United States

Because learning sometimes involves sensitive data, machine learning algorithms have been extended to offer differential privacy for training data. In practice, this has been mostly an afterthought, with privacy-preserving models obtained by re-running training with a different optimizer, but using the model architectures that already performed well in a non-privacy-preserving setting. This approach leads to less than ideal privacy/utility tradeoffs, as we show here. To improve these tradeoffs, prior work introduces variants of differential privacy that weaken the privacy guarantee proved to increase model utility. We show this is not necessary and instead propose that utility be improved by choosing activation functions designed explicitly for privacy-preserving training. 

A crucial operation in differentially private SGD is gradient clipping, which along with modifying the optimization path (at times resulting in not-optimizing a single objective function), may also introduce both significant bias and variance to the learning process. We empirically identify exploding gradients arising from ReLU may be one of the main sources of this. We demonstrate analytically and experimentally how a general family of bounded activation functions, the tempered sigmoids, consistently outperform the currently established choice: unbounded activation functions like ReLU. Using this paradigm, we achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR10 without any modification of the learning procedure fundamentals or differential privacy analysis. While the changes we make are simple in retrospect, the simplicity of our approach facilitates its implementation and adoption to meaningfully improve state-of-the-art machine learning while still providing strong guarantees in the original framework of differential privacy.

AAAI 2021

Tempered Sigmoid Activations for Deep Learning with Differential Privacy

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Reservoir classification is an essential step for the exploration and production process in the oil and gas industry. An appropriate automatic reservoir classification will not only reduce the manual workloads of experts, but also help petroleum companies to make optimal decisions efficiently, which in turn will dramatically reduce the costs. Existing methods mainly focused on generating reservoir classification in a single geological block but failed to work well on a new oilfield block. Indeed, how to transfer the subsurface characteristics and make accurate reservoir classification across the geological oilfields is a very important but challenging problem. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on the cross-oilfield reservoir classification task. Specifically, we first propose a Multi-scale Sensor Extraction (MSE) to extract the multi-scale feature representations of geological characteristics from multivariate well logs. Furthermore, we design an encoder-decoder module, Specific Feature Learning (SFL), to take advantage of specific information of both oilfields. Then, we develop a Knowledge-Attentive Transfer (KAT) module to learn the feature-invariant representation and transfer the geological knowledge from a source oilfield to a target oilfield. Finally, we evaluate our approaches by conducting extensive experiments with real-world industrial datasets. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches to transfer the geological knowledge and generate the cross-oilfield reservoir classifications.

Cross-Oilfield Reservoir Classification via Multi-Scale Sensor Knowledge Transfer

Large model size and high computational complexity prevent the neural machine translation (NMT) models from being deployed to low resource devices (e.g. mobile phones). Due to the large vocabulary, a large storage memory is required for the word embedding matrix in NMT models, in the meantime, high latency is introduced when constructing the word probability distribution. Based on reusing the word embedding matrix in the softmax layer, it is possible to handle the two problems brought by large vocabulary at the same time. In this paper, we propose Partial Vector Quantization (P-VQ) for NMT models, which can both compress the word embedding matrix and accelerate word probability prediction in the softmax layer. With P-VQ, the word embedding matrix is split into two low dimensional matrices, namely the shared part and the exclusive part. We compress the shared part by vector quantization and leave the exclusive part unchanged to maintain the uniqueness of each word. For acceleration, in the softmax layer, we replace most of the multiplication operations with the efficient looking-up operations based on our compression to reduce the computational complexity. Furthermore, we adopt curriculum learning and compact the word embedding matrix gradually to improve the compression quality. Experimental results on the Chinese-to-English translation task show that our method can reduce 74.35% of parameters of the word embedding and 74.42% of the FLOPs of the softmax layer. Meanwhile, the average BLEU score on the WMT test sets only drops 0.04.

Accelerating Neural Machine Translation with Partial Word Embedding Compression

During Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problems, agentscan  be  delayed  by  unexpected  events.  To  address  suchsituations  recent  work  describes k-Robust  Conflict-BasedSearch (k-CBS): an algorithm that produces coordinated andcollision-free plan that is robust for up tokdelays. In thiswork we introducing a variety of pairwise symmetry break-ing  constraints,  specific  tok-robust  planning,  that  can  effi-ciently find compatible and optimal paths for pairs of con-flicting  agents.  We  give  a  thorough  description  of  the  newconstraints and report large improvements to success rate ina range of domains including: (i) classic MAPF benchmarks;(ii)  automated  warehouse  domains  and;  (iii)  on  maps  fromthe  2019  Flatland  Challenge,  a  recently  introduced  railwaydomain wherek-robust planning can be fruitfully applied toschedule trains.

Symmetry Breaking for k-Robust Multi-Agent Path Finding

Recent deep-learning based Super-Resolution (SR) methods have achieved remarkable performance on images with known degradation. However, these methods always fail in real-world scene, since the Low-Resolution (LR) images after the ideal degradation (e.g., bicubic down-sampling) deviate from real source domain. The domain gap between the LR images and the real-world images can be observed clearly on frequency density, which inspires us to explicitly narrow the undesired gap caused by incorrect degradation. From this point of view, we design a novel Frequency Consistent Adaptation (FCA) that ensures the frequency domain consistency when applying existing SR methods to the real scene. We estimate degradation kernels from unsupervised images and generate the corresponding LR images. To provide useful gradient information for kernel estimation, we propose Frequency Density Comparator (FDC) by distinguishing the frequency density of images on different scales. Based on the domain-consistent LR-HR pairs, we train easy-implemented Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) SR models. Extensive experiments show that the proposed FCA improves the performance of the SR model under real-world setting achieving state-of-the-art results with high fidelity and plausible perception, thus providing a novel effective framework for real-world SR application.

Frequency Consistent Adaptation for Real World Super Resolution

BERT has set a new state-of-the-art performance on entity resolution (ER) task, largely owed to fine-tuning pre-trained language models and the deep pair-wise interaction. Albeit being remarkably effective, it comes with a steep increase in computational cost, as the deep-interaction requires to exhaustively compute every tuple pair to search for co-references. For ER task, it is often prohibitively expensive due to the large cardinality to be matched. To tackle this, we introduce a siamese network structure that independently encodes tuples using BERT but delays the pair-wise interaction via an enhanced alignment network. This siamese structure enables a dedicated blocking module to quickly filter out obviously dissimilar tuple pairs, and thus drastically reduces the cardinality of fine-grained matching. Further, the blocking and entity matching are integrated into a multi-task learning framework for facilitating both tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models (including BERT) in both efficiency and effectiveness.

Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness for Bert-Based Entity Resolution

Dialogue policy learning based on reinforcement learning is difficult to be applied to real users to train dialogue agents from scratch because of the high cost. User simulators, which choose random user goals for the dialogue agent to train on, have been considered as an affordable substitute for real users. However, this random sampling method ignores the law of human learning, making the learned dialogue policy inefficient and unstable. We propose a novel framework, Automatic Curriculum Learning-based Deep Q-Network (ACL-DQN), which replaces the traditional random sampling method with a teacher policy model to realize the dialogue policy for automatic curriculum learning. The teacher model arranges a meaningful ordered curriculum and automatically adjusts it by monitoring the learning progress of the dialogue agent and the over-repetition penalty without any requirement of prior knowledge. The learning progress of the dialogue agent reflects the relationship between the dialogue agent's ability and the sampled goals' difficulty for sample efficiency. The over-repetition penalty guarantees the sampled diversity. Experiments show that the ACL-DQN significantly improves the effectiveness and stability of dialogue tasks with a statistically significant margin. Furthermore, the framework can be further improved by equipping with different curriculum schedules, which demonstrates that the framework has strong generalizability.

Automatic Curriculum Learning with Over-Repetition Penalty for Dialogue Policy Learning

Contextual bandits algorithms have become essential in real-world user interaction problems in recent years. However, these algorithms represent context as attribute value representation, which makes them infeasible for real world domains like social networks, which are inherently relational. We propose Relational Boosted Bandits 
(RB2), a contextual bandits algorithm for relational domains based on (relational) boosted trees. RB2 enables us to learn interpretable and explainable models due to the more descriptive nature of the relational representation. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of RB2 on tasks such as link prediction, relational classification, and recommendation.

Relational Boosted Bandits

Are existing object detection methods adequate for detecting text and visual elements in scientific plots which are arguably different than the objects found in natural images? To answer this question, we train and compare the accuracy of Fast/Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLO and RetinaNet on the PlotQA dataset with over 220,000 scientific plots. At the standard IOU setting of 0.5, most networks perform well with mAP scores greater than 80% in detecting the relatively simple objects in plots. However, the performance drops drastically when evaluated at a stricter IOU of 0.9 with the best model giving a mAP of 35.70%. Note that such a stricter evaluation is essential when dealing with scientific plots where even minor localisation errors can lead to large errors in downstream numerical inferences. Given this poor performance, we propose minor modifications to existing models by combining ideas from different object detection networks. While this significantly improves the performance, there are still two main issues: (i) performance on text objects which are essential for reasoning is very poor, and (ii) inference time is unacceptably large considering the simplicity of plots. To solve this open problem, we make a series of contributions: (a) an efficient region proposal method based on Laplacian edge detectors, (b) a feature representation of region proposals that includes neighbouring information, (c) a linking component to join multiple region proposals for detecting longer textual objects, and (d) a custom loss function that combines a smooth L1-loss with an IOU-based loss. Combining these ideas, our final model is very accurate at extreme IOU values achieving a mAP of 93.44%@0.9 IOU. Simultaneously, our model is very efficient with an inference time 16x lesser than the current models, including one-stage detectors. Our model also achieves a high accuracy on an extrinsic plot-to-table conversion task with an F1 score of 0.77. With these contributions, we make a definitive progress in object detection for plots and enable further exploration on automated reasoning of plots.

A Systematic Evaluation of Object Detection Networks for Scientific Plots

With the growing number of published functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, meta-analysis databases and models have become an integral part of brain mapping research. Coordinate-based meta-analysis (CBMA) databases are built by extracting both coordinates of reported peak activations and term associations using natural language processing techniques from neuroimaging studies. Solving term-based queries on these databases makes it possible to obtain statistical maps of the brain related to specific cognitive processes. However, existing tools for analysing CBMA data are limited in their expressivity to propositional logic, restricting the variety of their queries. Moreover, with tools like Neurosynth, term-based queries on multiple terms often lead to power failure, because too few studies from the database contribute to the statistical estimations. We design a probabilistic domain-specific language (DSL) standing on Datalog and one of its probabilistic extensions, CP-Logic, for expressing and solving complex logic-based queries. We show how CBMA databases can be encoded as probabilistic programs. Using the joint distribution of their Bayesian network translation, we show that solutions of queries on these programs compute the right probability distributions of voxel activations. We explain how recent lifted query processing algorithms make it possible to scale to the size of large neuroimaging data, where knowledge compilation techniques fail to solve queries fast enough for practical applications. Finally, we introduce a method for relating studies to terms probabilistically, leading to better solutions for two-term conjunctive queries (CQs) on smaller databases. We demonstrate results for two-term CQs, both on simulated meta-analysis databases and on the widely used Neurosynth database.

Complex Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis with Probabilistic Programming

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing a machine that can understand video story is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of video story. Moreover, researches on how to evaluate the degree of video understanding based on human cognitive process have not progressed as yet. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focuses on two perspectives: 1) Hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) Character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 17,983 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we suggest Multi-level Context Matching model which hierarchically understands character-centered representations of video to answer questions. We release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes, and we expect our work to provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.

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Cross-Oilfield Reservoir Classification via Multi-Scale Sensor Knowledge Transfer

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The Impact of Differential Privacy on Group Disparity Mitigation

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