pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Survey on AI Sustainability: Emerging Trends on Learning Algorithms and Research Challenges
Authors: Zhenghua Chen, Min Wu, Alvin Chan, XiaoLi Li, Yew-Soon Ong
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing research and development (R&D) discipline which is attracting increasing attention because of its promises to bring vast benefits for consumers and businesses, with considerable benefits promised in productivity growth and innovation. To date it has reported significant accomplishments in many areas that have been deemed as challenging for machines, ranging from computer vision, natural language processing, audio analysis to smart sensing and many others. The technical trend in realizing the successes has been towards increasing complex and large size AI models so as to solve more complex problems at superior performance and robustness. This rapid progress, however, has taken place at the expense of substantial environmental costs and resources. Besides, debates on the societal impacts of AI, such as fairness, safety and privacy, have continued to grow in intensity. These issues have presented major concerns pertaining to the sustainable development of AI. In this work, we review major trends in machine learning approaches that can address the sustainability problem of AI. Specifically, we examine emerging AI methodologies and algorithms for addressing the sustainability issue of AI in two major aspects, i.e., environmental sustainability and social sustainability of AI. We will also highlight the major limitations of existing studies and propose potential research challenges and directions for the development of next generation of sustainable AI techniques. We believe that this technical review can help to promote a sustainable development of AI R&D activities for the research community.
Simultaneous Double Q-learning with Conservative Advantage Learning for Actor-Critic Methods
Authors: Qing Li, Wengang Zhou, Zhenbo Lu, Houqiang Li
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in continuous control tasks. However, they still suffer two nontrivial obstacles, i.e., low sample efficiency and overestimation bias. To this end, we propose Simultaneous Double Q-learning with Conservative Advantage Learning (SDQ-CAL). Our SDQ-CAL boosts the Double Q-learning for off-policy actor-critic RL based on a modification of the Bellman optimality operator with Advantage Learning. Specifically, SDQ-CAL improves sample efficiency by modifying the reward to facilitate the distinction from experience between the optimal actions and the others. Besides, it mitigates the overestimation issue by updating a pair of critics simultaneously upon double estimators. Extensive experiments reveal that our algorithm realizes less biased value estimation and achieves state-of-the-art performance in a range of continuous control benchmark tasks. We release the source code of our method at: \url{https://github.com/LQNew/SDQ-CAL}.
PGADA: Perturbation-Guided Adversarial Alignment for Few-shot Learning Under the Support-Query Shift
Authors: Siyang Jiang, Wei Ding, Hsi-Wen Chen, Ming-Syan Chen
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning methods aim to embed the data to a low-dimensional embedding space and then classify the unseen query data to the seen support set. While these works assume that the support set and the query set lie in the same embedding space, a distribution shift usually occurs between the support set and the query set, i.e., the Support-Query Shift, in the real world. Though optimal transportation has shown convincing results in aligning different distributions, we find that the small perturbations in the images would significantly misguide the optimal transportation and thus degrade the model performance. To relieve the misalignment, we first propose a novel adversarial data augmentation method, namely Perturbation-Guided Adversarial Alignment (PGADA), which generates the hard examples in a self-supervised manner. In addition, we introduce Regularized Optimal Transportation to derive a smooth optimal transportation plan. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets manifest that our framework significantly outperforms the eleven state-of-the-art methods on three datasets.
Beyond Distributional Hypothesis: Let Language Models Learn Meaning-Text Correspondence
Authors: Myeongjun Jang, Frank Mtumbuka, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Negation

The logical negation property (LNP), which implies generating different predictions for semantically opposite inputs, is an important property that a trustworthy language model must satisfy. However, much recent evidence shows that large-size pre-trained language models (PLMs) do not satisfy this property. In this paper, we perform experiments using probing tasks to assess PLM's LNP understanding. Unlike previous studies that only examined negation expressions, we expand the boundary of the investigation to lexical semantics. Through experiments, we observe that PLMs violate the LNP frequently. To alleviate the issue, we propose a novel intermediate training task, names meaning-matching, designed to directly learn a meaning-text correspondence, instead of relying on the distributional hypothesis. Through multiple experiments, we find that the task enables PLMs to learn lexical semantic information. Also, through fine-tuning experiments on 7 GLUE tasks, we confirm that it is a safe intermediate task that guarantees a similar or better performance of downstream tasks. Finally, we observe that our proposed approach outperforms our previous counterparts despite its time and resource efficiency.
Pervasive Machine Learning for Smart Radio Environments Enabled by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
Authors: George C. Alexandropoulos, Kyriakos Stylianopoulos, Chongwen Huang, Chau Yuen, Mehdi Bennis, Mérouane Debbah
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits

The emerging technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) is provisioned as an enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals over the wireless medium, ultimately providing increased environmental intelligence for diverse operation objectives. One of the major challenges with the envisioned dense deployment of RISs in such reconfigurable radio environments is the efficient configuration of multiple metasurfaces with limited, or even the absence of, computing hardware. In this paper, we consider multi-user and multi-RIS-empowered wireless systems, and present a thorough survey of the online machine learning approaches for the orchestration of their various tunable components. Focusing on the sum-rate maximization as a representative design objective, we present a comprehensive problem formulation based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We detail the correspondences among the parameters of the wireless system and the DRL terminology, and devise generic algorithmic steps for the artificial neural network training and deployment, while discussing their implementation details. Further practical considerations for multi-RIS-empowered wireless communications in the sixth Generation (6G) era are presented along with some key open research challenges. Differently from the DRL-based status quo, we leverage the independence between the configuration of the system design parameters and the future states of the wireless environment, and present efficient multi-armed bandits approaches, whose resulting sum-rate performances are numerically shown to outperform random configurations, while being sufficiently close to the conventional Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm, but with lower implementation complexity.
GRAPHCACHE: Message Passing as Caching for Sentence-Level Relation Extraction
Authors: Yiwei Wang, Muhao Chen, Wenxuan Zhou, Yujun Cai, Yuxuan Liang, Bryan Hooi
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Entity types and textual context are essential properties for sentence-level relation extraction (RE). Existing work only encodes these properties within individual instances, which limits the performance of RE given the insufficient features in a single sentence. In contrast, we model these properties from the whole dataset and use the dataset-level information to enrich the semantics of every instance. We propose the GRAPHCACHE (Graph Neural Network as Caching) module, that propagates the features across sentences to learn better representations for RE. GRAPHCACHE aggregates the features from sentences in the whole dataset to learn global representations of properties, and use them to augment the local features within individual sentences. The global property features act as dataset-level prior knowledge for RE, and a complement to the sentence-level features. Inspired by the classical caching technique in computer systems, we develop GRAPHCACHE to update the property representations in an online manner. Overall, GRAPHCACHE yields significant effectiveness gains on RE and enables efficient message passing across all sentences in the dataset.
Should We Rely on Entity Mentions for Relation Extraction? Debiasing Relation Extraction with Counterfactual Analysis
Authors: Yiwei Wang, Muhao Chen, Wenxuan Zhou, Yujun Cai, Yuxuan Liang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Juncheng Liu, Bryan Hooi
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: counterfactual, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Recent literature focuses on utilizing the entity information in the sentence-level relation extraction (RE), but this risks leaking superficial and spurious clues of relations. As a result, RE still suffers from unintended entity bias, i.e., the spurious correlation between entity mentions (names) and relations. Entity bias can mislead the RE models to extract the relations that do not exist in the text. To combat this issue, some previous work masks the entity mentions to prevent the RE models from overfitting entity mentions. However, this strategy degrades the RE performance because it loses the semantic information of entities. In this paper, we propose the CORE (Counterfactual Analysis based Relation Extraction) debiasing method that guides the RE models to focus on the main effects of textual context without losing the entity information. We first construct a causal graph for RE, which models the dependencies between variables in RE models. Then, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis on our causal graph to distill and mitigate the entity bias, that captures the causal effects of specific entity mentions in each instance. Note that our CORE method is model-agnostic to debias existing RE systems during inference without changing their training processes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CORE yields significant gains on both effectiveness and generalization for RE. The source code is provided at: https://github.com/vanoracai/CoRE.
RoViST:Learning Robust Metrics for Visual Storytelling
Authors: Eileen Wang, Caren Han, Josiah Poon
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Text Generation, Visual Grounding, Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling (VST) is the task of generating a story paragraph that describes a given image sequence. Most existing storytelling approaches have evaluated their models using traditional natural language generation metrics like BLEU or CIDEr. However, such metrics based on n-gram matching tend to have poor correlation with human evaluation scores and do not explicitly consider other criteria necessary for storytelling such as sentence structure or topic coherence. Moreover, a single score is not enough to assess a story as it does not inform us about what specific errors were made by the model. In this paper, we propose 3 evaluation metrics sets that analyses which aspects we would look for in a good story: 1) visual grounding, 2) coherence, and 3) non-redundancy. We measure the reliability of our metric sets by analysing its correlation with human judgement scores on a sample of machine stories obtained from 4 state-of-the-arts models trained on the Visual Storytelling Dataset (VIST). Our metric sets outperforms other metrics on human correlation, and could be served as a learning based evaluation metric set that is complementary to existing rule-based metrics.
Mutual Distillation Learning Network for Trajectory-User Linking
Authors: Wei Chen, Shuzhe Li, Chao Huang, Yanwei Yu, Yongguo Jiang, Junyu Dong
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00

Trajectory-User Linking (TUL), which links trajectories to users who generate them, has been a challenging problem due to the sparsity in check-in mobility data. Existing methods ignore the utilization of historical data or rich contextual features in check-in data, resulting in poor performance for TUL task. In this paper, we propose a novel Mutual distillation learning network to solve the TUL problem for sparse check-in mobility data, named MainTUL. Specifically, MainTUL is composed of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) trajectory encoder that models sequential patterns of input trajectory and a temporal-aware Transformer trajectory encoder that captures long-term time dependencies for the corresponding augmented historical trajectories. Then, the knowledge learned on historical trajectories is transferred between the two trajectory encoders to guide the learning of both encoders to achieve mutual distillation of information. Experimental results on two real-world check-in mobility datasets demonstrate the superiority of MainTUL against state-of-the-art baselines. The source code of our model is available at https://github.com/Onedean/MainTUL.
Math-KG: Construction and Applications of Mathematical Knowledge Graph
Authors: Jianing Wang
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Recently, the explosion of online education platforms makes a success in encouraging us to easily access online education resources. However, most of them ignore the integration of massive unstructured information, which inevitably brings the problem of \textit{information overload} and \textit{knowledge trek}. In this paper, we proposed a mathematical knowledge graph named Math-KG, which automatically constructed by the pipeline method with the natural language processing technology to integrate the resources of the mathematics. It is built from the corpora of Baidu Baike, Wikipedia. We implement a simple application system to validate the proposed Math-KG can make contributions on a series of scenes, including faults analysis and semantic search. The system is publicly available at GitHub \footnote{\url{https://github.com/wjn1996/Mathematical-Knowledge-Entity-Recognition}.}.
Transformer-Empowered 6G Intelligent Networks: From Massive MIMO Processing to Semantic Communication
Authors: Yang Wang, Zhen Gao, Dezhi Zheng, Sheng Chen, Deniz Gündüz, H. Vincent Poor
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Communication

It is anticipated that 6G wireless networks will accelerate the convergence of the physical and cyber worlds and enable a paradigm-shift in the way we deploy and exploit communication networks. Machine learning, in particular deep learning (DL), is expected to be one of the key technological enablers of 6G by offering a new paradigm for the design and optimization of networks with a high level of intelligence. In this article, we introduce an emerging DL architecture, known as the transformer, and discuss its potential impact on 6G network design. We first discuss the differences between the transformer and classical DL architectures, and emphasize the transformer's self-attention mechanism and strong representation capabilities, which make it particularly appealing for tackling various challenges in wireless network design. Specifically, we propose transformer-based solutions for various massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and semantic communication problems, and show their superiority compared to other architectures. Finally, we discuss key challenges and open issues in transformer-based solutions, and identify future research directions for their deployment in intelligent 6G networks.
DPMS: An ADD-Based Symbolic Approach for Generalized MaxSAT Solving
Authors: Anastasios Kyrillidis, Moshe Y. Vardi, Zhiwei Zhang
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00

Boolean MaxSAT, as well as generalized formulations such as Min-MaxSAT and Max-hybrid-SAT, are fundamental optimization problems in Boolean reasoning. Existing methods for MaxSAT have been successful in solving benchmarks in CNF format. They lack, however, the ability to handle 1) (non-CNF) hybrid constraints, such as XORs and 2) generalized MaxSAT problems natively. To address this issue, we propose a novel dynamic-programming approach for solving generalized MaxSAT problems with hybrid constraints -- called \emph{Dynamic-Programming-MaxSAT} or DPMS for short -- based on Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs). With the power of ADDs and the (graded) project-join-tree builder, our versatile framework admits many generalizations of CNF-MaxSAT, such as MaxSAT, Min-MaxSAT, and MinSAT with hybrid constraints. Moreover, DPMS scales provably well on instances with low width. Empirical results indicate that DPMS is able to solve certain problems quickly, where other algorithms based on various techniques all fail. Hence, DPMS is a promising framework and opens a new line of research that invites more investigation in the future.
End-to-End Rubbing Restoration Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Gongbo Sun, Zijie Zheng, Ming Zhang
Date: 2022-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Rubbing restorations are significant for preserving world cultural history. In this paper, we propose the RubbingGAN model for restoring incomplete rubbing characters. Specifically, we collect characters from the Zhang Menglong Bei and build up the first rubbing restoration dataset. We design the first generative adversarial network for rubbing restoration. Based on the dataset we collect, we apply the RubbingGAN to learn the Zhang Menglong Bei font style and restore the characters. The results of experiments show that RubbingGAN can repair both slightly and severely incomplete rubbing characters fast and effectively.
Towards a Progression-Aware Autonomous Dialogue Agent
Authors: Abraham Sanders, Tomek Strzalkowski, Mei Si, Albert Chang, Deepanshu Dey, Jonas Braasch, Dakuo Wang
Date: 2022-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent advances in large-scale language modeling and generation have enabled the creation of dialogue agents that exhibit human-like responses in a wide range of conversational scenarios spanning a diverse set of tasks, from general chit-chat to focused goal-oriented discourse. While these agents excel at generating high-quality responses that are relevant to prior context, they suffer from a lack of awareness of the overall direction in which the conversation is headed, and the likelihood of task success inherent therein. Thus, we propose a framework in which dialogue agents can evaluate the progression of a conversation toward or away from desired outcomes, and use this signal to inform planning for subsequent responses. Our framework is composed of three key elements: (1) the notion of a "global" dialogue state (GDS) space, (2) a task-specific progression function (PF) computed in terms of a conversation's trajectory through this space, and (3) a planning mechanism based on dialogue rollouts by which an agent may use progression signals to select its next response.
Playing Tic-Tac-Toe Games with Intelligent Single-pixel Imaging
Authors: Shuming Jiao, Jiaxiang Li, Wei Huang, Zibang Zhang
Date: 2022-05-07 00:00:00

Single-pixel imaging (SPI) is a novel optical imaging technique by replacing a two-dimensional pixelated sensor with a single-pixel detector and pattern illuminations. SPI have been extensively used for various tasks related to image acquisition and processing. In this work, a novel non-image-based task of playing Tic-Tac-Toe games interactively is merged into the framework of SPI. An optoelectronic artificial intelligent (AI) player with minimal digital computation can detect the game states, generate optimal moves and display output results mainly by pattern illumination and single-pixel detection. Simulated and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of proposed scheme and its unbeatable performance against human players.
Label-aware Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Shining Liang, Linjun Shou, Jian Pei, Ming Gong, Wanli Zuo, Xianglin Zuo, Daxin Jiang
Date: 2022-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Spoken Language Understanding, Transfer Learning

Despite the great success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, it remains challenging in low-resource languages mainly due to the lack of labeled training data. The recent multilingual code-switching approach achieves better alignments of model representations across languages by constructing a mixed-language context in zero-shot cross-lingual SLU. However, current code-switching methods are limited to implicit alignment and disregard the inherent semantic structure in SLU, i.e., the hierarchical inclusion of utterances, slots, and words. In this paper, we propose to model the utterance-slot-word structure by a multi-level contrastive learning framework at the utterance, slot, and word levels to facilitate explicit alignment. Novel code-switching schemes are introduced to generate hard negative examples for our contrastive learning framework. Furthermore, we develop a label-aware joint model leveraging label semantics to enhance the implicit alignment and feed to contrastive learning. Our experimental results show that our proposed methods significantly improve the performance compared with the strong baselines on two zero-shot cross-lingual SLU benchmark datasets.
Automatic Block-wise Pruning with Auxiliary Gating Structures for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Zhaofeng Si, Honggang Qi, Xiaoyu Song
Date: 2022-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Network Pruning, Scheduling

Convolutional neural networks are prevailing in deep learning tasks. However, they suffer from massive cost issues when working on mobile devices. Network pruning is an effective method of model compression to handle such problems. This paper presents a novel structured network pruning method with auxiliary gating structures which assigns importance marks to blocks in backbone network as a criterion when pruning. Block-wise pruning is then realized by proposed voting strategy, which is different from prevailing methods who prune a model in small granularity like channel-wise. We further develop a three-stage training scheduling for the proposed architecture incorporating knowledge distillation for better performance. Our experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-arts compression performance for the classification tasks. In addition, our approach can integrate synergistically with other pruning methods by providing pretrained models, thus achieving a better performance than the unpruned model with over 93\% FLOPs reduced.