United States

Instance-based model-agnostic feature importance explanations (LIME, SHAP, L2X) are a popular form of algorithmic transparency. These methods generally return either a weighting or subset of input features as an explanation for the classification of an instance. An alternative literature argues instead that counterfactual instances, which alter the black-box model&#39;s classification, provide a more actionable form of explanation. We present Feature Importance by Minimal Adversarial Perturbation (FIMAP), a neural network based approach that unifies feature importance and counterfactual explanations. We show that this approach combines the two paradigms, recovering the output of feature-weighting methods in continuous feature spaces, whilst indicating the direction in which the nearest counterfactuals can be found. Our method also provides an implicit confidence estimate in its own explanations, something existing methods lack. Additionally, FIMAP improves upon the speed of sampling-based methods, such as LIME, by an order of magnitude, allowing for explanation deployment in time-critical applications. We extend our approach to categorical features using a partitioned Gumbel layer and demonstrate its efficacy on standard datasets.

AAAI 2021

FIMAP: Feature Importance by Minimal Adversarial Perturbation

### 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.

Instance-based model-agnostic feature importance explanations (LIME, SHAP, L2X) are a popular form of algorithmic transparency. These methods generally return either a weighting or subset of input features as an explanation for the classification of an instance. An alternative literature argues instead that counterfactual instances, which alter the black-box model's classification, provide a more actionable form of explanation. We present Feature Importance by Minimal Adversarial Perturbation (FIMAP), a neural network based approach that unifies feature importance and counterfactual explanations. We show that this approach combines the two paradigms, recovering the output of feature-weighting methods in continuous feature spaces, whilst indicating the direction in which the nearest counterfactuals can be found. Our method also provides an implicit confidence estimate in its own explanations, something existing methods lack. Additionally, FIMAP improves upon the speed of sampling-based methods, such as LIME, by an order of magnitude, allowing for explanation deployment in time-critical applications. We extend our approach to categorical features using a partitioned Gumbel layer and demonstrate its efficacy on standard datasets.

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. 

In a situation where an agent has to produce specific resources using the available ones, it may not be possible to achieve the complete goal, but only obtaining some of its parts.This incompleteness problem calls for reasoning models to make rational decisions. In this paper, we introduce a logic-based framework for measuring resource production incompleteness: the greater the value returned by a measure, the greater is the intensity of incompleteness. After motivating our work  by describing situations where the incompleteness measures can be applied, we introduce our framework by  using a postulate-based approach. To some extent, the incompleteness measures can be seen as a counterpart  of inconsistency measures in resource logics. 
Here, intuitionistic affine logic is used  for representing and reasoning about resource consummation and production. Besides,  we propose different  notions that are useful for defining different types of incompleteness measures. We also present several  measures to illustrate the  introduced concepts and notions.

Quantification of Resource Production Incompleteness

In this paper, we technically propose an enriched prior guided framework, called Dual-constrained Deep Semi-Supervised Coupled Factorization Network (DS2CF-Net), for discovering hierarchical coupled data representation. To extract hidden deep features, DS2CF-Net is formulated as a partial-label and geometrical structure-constrained framework. Specifically, DS2CF-Net designs a deep factorization architecture using multilayers of linear transformations, which can coupled update both the basis vectors and new representations in each layer. To enable learned deep representations and coefficients to be discriminative, we also consider enriching the supervised prior by joint deep coefficients-based label prediction and then incorporate the enriched prior information as additional label and structure constraints. The label constraint can enable the intra-class samples to have same coordinate in feature space, and the structure constraint forces the coefficients in each layer to be block-diagonal so that the enriched prior using the self-expressive label propagation are more accurate. Our network also integrates the adaptive dual-graph learning to retain the local structures of both data and feature manifolds in each layer. Extensive experiments on image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DS2CF-Net for representation learning and clustering.

Partial-Label and Structure-Constrained Deep Coupled Factorization Network

Domain adaptation on time series data is an important but challenging task. Most of the existing works in this area are based on the learning of the domain-invariant representation of the data with the help of restrictions like MMD. However, such extraction of the domain-invariant representation is a non-trivial task for time series data, due to the complex dependence among the timestamps. In detail, in the fully dependent time series, a small change of the time lags or the offsets may lead to difficulty in the domain invariant extraction. Fortunately, the stability of the causality inspired us to explore the domain invariant structure of the data. To reduce the difficulty in the discovery of causal structure, we relax it to the sparse associative structure and propose a novel sparse associative structure alignment model for domain adaptation. First, we generate the segment set to exclude the obstacle of offsets. Second, the intra-variables and inter-variables sparse attention mechanisms are devised to extract associative structure time-series data with considering time lags. Finally, the associative structure alignment is used to guide the transfer of knowledge from the source domain to the target one. Experimental studies not only verify the good performance of our methods on three real-world datasets but also provide some insightful discoveries on the transferred knowledge.

Time Series Domain Adaptation via Sparse Associative Structure Alignment

Multi-modal named entity recognition (MNER) aims to discover named entities in free text and classify them into pre-defined types with images. However, dominant MNER models do not fully exploit fine-grained semantic correspondences between semantic units of different modalities, which have the potential to refine multi-modal representation learning. To deal with this issue, we propose a unified multi-modal graph fusion (UMGF) approach for MNER. Specifically, we first represent the input sentence and image using a unified multi-modal graph, which captures various semantic relationships between multi-modal semantic units (words and visual objects). Then, we stack multiple graph-based multi-modal fusion layers that iteratively perform semantic interactions to learn node representations. Finally, we achieve an attention-based multi-modal representation for each word and perform entity labeling with a CRF decoder. Experimentation on the two benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of our MNER model.

Multi-Modal Graph Fusion for Named Entity Recognition with Targeted Visual Guidance

To avoid the illumination limitation in visible person re-identification (Re-ID) and the heterogeneous issue in cross-modality Re-ID, we propose to utilize complementary advantages of multiple modalities including visible (RGB), near infrared (NI) and thermal infrared (TI) ones for robust person Re-ID. A novel progressive fusion network is designed to learn effective multi-modal features from single to multiple modalities and from local to global views. Our method works well in diversely challenging scenarios even in the presence of missing modalities. Moreover, we contribute a comprehensive benchmark dataset, RGBNT201, including 201 identities captured from various challenging conditions, to facilitate the research of RGB-NI-TI multi-modality person Re-ID. Comprehensive experiments on RGBNT201 dataset comparing to the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the contribution of multi-modality person Re-ID and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which launch a new benchmark and a new baseline for multi-modality person Re-ID.

Robust Multi-Modality Person Re-Identification

Ranked list truncation is of critical importance in a variety of professional information retrieval applications such as patent search or legal search. The goal is to dynamically determine the number of returned documents according to some user-defined objectives, in order to reach a balance between the overall utility of the results and user efforts. Existing methods formulate this task as a sequential decision problem and take some pre-defined loss as a proxy objective, which suffers from the limitation of local decision and non-direct optimization. In this work, we propose a global decision based truncation model named AttnCut, which directly optimizes user-defined objectives for the ranked list truncation. Specifically, we take the successful transformer architecture to capture the global dependency within the ranked list for truncation decision, and employ the reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) for direct optimization. We consider two types of user-defined objectives which are of practical usage. One is the widely adopted metric such as F1 which acts as a balanced objective, and the other is the best F1 under some minimal recall constraint which represents a typical objective in professional search. Empirical results over the Robust04 and MQ2007 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach as compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.

Learning to Truncate Ranked Lists for Information Retrieval

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration algorithms. In the exploration phase, the agent learns an exploratory policy by interacting with a reward-free environment and collects a dataset of transitions by executing the policy. In the planning phase, the agent computes a good policy for any reward function based on the dataset without further interacting with the environment. This framework is suitable for the meta RL setting where there are many reward functions of interest. In the exploration phase, we propose to maximize the Renyi entropy over the state-action space and justify this objective theoretically. The success of using Renyi entropy as the objective results from its encouragement to explore the hard-to-reach state-actions. We further deduce a policy gradient formulation for this objective and design a practical exploration algorithm that can deal with complex environments. In the planning phase, we solve for good policies given arbitrary reward functions using a batch RL algorithm. Empirically, we show that our exploration algorithm is effective and sample efficient, and results in superior policies for arbitrary reward functions in the planning phase.

Exploration by Maximizing Renyi Entropy for Reward-Free RL Framework

In this paper, we revisit the problem of extracting the values of a given set of key fields from form-like documents. It is the vital step to support many downstream applications, such as knowledge base construction, question answering, document comprehension and so on. Previous studies ignore the semantics of the given keys by considering them only as the class labels, and thus might be incapable to handle zero-shot keys. Meanwhile, although these models often leverage the attention mechanism, the learned features might not reflect the true proxy of explanations on why humans would recognize the value for the key, and thus could not well generalize to new documents. To address these issues, we propose a Key-Aware and Trigger-Aware (KATA) extraction model. With the input key, it explicitly learns two mappings, namely from key representations to trigger representations and then from trigger representations to values. These two mappings might be intrinsic and invariant across different keys and documents. With a large training set automatically constructed based on the Wikipedia data, we pre-train these two mappings. Experiments with the fine-tuning step to two applications show that the proposed model achieves more than 70% accuracy for the extraction of zero-shot keys while previous methods all fail.

Extracting Zero-Shot Structured Information from Form-like Documents: Pretraining with Keys and Triggers

Arbitrary-oriented objects widely appear in natural scenes, aerial photographs, remote sensing images, etc., and thus arbitrary-oriented object detection has received considerable attention. Many current rotation detectors use plenty of anchors with different orientations to achieve spatial alignment with ground truth boxes. Intersection-over-Union (IoU) is then applied to sample the positive and negative candidates for training. However, we observe that the selected positive anchors cannot always ensure accurate detections after regression, while some negative samples can achieve accurate localization. It indicates that the quality assessment of anchors through IoU is not appropriate, and this further leads to inconsistency between classification confidence and localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose a dynamic anchor learning (DAL) method, which utilizes the newly defined matching degree to comprehensively evaluate the localization potential of the anchors and carries out a more efficient label assignment process. In this way, the detector can dynamically select high-quality anchors to achieve accurate object detection, and the divergence between classification and regression will be alleviated. With the newly introduced DAL, we can achieve superior detection performance for arbitrary-oriented objects with only a few horizontal preset anchors. Experimental results on three remote sensing datasets HRSC2016, DOTA, UCAS-AOD as well as a scene text dataset ICDAR 2015 show that our method achieves substantial improvement compared with the baseline model. Besides, our approach is also universal for object detection using horizontal bound box. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ming71/DAL.

Dynamic Anchor Learning for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a leading two-level algorithm for optimal  Multi-Agent  Path  Finding  (MAPF).  The main step of CBS is to expand nodes by resolving conflicts (where two agents collide). Choosing the â€˜rightâ€™ conflict to resolve can greatly speed up the search. CBS first resolves conflicts where the costs  (g-values)  of the resulting child nodes are larger than the cost of the node to be split. However, the recent addition of high-level heuristics to CBS and expanding nodes according to f=g+h reduces the relevance of this conflict prioritization method. Therefore, we introduce an expanded categorization of conflicts, which first resolves conflicts where the f-values of the child nodes are larger than the f-value of the node to be split, and present a method for identifying such conflicts. We also enhance all known heuristics for CBS by using information about the cost of resolving certain conflicts, and with only a small computational overhead.  Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that both the expanded categorization of conflicts and the improved heuristics contribute to making CBS even more efficient.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2021

Quantification of Resource Production Incompleteness

Similar lecture

Enhancing textual counterfactual explanation intelligibility through Counterfactual Feature Importance

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2021

Quantification of Resource Production Incompleteness

Similar lecture

Enhancing textual counterfactual explanation intelligibility through Counterfactual Feature Importance

Downloads