United States

In recent years, many researchers have leveraged structural information from dependency trees to improve Named Entity Recognition (NER).
  Most of their methods take dependency-tree labels as input features for NER model training.
  However, such dependency information is not inherently provided in most NER corpora, making the methods with low usability in practice.  
  To effectively exploit the potential of word-dependency knowledge, motivated by the success of Multi-Task Learning on NER, we investigate a novel NER learning method incorporating cross-domain Dependency Parsing (DP) as its auxiliary learning task. 
  Then,  considering the high consistency of word-dependency relations across domains, we present an unsupervised domain-adapted method to transfer word-dependency knowledge from high-resource domains to low-resource ones.
  With the help of cross-domain DP to bridge different domains, both useful cross-domain and cross-task knowledge can be learnt by our model to considerably benefit cross-domain NER. 
  To make better use of the cross-task knowledge between NER and DP, we unify both tasks in a shared network architecture for joint learning using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD).
  Finally, through extensive experiments, we show our proposed method can not only effectively take advantage of word-dependency knowledge, but also significantly outperform other Multi-Task Learning methods on cross-domain NER.

AAAI 2023

Domain-Adapted Dependency Parsing for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

dependency parsing; domain adaption; named entity recognition.

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.

poster

The ability to understand and generate similes is an imperative step to realize human-level AI. However, there is still a considerable gap between machine intelligence and human cognition in similes, since deep models based on statistical distribution tend to favour high-frequency similes. Hence, a large-scale symbolic knowledge base of similes is required, as it contributes to the modeling of diverse yet unpopular similes while facilitating additional evaluation and reasoning. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel framework for large-scale simile knowledge base construction, as well as two probabilistic metrics which enable an improved understanding of simile phenomena in natural language. Overall, we construct MAPS-KB, a million-scale probabilistic simile knowledge base, covering 4.3 million triplets over 0.4 million terms from 70 GB corpora. We conduct sufficient experiments to justify the effectiveness and necessity of the methods of our framework. We also apply MAPS-KB on three downstream tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, further demonstrating the value of MAPS-KB. Resources of MAPS-KB are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/MAPS-KB.

MAPS-KB: A Million-scale Probabilistic Simile Knowledge Base

Developing a dynamical model for learning in games has attracted much recent interest. In stochastic games, agents need to make decisions in multiple states, and transitions between states, in turn, influence the dynamics of strategies. While previous works typically focus either on 2-agent stochastic games or on normal form games under an infinite-agent setting, we aim at formally modelling the learning dynamics in stochastic games under the infinite-agent setting. With a novel use of pair-approximation method, we develop a formal model for myopic Q-learning in stochastic games with symmetric state transition. We verify the descriptive power of our model (a partial differential equation) across various games through comparisons with agent-based simulation results. Based on our proposed model, we can gain qualitative and quantitative insights into the influence of transition probabilities on the dynamics of strategies. In particular, we illustrate that a careful design of transition probabilities can help players overcome the social dilemmas and promote cooperation, even if agents are myopic learners.

A Pair-Approximation Method for Modelling the Dynamics of Multi-Agent Stochastic Games

Event grounding aims at linking mention references in text corpora to events from a knowledge base (KB). Previous work on this task focused primarily on linking to a single KB event, thereby overlooking the hierarchical aspects of events.
Events in documents are typically described at various levels of spatio-temporal granularity (Glavaˇs et al. 2014). These hierarchical relations are utilized in downstream tasks of narrative understanding and schema construction. In this work, we present an extension to the event grounding task that requires tackling hierarchical event structures from the KB. Our proposed task involves linking a mention reference to a set of event labels from a subevent hierarchy in the KB. We propose a retrieval methodology that leverages event hierarchy through an auxiliary hierarchical loss (Murty et al. 2018). On an automatically created multilingual dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical loss against retrieve and re-rank baselines
(Wu et al. 2020; Pratapa, Gupta, and Mitamura 2022). Furthermore, we demonstrate the systems’ ability to aid hierarchical discovery among unseen events.

Hierarchical Event Grounding

Exploratory data analytics (EDA) is a sequential decision making process where analysts choose subsequent queries that might lead to some interesting insights based on the previous queries and corresponding results. Data processing systems often execute the queries on samples to produce results with low latency. Different downsampling strategy preserves different statistics of the data and have different magnitude of latency reductions. The optimum choice of sampling strategy often depends on the particular context of the analysis flow and the hidden intent of the analyst. In this paper, we are the first to consider the impact of sampling in interactive data exploration settings as they introduce approximation errors.
We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based framework which can optimize the sample selection in order to keep the analysis and insight generation flow intact. Evaluations with real datasets show that our technique can preserve the original insight generation flow while improving the interaction latency, compared to baseline methods. 

Reinforced Approximate Exploratory Data Analysis

Multimodal processing has attracted much attention lately especially with the success of pre-training. However, the exploration has mainly focused on vision-language pre-training, as introducing more modalities can greatly complicate model design and optimization. In this paper, we extend the state-of-the-art Vision-Language model CLIP to accommodate the audio modality for Vision-Language-Audio multimodal processing. Specifically, we apply inter-modal and intra-modal
contrastive learning to explore the correlation between audio and other modalities in addition to the inner characteristics of the audio modality. Moreover, we further design an audio type token to dynamically learn different audio information
type for different scenarios, as both verbal and nonverbal heterogeneous information is conveyed in general audios. Our proposed CLIP4VLA model is validated in different downstream tasks including video retrieval and video captioning, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets of MSR-VTT, VATEX, and Audiocaps.

Accommodating Audio Modality in CLIP for Multimodal Processing

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is an important model metric for evaluating binary classifiers, and many algorithms have been proposed to optimize AUC approximately. It raises the question of whether the generally insignificant gains observed by previous studies are due to inherent limitations of the metric or the inadequate quality of optimization.

To better understand the value of optimizing for AUC, we present an efficient algorithm, namely AUC-opt, to find the provably optimal AUC linear classifier in $\mathbb{R}^2$, which runs in $\mathcal{O}(n_+ n_- \log (n_+ n_-))$ where $n_+$ and $n_-$ are the number of positive and negative samples respectively. Furthermore, it can be naturally extended to $\mathbb{R}^d$ in $\mathcal{O}((n_+n_-)^{d-1}\log (n_+n_-))$ by calling AUC-opt in lower-dimensional spaces recursively. We prove the problem is NP-complete when $d$ is not fixed, reducing from the \textit{open hemisphere problem}.

Experiments show that compared with other methods, AUC-opt achieves statistically significant improvements on between 17 to 40 in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and on between 4 to 42 in $\mathbb{R}^3$ of 50 t-SNE training datasets. However, generally the gain proves insignificant on most testing datasets compared to the best standard classifiers. Similar observations are found for nonlinear AUC methods under real-world datasets.

Does it pay to optimize AUC?

Evaluating an explanation's faithfulness is desired for many reasons such as trust, interpretability and diagnosing the sources of model's errors. In this work, which focuses on the NLI task, we introduce the methodology of Faithfulness-through-Counterfactuals, which first generates a counterfactual hypothesis based on the logical predicates expressed in the explanation, and then evaluates if the model's prediction on the counterfactual is consistent with that expressed logic (i.e. if the new formula is \textit{logically satisfiable}). In contrast to existing approaches, this does not require any explanations for training a separate verification model. We first validate the efficacy of automatic counterfactual hypothesis generation, leveraging on the few-shot priming paradigm. Next, we show that our proposed metric distinguishes between human-model agreement and disagreement on new counterfactual input. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to validate that our metric is sensitive to unfaithful explanations.  

Logical Satisfiability of Counterfactuals for Faithful Explanations in NLI

    Owing to the prohibitive costs of generating large amounts of labeled data, weakly supervised learning is a growing paradigm within machine learning. In this setting, users design heuristics, or weak labelers, that label subsets of the data. These weak labels are combined (typically via a graphical model) to form pseudolabels, which are then used to train a downstream machine learning model. In this work, we question a foundational premise of the typical weakly supervised learning pipeline: given that the heuristic provides all ``label" information, why do we need to generate pseudolabels at all? Instead, we propose to directly transform the heuristics themselves into corresponding loss functions that penalize differences between our model and the heuristic. Indeed, by constructing losses directly from the heuristics, we can incorporate more information than is used in the standard weakly supervised pipeline, such as information on how the heuristics make their decisions; e.g, this can inform feature selection or gradient information during the training process. We call our method Losses over Labels (LoL), as it focuses on transforming heuristics directly into loss functions without going through the intermediate step of a label. We show that LoL improves upon existing weak supervision methods, on several benchmark image and text classification tasks.

Losses over Labels: Weakly Supervised Learning via Direct Loss Construction

As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces serious challenges in dealing with massive clients with heterogeneous data distribution and computation and communication resources. Various client-variance-reduction schemes and client sampling strategies have been respectively introduced to improve the robustness of FL. Among others, primal-dual algorithms such as the alternating direction of method multipliers (ADMM) have been found being resilient to data distribution and outperform most of the primal-only FL algorithms. However, the reason behind remains a mystery still. In this paper, we firstly reveal the fact that the federated ADMM is essentially a client-variance-reduced algorithm. While this explains the inherent robustness of federated ADMM, the vanilla version of it lacks the ability to be adaptive to the degree of client heterogeneity. Besides, the global model at the server under client sampling is biased which slows down the practical convergence. To go beyond ADMM, we propose a novel primal-dual FL algorithm, termed FedVRA, that allows one to adaptively control the variance-reduction level and biasness of the global model. In addition, FedVRA unifies several representative FL algorithms in the sense that they are either special instances of FedVRA or are close to it. Extensions of FedVRA to semi/un-supervised learning are also presented. Experiments based on (semi-)supervised image classification tasks demonstrate superiority of FedVRA over the existing schemes in learning scenarios with massive heterogeneous clients and client sampling.

Beyond ADMM: A Unified Client-variance-reduced Adaptive Federated Learning Framework

Training ML models which are fair across different demographic groups is of critical importance due to the increased integration of ML in crucial decision-making scenarios such as healthcare and recruitment. Federated learning has been viewed as a promising solution for collaboratively training machine learning models among multiple parties while maintaining their local data privacy. However, federated learning also poses new challenges in mitigating the potential bias against certain populations (e.g., demographic groups), as this typically requires centralized access to the sensitive information (e.g., race, gender) of each datapoint. Motivated by the importance and challenges of group fairness in federated learning, in this work, we propose FairFed, a novel algorithm for fairness-aware aggregation to enhance group fairness in federated learning. Our proposed approach is server-side and agnostic to the applied local debiasing thus allowing for flexible use of different local debiasing methods across clients. We evaluate FairFed empirically versus common baselines for fair ML and federated learning and demonstrate that it provides fairer models, particularly under highly heterogeneous data distributions across clients. We also demonstrate the benefits of FairFed in scenarios involving naturally distributed real-life data collected from different geographical locations or departments within an organization.

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Domain-Adapted Dependency Parsing for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

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MAPS-KB: A Million-scale Probabilistic Simile Knowledge Base

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