pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SLFNet: Generating Semantic Logic Forms from Natural Language Using Semantic Probability Graphs
Authors: Hao Wu, Fan Xu
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00

Building natural language interfaces typically uses a semantic parser to parse the user's natural language and convert it into structured \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{L}ogic \textbf{F}orms (SLFs). The mainstream approach is to adopt a sequence-to-sequence framework, which requires that natural language commands and SLFs must be represented serially. Since a single natural language may have multiple SLFs or multiple natural language commands may have the same SLF, training a sequence-to-sequence model is sensitive to the choice among them, a phenomenon recorded as "order matters". To solve this problem, we propose a novel neural network, SLFNet, which firstly incorporates dependent syntactic information as prior knowledge and can capture the long-range interactions between contextual information and words. Secondly construct semantic probability graphs to obtain local dependencies between predictor variables. Finally we propose the Multi-Head SLF Attention mechanism to synthesize SLFs from natural language commands based on Sequence-to-Slots. Experiments show that SLFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ChineseQCI-TS and Okapi datasets, and competitive performance on the ATIS dataset.
Are LLMs Effective Backbones for Fine-tuning? An Experimental Investigation of Supervised LLMs on Chinese Short Text Matching
Authors: Shulin Liu, Chengcheng Xu, Hao liu, TingHao Yu, Tao Yang
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Text Matching

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention in both academia and industry. Prior research on LLMs has primarily focused on enhancing or leveraging their generalization capabilities in zero- and few-shot settings. However, there has been limited investigation into effectively fine-tuning LLMs for a specific natural language understanding task in supervised settings. In this study, we conduct an experimental analysis by fine-tuning LLMs for the task of Chinese short text matching. We explore various factors that influence performance when fine-tuning LLMs, including task modeling methods, prompt formats, and output formats.
Target Span Detection for Implicit Harmful Content
Authors: Nazanin Jafari, James Allan, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00

Identifying the targets of hate speech is a crucial step in grasping the nature of such speech and, ultimately, in improving the detection of offensive posts on online forums. Much harmful content on online platforms uses implicit language especially when targeting vulnerable and protected groups such as using stereotypical characteristics instead of explicit target names, making it harder to detect and mitigate the language. In this study, we focus on identifying implied targets of hate speech, essential for recognizing subtler hate speech and enhancing the detection of harmful content on digital platforms. We define a new task aimed at identifying the targets even when they are not explicitly stated. To address that task, we collect and annotate target spans in three prominent implicit hate speech datasets: SBIC, DynaHate, and IHC. We call the resulting merged collection Implicit-Target-Span. The collection is achieved using an innovative pooling method with matching scores based on human annotations and Large Language Models (LLMs). Our experiments indicate that Implicit-Target-Span provides a challenging test bed for target span detection methods.
Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs
Authors: Kanishka Misra, Kyle Mahowald
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Memorization

Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which this is attributable to generalization vs. memorization is a major open question. To that end, we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora which were human-scale in size, and then evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (``a beautiful five days''). We compared how well this construction was learned on the default corpus relative to a counterfactual corpus in which AANN sentences were removed. We found that AANNs were still learned better than systematically perturbed variants of the construction. Using additional counterfactual corpora, we suggest that this learning occurs through generalization from related constructions (e.g., ``a few days''). An additional experiment showed that this learning is enhanced when there is more variability in the input. Taken together, our results provide an existence proof that LMs can learn rare grammatical phenomena by generalization from less rare phenomena. Data and code: https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis.
GOLD: Generalized Knowledge Distillation via Out-of-Distribution-Guided Language Data Generation
Authors: Mohsen Gholami, Mohammad Akbari, Cindy Hu, Vaden Masrani, Z. Jane Wang, Yong Zhang
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-free Knowledge Distillation, Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation from LLMs is essential for the efficient deployment of language models. Prior works have proposed data generation using LLMs for preparing distilled models. We argue that generating data with LLMs is prone to sampling mainly from the center of original content distribution. This limitation hinders the distilled model from learning the true underlying data distribution and to forget the tails of the distributions (samples with lower probability). To this end, we propose GOLD, a task-agnostic data generation and knowledge distillation framework, which employs an iterative out-of-distribution-guided feedback mechanism for the LLM. As a result, the generated data improves the generalizability of distilled models. An energy-based OOD evaluation approach is also introduced to deal with noisy generated data. Our extensive experiments on 10 different classification and sequence-to-sequence tasks in NLP show that GOLD respectively outperforms prior arts and the LLM with an average improvement of 5% and 14%. We will also show that the proposed method is applicable to less explored and novel tasks. The code is available.
Biologically-Plausible Topology Improved Spiking Actor Network for Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Duzhen Zhang, Qingyu Wang, Tielin Zhang, Bo Xu
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning

The success of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is largely attributed to utilizing Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as function approximators. Recent advances in neuroscience have unveiled that the human brain achieves efficient reward-based learning, at least by integrating spiking neurons with spatial-temporal dynamics and network topologies with biologically-plausible connectivity patterns. This integration process allows spiking neurons to efficiently combine information across and within layers via nonlinear dendritic trees and lateral interactions. The fusion of these two topologies enhances the network's information-processing ability, crucial for grasping intricate perceptions and guiding decision-making procedures. However, ANNs and brain networks differ significantly. ANNs lack intricate dynamical neurons and only feature inter-layer connections, typically achieved by direct linear summation, without intra-layer connections. This limitation leads to constrained network expressivity. To address this, we propose a novel alternative for function approximator, the Biologically-Plausible Topology improved Spiking Actor Network (BPT-SAN), tailored for efficient decision-making in DRL. The BPT-SAN incorporates spiking neurons with intricate spatial-temporal dynamics and introduces intra-layer connections, enhancing spatial-temporal state representation and facilitating more precise biological simulations. Diverging from the conventional direct linear weighted sum, the BPT-SAN models the local nonlinearities of dendritic trees within the inter-layer connections. For the intra-layer connections, the BPT-SAN introduces lateral interactions between adjacent neurons, integrating them into the membrane potential formula to ensure accurate spike firing.
Towards Reverse-Engineering the Brain: Brain-Derived Neuromorphic Computing Approach with Photonic, Electronic, and Ionic Dynamicity in 3D integrated circuits
Authors: S. J. Ben Yoo, Luis El-Srouji, Suman Datta, Shimeng Yu, Jean Anne Incorvia, Alberto Salleo, Volker Sorger, Juejun Hu, Lionel C Kimerling, Kristofer Bouchard, Joy Geng, Rishidev Chaudhuri, Charan Ranganath, Randall O'Reilly
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

The human brain has immense learning capabilities at extreme energy efficiencies and scale that no artificial system has been able to match. For decades, reverse engineering the brain has been one of the top priorities of science and technology research. Despite numerous efforts, conventional electronics-based methods have failed to match the scalability, energy efficiency, and self-supervised learning capabilities of the human brain. On the other hand, very recent progress in the development of new generations of photonic and electronic memristive materials, device technologies, and 3D electronic-photonic integrated circuits (3D EPIC ) promise to realize new brain-derived neuromorphic systems with comparable connectivity, density, energy-efficiency, and scalability. When combined with bio-realistic learning algorithms and architectures, it may be possible to realize an 'artificial brain' prototype with general self-learning capabilities. This paper argues the possibility of reverse-engineering the brain through architecting a prototype of a brain-derived neuromorphic computing system consisting of artificial electronic, ionic, photonic materials, devices, and circuits with dynamicity resembling the bio-plausible molecular, neuro/synaptic, neuro-circuit, and multi-structural hierarchical macro-circuits of the brain based on well-tested computational models. We further argue the importance of bio-plausible local learning algorithms applicable to the neuromorphic computing system that capture the flexible and adaptive unsupervised and self-supervised learning mechanisms central to human intelligence. Most importantly, we emphasize that the unique capabilities in brain-derived neuromorphic computing prototype systems will enable us to understand links between specific neuronal and network-level properties with system-level functioning and behavior.
Hierarchical Recurrent Adapters for Efficient Multi-Task Adaptation of Large Speech Models
Authors: Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Youzheng Chen, Khe Chai Sim, Fadi Biadsy, Tara Sainath, Pedro Moreno Mengibar
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Parameter efficient adaptation methods have become a key mechanism to train large pre-trained models for downstream tasks. However, their per-task parameter overhead is considered still high when the number of downstream tasks to adapt for is large. We introduce an adapter module that has a better efficiency in large scale multi-task adaptation scenario. Our adapter is hierarchical in terms of how the adapter parameters are allocated. The adapter consists of a single shared controller network and multiple task-level adapter heads to reduce the per-task parameter overhead without performance regression on downstream tasks. The adapter is also recurrent so the entire adapter parameters are reused across different layers of the pre-trained model. Our Hierarchical Recurrent Adapter (HRA) outperforms the previous adapter-based approaches as well as full model fine-tuning baseline in both single and multi-task adaptation settings when evaluated on automatic speech recognition tasks.
High-dimensional analysis of ridge regression for non-identically distributed data with a variance profile
Authors: Jérémie Bigot, Issa-Mbenard Dabo, Camille Male
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

High-dimensional linear regression has been thoroughly studied in the context of independent and identically distributed data. We propose to investigate high-dimensional regression models for independent but non-identically distributed data. To this end, we suppose that the set of observed predictors (or features) is a random matrix with a variance profile and with dimensions growing at a proportional rate. Assuming a random effect model, we study the predictive risk of the ridge estimator for linear regression with such a variance profile. In this setting, we provide deterministic equivalents of this risk and of the degree of freedom of the ridge estimator. For certain class of variance profile, our work highlights the emergence of the well-known double descent phenomenon in high-dimensional regression for the minimum norm least-squares estimator when the ridge regularization parameter goes to zero. We also exhibit variance profiles for which the shape of this predictive risk differs from double descent. The proofs of our results are based on tools from random matrix theory in the presence of a variance profile that have not been considered so far to study regression models. Numerical experiments are provided to show the accuracy of the aforementioned deterministic equivalents on the computation of the predictive risk of ridge regression. We also investigate the similarities and differences that exist with the standard setting of independent and identically distributed data.
Screening for Diabetes Mellitus in the U.S. Population Using Neural Network Models and Complex Survey Designs
Authors: Marcos Matabuena, Juan C. Vidal, Rahul Ghosal, Jukka-Pekka Onnela
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey, Uncertainty Quantification

Complex survey designs are commonly employed in many medical cohorts. In such scenarios, developing case-specific predictive risk score models that reflect the unique characteristics of the study design is essential for minimizing selective biases in the statistical results. The objectives of this paper are to: (i) propose a general predictive framework for regression and classification using neural network (NN) modeling that incorporates survey weights into the estimation process; (ii) introduce an uncertainty quantification algorithm for model prediction tailored to data from complex survey designs; and (iii) apply this method to develop robust risk score models for assessing the risk of Diabetes Mellitus in the US population, utilizing data from the NHANES 2011-2014 cohort. The results indicate that models of varying complexity, each utilizing a different set of variables, demonstrate different discriminative power for predicting diabetes (with different economic cost), yet yield generalizable results at the population level. Although the focus is on diabetes, this NN predictive framework is adaptable for developing clinical models across a diverse range of diseases and medical cohorts. The software and data used in this paper are publicly available on GitHub.
Aiming at the Target: Filter Collaborative Information for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Hanyu Li, Weizhi Ma, Peijie Sun, Jiayu Li, Cunxiang Yin, Yancheng He, Guoqiang Xu, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00

Cross-domain recommender (CDR) systems aim to enhance the performance of the target domain by utilizing data from other related domains. However, irrelevant information from the source domain may instead degrade target domain performance, which is known as the negative transfer problem. There have been some attempts to address this problem, mostly by designing adaptive representations for overlapped users. Whereas, representation adaptions solely rely on the expressive capacity of the CDR model, lacking explicit constraint to filter the irrelevant source-domain collaborative information for the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative information regularized User Transformation (CUT) framework to tackle the negative transfer problem by directly filtering users' collaborative information. In CUT, user similarity in the target domain is adopted as a constraint for user transformation learning to filter the user collaborative information from the source domain. CUT first learns user similarity relationships from the target domain. Then, source-target information transfer is guided by the user similarity, where we design a user transformation layer to learn target-domain user representations and a contrastive loss to supervise the user collaborative information transferred. The results show significant performance improvement of CUT compared with SOTA single and cross-domain methods. Further analysis of the target-domain results illustrates that CUT can effectively alleviate the negative transfer problem.
Robust Federated Contrastive Recommender System against Model Poisoning Attack
Authors: Wei Yuan, Chaoqun Yang, Liang Qu, Guanhua Ye, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Hongzhi Yin
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Model Poisoning, Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

Federated Recommender Systems (FedRecs) have garnered increasing attention recently, thanks to their privacy-preserving benefits. However, the decentralized and open characteristics of current FedRecs present two dilemmas. First, the performance of FedRecs is compromised due to highly sparse on-device data for each client. Second, the system's robustness is undermined by the vulnerability to model poisoning attacks launched by malicious users. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive learning framework designed to fully leverage the client's sparse data through embedding augmentation, referred to as CL4FedRec. Unlike previous contrastive learning approaches in FedRecs that necessitate clients to share their private parameters, our CL4FedRec aligns with the basic FedRec learning protocol, ensuring compatibility with most existing FedRec implementations. We then evaluate the robustness of FedRecs equipped with CL4FedRec by subjecting it to several state-of-the-art model poisoning attacks. Surprisingly, our observations reveal that contrastive learning tends to exacerbate the vulnerability of FedRecs to these attacks. This is attributed to the enhanced embedding uniformity, making the polluted target item embedding easily proximate to popular items. Based on this insight, we propose an enhanced and robust version of CL4FedRec (rCL4FedRec) by introducing a regularizer to maintain the distance among item embeddings with different popularity levels. Extensive experiments conducted on four commonly used recommendation datasets demonstrate that CL4FedRec significantly enhances both the model's performance and the robustness of FedRecs.
KGUF: Simple Knowledge-aware Graph-based Recommender with User-based Semantic Features Filtering
Authors: Salvatore Bufi, Alberto Carlo Maria Mancino, Antonio Ferrara, Daniele Malitesta, Tommaso Di Noia, Eugenio Di Sciascio
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

The recent integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) into recommendation has led to a novel family of Collaborative Filtering (CF) approaches, namely Graph Collaborative Filtering (GCF). Following the same GNNs wave, recommender systems exploiting Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have also been successfully empowered by the GCF rationale to combine the representational power of GNNs with the semantics conveyed by KGs, giving rise to Knowledge-aware Graph Collaborative Filtering (KGCF), which use KGs to mine hidden user intent. Nevertheless, empirical evidence suggests that computing and combining user-level intent might not always be necessary, as simpler approaches can yield comparable or superior results while keeping explicit semantic features. Under this perspective, user historical preferences become essential to refine the KG and retain the most discriminating features, thus leading to concise item representation. Driven by the assumptions above, we propose KGUF, a KGCF model that learns latent representations of semantic features in the KG to better define the item profile. By leveraging user profiles through decision trees, KGUF effectively retains only those features relevant to users. Results on three datasets justify KGUF's rationale, as our approach is able to reach performance comparable or superior to SOTA methods while maintaining a simpler formalization. Link to the repository: https://github.com/sisinflab/KGUF.
Inclusive Design Insights from a Preliminary Image-Based Conversational Search Systems Evaluation
Authors: Yue Zheng, Lei Yu, Junmian Chen, Tianyu Xia, Yuanyuan Yin, Shan Wang, Haiming Liu
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Emotion Recognition

The digital realm has witnessed the rise of various search modalities, among which the Image-Based Conversational Search System stands out. This research delves into the design, implementation, and evaluation of this specific system, juxtaposing it against its text-based and mixed counterparts. A diverse participant cohort ensures a broad evaluation spectrum. Advanced tools facilitate emotion analysis, capturing user sentiments during interactions, while structured feedback sessions offer qualitative insights. Results indicate that while the text-based system minimizes user confusion, the image-based system presents challenges in direct information interpretation. However, the mixed system achieves the highest engagement, suggesting an optimal blend of visual and textual information. Notably, the potential of these systems, especially the image-based modality, to assist individuals with intellectual disabilities is highlighted. The study concludes that the Image-Based Conversational Search System, though challenging in some aspects, holds promise, especially when integrated into a mixed system, offering both clarity and engagement.
Dealing with Missing Modalities in Multimodal Recommendation: a Feature Propagation-based Approach
Authors: Daniele Malitesta, Emanuele Rossi, Claudio Pomo, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros, Tommaso Di Noia
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Multimodal Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Multimodal recommender systems work by augmenting the representation of the products in the catalogue through multimodal features extracted from images, textual descriptions, or audio tracks characterising such products. Nevertheless, in real-world applications, only a limited percentage of products come with multimodal content to extract meaningful features from, making it hard to provide accurate recommendations. To the best of our knowledge, very few attention has been put into the problem of missing modalities in multimodal recommendation so far. To this end, our paper comes as a preliminary attempt to formalise and address such an issue. Inspired by the recent advances in graph representation learning, we propose to re-sketch the missing modalities problem as a problem of missing graph node features to apply the state-of-the-art feature propagation algorithm eventually. Technically, we first project the user-item graph into an item-item one based on co-interactions. Then, leveraging the multimodal similarities among co-interacted items, we apply a modified version of the feature propagation technique to impute the missing multimodal features. Adopted as a pre-processing stage for two recent multimodal recommender systems, our simple approach performs better than other shallower solutions on three popular datasets.