Canada

This paper presents a new supervised representation learning framework, namely structured probabilistic coding (SPC), to learn compact and informative representations from input related to the target task. SPC is an encoder-only probabilistic coding technology with a structured regularization from the target label space. It can enhance the generalization ability of pre-trained language models for better language understanding. Specifically, our probabilistic coding technology simultaneously performs information encoding and task prediction in one module to more fully utilize the effective information from input data. It uses variational inference in the output space to reduce randomness and uncertainty. Besides, to better control the probability distribution in the latent space, a structured regularization is proposed to promote class-level uniformity in the latent space. With the regularization term, SPC can preserve the Gaussian distribution structure of latent code as well as better cover the hidden space with class uniformly. Experimental results on 12 natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that our SPC effectively improves the performance of pre-trained language models for classification and regression. Extensive experiments show that SPC can enhance the generalization capability, robustness to label noise, and clustering quality of output representations.

AAAI 2024

Structured Probabilistic Coding | VIDEO

snlp: text classification

ml: probabilistic methods

snlp: language models

ml: representation learning

ml: classification and regression

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

ACL 2023

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.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Real-world data is extremely imbalanced and presents a long-tailed distribution, resulting in models that are biased towards classes with sufficient samples and perform poorly on rare classes. Recent methods propose to rebalance classes but they undertake the seesaw dilemma (what is increasing performance on tail classes may decrease that of head classes, and vice versa). In this paper, we argue that the seesaw dilemma is derived from gradient imbalance of different classes, in which gradients of inappropriate classes are set to important for updating, thus are prone to overcompensation or undercompensation on tail classes. To achieve ideal compensation, we formulate the long-tailed recognition as an multi-objective optimization problem, which fairly respects the contributions of head and tail classes simultaneously. For efficiency, we propose a Gradient-Balancing Grouping (GBG) strategy to gather the classes with similar gradient directions, thus approximately make every update under a Pareto descent direction. Our GBG method drives classes with similar gradient directions to form more representative gradient and provide ideal compensation to the tail classes. Moreover, We conduct extensive experiments on commonly used benchmarks in long-tailed learning and demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing SOTA methods.

Long-Tailed Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization

Understanding intermediate representations of the concepts learned by deep learning classifiers is indispensable for interpreting general model behaviors. Existing approaches to reveal learned concepts often rely on human supervision, such as pre-defined concept sets or segmentation processes. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised method for discovering distributed representations of concepts by selecting a principal subset of neurons. Our empirical findings demonstrate that instances with similar neuron activation states tend to share coherent concepts. Based on the observations, the proposed method selects principal neurons that construct an interpretable region, namely a \textit{Relaxed Decision Region (RDR)}, encompassing instances with coherent concepts in the feature space. It can be utilized to identify unlabeled subclasses within data and to detect the causes of misclassifications. Furthermore, the applicability of our method across various layers discloses distinct distributed representations over the layers, which provides deeper insights into the internal mechanisms of the deep learning model.

Understanding Distributed Representations of Concepts in Deep Neural Networks without Supervision | VIDEO

The Shapley value, which is arguably the most popular approach for assigning a meaningful contribution value to players in a cooperative game, has recently been used intensively in explainable artificial intelligence. Its meaningfulness is due to axiomatic properties that only the Shapley value satisfies, which, however, comes at the expense of an exact computation growing exponentially with the number of agents. Accordingly, a number of works are devoted to the efficient approximation of the Shapley value, most of them revolve around the notion of an agent's marginal contribution. In this paper, we propose with SVARM and Stratified SVARM two parameter-free and domain-independent approximation algorithms based on a representation of the Shapley value detached from the notion of marginal contribution. We prove unmatched theoretical guarantees regarding their approximation quality and provide empirical results including synthetic games as well as common explainability use cases comparing ourselves with state-of-the-art methods.

Approximating the Shapley Value without Marginal Contributions

Reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific research. On the one hand, it increases confidence in results. On the other hand, reproducible results can be extended on a solid basis. In rapidly developing fields such as machine learning, the latter is particularly important to ensure the reliability of research. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to reproducing (using the available implementation), replicating (using an alternative implementation) and reevaluating (using different datasets) state-of-the-art experiments. This approach enables the early detection and correction of deficiencies and thus the development of more robust and transparent machine learning methods. We detail the independent reproduction, replication, and reevaluation of the initially published experiments with a method that we want to extend. For each step, we identify issues and draw lessons learned. We further discuss solutions that have proven effective in overcoming the encountered problems. This work can serve as a guide for further reproducibility studies and generally improve reproducibility in machine learning.

Reproduce, Replicate, Reevaluate. The Long but Safe Way to Extend Machine Learning Methods

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables an active party with labeled data to enhance model performance (utility) by collaborating with multiple passive parties that possess auxiliary features corresponding to the same sample identifiers (IDs). Model serving in VFL is vital for real-world, delay-sensitive applications, and it faces two major challenges: 1) robustness against arbitrarily-aligned data and stragglers; and 2) privacy protection, ensuring minimal label leakage to passive parties. Existing methods fail to transfer knowledge among parties to improve robustness in a privacy-preserving way. In this paper, we introduce a privacy-preserving knowledge transfer framework, Complementary Knowledge Distillation (CKD), designed to enhance the robustness and privacy of multi-party VFL systems. Specifically, we formulate a Complementary Label Coding (CLC) objective to encode only complementary label information of the active party's local model for passive parties to learn. Then, CKD selectively transfers the CLC-encoded complementary knowledge 1) from the passive parties to the active party, and 2) among the passive parties themselves. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that CKD outperforms existing approaches in terms of robustness against arbitrarily-aligned data, while also minimizing label privacy leakage.

Complementary Knowledge Distillation for Robust and Privacy-Preserving Model Serving in Vertical Federated Learning

The dot product self-attention (DPSA) is a fundamental component of transformers. However, scaling them to long sequences, like documents or high-resolution images, becomes prohibitively expensive due to the quadratic time and memory complexities arising from the softmax operation. Kernel methods are employed to simplify computations by approximating softmax but often lead to performance drops compared to softmax attention. We propose SeTformer, a novel transformer where DPSA is purely replaced by Self-optimal Transport (SeT) for achieving better performance and computational efficiency. SeT is based on two essential softmax properties: maintaining a non-negative attention matrix and using a nonlinear reweighting mechanism to emphasize important tokens in input sequences. By introducing a kernel cost function for optimal transport, SeTformer effectively satisfies these properties. In particular, with small and base-sized models, SeTformer achieves impressive top-1 accuracies of 84.7% and 86.2% on ImageNet-1K. In object detection, SeTformer-base outperforms the FocalNet counterpart by +2.2 mAP, using 38% fewer parameters and 29% fewer FLOPs. In semantic segmentation, our base-size model surpasses NAT by +3.5 mIoU with 33% fewer parameters. SeTformer also achieves state-of-the-art results in language modeling on the GLUE benchmark. These findings highlight SeTformer applicability for vision and language tasks.

SeTformer Is What You Need for Vision and Language

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly pervaded and reshaped almost all walks of life, but efforts to promote AI literacy in K-12 schools remain limited. There is a knowledge gap in how to prepare teachers to teach AI literacy in inclusive classrooms and how teacher-led classroom implementations can impact students. This paper reports a comparison study to investigate the effectiveness of an AI literacy curriculum when taught by classroom teachers. The experimental group included 89 middle school students who learned an AI literacy curriculum during regular school hours. The comparison group consisted of 69 students who did not learn the curriculum. Both groups completed the same pre and post-test. The results show that students in the experimental group developed a deeper understanding of AI concepts and more positive attitudes toward AI and its impact on future careers after the curriculum than those in the comparison group. This shows that the teacher-led classroom implementation successfully equipped students with a conceptual understanding of AI. Students achieved significant gains in recognizing how AI is relevant to their lives and felt empowered to thrive in the age of AI. Overall this study confirms the potential of preparing K-12 classroom teachers to offer AI education in classrooms in order to reach learners of diverse backgrounds and broaden participation in AI literacy education among young learners.

An Effectiveness Study of Teacher-Led AI Literacy Curriculum in K-12 Classrooms

With the growing prevalence of AI, the need for K-12 AI education is becoming more crucial, which is prompting active research in developing engaging and age-appropriate AI learning activities. Efforts are underway, such as those by the AI4K12 initiative, to establish guidelines for organizing K-12 AI education; however, effective instructional resources are needed by educators. In this paper, we describe our work to design, develop, and implement an unplugged activity centered on facial recognition technology for middle school students. Facial recognition is integrated into a wide range of applications throughout daily life, often offering significant convenience to individuals. Its applications, ranging from unlocking mobile phones to user authentication, make it a familiar and engaging tool for students and an effective medium for conveying AI concepts. Our unplugged activity, "Guess Whose Face," is designed as a board game that focuses on Representation and Reasoning from AI4K12's 5 Big Ideas. The game is crafted to enable students to develop AI competencies naturally through physical interaction. In the game, one student uses tracing paper to extract facial features from a familiar face, such as cartoon character or celebrity, then other students try to guess the identity of the hidden face. We discuss details of the game as well as initial findings from piloting the game during a summer camp for rural middle school students. To promote customization, we developed a template for the cards that allows educators to tailor the activity for their students by utilizing facial images of their choice. Implications of our research are also discussed.

Unplugged K-12 AI Learning: Exploring Representation and Reasoning with a Facial Recognition Game | VIDEO

Text-to-image generation (TTIG) technologies are Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms that use natural language algorithms in combination with visual generative algorithms. Consumer TTIG tools have gained popularity in recent months, garnering interest from non-AI experts, including educators and K-12 students. While they have exciting creative potential when used by K-12 learners and educators for creative learning, they are also accompanied by serious ethical implications, such as data privacy, spreading misinformation, and algorithmic bias. Given the potential learning applications, social implications, and ethical concerns, we designed learning materials to teach K-12 teachers from diverse subject expertise about the technical implementation, classroom applications, and ethical implications of TTIG algorithms. We piloted the learning materials titled “Demystify text-to-image generative tools for K-12 educators" with 51 teachers across two 6-hour workshops with the goal of preparing them to teach about and use TTIG tools in their classrooms. We found that teachers demonstrated a technical, applied and ethical understanding of TTIG algorithms and successfully designed early prototypes of teaching materials for their K-12 classrooms.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Co-designing Text-to-Image Generation Learning Materials for K-12 with Educators | VIDEO

The Adam optimizer is a popular choice in contemporary deep learning due to its strong empirical performance. However we observe that in privacy sensitive scenarios, the traditional use of Differential Privacy (DP) with the Adam optimizer leads to sub-optimal performance on several tasks. We find that this performance degradation is due to a DP bias in Adam's second moment estimator, introduced by the addition of independent noise in the gradient computation to enforce DP guarantees. This DP bias leads to a different scaling for low variance parameter updates, that is inconsistent with the behavior of non-private Adam, and Adam's sign descent interpretation. We propose the DP-AdamBC optimization algorithm, which corrects for the bias in the second moment estimation and retrieves the expected behaviour of Adam. Empirically, DP-AdamBC significantly improves the optimization performance of DP-Adam by up to 3.5\% in final accuracy in image, text, and graph node classification tasks.

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Long-Tailed Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization

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SPC: Soft Prompt Construction for Cross Domain Generalization

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