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As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is high, a major challenge is to learn different tasks with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. To better utilize the power of PLMs, this paper proposes Comprehensive Instruction (CINS) that exploits PLMs with extra task-specific instructions. We design a schema (definition, constraint, prompt) of instructions and their customized realizations for three important downstream tasks in ToD, ie. intent classification, dialog state tracking, and natural language generation. A sequence-to-sequence model (T5) is adopted to solve these three tasks in a unified framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on these ToD tasks in realistic few-shot learning scenarios with small validation data. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed CINS approach consistently improves techniques that finetune PLMs with raw input or short prompt.

AAAI 2022

CINS: Comprehensive Instruction for Few-Shot Learning in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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. 

This paper proposes a new variant of multi-play MAB model, to capture important factors of the sequential user-centric selection problem arising from mobile edge computing, ridesharing applications, etc. In the proposed model, each arm is associated with 
discrete units of resources, each play is associate with movement costs and multiple plays can pull the same arm simultaneously. To learn the optimal action profile (an action profile prescribes the arm that each play pulls), there are two challenges: (1) the number of action profiles is large, i.e., M^K, where K and M denote the number of plays and arms respectively; (2) feedbacks on action profiles are not available, but instead feedbacks on some model parameters can be observed.  To address the first challenge, we formulate a completed weighted bipartite graph to capture key factors of the offline decision problem with given model parameters. We identify the correspondence between action profiles and a special class of matchings of the graph. We also identify a dominance structure of this class of matchings. This correspondence and dominance structure enable us to design an algorithm named OffOptActPrf to locate the optimal action efficiently. To address the second challenge, we design an OnLinActPrf algorithm. We design estimators for model parameters and use these estimators to design a Quasi-UCB index for each action profile. The OnLinActPrf uses OffOptActPrf as a subroutine to select the action profile with the largest Quasi-UCB index. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficiency of OnLinActPrf.

An Online Learning Approach to Sequential User-Centric Selection Problems

In most video platforms, such as Youtube, Kwai, and TikTok, the played videos usually have undergone multiple video encodings such as hardware encoding by recording devices, software encoding by video editing apps, and single/multiple video transcoding by video application servers. Previous works in compressed video restoration typically assume the compression artifacts are caused by one-time encoding. Thus, the derived solution usually does not work very well in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method, temporal spatial auxiliary network (TSAN), for transcoded video restoration. Our method considers the unique traits between video encoding and transcoding, and we consider the initial shallow encoded videos as the intermediate labels to assist the network to conduct self-supervised attention training. In addition, we employ adjacent multi-frame information and propose the temporal deformable alignment and pyramidal spatial fusion for transcoded video restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of the previous techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/icecherylXuli/TSAN.

Transcoded Video Restoration by Temporal Spatial Auxiliary Network

We study Policy-extended Value Function Approximator (PeVFA) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which extends conventional value function approximator (VFA) to take as input not only the state (and action) but also an explicit policy representation. Such an extension enables PeVFA to preserve values of multiple policies at the same time and brings an appealing characteristic, i.e., value generalization among policies. We formally analyze the value generalization under Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI). From theoretical and empirical lens, we show that generalized value estimates offered by PeVFA may have lower initial approximation error to true values of successive policies, which is expected to improve consecutive value approximation during GPI. Based on above clues, we introduce a new form of GPI with PeVFA which leverages the value generalization along policy improvement path. Moreover, we propose a representation learning framework for RL policy, providing several approaches to learn effective policy embeddings from policy network parameters or state-action pairs. In our experiments, we evaluate the efficacy of value generalization offered by PeVFA and policy representation learning in several OpenAI Gym continuous control tasks. For a representative instance of algorithm implementation, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) re-implemented under the paradigm of GPI with PeVFA achieves about 40% performance improvement on its vanilla counterpart in most environments.

What About Inputing Policy in Value Function: Policy Representation and Policy-Extended Value Function Approximator

The detection of fake news often requires sophisticated reasoning skills, such as logically combining information by considering word-level subtle clues. In this paper, we move towards fine-grained reasoning for fake news detection by better reflecting the logical processes of human thinking and enabling the modeling of subtle clues. In particular, we propose a fine-grained reasoning framework by following the human's information-processing model, introduce a mutual-reinforcement-based method for incorporating human knowledge about which evidence is more important, and design a prior-aware bi-channel kernel graph network to model subtle differences between pieces of evidence. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate the explainability of our approach.

Towards Fine-Grained Reasoning for Fake News Detection

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. 
Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on ``emotion shift'' frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an ``easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.

Hybrid Curriculum Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Recent deep models for solving routing problems always assume a single distribution of nodes for training, which severely impairs their cross-distribution generalization ability. In this paper, we exploit group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) to tackle this issue, where we jointly optimize the weights for different groups of distributions and the parameters for the deep model in an interleaved manner during training. We also design a module based on convolutional neural network, which allows the deep model to learn more informative latent pattern among the nodes. We evaluate the proposed approach on two types of well-known deep models including GCN and POMO. The experimental results on the randomly synthesized instances and the ones from two benchmark dataset (i.e., TSPLib and CVRPLib) demonstrate that our approach could significantly improve the cross-distribution generalization performance over the original models.

Learning to Solve Routing Problems via Distributionally Robust Optimization

In this paper, we propose a novel method to mine the commonsense knowledge shared between the video and text modalities for video-text retrieval, namely visual consensus modeling. Different from the existing works, which learn the video and text representations and their complicated relationships solely based on the pairwise video-text data, we make the first attempt to model the visual consensus by mining the visual concepts from videos and exploiting their co-occurrence patterns within the video and text modalities with no reliance on any additional concept annotations. Specifically, we build a shareable and learnable graph as the visual consensus, where the nodes denoting the mined visual concepts and the edges connecting the nodes representing the co-occurrence relationships between the visual concepts. Extensive experimental results on the public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method, with the ability to effectively model the visual consensus,  achieves state-of-the-art performances on the bidirectional video-text retrieval task. Our code is available at https://github.com/sqiangcao99/VCM.

Visual Consensus Modeling for Video-Text Retrieval

Recent methods in speech and language technology pretrain very large models which are fine-tuned for specific tasks. However, the benefits of such large models are often limited to a few resource rich languages of the world. In this work, we make multiple contributions towards building ASR systems for low resource languages from the Indian subcontinent. First, we curate 17,000 hours of raw speech data for 40 Indian languages from a wide variety of domains including education, news, technology, and finance. Second, using this raw speech data we pretrain several variants of wav2vec style models for 40 Indian languages. Third, we analyze the pretrained models to find key features: codebook vectors of similar sounding phonemes are shared across languages, representations across layers are discriminative of the language family, and attention heads often pay attention within small local windows. Fourth, we fine-tune this model for downstream ASR for 9 languages and obtain state-of-the-art results on 3 public datasets, including on very low-resource languages such as Sinhala and Nepali. Our work establishes that multilingual pretraining is an effective strategy for building ASR systems for the linguistically diverse speakers of the Indian subcontinent.

Towards Building ASR Systems for the Next Billion Users

Skeleton-based action recognition models have recently been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Compared to adversarial attacks on images, perturbations to skeletons are typically bounded to a lower dimension of approximately 100 per frame. This lower-dimensional setting makes it more difficult to generate imperceptible perturbations. Existing attacks resolve this by exploiting the temporal structure of the skeleton motion so that the perturbation dimension increases to thousands. In this paper, we show that adversarial attacks can be performed on skeleton-based action recognition models, even in a significantly low-dimensional setting without any temporal manipulation. Specifically, we restrict the perturbations to the lengths of the skeleton's bones, which allows an adversary to manipulate only approximately 30 effective dimensions. We conducted experiments on the NTU RGB+D and HDM05 datasets and demonstrate that the proposed attack successfully deceived models with sometimes greater than 90% success rate by small perturbations. Furthermore, we discovered an interesting phenomenon: in our low-dimensional setting, the adversarial training with the bone length attack shares a similar property with data augmentation, and it not only improves the adversarial robustness but also improves the classification accuracy on the original data. This is an interesting counterexample of the trade-off between adversarial robustness and clean accuracy, which has been widely observed in studies on adversarial training in the high-dimensional regime.

Adversarial Bone Length Attack on Action Recognition

Statistical samples, in order to be representative, have to be drawn from a population in a random and unbiased way. Nevertheless, it is common practice in the ï¬eld of model-based diagnosis to make estimations from (biased) best-ï¬rst samples. One example is the computation of a few most probable fault explanations for a defective system and the use of these to assess which aspect of the system, if measured, would bring the highest information gain. In this work, we scrutinize whether these statistically not well-founded conventions, that both diagnosis researchers and practitioners have adhered to for decades, are indeed reasonable. To this end, we empirically analyze various sampling methods that generate fault explanations. We study the representativeness of the produced samples in terms of their estimations about fault explanations and how well they guide diagnostic decisions, and we investigate the impact of sample size, the optimal trade-off between sampling efï¬ciency and effectivity, and how approximate sampling techniques compare to exact ones.

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An Online Learning Approach to Sequential User-Centric Selection Problems

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Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

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