local optima. While early QD algorithms view the objective and descriptor functions as black-box functions, novel tools have been introduced to use gradient information to accelerate the search and improve overall performance of those algorithms over continuous input spaces. However a broad range of applications involve discrete spaces, such as drug discovery or image generation. Exploring those spaces is challenging as they are combinatorially large and gradients cannot be used in the same manner as in continuous spaces. We introduce map-elites with a Gradient-Informed Discrete Emitter (ME-GIDE), which extends QD optimisation with differentiable functions over discrete search spaces. ME-GIDE leverages the gradient information of the objective and descriptor functions with respect to its discrete inputs to propose gradient-informed updates that guide the search towards a diverse set of high quality solutions. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks including protein design and discrete latent space illumination and find that our method outperforms state-of-the-art QD algorithms in all benchmarks.
Does Image Anonymization Impact Computer Vision Training?
Authors: Håkon Hukkelås, Frank Lindseth
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anonymization, Instance Segmentation, Pose Estimation, Privacy Preserving, Semantic Segmentation

Image anonymization is widely adapted in practice to comply with privacy regulations in many regions. However, anonymization often degrades the quality of the data, reducing its utility for computer vision development. In this paper, we investigate the impact of image anonymization for training computer vision models on key computer vision tasks (detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation). Specifically, we benchmark the recognition drop on common detection datasets, where we evaluate both traditional and realistic anonymization for faces and full bodies. Our comprehensive experiments reflect that traditional image anonymization substantially impacts final model performance, particularly when anonymizing the full body. Furthermore, we find that realistic anonymization can mitigate this decrease in performance, where our experiments reflect a minimal performance drop for face anonymization. Our study demonstrates that realistic anonymization can enable privacy-preserving computer vision development with minimal performance degradation across a range of important computer vision benchmarks.
Explainable Predictive Maintenance
Authors: Sepideh Pashami, Slawomir Nowaczyk, Yuantao Fan, Jakub Jakubowski, Nuno Paiva, Narjes Davari, Szymon Bobek, Samaneh Jamshidi, Hamid Sarmadi, Abdallah Alabdallah, Rita P. Ribeiro, Bruno Veloso, Moamar Sayed-Mouchaweh, Lala Rajaoarisoa, Grzegorz J. Nalepa, João Gama
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) fills the role of a critical interface fostering interactions between sophisticated intelligent systems and diverse individuals, including data scientists, domain experts, end-users, and more. It aids in deciphering the intricate internal mechanisms of ``black box'' Machine Learning (ML), rendering the reasons behind their decisions more understandable. However, current research in XAI primarily focuses on two aspects; ways to facilitate user trust, or to debug and refine the ML model. The majority of it falls short of recognising the diverse types of explanations needed in broader contexts, as different users and varied application areas necessitate solutions tailored to their specific needs. One such domain is Predictive Maintenance (PdM), an exploding area of research under the Industry 4.0 \& 5.0 umbrella. This position paper highlights the gap between existing XAI methodologies and the specific requirements for explanations within industrial applications, particularly the Predictive Maintenance field. Despite explainability's crucial role, this subject remains a relatively under-explored area, making this paper a pioneering attempt to bring relevant challenges to the research community's attention. We provide an overview of predictive maintenance tasks and accentuate the need and varying purposes for corresponding explanations. We then list and describe XAI techniques commonly employed in the literature, discussing their suitability for PdM tasks. Finally, to make the ideas and claims more concrete, we demonstrate XAI applied in four specific industrial use cases: commercial vehicles, metro trains, steel plants, and wind farms, spotlighting areas requiring further research.
On Search Strategies for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Christian Herold, Hermann Ney
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Compared to sentence-level systems, document-level neural machine translation (NMT) models produce a more consistent output across a document and are able to better resolve ambiguities within the input. There are many works on document-level NMT, mostly focusing on modifying the model architecture or training strategy to better accommodate the additional context-input. On the other hand, in most works, the question on how to perform search with the trained model is scarcely discussed, sometimes not mentioned at all. In this work, we aim to answer the question how to best utilize a context-aware translation model in decoding. We start with the most popular document-level NMT approach and compare different decoding schemes, some from the literature and others proposed by us. In the comparison, we are using both, standard automatic metrics, as well as specific linguistic phenomena on three standard document-level translation benchmarks. We find that most commonly used decoding strategies perform similar to each other and that higher quality context information has the potential to further improve the translation.
FheFL: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Friendly Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Byzantine Users
Authors: Yogachandran Rahulamathavan, Charuka Herath, Xiaolan Liu, Sangarapillai Lambotharan, Carsten Maple
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

The federated learning (FL) technique was developed to mitigate data privacy issues in the traditional machine learning paradigm. While FL ensures that a user's data always remain with the user, the gradients are shared with the centralized server to build the global model. This results in privacy leakage, where the server can infer private information from the shared gradients. To mitigate this flaw, the next-generation FL architectures proposed encryption and anonymization techniques to protect the model updates from the server. However, this approach creates other challenges, such as malicious users sharing false gradients. Since the gradients are encrypted, the server is unable to identify rogue users. To mitigate both attacks, this paper proposes a novel FL algorithm based on a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme. We develop a distributed multi-key additive homomorphic encryption scheme that supports model aggregation in FL. We also develop a novel aggregation scheme within the encrypted domain, utilizing users' non-poisoning rates, to effectively address data poisoning attacks while ensuring privacy is preserved by the proposed encryption scheme. Rigorous security, privacy, convergence, and experimental analyses have been provided to show that FheFL is novel, secure, and private, and achieves comparable accuracy at reasonable computational cost.
PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization
Authors: Yidong Wang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhengran Zeng, Linyi Yang, Cunxiang Wang, Hao Chen, Chaoya Jiang, Rui Xie, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang, Yue Zhang
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential. However, establishing such a benchmark is not a trivial task due to the challenges associated with evaluation accuracy and privacy protection. In response to these challenges, we introduce a judge large language model, named PandaLM, which is trained to distinguish the superior model given several LLMs. PandaLM's focus extends beyond just the objective correctness of responses, which is the main focus of traditional evaluation datasets. It addresses vital subjective factors such as relative conciseness, clarity, adherence to instructions, comprehensiveness, and formality. To ensure the reliability of PandaLM, we collect a diverse human-annotated test dataset, where all contexts are generated by humans and labels are aligned with human preferences. Our results indicate that PandaLM-7B achieves 93.75% of GPT-3.5's evaluation ability and 88.28% of GPT-4's in terms of F1-score on our test dataset. PandaLM enables the evaluation of LLM to be fairer but with less cost, evidenced by significant improvements achieved by models tuned through PandaLM compared to their counterparts trained with default Alpaca's hyperparameters. In addition, PandaLM does not depend on API-based evaluations, thus avoiding potential data leakage. All resources of PandaLM are released at https://github.com/WeOpenML/PandaLM.
The Importance of Time in Causal Algorithmic Recourse
Authors: Isacco Beretta, Martina Cinquini
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The application of Algorithmic Recourse in decision-making is a promising field that offers practical solutions to reverse unfavorable decisions. However, the inability of these methods to consider potential dependencies among variables poses a significant challenge due to the assumption of feature independence. Recent advancements have incorporated knowledge of causal dependencies, thereby enhancing the quality of the recommended recourse actions. Despite these improvements, the inability to incorporate the temporal dimension remains a significant limitation of these approaches. This is particularly problematic as identifying and addressing the root causes of undesired outcomes requires understanding time-dependent relationships between variables. In this work, we motivate the need to integrate the temporal dimension into causal algorithmic recourse methods to enhance recommendations' plausibility and reliability. The experimental evaluation highlights the significance of the role of time in this field.
Improving Language Model Integration for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao, Mohammad Zeineldeen, Hermann Ney
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

The integration of language models for neural machine translation has been extensively studied in the past. It has been shown that an external language model, trained on additional target-side monolingual data, can help improve translation quality. However, there has always been the assumption that the translation model also learns an implicit target-side language model during training, which interferes with the external language model at decoding time. Recently, some works on automatic speech recognition have demonstrated that, if the implicit language model is neutralized in decoding, further improvements can be gained when integrating an external language model. In this work, we transfer this concept to the task of machine translation and compare with the most prominent way of including additional monolingual data - namely back-translation. We find that accounting for the implicit language model significantly boosts the performance of language model fusion, although this approach is still outperformed by back-translation.
A Causal Framework for Decomposing Spurious Variations
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Causal Inference, Epidemiology

One of the fundamental challenges found throughout the data sciences is to explain why things happen in specific ways, or through which mechanisms a certain variable $X$ exerts influences over another variable $Y$. In statistics and machine learning, significant efforts have been put into developing machinery to estimate correlations across variables efficiently. In causal inference, a large body of literature is concerned with the decomposition of causal effects under the rubric of mediation analysis. However, many variations are spurious in nature, including different phenomena throughout the applied sciences. Despite the statistical power to estimate correlations and the identification power to decompose causal effects, there is still little understanding of the properties of spurious associations and how they can be decomposed in terms of the underlying causal mechanisms. In this manuscript, we develop formal tools for decomposing spurious variations in both Markovian and Semi-Markovian models. We prove the first results that allow a non-parametric decomposition of spurious effects and provide sufficient conditions for the identification of such decompositions. The described approach has several applications, ranging from explainable and fair AI to questions in epidemiology and medicine, and we empirically demonstrate its use on a real-world dataset.
Capturing (Optimal) Relaxed Plans with Stable and Supported Models of Logic Programs
Authors: Masood Feyzbakhsh Rankooh, Tomi Janhunen
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

We establish a novel relation between delete-free planning, an important task for the AI Planning community also known as relaxed planning, and logic programming. We show that given a planning problem, all subsets of actions that could be ordered to produce relaxed plans for the problem can be bijectively captured with stable models of a logic program describing the corresponding relaxed planning problem. We also consider the supported model semantics of logic programs, and introduce one causal and one diagnostic encoding of the relaxed planning problem as logic programs, both capturing relaxed plans with their supported models. Our experimental results show that these new encodings can provide major performance gain when computing optimal relaxed plans, with our diagnostic encoding outperforming state-of-the-art approaches to relaxed planning regardless of the given time limit when measured on a wide collection of STRIPS planning benchmarks.