United States

The prevailing framework for solving referring expression grounding is based on a two-stage process: 1) detecting proposals with an object detector and 2) grounding the referent to one of the proposals. Existing two-stage solutions mostly focus on the grounding step, which aims to align the expressions with the proposals. In this paper, we argue that these methods overlook an obvious mismatch between the roles of proposals in the two stages: they generate proposals solely based on the detection confidence (i.e., expression-agnostic), hoping that the proposals contain all right instances in the expression (i.e., expression-aware). Due to this mismatch, current two-stage methods suffer from a severe performance drop between detected and ground-truth proposals. To this end, we propose Ref-NMS, which is the first method to yield expression-aware proposals at the first stage. Ref-NMS regards all nouns in the expression as critical objects, and introduces a lightweight module to predict a score for aligning each box with a critical object. These scores can guide the NMS operation to filter out the boxes irrelevant to the expression, increasing the recall of critical objects, resulting in a significantly improved grounding performance. Since Ref- NMS is agnostic to the grounding step, it can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art two-stage method. Extensive ablation studies on several backbones, benchmarks, and tasks consistently demonstrate the superiority of Ref-NMS. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ChopinSharp/ref-nms.

AAAI 2021

Ref-NMS: Breaking Proposal Bottlenecks in Two-Stage Referring Expression Grounding

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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. 

In this paper, we propose to estimate 3D hand pose by recovering the 3D coordinates of joints in a group-wise manner, where less-related joints are automatically categorized into different groups and exhibit different features. This is different from the previous methods where all the joints are considered holistically and share the same feature. The benefits of our method are illustrated by the principle of multi-task learning (MTL), i.e., by separating less-related joints into different groups (as different tasks), our method learns different features for each of them, therefore efficiently avoids the negative transfer (among less related tasks/groups of joints). The key of our method is a novel binary selector that automatically selects related joints into the same group. We implement such a selector with binary values stochastically sampled from a Concretedistribution, which is constructed using Gumbel softmax on trainable parameters. This enables us to preserve the differentiable property of the whole network. We further exploit features from those less-related groups by carrying out an additional feature fusing scheme among them, to learn more discriminative features. This is realized by implementing multiple 1x1 convolutions on the concatenated features, where each joint group contains a unique 1x1convolution  for feature fusion.  The detailed ablation analysis and the extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Besides, our method achieves top-1 among all the methods that do not exploit the dense 3D shape labels on the most recently released FreiHAND competition at the submission date. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/moranli-aca/LearnableGroups-Hand.

Exploiting Learnable Joint Groups for Hand Pose Estimation

The challenge of video grounding - localizing activities in an untrimmed video via a natural language query - is to tackle the semantics of vision and language consistently along the temporal dimension. Most existing proposal-based methods are trapped by computational cost with extensive candidate proposals. In this paper, we propose a novel proposal-free framework named Contextual Pyramid Network (CPNet) to investigate multi-scale temporal correlation in the video. Specifically, we propose a pyramid network to extract 2D contextual correlation maps at different temporal scales (T*T, T/2*T/2, T/4*T/4), where the 2D correlation map (past to current & future to current) is designed to model all the relations of any two moments in the video. In other words, CPNet progressively replenishes the temporal contexts and refines the location of queried activity by enlarging the temporal receptive fields. Finally, we implement a temporal self-attentive regression (i.e., proposal-free regression) to predict the activity boundary from the above hierarchical context-aware 2D correlation maps. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet Captions, Charades-STA, and TACoS datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Proposal-Free Video Grounding with Contextual Pyramid Network

Session-based recommendation plays a central role in a wide spectrum of online applications, ranging from e-commerce to online advertising services. However, the majority of existing session-based recommendation techniques (e.g., attention-based recurrent network or graph neural network) are not well-designed for capturing the complex transition dynamics exhibited with temporally-ordered and multi-level interdependent relation structures. These methods largely overlook the relation hierarchy of item transitional patterns. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning framework with Multi-level Transition Dynamics (MTD), which enables the jointly learning of intra- and inter-session item transition dynamics in automatic and hierarchical manner. Towards this end, we first develop a position-aware attention mechanism to learn item transitional regularities within individual session. Then, a graph-structured hierarchical relation encoder is proposed to explicitly capture the cross-session item transitions in the form of high-order connectivities by performing embedding propagation with the global graph context. The learning process of intra- and inter-session transition dynamics are integrated, to preserve the underlying low- and high-level item relationships in a common latent space. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MTD as compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Graph-Enhanced Multi-Task Learning of Multi-Level Transition Dynamics for Session-Based Recommendation

An important means for disseminating information in social media platforms is by including URLs that point to external sources in user posts. In Twitter, we estimate that about 21% of the daily stream of English-language tweets contain URLs. We notice that NLP tools make little attempt at understanding the relationship between the content of the URL and the text surrounding it in a tweet. In this work, we study the structure of tweets with URLs relative to the content of the Web documents pointed to by the URLs. We identify several segments classes that may appear in a tweet with URLs, such as the title of a Web page and the user's original content. Our goals in this paper are: introduce, define, and analyze the segmentation problem of tweets with URLs, develop an effective algorithm to solve it, and show that our solution can benefit sentiment analysis on Twitter. We also show that the problem is an instance of the block edit distance problem, and thus an NP-hard problem.

Segmentation of Tweets with URLs and its Applications to Sentiment Analysis

Few-shot detection and classification have advanced significantly in recent years. Yet, detection approaches require strong annotation (bounding boxes) both for pre-training and for adaptation to novel classes, and classification approaches rarely provide localization of objects in the scene. In this paper, we introduce StarNet - a few-shot model featuring an end-to-end differentiable non-parametric star-model detection and classification head. Through this head, the backbone is meta-trained using only image-level labels to produce good features for jointly localizing and classifying previously unseen categories of few-shot test tasks using a star-model that geometrically matches between the query and support images (to find corresponding object instances). Being a few-shot detector, StarNet does not require any bounding box annotations, neither during pre-training nor for novel classes adaptation. It can thus be applied to the previously unexplored and challenging task of Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection (WS-FSOD), where it attains significant improvements over the baselines. In addition, StarNet shows significant gains on few-shot classification benchmarks that are less cropped around the objects (where object localization is key).

StarNet: Towards Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental and important research topic for many downstream NLP tasks, aiming at detecting and classifying named entities (NEs) mentioned in unstructured text into pre-defined categories. Learning from labeled data only is far from enough when it comes to domain-specific or temporally-evolving entities (medical terminologies or restaurant names). Luckily, open-source Knowledge Bases (KBs) (Wikidata and Freebase) contain NEs that are manually labeled with predefined types in different domains, which is potentially beneficial to identify entity boundaries and recognize entity types more accurately. 
However, the type system of a domain-specific NER task is typically independent of that of current KBs and thus exhibits heterogeneity issue inevitably, which makes matching between the original NER and KB types (Person in NER potentially matches President in KBs) less likely, or introduces unintended noises without considering domain-specific knowledge (Band in NER should be mapped to Out_of_Entity_Types in the restaurant-related task). To better incorporate and denoise the abundant knowledge in KBs, we propose a new KB-aware NER framework (KaNa), which utilizes type-heterogeneous knowledge to improve NER.
Specifically, for an entity mention along with a set of candidate entities that are linked from KBs, KaNa first uses a type projection mechanism that maps the mention type and entity types into a shared space to homogenize the heterogeneous entity types. Then, based on projected types, a noise detector filters out certain less-confident candidate entities in an unsupervised manner. Finally, the filtered mention-entity pairs are injected into a NER model as a graph to predict answers.  The experimental results demonstrate KaNa's state-of-the-art performance on five public benchmark datasets from different domains.

Knowledge-Aware Named Entity Recognition with Alleviating Heterogeneity

Large-scale cross-lingual language models (LM), such as mBERT, Unicoder and XLM, have achieved great success in cross-lingual representation learning. However, when applied to zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks, most existing methods use only single-language input for LM finetuning, without leveraging the intrinsic cross-lingual alignment between different languages that proves essential for multilingual tasks. In this paper, we propose FILTER, an enhanced fusion method that takes cross-lingual data as input for XLM finetuning. Specifically, FILTER first encodes text input in the source language and its translation in the target language independently in the shallow layers, then performs cross-language fusion to extract multilingual knowledge in the intermediate layers, and finally performs further language-specific encoding. During inference, the model makes predictions based on the text input in the target language and its translation in the source language. For simple tasks such as classification, translated text in the target language shares the same label as the source language. However, this shared label becomes less accurate or even unavailable for more complex tasks such as question answering, NER and POS tagging. To tackle this issue, we further propose an additional KL-divergence self-teaching loss for model training, based on auto-generated soft pseudo-labels for translated text in the target language.  Extensive experiments demonstrate that FILTER achieves new state of the art on two challenging multilingual multi-task benchmarks, XTREME and XGLUE.

FILTER: An Enhanced Fusion Method for Cross-Lingual Language Understanding

Most supervised learning models are trained for full automation. However, their predictions are sometimes worse than those by human experts on some specific instances. Motivated by this empirical observation, our goal is to design classifiers that are optimized to operate under different automation levels. More specifically, we focus on convex margin-based classifiers and first show that the problem is NP-hard. Then, we further show that, for support vector machines, the corresponding objective function can be expressed as the difference of two functions f = g - c, where g is monotone, non-negative and gamma-weakly submodular, and c is non-negative and modular. This representation allows a recently introduced deterministic greedy algorithm, as well as a more efficient randomized variant of the algorithm, to enjoy approximation guarantees at solving the problem. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data from several applications in medical diagnosis illustrate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that, under human assistance, supervised learning models trained to operate under different automation levels can outperform those trained for full automation as well as humans operating alone.

Classification under Human Assistance

We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between the reward of the best action and the agent's action, this criterion might lead to undesirable results. For example, in large problems, or when the interaction with the environment is brief, finding an optimal arm is infeasible, and regret-minimizing algorithms tend to over-explore. To overcome this issue, algorithms for such settings should instead focus on playing near-optimal arms. To this end, we suggest a new, more lenient, regret criterion that ignores suboptimality gaps smaller than some Îµ. We then present a variant of the Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm, called Îµ-TS, and prove its asymptotic optimality in terms of the lenient regret. Importantly, we show that when the mean of the optimal arm is high enough, the lenient regret of Îµ-TS is bounded by a constant. Finally, we show that Îµ-TS can be applied to improve the performance when the agent knows a lower bound of the suboptimality gaps.

Lenient Regret for Multi-Armed Bandits

Tensor decompositions have found many applications in signal processing, data mining, machine learning, etc. 
In particular, the block term decomposition (BTD), which is a generalization of CP decomposition and Tucker decomposition/HOSVD, 
has been successfully used for the compression and acceleration of neural networks. 
However, computing BTD is NP-hard, and optimization based methods usually suffer from slow convergence or even fail to converge, which limits the applications of BTD. 
This paper considers a â€œblindâ€ block term decomposition (BBTD) of high order tensors, in which the block diagonal structure of the core tensor is unknown. 
Our contributions include: 
1) We establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of BTD, characterize the condition when a BTD solves the BBTD problem, and show that the BBTD is unique under a â€œlow rankâ€ assumption. 
2) We propose an algebraic method to compute the BBTD. 
This method transforms the problem of determining the block diagonal structure of the core tensor into a clustering problem of complex numbers, in polynomial time. 
And once the clustering problem is solved, the BBTD can be obtained via computing several matrix decompositions.
Numerical results show that our method is able to compute the BBTD, even in the presence of noise to some extent, 
whereas optimization based methods (e.g., MINF and NLS in TENSORLAB) may fail to converge.

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Exploiting Learnable Joint Groups for Hand Pose Estimation

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More Than Spoken Words: Nonverbal Message Extraction and Generation

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