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Most approaches used in open-domain question answering on hybrid data that comprises both tabular-and-textual contents are based on a \textit{Retrieval-Reader} pipeline in which the retrieval module finds relevant ``heterogenous&#39;&#39; evidence for a given question and the reader module generates an answer from the retrieved evidence. In this paper, we present a \textit{Retriever-Reranker-Reader} framework by newly proposing a Reader-INherited evidence reranKer (RINK) where a reranker module is designed by finetuning the reader’s neural architecture based on a simple prompting method. Our underlying assumption of reusing the reader’s module for the reranker is that the reader’s ability to generating an answer from evidence contains the knowledge required for the reranking, because the reranker needs to ``read&#39;&#39; in-depth a question and evidences more carefully and elaborately than a baseline retriever. Furthermore, we present a simple and effective pretraining method by extensively deploying the commonly used data augmentation methods of \textit{cell corruption} and \textit{cell reordering} based on the pretraining tasks  -- \textit{tabular-and-textual entailment} and \textit{cross-modal masked language modeling}. Experimental results on OTT-QA, a large-scale table-and-text open-domain question answering dataset, show that the proposed RINK armed with our pretraining procedure makes improvements over the baseline reranking method and leads to state-of-the-art performance. 

AAAI 2023

RINK: Reader-Inherited Evidence Reranker for Table-and-Text Open Domain Question Answering

snlp: application

snlp: information extraction

snlp: question answering

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Most approaches used in open-domain question answering on hybrid data that comprises both tabular-and-textual contents are based on a \textit{Retrieval-Reader} pipeline in which the retrieval module finds relevant ``heterogenous'' evidence for a given question and the reader module generates an answer from the retrieved evidence. In this paper, we present a \textit{Retriever-Reranker-Reader} framework by newly proposing a Reader-INherited evidence reranKer (RINK) where a reranker module is designed by finetuning the reader’s neural architecture based on a simple prompting method. Our underlying assumption of reusing the reader’s module for the reranker is that the reader’s ability to generating an answer from evidence contains the knowledge required for the reranking, because the reranker needs to ``read'' in-depth a question and evidences more carefully and elaborately than a baseline retriever. Furthermore, we present a simple and effective pretraining method by extensively deploying the commonly used data augmentation methods of \textit{cell corruption} and \textit{cell reordering} based on the pretraining tasks  -- \textit{tabular-and-textual entailment} and \textit{cross-modal masked language modeling}. Experimental results on OTT-QA, a large-scale table-and-text open-domain question answering dataset, show that the proposed RINK armed with our pretraining procedure makes improvements over the baseline reranking method and leads to state-of-the-art performance. 

poster

The self-supervised Masked Image Modeling (MIM) schema, following "mask-and-reconstruct" pipeline of recovering contents from masked image, has recently captured the increasing interest in the community, owing to the excellent ability of learning visual representation from unlabeled data. Aiming at learning representations with high semantics abstracted, a group of works attempts to reconstruct non-semantic pixels with large-ratio masking strategy, which may suffer from "over-smoothing" problem, while others directly infuse semantics into targets in off-line way requiring extra data. Different from them, we shift the perspective to the Fourier domain which naturally has global perspective and present a new Masked Image Modeling (MIM), termed Geminated Gestalt Autoencoder (Ge^2-AE) for visual pre-training. Specifically, we equip our model with geminated decoders in charge of reconstructing image contents from both pixel and frequency space, where each other serves as not only the complementation but also the reciprocal constraints. Through this way, more robust representations can be learned in the pre-trained encoders, of which the effectiveness is confirmed by the juxtaposing experimental results on downstream recognition tasks. We also conduct several quantitative and qualitative experiments to investigate the learning behavior of our method. To our best knowledge, this is the first MIM work to solve the visual pre-training through the lens of frequency domain. 

The Devil is in the Frequency: Geminated Gestalt Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training

A key challenge in federated learning (FL) is the statistical heterogeneity that impairs the generalization of the global model on each client. To address this, we propose a  method Federated learning with Adaptive Local Aggregation (FedALA) by capturing the desired information in the global model for client models in personalized FL. The key component of FedALA is an Adaptive Local Aggregation (ALA)  module, which can adaptively aggregate the downloaded global model and local model towards the local objective on each client to initialize the local model before training in each iteration.  To evaluate the effectiveness of FedALA, we conduct extensive experiments with five benchmark datasets in computer vision and natural language processing domains. FedALA outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines by up to 3.27% in test accuracy.  Furthermore, we also apply ALA  module to other federated learning methods and achieve up to 24.19% improvement in test accuracy.

FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning

The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common -- but very different -- ways to measure the satisfaction of a voter consider (i) the number of approved projects and (ii) the total cost of approved projects, respectively. In general, it is difficult to decide which measure of satisfaction best reflects the voters' true utilities. In this paper, we study proportionality axioms with respect to large classes of approval-based satisfaction functions. We establish logical implications among our axioms and related notions from the literature, and we ask whether outcomes can be achieved that are proportional with respect to more than one satisfaction function. We show that this is impossible for the two commonly used satisfaction functions when considering proportionality notions based on extended justified representation, but achievable for a notion based on proportional justified representation. For the latter result, we introduce a strengthening of priceability and show that it is satisfied by several polynomial-time computable rules, including the Method of Equal Shares and Phragmén's sequential rule. 

Proportionality in Approval-Based Participatory Budgeting

Deep networks trained on the source domain show degraded performance when tested on unseen target domain data. To enhance the model's generalization ability, most existing domain generalization methods learn domain invariant features by suppressing domain sensitive features. Different from them, we propose a Domain Projection and Contrastive Learning (DPCL) approach for generalized semantic segmentation, which includes two modules: Self-supervised Source Domain Projection (SSDP) and Multi-level Contrastive Learning (MLCL). SSDP aims to reduce domain gap by projecting data to the source domain, while MLCL is a learning scheme to learn discriminative and generalizable features on the projected data. During test time, we first project the target data by SSDP to mitigate domain shift, then generate the segmentation results by the learned segmentation network based on MLCL. At test time, we can update the projected data for minimizing our proposed pixel-to-pixel contrastive loss to obtain better results. Extensive experiments for semantic segmentation demonstrate the favorable generalization capability of our method on benchmark datasets.

Generalized Semantic Segmentation by Self-Supervised Source Domain Projection and Multi-Level Contrastive Learning

Multi-hop questions are associated with a series of justifications, and one needs to obtain the answers by following the reasoning path (RP) that orders the justifications adequately. So reasoning path retrieval becomes a critical preliminary stage for multi-hop Question Answering (QA). Within the RP, two fundamental challenges emerge for better performance: (i) what the order of the justifications in the RP should be, and (ii) what if the wrong justification has been in the path. In this paper, we propose Reasoning Path Augmentation (RPA), which uses reasoning path reordering and augmentation to handle the above two challenges, respectively. Reasoning path reordering restructures the reasoning by targeting the easier justification first but difficult one later, in which the difficulty is determined by the overlap between query and justifications since the higher overlap means more lexical relevance and easier searchable. Reasoning path augmentation automatically generates artificial RPs, in which the distracted justifications are inserted to aid the model recover from the wrong justification. We build RPA with a naive pre-trained model and evaluate RPA on the QASC and MultiRC datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate that RPA outperforms previously published reasoning path retrieval methods, showing the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Moreover, we present detailed experiments on how the orders of justifications and the percent of augmented paths affect the question- answering performance, revealing the importance of polishing RPs and the necessity of augmentation.

RPA: Reasoning Path Augmentation in Iterative Retrieving for Multi-hop QA

Automatic segmentation of left ventricular endocardium in echocardiography videos is critical for assessing various cardiac functions and improving the diagnosis of cardiac diseases. It is yet a challenging task due to heavy speckle noise, significant shape variability of cardiac structure, and limited labeled data. Particularly, the real-time demand in clinical practice makes this task even harder. In this paper, we propose a novel proxy- and kernel-based semi-supervised segmentation network (PKEcho-Net) to comprehensively address these challenges. We first propose a multi-scale region proxy (MRP) mechanism to model the region-wise contexts, in which a learnable region proxy with an arbitrary shape is developed in each layer of the encoder, allowing the network to identify homogeneous semantics and hence alleviate the influence of speckle noise on segmentation. To sufficiently and efficiently exploit temporal consistency, different from traditional methods which only utilize the temporal contexts of two neighboring frames via feature warping or self-attention mechanism, we formulate the semi-supervised segmentation with a group of learnable kernels, which can naturally and uniformly encode the appearances of left ventricular endocardium, as well as extracting the inter-frame contexts across the whole video to resist the fast shape variability of cardiac structures. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two famous public echocardiography video datasets, EchoNet-Dynamic and CAMUS. Our model achieves the best performance-efficiency trade-off when compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, attaining comparative accuracy with a much faster speed. The code is available at https://github.com/JingyinLin/PKEcho-Net.

Super-efficient Echocardiography Video Segmentation via Proxy- and Kernel-Based Semi-supervised Learning

Continual learning is known for suffering from catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon where previously learned concepts are forgotten upon learning new tasks. A natural remedy is to use trained models for old tasks as ‘teachers’ to regularize the update of the current model to prevent such forgetting. However, this requires storing all past models, which is very space-consuming for large models, e.g. BERT, thus impractical in real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we propose to construct snapshots of seen tasks whose key knowledge is captured in lightweight adapters. During continual learning, we transfer knowledge from past snapshots to the current model through knowledge distillation, allowing the current model to review previously learned knowledge while learning new tasks. We also design representation recalibration to better handle the class-incremental setting. Experiments over various task sequences show that our approach effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and outperforms all baselines.

Effective Continual Learning for Text Classification with Lightweight Snapshots

We present a framework for learning useful subgoals that support efficient long-term planning to achieve novel goals.  At the core of our framework is a collection of rational subgoals (RSGs), which are essentially binary classifiers over the environmental states. RSGs can be learned from weakly-annotated data, in the form of unsegmented demonstration trajectories, paired with abstract task descriptions, which are composed of terms that are initially unknown to the agent (e.g., collect-wood then craft-boat then go-across-river). Our framework also discovers dependencies between RSGs, such as predicting "collect-wood" is a helpful subgoal for task "craft-boat". Given a goal description, the learned subgoals and the derived dependencies  facilitate off-the-shelf planning algorithms, such as A*and RRT, by setting helpful subgoals as waypoints to the planner. It significantly improves performance-time efficiency.

Learning Rational Subgoals from Demonstrations and Instructions

Text-guided 3D object generation aims to generate 3D objects described by user-defined captions, which paves a flexible way to visualize what we imagined. Although some works have been devoted to solving this challenging task, these works either utilize some explicit 3D representations (e.g., mesh), which lack texture and require post-processing for rendering photo-realistic views; or require individual time-consuming optimization for every single case. Here, we make the first attempt to achieve generic text-guided cross-category 3D object generation via a new 3D-TOGO model, which integrates a text-to-views generation module and a views-to-3D generation module. The text-to-views generation module is designed to generate different views of the target 3D object given an input caption. prior-guidance, caption-guidance and view contrastive learning are proposed for achieving better view-consistency and caption similarity. Meanwhile, a pixelNeRF model is adopted for the views-to-3D generation module to obtain the implicit 3D neural representation from the previously-generated views. Our 3D-TOGO model generates 3D objects in the form of the neural radiance field with good texture and requires no time-cost optimization for every single caption. Besides, 3D-TOGO can control the category, color and shape of generated 3D objects with the input caption. Extensive experiments on the largest 3D object dataset (i.e., ABO) are conducted to verify that 3D-TOGO can better generate high-quality 3D objects according to the input captions across 98 different categories, in terms of PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS and CLIP-score, compared with text-NeRF and Dreamfields.

3D-TOGO: Towards Text-Guided Cross-Category 3D Object Generation

The huge training overhead, considerable commercial value, and various potential security risks make it urgent to protect the intellectual property (IP) of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNN watermarking has become a plausible method to meet this need. However, most of the existing watermarking schemes focus on image classification tasks. The schemes designed for the textual domain lack security and reliability. Moreover, how to protect the IP of widely-used pre-trained language models (PLMs) remains a blank. 
To fill these gaps, we propose PLMmark, the first secure and robust black-box watermarking framework for PLMs. It consists of three phases: (1) In order to generate watermarks that contain owners’ identity information, we propose a novel encoding method to establish a strong link between a digital signature and trigger words by leveraging the original vocabulary tables of PLMs. Combining this with public key cryptography ensures the security of our scheme. (2) To embed robust, task-agnostic, and highly transferable watermarks in PLMs, we introduce a supervised contrastive loss to deviate the output representations of trigger sets from that of clean samples. In this way, the watermarked models will respond to the trigger sets anomaly and thus can identify the ownership. (3) To make the model ownership verification results reliable, we perform double verification, which guarantees the unforgeability of ownership. Extensive experiments on text classification tasks demonstrate that the embedded watermark can transfer to all the downstream tasks and can be effectively extracted and verified. The watermarking scheme is robust to watermark removing attacks (fine-pruning and re-initializing) and is secure enough to resist forgery attacks.

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RINK: Reader-Inherited Evidence Reranker for Table-and-Text Open Domain Question Answering

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