pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A DSEL for High Throughput and Low Latency Software-Defined Radio on Multicore CPUs
Authors: Adrien Cassagne, Romain Tajan, Olivier Aumage, Camille Leroux, Denis Barthou, Christophe Jégo
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

This article presents a new Domain Specific Embedded Language (DSEL) dedicated to Software-Defined Radio (SDR). From a set of carefully designed components, it enables to build efficient software digital communication systems, able to take advantage of the parallelism of modern processor architectures, in a straightforward and safe manner for the programmer. In particular, proposed DSEL enables the combination of pipelining and sequence duplication techniques to extract both temporal and spatial parallelism from digital communication systems. We leverage the DSEL capabilities on a real use case: a fully digital transceiver for the widely used DVB-S2 standard designed entirely in software. Through evaluation, we show how proposed software DVB-S2 transceiver is able to get the most from modern, high-end multicore CPU targets.
On the Learning of Non-Autoregressive Transformers
Authors: Fei Huang, Tianhua Tao, Hao Zhou, Lei LI, Minlie Huang
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Non-autoregressive Transformer (NAT) is a family of text generation models, which aims to reduce the decoding latency by predicting the whole sentences in parallel. However, such latency reduction sacrifices the ability to capture left-to-right dependencies, thereby making NAT learning very challenging. In this paper, we present theoretical and empirical analyses to reveal the challenges of NAT learning and propose a unified perspective to understand existing successes. First, we show that simply training NAT by maximizing the likelihood can lead to an approximation of marginal distributions but drops all dependencies between tokens, where the dropped information can be measured by the dataset's conditional total correlation. Second, we formalize many previous objectives in a unified framework and show that their success can be concluded as maximizing the likelihood on a proxy distribution, leading to a reduced information loss. Empirical studies show that our perspective can explain the phenomena in NAT learning and guide the design of new training methods.
A Sahlqvist-style Correspondence Theorem for Linear-time Temporal Logic
Authors: Rui Li, Francesco Belardinelli
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00

The language of modal logic is capable of expressing first-order conditions on Kripke frames. The classic result by Henrik Sahlqvist identifies a significant class of modal formulas for which first-order conditions -- or Sahlqvist correspondents -- can be find in an effective, algorithmic way. Recent works have successfully extended this classic result to more complex modal languages. In this paper, we pursue a similar line and develop a Sahlqvist-style correspondence theorem for Linear-time Temporal Logic (LTL), which is one of the most widely used formal languages for temporal specification. LTL extends the syntax of basic modal logic with dedicated temporal operators Next X and Until U . As a result, the complexity of the class of formulas that have first-order correspondents also increases accordingly. In this paper, we identify a significant class of LTL Sahlqvist formulas built by using modal operators F , G, X, and U . The main result of this paper is to prove the correspondence of LTL Sahlqvist formulas to frame conditions that are definable in first-order language.
Over-Generation Cannot Be Rewarded: Length-Adaptive Average Lagging for Simultaneous Speech Translation
Authors: Sara Papi, Marco Gaido, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (AutoSimTrans) 2022 7
Tasks: Translation

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems aim at generating their output with the lowest possible latency, which is normally computed in terms of Average Lagging (AL). In this paper we highlight that, despite its widespread adoption, AL provides underestimated scores for systems that generate longer predictions compared to the corresponding references. We also show that this problem has practical relevance, as recent SimulST systems have indeed a tendency to over-generate. As a solution, we propose LAAL (Length-Adaptive Average Lagging), a modified version of the metric that takes into account the over-generation phenomenon and allows for unbiased evaluation of both under-/over-generating systems.
Data Augmentation for Intent Classification
Authors: Derek Chen, Claire Yin
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, intent-classification, Intent Classification

Training accurate intent classifiers requires labeled data, which can be costly to obtain. Data augmentation methods may ameliorate this issue, but the quality of the generated data varies significantly across techniques. We study the process of systematically producing pseudo-labeled data given a small seed set using a wide variety of data augmentation techniques, including mixing methods together. We find that while certain methods dramatically improve qualitative and quantitative performance, other methods have minimal or even negative impact. We also analyze key considerations when implementing data augmentation methods in production.
The YiTrans End-to-End Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2022 Offline Shared Task
Authors: Ziqiang Zhang, Junyi Ao, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Furu Wei, Jinyu Li
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Translation

This paper describes the submission of our end-to-end YiTrans speech translation system for the IWSLT 2022 offline task, which translates from English audio to German, Chinese, and Japanese. The YiTrans system is built on large-scale pre-trained encoder-decoder models. More specifically, we first design a multi-stage pre-training strategy to build a multi-modality model with a large amount of labeled and unlabeled data. We then fine-tune the corresponding components of the model for the downstream speech translation tasks. Moreover, we make various efforts to improve performance, such as data filtering, data augmentation, speech segmentation, model ensemble, and so on. Experimental results show that our YiTrans system obtains a significant improvement than the strong baseline on three translation directions, and it achieves +5.2 BLEU improvements over last year's optimal end-to-end system on tst2021 English-German. Our final submissions rank first on English-German and English-Chinese end-to-end systems in terms of the automatic evaluation metric. We make our code and models publicly available.
CoSe-Co: Text Conditioned Generative CommonSense Contextualizer
Authors: Rachit Bansal, Milan Aggarwal, Sumit Bhatia, Jivat Neet Kaur, Balaji Krishnamurthy
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: ARC, Knowledge Graphs, Paraphrase Generation, Retrieval, Sentence

Pre-trained Language Models (PTLMs) have been shown to perform well on natural language tasks. Many prior works have leveraged structured commonsense present in the form of entities linked through labeled relations in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to assist PTLMs. Retrieval approaches use KG as a separate static module which limits coverage since KGs contain finite knowledge. Generative methods train PTLMs on KG triples to improve the scale at which knowledge can be obtained. However, training on symbolic KG entities limits their applicability in tasks involving natural language text where they ignore overall context. To mitigate this, we propose a CommonSense Contextualizer (CoSe-Co) conditioned on sentences as input to make it generically usable in tasks for generating knowledge relevant to the overall context of input text. To train CoSe-Co, we propose a novel dataset comprising of sentence and commonsense knowledge pairs. The knowledge inferred by CoSe-Co is diverse and contain novel entities not present in the underlying KG. We augment generated knowledge in Multi-Choice QA and Open-ended CommonSense Reasoning tasks leading to improvements over current best methods on CSQA, ARC, QASC and OBQA datasets. We also demonstrate its applicability in improving performance of a baseline model for paraphrase generation task.
Grounding in social media: An approach to building a chit-chat dialogue model
Authors: Ritvik Choudhary, Daisuke Kawahara
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (ACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Text Generation

Building open-domain dialogue systems capable of rich human-like conversational ability is one of the fundamental challenges in language generation. However, even with recent advancements in the field, existing open-domain generative models fail to capture and utilize external knowledge, leading to repetitive or generic responses to unseen utterances. Current work on knowledge-grounded dialogue generation primarily focuses on persona incorporation or searching a fact-based structured knowledge source such as Wikipedia. Our method takes a broader and simpler approach, which aims to improve the raw conversation ability of the system by mimicking the human response behavior through casual interactions found on social media. Utilizing a joint retriever-generator setup, the model queries a large set of filtered comment data from Reddit to act as additional context for the seq2seq generator. Automatic and human evaluations on open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Improving Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning with Noise Stability Regularization
Authors: Hang Hua, Xingjian Li, Dejing Dou, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification

The advent of large-scale pre-trained language models has contributed greatly to the recent progress in natural language processing. Many state-of-the-art language models are first trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Despite its recent success and wide adoption, fine-tuning a pre-trained language model often suffers from overfitting, which leads to poor generalizability due to the extremely high complexity of the model and the limited training samples from downstream tasks. To address this problem, we propose a novel and effective fine-tuning framework, named Layerwise Noise Stability Regularization (LNSR). Specifically, we propose to inject the standard Gaussian noise or In-manifold noise and regularize hidden representations of the fine-tuned model. We first provide theoretical analyses to support the efficacy of our method. We then demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art algorithms including L2-SP, Mixout and SMART. While these previous works only verify the effectiveness of their methods on relatively simple text classification tasks, we also verify the effectiveness of our method on question answering tasks, where the target problem is much more difficult and more training examples are available. Furthermore, extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can not only enhance the in-domain performance of the language models but also improve the domain generalization performance on out-of-domain data.
Can the Language of the Collation be Translated into the Language of the Stemma? Using Machine Translation for Witness Localization
Authors: Armin Hoenen
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation

Stemmatology is a subfield of philology where one approach to understand the copy-history of textual variants of a text (witnesses of a tradition) is to generate an evolutionary tree. Computational methods are partly shared between the sister discipline of phylogenetics and stemmatology. In 2022, a surveypaper in nature communications found that Deep Learning (DL), which otherwise has brought about major improvements in many fields (Krohn et al 2020) has had only minor successes in phylogenetics and that "it is difficult to conceive of an end-to-end DL model to directly estimate phylogenetic trees from raw data in the near future"(Sapoval et al. 2022, p.8). In stemmatology, there is to date no known DL approach at all. In this paper, we present a new DL approach to placement of manuscripts on a stemma and demonstrate its potential. This could be extended to phylogenetics where the universal code of DNA might be an even better prerequisite for the method using sequence to sequence based neural networks in order to retrieve tree distances.
Investigation of Ensemble features of Self-Supervised Pretrained Models for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: A Arunkumar, Vrunda N Sukhadia, S. Umesh
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) based models have been shown to generate powerful representations that can be used to improve the performance of downstream speech tasks. Several state-of-the-art SSL models are available, and each of these models optimizes a different loss which gives rise to the possibility of their features being complementary. This paper proposes using an ensemble of such SSL representations and models, which exploits the complementary nature of the features extracted by the various pretrained models. We hypothesize that this results in a richer feature representation and shows results for the ASR downstream task. To this end, we use three SSL models that have shown excellent results on ASR tasks, namely HuBERT, Wav2vec2.0, and WaveLM. We explore the ensemble of models fine-tuned for the ASR task and the ensemble of features using the embeddings obtained from the pre-trained models for a downstream ASR task. We get improved performance over individual models and pre-trained features using Librispeech(100h) and WSJ dataset for the downstream tasks.
Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck
Authors: Cenyuan Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Yixin Wan, Xiaoqing Zheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, SST-2

Existing studies have demonstrated that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features, which are highly predictive, but can be easily manipulated by adversaries to fool NLP models. In this study, we explore the feasibility of capturing task-specific robust features, while eliminating the non-robust ones by using the information bottleneck theory. Through extensive experiments, we show that the models trained with our information bottleneck-based method are able to achieve a significant improvement in robust accuracy, exceeding performances of all the previously reported defense methods while suffering almost no performance drop in clean accuracy on SST-2, AGNEWS and IMDB datasets.
Comparative Snippet Generation
Authors: Saurabh Jain, Yisong Miao, Min-Yen Kan
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECNLP (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Sentence

We model product reviews to generate comparative responses consisting of positive and negative experiences regarding the product. Specifically, we generate a single-sentence, comparative response from a given positive and a negative opinion. We contribute the first dataset for this task of Comparative Snippet Generation from contrasting opinions regarding a product, and a performance analysis of a pre-trained BERT model to generate such snippets.
A Decomposition-Based Approach for Evaluating Inter-Annotator Disagreement in Narrative Analysis
Authors: Effi Levi, Shaul R. Shenhav
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00

In this work, we explore sources of inter-annotator disagreement in narrative analysis, in light of the question of whether or not a narrative plot exists in the text. For this purpose, we present a method for a conceptual decomposition of an existing annotation into two separate levels: (1) \textbf{whether} or not a narrative plot exists in the text, and (2) \textbf{which} plot elements exist in the text. We apply this method to an existing dataset of sentences annotated with three different narrative plot elements: \textit{Complication}, \textit{Resolution} and \textit{Success}. We then employ statistical analysis in order to quantify how much of the inter-annotator disagreement can be explained by each of the two levels. We further perform a qualitative analysis of disagreement cases in each level, observing several sources of disagreement, such as text ambiguity, scheme definition and personal differences between the annotators. The insights gathered on the dataset may serve to reduce inter-annotator disagreement in future annotation endeavors. We conclude with a broader discussion on the potential implications of our approach in studying and evaluating inter-annotator disagreement in other settings.
Building a Personalized Dialogue System with Prompt-Tuning
Authors: Tomohito Kasahara, Daisuke Kawahara, Nguyen Tung, Shengzhe Li, Kenta Shinzato, Toshinori Sato
Date: 2022-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (ACL) 2022 7

Dialogue systems without consistent responses are not fascinating. In this study, we build a dialogue system that can respond based on a given character setting (persona) to bring consistency. Considering the trend of the rapidly increasing scale of language models, we propose an approach that uses prompt-tuning, which has low learning costs, on pre-trained large-scale language models. The results of automatic and manual evaluations in English and Japanese show that it is possible to build a dialogue system with more natural and personalized responses using less computational resources than fine-tuning.
AHD ConvNet for Speech Emotion Classification
Authors: Asfand Ali, Danial Nasir, Mohammad Hassan Jawad
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence are utilized in the advancement of computing and making of intelligent machines for facilitating mankind and improving user experience. Emotions are rudimentary for people, affecting thinking and ordinary exercises like correspondence, learning and direction. Speech emotion recognition is domain of interest in this regard and in this work, we propose a novel mel spectrogram learning approach in which our model uses the datapoints to learn emotions from the given wav form voice notes in the popular CREMA-D dataset. Our model uses log mel-spectrogram as feature with number of mels = 64. It took less training time compared to other approaches used to address the problem of emotion speech recognition.
Energy Consumption Analysis of pruned Semantic Segmentation Networks on an Embedded GPU
Authors: Hugo Tessier, Vincent Gripon, Mathieu Léonardon, Matthieu Arzel, David Bertrand, Thomas Hannagan
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, GPU, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks are the state of the art in many computer vision tasks. Their deployment in the context of autonomous vehicles is of particular interest, since their limitations in terms of energy consumption prohibit the use of very large networks, that typically reach the best performance. A common method to reduce the complexity of these architectures, without sacrificing accuracy, is to rely on pruning, in which the least important portions are eliminated. There is a large literature on the subject, but interestingly few works have measured the actual impact of pruning on energy. In this work, we are interested in measuring it in the specific context of semantic segmentation for autonomous driving, using the Cityscapes dataset. To this end, we analyze the impact of recently proposed structured pruning methods when trained architectures are deployed on a Jetson Xavier embedded GPU.
Leveraging Structured Pruning of Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Hugo Tessier, Vincent Gripon, Mathieu Léonardon, Matthieu Arzel, David Bertrand, Thomas Hannagan
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00

Structured pruning is a popular method to reduce the cost of convolutional neural networks, that are the state of the art in many computer vision tasks. However, depending on the architecture, pruning introduces dimensional discrepancies which prevent the actual reduction of pruned networks. To tackle this problem, we propose a method that is able to take any structured pruning mask and generate a network that does not encounter any of these problems and can be leveraged efficiently. We provide an accurate description of our solution and show results of gains, in energy consumption and inference time on embedded hardware, of pruned convolutional neural networks.
Evolutionary Multi-Task Injection Testing on Web Application Firewalls
Authors: Ke Li, Heng Yang, Willem Visser
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Translation

Web application firewall (WAF) plays an integral role nowadays to protect web applications from various malicious injection attacks such as SQL injection, XML injection, and PHP injection, to name a few. However, given the evolving sophistication of injection attacks and the increasing complexity of tuning a WAF, it is challenging to ensure that the WAF is free of injection vulnerabilities such that it will block all malicious injection attacks without wrongly affecting the legitimate message. Automatically testing the WAF is, therefore, a timely and essential task. In this paper, we propose DaNuoYi, an automatic injection testing tool that simultaneously generates test inputs for multiple types of injection attacks on a WAF. Our basic idea derives from the cross-lingual translation in the natural language processing domain. In particular, test inputs for different types of injection attacks are syntactically different but may be semantically similar. Sharing semantic knowledge across multiple programming languages can thus stimulate the generation of more sophisticated test inputs and discovering injection vulnerabilities of the WAF that are otherwise difficult to find. To this end, in DaNuoYi, we train several injection translation models by using multi-task learning that translates the test inputs between any pair of injection attacks. The model is then used by a novel multi-task evolutionary algorithm to co-evolve test inputs for different types of injection attacks facilitated by a shared mating pool and domain-specific mutation operators at each generation. We conduct experiments on three real-world open-source WAFs and six types of injection attacks, the results reveal that DaNuoYi generates up to 3.8x and 5.78x more valid test inputs (i.e., bypassing the underlying WAF) than its state-of-the-art single-task counterparts and the context-free grammar-based injection construction.
A comparative study of back propagation and its alternatives on multilayer perceptrons
Authors: John Waldo
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00

The de facto algorithm for training the back pass of a feedforward neural network is backpropagation (BP). The use of almost-everywhere differentiable activation functions made it efficient and effective to propagate the gradient backwards through layers of deep neural networks. However, in recent years, there has been much research in alternatives to backpropagation. This analysis has largely focused on reaching state-of-the-art accuracy in multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we analyze the stability and similarity of predictions and neurons in MLPs and propose a new variation of one of the algorithms.