pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Markedness in Visual Semantic AI
Authors: Robert Wolfe, Aylin Caliskan
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00

We evaluate the state-of-the-art multimodal "visual semantic" model CLIP ("Contrastive Language Image Pretraining") for biases related to the marking of age, gender, and race or ethnicity. Given the option to label an image as "a photo of a person" or to select a label denoting race or ethnicity, CLIP chooses the "person" label 47.9% of the time for White individuals, compared with 5.0% or less for individuals who are Black, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Indian, or Latino or Hispanic. The model is more likely to rank the unmarked "person" label higher than labels denoting gender for Male individuals (26.7% of the time) vs. Female individuals (15.2% of the time). Age affects whether an individual is marked by the model: Female individuals under the age of 20 are more likely than Male individuals to be marked with a gender label, but less likely to be marked with an age label, while Female individuals over the age of 40 are more likely to be marked based on age than Male individuals. We also examine the self-similarity (mean pairwise cosine similarity) for each social group, where higher self-similarity denotes greater attention directed by CLIP to the shared characteristics (age, race, or gender) of the social group. As age increases, the self-similarity of representations of Female individuals increases at a higher rate than for Male individuals, with the disparity most pronounced at the "more than 70" age range. All ten of the most self-similar social groups are individuals under the age of 10 or over the age of 70, and six of the ten are Female individuals. Existing biases of self-similarity and markedness between Male and Female gender groups are further exacerbated when the groups compared are individuals who are White and Male and individuals who are Black and Female. Results indicate that CLIP reflects the biases of the language and society which produced its training data.
Learned Digital Back-Propagation for Dual-Polarization Dispersion Managed Systems
Authors: Mohannad Abu-romoh, Nelson Costa, Antonio Napoli, Bernhard Spinnler, Yves Jaouën, Mansoor Yousefi
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00

Digital back-propagation (DBP) and learned DBP (LDBP) are proposed for nonlinearity mitigation in WDM dual-polarization dispersion-managed systems. LDBP achieves Q-factor improvement of 1.8 dB and 1.2 dB, respectively, over linear equalization and a variant of DBP adapted to DM systems.
Looking for a Handsome Carpenter! Debiasing GPT-3 Job Advertisements
Authors: Conrad Borchers, Dalia Sara Gala, Benjamin Gilburt, Eduard Oravkin, Wilfried Bounsi, Yuki M. Asano, Hannah Rose Kirk
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (GeBNLP) 2022 7
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prompt Engineering

The growing capability and availability of generative language models has enabled a wide range of new downstream tasks. Academic research has identified, quantified and mitigated biases present in language models but is rarely tailored to downstream tasks where wider impact on individuals and society can be felt. In this work, we leverage one popular generative language model, GPT-3, with the goal of writing unbiased and realistic job advertisements. We first assess the bias and realism of zero-shot generated advertisements and compare them to real-world advertisements. We then evaluate prompt-engineering and fine-tuning as debiasing methods. We find that prompt-engineering with diversity-encouraging prompts gives no significant improvement to bias, nor realism. Conversely, fine-tuning, especially on unbiased real advertisements, can improve realism and reduce bias.
Rethinking Task-Incremental Learning Baselines
Authors: Md Sazzad Hossain, Pritom Saha, Townim Faisal Chowdhury, Shafin Rahman, Fuad Rahman, Nabeel Mohammed
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning

It is common to have continuous streams of new data that need to be introduced in the system in real-world applications. The model needs to learn newly added capabilities (future tasks) while retaining the old knowledge (past tasks). Incremental learning has recently become increasingly appealing for this problem. Task-incremental learning is a kind of incremental learning where task identity of newly included task (a set of classes) remains known during inference. A common goal of task-incremental methods is to design a network that can operate on minimal size, maintaining decent performance. To manage the stability-plasticity dilemma, different methods utilize replay memory of past tasks, specialized hardware, regularization monitoring etc. However, these methods are still less memory efficient in terms of architecture growth or input data costs. In this study, we present a simple yet effective adjustment network (SAN) for task incremental learning that achieves near state-of-the-art performance while using minimal architectural size without using memory instances compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches. We investigate this approach on both 3D point cloud object (ModelNet40) and 2D image (CIFAR10, CIFAR100, MiniImageNet, MNIST, PermutedMNIST, notMNIST, SVHN, and FashionMNIST) recognition tasks and establish a strong baseline result for a fair comparison with existing methods. On both 2D and 3D domains, we also observe that SAN is primarily unaffected by different task orders in a task-incremental setting.
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Personalized Session-Based Recommendation with User-Session Constraints
Authors: Minjae Park
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems, Session-Based Recommendations

The recommendation system provides users with an appropriate limit of recent online large amounts of information. Session-based recommendation, a sub-area of recommender systems, attempts to recommend items by interpreting sessions that consist of sequences of items. Recently, research to include user information in these sessions is progress. However, it is difficult to generate high-quality user representation that includes session representations generated by user. In this paper, we consider various relationships in graph created by sessions through Heterogeneous attention network. Constraints also force user representations to consider the user's preferences presented in the session. It seeks to increase performance through additional optimization in the training process. The proposed model outperformed other methods on various real-world datasets.
ImGCL: Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Imbalanced Node Classification
Authors: Liang Zeng, Lanqing Li, Ziqi Gao, Peilin Zhao, Jian Li
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Node Classification, Online Clustering

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has attracted a surge of attention due to its superior performance for learning node/graph representations without labels. However, in practice, the underlying class distribution of unlabeled nodes for the given graph is usually imbalanced. This highly imbalanced class distribution inevitably deteriorates the quality of learned node representations in GCL. Indeed, we empirically find that most state-of-the-art GCL methods cannot obtain discriminative representations and exhibit poor performance on imbalanced node classification. Motivated by this observation, we propose a principled GCL framework on Imbalanced node classification (ImGCL), which automatically and adaptively balances the representations learned from GCL without labels. Specifically, we first introduce the online clustering based progressively balanced sampling (PBS) method with theoretical rationale, which balances the training sets based on pseudo-labels obtained from learned representations in GCL. We then develop the node centrality based PBS method to better preserve the intrinsic structure of graphs, by upweighting the important nodes of the given graph. Extensive experiments on multiple imbalanced graph datasets and imbalanced settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which significantly improves the performance of the recent state-of-the-art GCL methods. Further experimental ablations and analyses show that the ImGCL framework consistently improves the representation quality of nodes in under-represented (tail) classes.
KOLD: Korean Offensive Language Dataset
Authors: Younghoon Jeong, Juhyun Oh, Jaimeen Ahn, Jongwon Lee, Jihyung Moon, Sungjoon Park, Alice Oh
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Classification

Recent directions for offensive language detection are hierarchical modeling, identifying the type and the target of offensive language, and interpretability with offensive span annotation and prediction. These improvements are focused on English and do not transfer well to other languages because of cultural and linguistic differences. In this paper, we present the Korean Offensive Language Dataset (KOLD) comprising 40,429 comments, which are annotated hierarchically with the type and the target of offensive language, accompanied by annotations of the corresponding text spans. We collect the comments from NAVER news and YouTube platform and provide the titles of the articles and videos as the context information for the annotation process. We use these annotated comments as training data for Korean BERT and RoBERTa models and find that they are effective at offensiveness detection, target classification, and target span detection while having room for improvement for target group classification and offensive span detection. We discover that the target group distribution differs drastically from the existing English datasets, and observe that providing the context information improves the model performance in offensiveness detection (+0.3), target classification (+1.5), and target group classification (+13.1). We publicly release the dataset and baseline models.
Cooperative Reinforcement Learning on Traffic Signal Control
Authors: Chi-Chun Chao, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Bor-Shiun Wang
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

Traffic signal control is a challenging real-world problem aiming to minimize overall travel time by coordinating vehicle movements at road intersections. Existing traffic signal control systems in use still rely heavily on oversimplified information and rule-based methods. Specifically, the periodicity of green/red light alternations can be considered as a prior for better planning of each agent in policy optimization. To better learn such adaptive and predictive priors, traditional RL-based methods can only return a fixed length from predefined action pool with only local agents. If there is no cooperation between these agents, some agents often make conflicts to other agents and thus decrease the whole throughput. This paper proposes a cooperative, multi-objective architecture with age-decaying weights to better estimate multiple reward terms for traffic signal control optimization, which termed COoperative Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (COMMA-DDPG). Two types of agents running to maximize rewards of different goals - one for local traffic optimization at each intersection and the other for global traffic waiting time optimization. The global agent is used to guide the local agents as a means for aiding faster learning but not used in the inference phase. We also provide an analysis of solution existence together with convergence proof for the proposed RL optimization. Evaluation is performed using real-world traffic data collected using traffic cameras from an Asian country. Our method can effectively reduce the total delayed time by 60\%. Results demonstrate its superiority when compared to SoTA methods.
GR-GAN: Gradual Refinement Text-to-image Generation
Authors: Bo Yang, Fangxiang Feng, Xiaojie Wang
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Image-text matching, Sentence, Text Matching, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

A good Text-to-Image model should not only generate high quality images, but also ensure the consistency between the text and the generated image. Previous models failed to simultaneously fix both sides well. This paper proposes a Gradual Refinement Generative Adversarial Network (GR-GAN) to alleviates the problem efficiently. A GRG module is designed to generate images from low resolution to high resolution with the corresponding text constraints from coarse granularity (sentence) to fine granularity (word) stage by stage, a ITM module is designed to provide image-text matching losses at both sentence-image level and word-region level for corresponding stages. We also introduce a new metric Cross-Model Distance (CMD) for simultaneously evaluating image quality and image-text consistency. Experimental results show GR-GAN significant outperform previous models, and achieve new state-of-the-art on both FID and CMD. A detailed analysis demonstrates the efficiency of different generation stages in GR-GAN.
What You See is What You Classify: Black Box Attributions
Authors: Steven Stalder, Nathanaël Perraudin, Radhakrishna Achanta, Fernando Perez-Cruz, Michele Volpi
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00

An important step towards explaining deep image classifiers lies in the identification of image regions that contribute to individual class scores in the model's output. However, doing this accurately is a difficult task due to the black-box nature of such networks. Most existing approaches find such attributions either using activations and gradients or by repeatedly perturbing the input. We instead address this challenge by training a second deep network, the Explainer, to predict attributions for a pre-trained black-box classifier, the Explanandum. These attributions are provided in the form of masks that only show the classifier-relevant parts of an image, masking out the rest. Our approach produces sharper and more boundary-precise masks when compared to the saliency maps generated by other methods. Moreover, unlike most existing approaches, ours is capable of directly generating very distinct class-specific masks in a single forward pass. This makes the proposed method very efficient during inference. We show that our attributions are superior to established methods both visually and quantitatively with respect to the PASCAL VOC-2007 and Microsoft COCO-2014 datasets.
Document Intelligence Metrics for Visually Rich Document Evaluation
Authors: Jonathan Degange, Swapnil Gupta, Zhuoyu Han, Krzysztof Wilkosz, Adam Karwan
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Document AI

The processing of Visually-Rich Documents (VRDs) is highly important in information extraction tasks associated with Document Intelligence. We introduce DI-Metrics, a Python library devoted to VRD model evaluation comprising text-based, geometric-based and hierarchical metrics for information extraction tasks. We apply DI-Metrics to evaluate information extraction performance using publicly available CORD dataset, comparing performance of three SOTA models and one industry model. The open-source library is available on GitHub.
Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation
Authors: Yichao Du, Weizhi Wang, Zhirui Zhang, Boxing Chen, Tong Xu, Jun Xie, Enhong Chen
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Translation, Triplet

End-to-End Speech Translation (E2E-ST) has received increasing attention due to the potential of its less error propagation, lower latency, and fewer parameters. However, the effectiveness of neural-based approaches to this task is severely limited by the available training corpus, especially for domain adaptation where in-domain triplet training data is scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric method that leverages domain-specific text translation corpus to achieve domain adaptation for the E2E-ST system. To this end, we first incorporate an additional encoder into the pre-trained E2E-ST model to realize text translation modelling, and then unify the decoder's output representation for text and speech translation tasks by reducing the correspondent representation mismatch in available triplet training data. During domain adaptation, a k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classifier is introduced to produce the final translation distribution using the external datastore built by the domain-specific text translation corpus, while the universal output representation is adopted to perform a similarity search. Experiments on the Europarl-ST benchmark demonstrate that when in-domain text translation data is involved only, our proposed approach significantly improves baseline by 12.82 BLEU on average in all translation directions, even outperforming the strong in-domain fine-tuning method.
Stop Filtering: Multi-View Attribute-Enhanced Dialogue Learning
Authors: Yiwei Li, Bin Sun, Shaoxiong Feng, Kan Li
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

There is a growing interest in improving the conversational ability of models by filtering the raw dialogue corpora. Previous filtering strategies usually rely on a scoring method to assess and discard samples from one perspective, enabling the model to enhance the corresponding dialogue attributes (e.g., consistency) more easily. However, the discarded samples may obtain high scores in other perspectives and can provide regularization effects on the model learning, which causes the performance improvement to be sensitive to the filtering ratio. In this work, we propose a multi-view attribute-enhanced dialogue learning framework that strengthens the attribute-related features more robustly and comprehensively. Instead of filtering the raw dataset to train the model, our framework first pre-trains the model on the raw dataset and then fine-tunes it through adapters on the selected sub-sets, which also enhances certain attributes of responses but without suffering from the problems mentioned above. Considering the variety of the dialogue attribute, we further design a multi-view enhancement mechanism, including multi-view selection and inter-view fusion. It groups the high-quality samples from multiple perspectives, respectively, and enhances different attributes of responses with the corresponding sample sets and adapters, keeping knowledge independent and allowing flexible integration. Empirical results and analysis show that our framework can improve the performance significantly in terms of enhancing dialogue attributes and fusing view-specific knowledge.
BBTv2: Towards a Gradient-Free Future with Large Language Models
Authors: Tianxiang Sun, Zhengfu He, Hong Qian, Yunhua Zhou, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modelling

Most downstream adaptation methods tune all or part of the parameters of pre-trained models (PTMs) through gradient descent, where the tuning cost increases linearly with the growth of the model size. By contrast, gradient-free methods only require the forward computation of the PTM to tune the prompt, retaining the benefits of efficient tuning and deployment. Though, past work on gradient-free tuning often introduces gradient descent to seek a good initialization of prompt and lacks versatility across tasks and PTMs. In this paper, we present BBTv2, an improved version of Black-Box Tuning, to drive PTMs for few-shot learning. We prepend continuous prompts to every layer of the PTM and propose a divide-and-conquer gradient-free algorithm to optimize the prompts at different layers alternately. Extensive experiments across various tasks and PTMs show that BBTv2 can achieve comparable performance to full model tuning and state-of-the-art parameter-efficient methods (e.g., Adapter, LoRA, BitFit, etc.) under few-shot settings while maintaining much fewer tunable parameters.
NPU-BOLT: A Dataset for Bolt Object Detection in Natural Scene Images
Authors: Yadian Zhao, Zhenglin Yang, Chao Xu
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Bolt joints are very common and important in engineering structures. Due to extreme service environment and load factors, bolts often get loose or even disengaged. To real-time or timely detect the loosed or disengaged bolts is an urgent need in practical engineering, which is critical to keep structural safety and service life. In recent years, many bolt loosening detection methods using deep learning and machine learning techniques have been proposed and are attracting more and more attention. However, most of these studies use bolt images captured in laboratory for deep leaning model training. The images are obtained in a well-controlled light, distance, and view angle conditions. Also, the bolted structures are well designed experimental structures with brand new bolts and the bolts are exposed without any shelter nearby. It is noted that in practical engineering, the above well controlled lab conditions are not easy realized and the real bolt images often have blur edges, oblique perspective, partial occlusion and indistinguishable colors etc., which make the trained models obtained in laboratory conditions loss their accuracy or fails. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a dataset named NPU-BOLT for bolt object detection in natural scene images and open it to researchers for public use and further development. In the first version of the dataset, it contains 337 samples of bolt joints images mainly in the natural environment, with image data sizes ranging from 400*400 to 6000*4000, totaling approximately 1275 bolt targets. The bolt targets are annotated into four categories named blur bolt, bolt head, bolt nut and bolt side. The dataset is tested with advanced object detection models including yolov5, Faster-RCNN and CenterNet. The effectiveness of the dataset is validated.
An Evaluation Study of Intrinsic Motivation Techniques applied to Reinforcement Learning over Hard Exploration Environments
Authors: Alain Andres, Esther Villar-Rodriguez, Javier Del Ser
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration problems, intrinsic motivation mechanisms are arguably among the most studied alternatives to date. Advances reported in this area over time have tackled the exploration issue by proposing new algorithmic ideas to generate alternative mechanisms to measure the novelty. However, most efforts in this direction have overlooked the influence of different design choices and parameter settings that have also been introduced to improve the effect of the generated intrinsic bonus, forgetting the application of those choices to other intrinsic motivation techniques that may also benefit of them. Furthermore, some of those intrinsic methods are applied with different base reinforcement algorithms (e.g. PPO, IMPALA) and neural network architectures, being hard to fairly compare the provided results and the actual progress provided by each solution. The goal of this work is to stress on this crucial matter in reinforcement learning over hard exploration environments, exposing the variability and susceptibility of avant-garde intrinsic motivation techniques to diverse design factors. Ultimately, our experiments herein reported underscore the importance of a careful selection of these design aspects coupled with the exploration requirements of the environment and the task in question under the same setup, so that fair comparisons can be guaranteed.