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Effectively integrating knowledge into end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems remains a challenge. It typically requires incorporation of an external knowledge base (KB) and capture of the intrinsic semantics of the dialog history. Recent research shows promising results by using Sequence-to-Sequence models, Memory Networks, and even Graph Convolutional Networks. However, current state-of-the-art models are less effective at integrating dialog history and KB into task-oriented dialog systems in the following ways: 1. The KB representation is not fully context-aware. The dynamic interaction between the dialog history and KB is seldom explored. 2. Both the sequential and structural information in the dialog history can contribute to capturing the dialog semantics, but they are not studied concurrently. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Memory Network (GMN) based Seq2Seq model, GraphMemDialog, to effectively learn the inherent structural information hidden in dialog history, and to model the dynamic interaction between dialog history and KBs. We adopt a modified graph attention network to learn the rich structural representation of the dialog history, whereas the context-aware representation of KB entities are learnt by our novel GMN. To fully exploit this dynamic interaction, we design a learnable memory controller coupled with external KB entity memories to recurrently incorporate dialog history context into KB entities through a multi-hop reasoning mechanism. Experiments on three public datasets show that our GraphMemDialog model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms strong baselines by a large margin, especially on datatests with more complicated KB information.

AAAI 2022

GraphMemDialog: Optimizing End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems Using Graph Memory Networks

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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. 

Finding diverse solutions in combinatorial problems recently has received considerable attention (Baste et al. 2020; Fomin et al. 2020; Hanaka et al. 2021). In this paper we study the following type of problems: given an integer k, the problem asks for k solutions such that the sum of pairwise (weighted) Hamming distances between these solutions is maximized. Such solutions are called diverse solutions. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for finding diverse shortest st-paths in weighted directed graphs. Moreover, we study the diverse version of other classical combinatorial problems such as diverse weighted matroid bases, diverse weighted arborescences, and diverse bipartite matchings. We show that these problems can be solved in polynomial time as well. To evaluate the practical performance of our algorithm for finding diverse shortest st-paths, we conduct a computational experiment with synthetic and real-world instances. The experiment shows that our algorithm successfully computes diverse solutions within reasonable computational time.

Computing Diverse Shortest Paths Efficiently: A Theoretical and Experimental Study

We study a participatory budgeting problem, where a set of strategic agents wish to split a divisible budget among different projects by aggregating their proposals on a single division. Unfortunately, the straightforward rule that divides the budget proportionally is susceptible to manipulation. Recently, a class of truthful mechanisms has been proposed, namely the moving phantom mechanisms. One such mechanism satisfies the proportionality property, in the sense that in the extreme case where all agents prefer a single project to receive the whole amount, the budget is assigned proportionally.


While proportionality is a naturally desired property, it is defined over a limited type of preference profiles. To address this, we expand the notion of proportionality, by proposing a quantitative framework that evaluates a budget aggregation mechanism according to its worst-case distance from the proportional allocation. Crucially, this is defined for every preference profile. We study this measure on the class of moving phantom mechanisms, and we provide approximation guarantees. For two projects, we show that the Uniform Phantom mechanism is optimal among all truthful mechanisms. For three projects, we propose a new, proportional mechanism that is optimal among all moving phantom mechanisms. Finally, we provide impossibility results regarding the approximability of moving phantom mechanisms.

Truthful Aggregation of Budget Proposals with Proportionality Guarantees

Low-frequency word prediction remains a challenge in modern neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Recent adaptive training methods promote the output of infrequent words by emphasizing their weights in the overall training objectives. Despite the improved recall of low-frequency words, their prediction precision is unexpectedly hindered by the adaptive objectives. Inspired by the observation that low-frequency words form a more compact embedding space, we tackle this challenge from a representation learning perspective. Specifically, we propose a frequency-aware token-level contrastive learning method, in which the hidden state of each decoding step is pushed away from the counterparts of other target words, in a soft contrastive way based on the corresponding word frequencies. We conduct experiments on widely used NIST Chinese-English and WMT14 English-German translation tasks. Empirical results show that our proposed methods can not only significantly improve the translation quality but also enhance lexical diversity and optimize word representation space. Further investigation reveals that, comparing with related adaptive training strategies, the superiority of our method on low-frequency word prediction lies in the robustness of token-level recall across different frequencies without sacrificing precision.

Frequency-Aware Contrastive Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives. We release our code at https://github.com/xssstory/SeqCo.

Sequence Level Contrastive Learning for Text Summarization

In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 19 state-of-the-art tracking methods. Dataset, code, model and results are available at https://github.com/mmic-lcl/source-code.

Cross-Modal Object Tracking: Modality-Aware Representations and a Unified Benchmark

3D delineation of anatomical structures is a cardinal goal in medical imaging analysis. Prior to deep learning, statistical shape models (SSMs) that imposed anatomical constraints and produced high quality surfaces were a core technology. Today's fully-convolutional networks (FCNs), while dominant, do not offer these capabilities. We present deep implicit statistical shape models (DISSMs), a new approach that marries the representation power of deep networks with the benefits of SSMs. DISSMs use an implicit representation to produce compact and descriptive deep surface embeddings that permit statistical models of anatomical variance. To reliably fit anatomically plausible shapes to an image, we introduce a novel rigid and non-rigid pose estimation pipeline that is modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Intra-dataset experiments on the task of pathological liver segmentation demonstrate that DISSMs can perform more robustly than four leading FCN models, including nnU-Net + an adversarial prior: reducing the mean Hausdorff distance (HD) by 7.5-14.3 mm and improving the worst case Dice-SÃ¸rensen coefficient (DSC) by 1.2-2.3%. More critically, cross-dataset experiments on an external and highly challenging clinical dataset demonstrate that DISSMs improve the mean DSC and HD by 2.1-5.9% and 9.9-24.5 mm, respectively, and the worst-case DSC by 5.4-7.3%. Supplemental validation on a highly challenging and low-contrast larynx dataset further demonstrate DISSM's improvements. These improvements are over and above any benefits from representing delineations with high-quality surfaces.

Deep Implicit Statistical Shape Models for 3D Medical Image Delineation

We propose an information-theoretic bias measurement technique through a causal interpretation of spurious correlation, which is effective to identify the feature-level algorithmic bias by taking advantage of conditional mutual information. Although several bias measurement methods have been proposed and widely investigated to achieve algorithmic fairness in various tasks such as face recognition, their accuracy- or logit-based metrics are susceptible to leading to trivial prediction score adjustment rather than fundamental bias reduction. Hence, we design a novel debiasing framework against the algorithmic bias, which incorporates a bias regularization loss derived by the proposed information-theoretic bias measurement approach. In addition, we present a simple yet effective unsupervised debiasing technique based on stochastic label noise, which does not require the explicit supervision of bias information. The proposed bias measurement and debiasing approaches are validated in diverse realistic scenarios through extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks.

Information-Theoretic Bias Reduction via Causal View of Spurious Correlation

Modeling complex hierarchical and grouped feature interaction in the multivariate time series data is indispensable to comprehend the data dynamics and predicting the future condition. The implicit feature interaction and high-dimensional data make multivariate forecasting very challenging. Many existing works did not put more emphasis on exploring explicit correlation among multiple time series data, and complicated models are designed to capture long- and short-range pattern with the aid of attention mechanism. In this work, we think that pre-defined graph or general learning method is difficult due to their irregular structure. Hence, we present CATN, an end-to-end model of Cross Attentive Tree-aware Network to jointly capture the inter-series correlation and intra-series temporal pattern. We first construct a tree structure to learn hierarchical and grouped correlation and design an embedding approach that can pass dynamic message to generalize implicit but interpretable cross features among multiple time series. Next in temporal aspect, we propose a multi-level dependency learning mechanism including global&local learning and cross attention mechanism, which can combine long-range dependencies, short-range dependencies as well as cross dependencies at different time steps. The extensive experiments on different datasets from real world show the effectiveness and robustness of the method we proposed when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.

CATN: Cross Attentive Tree-Aware Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received tremendous attention due to their superiority in learning node representations. These models rely on message passing and feature transformation functions to encode the structural and feature information from neighbors. However, stacking more convolutional layers significantly decreases the performance of GNNs. Most recent studies attribute this limitation to the over-smoothing issue, where node embeddings converge to indistinguishable vectors. Through a number of experimental observations, we argue that the main factor degrading the performance is the unstable forward normalization and backward gradient resulted from the improper design of the feature transformation, especially for shallow GNNs where the over-smoothing has not happened. Therefore, we propose a novel orthogonal feature transformation, named Ortho-GConv, which could generally augment the existing GNN backbones to stabilize the model training and improve the model's generalization performance. Specifically, we maintain the orthogonality of the feature transformation comprehensively from three perspectives, namely hybrid weight initialization, orthogonal transformation, and orthogonal regularization. By equipping the existing GNNs (e.g. GCN, JKNet, GCNII) with Ortho-GConv, we demonstrate the generality of the orthogonal feature transformation to enable stable training, and show its effectiveness for node and graph classification tasks.

Orthogonal Graph Neural Networks

Even though considerable progress has been made in deep learning-based 3D point cloud processing, how to obtain accurate correspondences for robust registration remains a major challenge because existing hard assignment methods cannot deal with outliers naturally. Alternatively, the soft matching-based methods have been proposed to learn the matching probability rather than hard assignment. However, in this paper, we prove that these methods have an inherent ambiguity causing many deceptive correspondences. To address the above challenges, we propose to learn a partial permutation matching matrix, which does not assign corresponding points to outliers, and implements hard assignment to prevent ambiguity. However, this proposal poses two new problems, i.e. existing hard assignment algorithms can only solve a full rank permutation matrix rather than a partial permutation matrix, and this desired matrix is defined in the discrete space, which is non-differentiable. In response, we design a dedicated soft-to-hard (S2H) matching procedure within the registration pipeline consisting of two steps: solving the soft matching matrix (S-step) and projecting this soft matrix to the partial permutation matrix (H-step). Specifically, we augment the profit matrix before the hard assignment to solve an augmented permutation matrix, which is cropped to achieve the final partial permutation matrix. Moreover, to guarantee end-to-end learning, we supervise the learned partial permutation matrix but propagate the gradient to the soft matrix instead. Our S2H matching procedure can be easily integrated with existing registration frameworks, which has been verified in representative frameworks including DCP, RPMNet, and DGR. Extensive experiments have validated our method, which creates a new state-of-the-art performance.

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Computing Diverse Shortest Paths Efficiently: A Theoretical and Experimental Study

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Dual Dynamic Memory Network for End-to-End Multi-turn Task-oriented Dialog Systems

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