United States

The task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has received remarkable attention with wide applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. While one of the key principles of GEC is to keep the correct parts unchanged and avoid over-correction, previous sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models generate results from scratch, which are not guaranteed to follow the original sentence structure and may suffer from the over-correction problem. In the meantime, the recently proposed sequence tagging models can overcome the over-correction problem by only generating edit operations, but are conditioned on human designed language-specific tagging labels. In this paper, we combine the pros and alleviate the cons of both models by proposing a novel Sequence-to-Action (S2A) module. The S2A module jointly takes the source and target sentences as input, and is able to automatically generate a token-level action sequence before predicting each token, where each action is generated from three choices named SKIP, COPY and GENerate. Then the actions are fused with the basic seq2seq framework to provide final predictions. We conduct experiments on the benchmark datasets of both English and Chinese GEC tasks. Our model consistently outperforms the seq2seq baselines, while being able to significantly alleviate the over-correction problem as well as holding better generality and diversity in the generation results compared to the sequence tagging models.

AAAI 2022

Sequence-to-Action: Grammatical Error Correction with Action Guided Sequence Generation

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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. 

Recent advances in neural-symbolic learning, such as DeepProbLog, extend probabilistic logic programs with neural predicates. Like graphical models, these probabilistic logic programs define a probability distribution over possible worlds, for which inference is computationally hard. We propose DeepStochLog, an alternative neural-symbolic framework based on stochastic definite clause grammars, a kind of stochastic logic program. More specifically, we introduce neural grammar rules into stochastic definite clause grammars to create a framework that can be trained end-to-end. We show that inference and learning in neural stochastic logic programming scale much better than for neural probabilistic logic programs. Furthermore, the experimental evaluation shows that DeepStochLog achieves state-of-the-art results on challenging neural-symbolic learning tasks.

DeepStochLog: Neural Stochastic Logic Programming

Cooperative Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP), as a variant of the typical Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), is an important formulation in many real-world applications, such as on-demand delivery, industrial warehousing, etc. It is of great importance to efficiently provide high-quality solutions of cooperative PDP. However, it is not trivial to provide effective solutions directly due to two major challenges: 1) the structural dependency between pickup and delivery pairs require explicit modeling and representation. 2) the cooperation between different vehicles is highly related to the solution exploration and difficult to model. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning based framework to solve the cooperative PDP (MAPDP). First, we design a paired context embedding to well measure the dependency of different nodes considering their structural limits. Second, we utilize cooperative multi-agent decoders to leverage the decision dependence among different vehicle agents based on a special communication embedding. Third, we design a novel cooperative A2C algorithm to train the integrated model. We conduct extensive experiments on a randomly generated dataset and a real-world dataset. Experiments result shown that the proposed MAPDP outperform all other baselines by at least 1.64\% in all settings, and shows significant computation speed during solution inference.

MAPDP: Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to Solve Pickup and Delivery Problems

Due to difficulties in acquiring ground truth depth of equirectangular (360) images, the quality and quantity of equirectangular depth data today is insufficient to represent the various scenes in the world. Therefore, 360 depth estimation studies, which relied solely on supervised learning, are destined to produce unsatisfactory results. Although self-supervised learning methods focusing on equirectangular images (EIs) are introduced, they often have incorrect or non-unique solutions, causing unstable performance. In this paper, we propose 360 monocular depth estimation methods which improve on the areas that limited previous studies. First, we introduce a self-supervised 360 depth learning method that only utilizes gravity-aligned videos, which has the potential to eliminate the needs for depth data during the training procedure. Second, we propose a joint learning scheme realized by combining supervised and self-supervised learning. The weakness of each learning is compensated, thus leading to more accurate depth estimation. Third, we propose a non-local fusion block, which can further retain the global information encoded by vision transformer when reconstructing the depths. With the proposed methods, we successfully apply the transformer to 360 depth estimations, to the best of our knowledge, which has not been tried before. On several benchmarks, our approach achieves significant improvements over previous works and establishes a state of the art.

Improving 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Non-Local Dense Prediction Transformer and Joint Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables agents to learn how to perform various tasks from scratch. In domains like autonomous driving, recommendation systems, and more, optimal RL policies learned could cause a privacy breach if the policies memorize any part of the private reward. We study the set of existing differentially-private RL policies derived from various RL algorithms such as Value Iteration, Deep-Q Networks, and Vanilla Proximal Policy Optimization. We propose a new Privacy-Aware Inverse RL analysis framework (PRIL) that involves performing reward reconstruction as an adversarial attack on private policies that the agents may deploy. For this, we introduce the reward reconstruction attack, wherein we seek to reconstruct the original reward from a privacy-preserving policy using the Inverse RL algorithm. An adversary must do poorly at reconstructing the original reward function if the agent uses a tightly private policy. Using this framework, we empirically test the effectiveness of the privacy guarantee offered by the private algorithms on instances of the FrozenLake domain of varying complexities. Based on the analysis performed, we infer a gap between the current standard of privacy offered and the standard of privacy needed to protect reward functions in RL. We do so by quantifying the extent to which each private policy protects the reward function by measuring distances between the original and reconstructed rewards.

How Private Is Your RL Policy? An Inverse RL Based Analysis Framework

The challenge of talking face generation from speech lies in aligning two different modal information, audio and video, such that the mouth region corresponds to input audio. Previous methods either exploit audio-visual representation learning or leverage intermediate structural information such as landmarks and 3D models. However, they struggle to synthesize fine details of the lips varying at the phoneme level as they do not sufficiently provide visual information of the lips at the video synthesis step. To overcome this limitation, our work proposes Audio-Lip Memory that brings in visual information of the mouth region corresponding to input audio and enforces fine-grained audio-visual coherence. It stores lip motion features from sequential ground truth images in the value memory and aligns them with corresponding audio features so that they can be retrieved using audio input at inference time. Therefore, using the retrieved lip motion features as visual hints, it can easily correlate audio with visual dynamics in the synthesis step. By analyzing the memory, we demonstrate that unique lip features are stored in each memory slot at the phoneme level, capturing subtle lip motion based on memory addressing. In addition, we introduce visual-visual synchronization loss which can enhance lip-syncing performance when used along with audio-visual synchronization loss in our model. Extensive experiments are performed to verify that our method generates high-quality video with mouth shapes that best align with the input audio, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.

SyncTalkFace: Talking Face Generation with Precise Lip-Syncing via Audio-Lip Memory

When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of outcomes focus on groups of agents and demand that sufficiently large and cohesive groups are "represented" in the sense that candidates approved by some group members are selected. Crucially, these criteria say nothing about the representation of individual agents, even if these agents are members of groups that deserve representation. In this paper, we formalize the concept of individual representation (IR) and explore to which extent, and under which circumstances, it can be achieved. We show that checking whether an IR outcome exists is computationally intractable, and we verify that all common approval-based voting rules may fail to provide IR even in cases where this is possible. We then focus on domain restrictions and establish an interesting contrast between "voter interval" and "candidate interval" preferences. This contrast can also be observed in our experimental results, where we analyze the attainability of IR for realistic preference profiles.

Individual Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting

Is it possible to complete Vision Transformer (ViT) pre-training without natural images and human-annotated labels? This question has become increasingly relevant in recent months because while current ViT pre-training tends to rely heavily on a large number of natural images and human-annotated labels, the recent use of natural images has resulted in problems related to privacy violation, inadequate fairness protection, and the need for labor-intensive annotations. In this paper, we experimentally verify that the results of formula-driven supervised learning (FDSL) framework are comparable with, and can even partially outperform, sophisticated self-supervised learning (SSL) methods like SimCLRv2 and MoCov2 without using any natural images in the pre-training phase. We also consider ways to reorganize FractalDB generation based on our tentative conclusion that there is room for configuration improvements in the iterated function system (IFS) parameter settings of such databases. Moreover, we show that while ViTs pre-trained without natural images produce visualizations that are somewhat different from ImageNet pre-trained ViTs, they can still interpret natural image datasets to a large extent. Finally, in experiments using the CIFAR-10 dataset, we show that our model achieved a performance rate of 97.8, which is comparable to the rate of 97.4 achieved with SimCLRv2 and 98.0 achieved with ImageNet.

Can Vision Transformers Learn without Natural Images?

Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere, while they neglect the heterogeneity of relations and influence among users. In this paper, we propose a novel bot detection framework to alleviate this problem, which leverages the topological structure of user-formed heterogeneous graphs and models varying influence intensity between users. Specifically, we construct a heterogeneous information network with users as nodes and diversified relations as edges. We then propose relational graph transformers to model heterogeneous influence between users and learn node representations. Finally, we use semantic attention networks to aggregate messages across users and relations and conduct heterogeneity-aware Twitter bot detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a comprehensive Twitter bot detection benchmark. Additional studies also bear out the effectiveness of our proposed relational graph transformers, semantic attention networks and the graph-based approach in general.

Heterogeneity-Aware Twitter Bot Detection with Relational Graph Transformers

Neural networks have a bias towards low frequency functions. This spectral bias has been the subject of several previous studies, both empirical and theoretical.
 Here we present a computable definition of the spectral bias based on a decomposition of the reconstruction error into a low and a high frequency component. The distinction between low and high frequencies is made in a way that allows for easy interpretation of the spectral bias. Furthermore, we present two methods for estimating the spectral bias. Method 1 relies on the use of the discrete Fourier transform to explicitly estimate the Fourier spectrum of the prediction residual, and Method 2 uses convolution to extract the low frequency components, where the convolution integral is estimated by Monte Carlo methods.
 The spectral bias depends on the distribution of the data, which is approximated with kernel density estimation when unknown. We devise a set of numerical experiments that confirm that low frequencies are learned first, a behavior quantified by our definition.

A Computable Definition of the Spectral Bias

Local image feature matching under large appearance, viewpoint, and distance changes is challenging yet important. Conventional methods detect and match tentative local features across the whole images, with heuristic consistency checks to guarantee reliable matches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Overlap Estimation method conditioned on image pairs with TRansformer, named OETR, to constrain local feature matching in the commonly visible region. OETR performs overlap estimation in a two step process of feature correlation and then overlap regression. As a preprocessing module, OETR can be plugged into any existing local feature detection and matching pipeline, to mitigate potential view angle or scale variance. Intensive experiments show that OETR can boost state of the art local feature matching performance substantially, especially for image pairs with small shared regions. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AbyssGaze/OETR.

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DeepStochLog: Neural Stochastic Logic Programming

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Mitigating Exposure Bias in Grammatical Error Correction with Data Augmentation and Reweighting

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Next from AAAI 2022

DeepStochLog: Neural Stochastic Logic Programming

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Mitigating Exposure Bias in Grammatical Error Correction with Data Augmentation and Reweighting

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