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Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to be sensitive towards perturbations on input samples, and previous works highlight that adversarial samples are even more vulnerable than normal ones. In this work, this phenomenon is illustrated frWe first show that adversarial samples locate in steep and narrow local minima of the loss landscape (high sharpness) while normal samples, which differs distinctly from adversarial ones, reside in the loss surface that is more flatter (low sharpness).om the perspective of sharpness via visualizing the input loss landscape of models. Based on this, we propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector to distinct adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. Considering that the notion of sharpness of a loss landscape is relative, we further propose an adaptive optimization strategy in an attempt to fairly compare the relative sharpness among different samples. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform previous detection methods by large margins (average +6.6 F1 score) for four advanced attack strategies considered in this paper across three text classification tasks.

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ACL 2023

Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape

robust

detection

adversarial examples

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to be sensitive towards perturbations on input samples, and previous works highlight that adversarial samples are even more vulnerable than normal ones. In this work, this phenomenon is illustrated frWe first show that adversarial samples locate in steep and narrow local minima of the loss landscape (high sharpness) while normal samples, which differs distinctly from adversarial ones, reside in the loss surface that is more flatter (low sharpness).om the perspective of sharpness via visualizing the input loss landscape of models. Based on this, we propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector to distinct adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. Considering that the notion of sharpness of a loss landscape is relative, we further propose an adaptive optimization strategy in an attempt to fairly compare the relative sharpness among different samples. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform previous detection methods by large margins (average +6.6 F1 score) for four advanced attack strategies considered in this paper across three text classification tasks.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Diverse headline generation is an NLP task where given a news article, the goal is to generate multiple headlines that are true to the content of the article but are different among themselves. This task aims to exhibit and exploit semantically similar one-to-many relationships between a source news article and multiple target headlines. Toward this, we propose a novel model called DIVHSK. It has two components:KEYSELECT for selecting the important keywords, and SEQGEN, for finally generating the multiple diverse headlines. In KEYSELECT, we cluster the self-attention heads of the last layer of the pre-trained encoder and select the most-attentive theme and general keywords from the source article. Then, cluster-specific keyword sets guide the SEQGEN, a pre-trained encoder-decoder model, to generate diverse yet semantically similar headlines. The proposed model consistently outperformed existing literature and our strong baselines and emerged as a state-of-the-art model. We have also created a high-quality multi-reference headline dataset from news articles.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/e745aab8-f1dc-4870-b21b-9c4fad702dc2" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

DivHSK: Diverse Headline Generation using Self-Attention based Keyword Selection

Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this work, we present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. AraMUS achieves state-of-the-art performances on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. Moreover, AraMUS shows impressive few-shot learning abilities compared with the best existing Arabic PLMs.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/9yzqPifSAmy9Efyrt2gEbX/embed/polls/4506160b-0879-41f4-a404-4f5030271881" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

AraMUS: Pushing the Limits of Data and Model Scale for Arabic Natural Language Processing

Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering (ODConvQA) aims at answering questions through a multi-turn conversation based on a retriever-reader pipeline, which retrieves passages and then predicts answers with them. However, such a pipeline approach not only makes the reader vulnerable to the errors propagated from the retriever, but also demands additional effort to develop both the retriever and the reader, which further makes it slower since they are not runnable in parallel. In this work, we propose a method to directly predict answers with a phrase retrieval scheme for a sequence of words, reducing the conventional two distinct subtasks into a single one. Also, for the first time, we study its capability for ODConvQA tasks. However, simply adopting it is largely problematic, due to the dependencies between previous and current turns in a conversation. To address this problem, we further introduce a novel contrastive learning strategy, making sure to reflect previous turns when retrieving the phrase for the current context, by maximizing representational similarities of consecutive turns in a conversation while minimizing irrelevant conversational contexts. We validate our model on two ODConvQA datasets, whose experimental results show that it substantially outperforms the relevant baselines with the retriever-reader. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/PRO-ConvQA.

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Phrase Retrieval for Open Domain Conversational Question Answering with Conversational Dependency Modeling via Contrastive Learning

Well pre-trained contextualized representations from pre-trained language model (PLM) have been shown helpful for enhancing various natural language processing tasks, surely including neural machine translation (NMT). However, existing methods either consider encoder-only enhancement or rely on specific multilingual PLMs, which leads to a much larger model or give up potentially helpful knowledge from target PLMs. In this paper, we propose a new monolingual PLM-sponsored NMT model to let both encoder and decoder enjoy PLM enhancement to alleviate such obvious inconvenience. Especially, incorporating a newly proposed frequency-weighted embedding transformation algorithm, PLM embeddings can be effectively exploited in terms of the representations of the NMT decoder. We evaluate our model on IWSLT14 En-De, De-En, WMT14 En-De, and En-Fr tasks, and the results show that our proposed PLM enhancement gives significant improvement and even helps achieve new state-of-the-art.

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Encoder and Decoder, Not One Less for Pre-trained Language Model Sponsored NMT

kNN-MT presents a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore, which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. As a result, the constructed datastore is usually large and possibly redundant. In this paper, we investigate the interpretability issue of this approach: what knowledge does the NMT model need? We propose the notion of local correctness (LAC) as a new angle, which describes the potential translation correctness for a single entry and for a given neighborhood. Empirical study shows that our investigation successfully finds the conditions where the NMT model could easily fail and need related knowledge. Experiments on six diverse target domains and two language-pairs show that pruning according to local correctness brings a light and more explainable memory for kNN-MT domain adaptation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/dc2ecc70-0cd9-458e-a109-96f645137222" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation

Task embeddings are task-specific vectors designed to construct a semantic space of tasks, which can be used to predict the most transferable source task for a given target task via the similarity between task embeddings. However, existing methods use optimized parameters and representations as task embeddings, resulting in substantial computational complexity and storage requirements. In this work, we draw inspiration from the operating mechanism of deep neural networks (DNNs) and biological brains, where neuronal activations are sparse and task-specific, and we use the connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with the task. The proposed method learns to assign importance masks for sub-structures of DNNs, and accordingly indicate the task-specific connectivity patterns. In addition to the storage advantages brought by the binary masking mechanism and structured sparsity, the early-bird nature of the sparse optimization process can deliver an efficient computation advantage. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings, while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/ebd72ec4-0ae8-4d5f-bb47-9fa2db312e1c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings

We present SkillQG: a question generation framework with controllable comprehension types for assessing and improving machine reading comprehension models. Existing question generation systems widely differentiate questions by literal information such as question words and answer types to generate semantically relevant questions for a given context.However, they rarely consider the comprehension nature of questions, \ie the different comprehension capabilities embodied by different questions.In comparison, our SkillQG is able to tailor a fine-grained assessment and improvement to the capabilities of questions answering models built on it.Specifically, we first frame the comprehension type of questions based on a hierarchical skill-based schema.We then formulate SkillQG as a skill-conditioned question generator.Furthermore, to improve the controllability of generation, we augment the input text with skill-specific question focus and knowledge, which are constructed by iteratively prompting the pre-trained language models.Empirical results demonstrate that SkillQG outperforms baselines in terms of quality, relevance, and skill-controllability while showing a promising performance boost in downstream question answering task.

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SkillQG: Learning to Generate Question for Reading Comprehension Assessment

Annotator disagreement is common whenever human judgment is needed for supervised learning. It is conventional to assume that one label per item represents ground truth. However, this obscures minority opinions, if present. We regard "ground truth'' as the distribution of all labels that a population of annotators could produce, if asked (and of which we only have a small sample). We next introduce DisCo (Distribution from Context), a simple neural model that learns to predict this distribution. The model takes annotator-item pairs, rather than items alone, as input, and performs inference by aggregating over all annotators. Despite its simplicity, our experiments show that, on six benchmark datasets, our model is competitive with, and frequently outperforms, other, more complex models that either do not model specific annotators or were not designed for label distribution learning.

Disagreement Matters: Preserving Label Diversity by Jointly Modeling Item and Annotator Label Distributions with DisCo

Goal-directed dialogue systems aim to proactively reach a pre-determined target through multi-turn conversations. The key to achieving this task lies in planning dialogue paths that smoothly and coherently direct conversations towards the target. However, this is a challenging and under-explored task. In this work, we propose a coherent dialogue planning approach that uses a stochastic process to model the temporal dynamics of dialogue paths. We define a latent space that captures the coherence of goal-directed behavior using a Brownian bridge process, which allows us to incorporate user feedback flexibly in dialogue planning. Based on the derived latent trajectories, we generate dialogue paths explicitly using pre-trained language models. We finally employ these paths as natural language prompts to guide dialogue generation. Our experiments show that our approach generates more coherent utterances and achieves the goal with a higher success rate.

Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialogue

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to learn new concepts purely from language. Several recent approaches have explored training machine learning models via natural language supervision. However, these approaches fall short in leveraging linguistic quantifiers (such as always' or rarely') and mimicking humans in compositionally learning complex tasks. Here, we present LaSQuE, a method that can learn zero-shot classifiers from language explanations by using three new strategies - (1) modeling the semantics of linguistic quantifiers in explanations (including exploiting ordinal strength relationships, such as always' > likely'), (2) aggregating information from multiple explanations using an attention-based mechanism, and (3) model training via curriculum learning. With these strategies, LaSQuE outperforms prior work, showing an absolute gain of up to 7% in generalizing to unseen real-world classification tasks.

Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape

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DivHSK: Diverse Headline Generation using Self-Attention based Keyword Selection

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