United States

Single-table text-to-SQL aims to transform a natural language question into a SQL query according to one single table.  Recent work has made promising progress on this task by pre-trained language models and a multi-submodule framework. However, zero-shot table, that is, the invisible table in the training set, is currently the most critical bottleneck restricting the application of existing approaches to real-world scenarios. Although some work has utilized auxiliary tasks to help handle zero-shot tables, expensive extra manual annotation limits their practicality. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the zero-shot text-to-SQL task which does not rely on any additional manual annotations. Our approach consists of two parts. First, we propose a new model that leverages the abundant information of table content to help establish the mapping between questions and zero-shot tables. Further, we propose a simple but efficient meta-learning strategy to train our model. The strategy utilizes the two-step gradient update to force the model to learn a generalization ability towards zero-shot tables. We conduct extensive experiments on a public open-domain text-to-SQL dataset WikiSQL and a domain-specific dataset ESQL. Compared to existing approaches using the same pre-trained model, our approach achieves significant improvements on both datasets. Compared to the larger pre-trained model and the tabular-specific pre-trained model, our approach is still competitive. More importantly, on the zero-shot subsets of both the datasets, our approach further increases the improvements.

AAAI 2021

Leveraging Table Content for Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL with Meta-Learning

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 this paper, we tackle the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation, which aims to segment the unlabeled real data using labeled synthetic data. The main problem of UDA for semantic segmentation relies on reducing the domain gap between the real image and synthetic image. To solve this problem, we focused on separating information in an image into content and style. Here, only the content has cues for semantic segmentation, and the style makes the domain gap. Thus, precise separation of content and style in an image leads to effect as supervision of real data even when learning with synthetic data. To make the best of this effect, we propose a zero-style loss. Even though we perfectly extract content for semantic segmentation in the real domain, another main challenge, the class imbalance problem, still exists in UDA for semantic segmentation. We address this problem by transferring the contents of tail classes from synthetic to real domain. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation on the major two UDA settings.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation by Content Transfer

We propose the maximin support method, a novel extension of the D'Hondt apportionment method to approval-based multiwinner elections. The maximin support method is a sequential procedure that aims to maximize the support of the least supported elected candidate. It can be computed efficiently and satisfies (adjusted versions of) the main properties of the original D'Hondt method: house monotonicity, population monotonicity, and proportional representation. We also establish a close relationship between the maximin support method and alternative D'Hondt extensions due to PhragmÃ©n.

The Maximin Support Method: An Extension of the D’Hondt Method to Approval-Based Multiwinner Elections

Analogy is core to human cognition. It allows us to solve problems based on prior experience, it governs the way we conceptualize new information, and it even influences our visual perception. The importance of analogy to humans has made it an active area of research in the broader field of artificial intelligence, resulting in data-efficient models that learn and reason in human-like ways. 
While cognitive perspectives of analogy and deep learning have generally been studied independently of one another, the integration of the two lines of research is a promising step towards more robust and efficient learning techniques.
As part of a growing body of research on such an integration, we introduce the Analogical Matching Network: a neural architecture that learns to produce analogies between structured, symbolic representations that are largely consistent with the principles of Structure-Mapping Theory.

Neural Analogical Matching

People often encounter situations where they need to recall past experiences from their daily life. In this paper, we aim to construct a question answering system that enables human to query their past experiences over personal knowledge base. Previous works on knowledge base question answering focus on finding answers for answerable questions. In the real world applications, however, people often muddle up facts and ask those questions that cannot be answered with knowledge base. This work presents a novel system consisting of question answering model and question generation model. It not only answers answerable questions, but also corrects unanswerable questions if necessary. Our question answering model recognizes the question that is inconsistent with the state of the personal knowledge base and suggests facts that can form a feasible question. Then, the facts are converted to an answerable question by the question generation model. For refining question, we propose a question generation model based on the reinforcement learning (RL) with question editing mechanism. Experimental results show that our proposed system is effective for correcting unanswerable questions in personal knowledge base question answering.

Unanswerable Question Correction in Question Answering over Personal Knowledge Base

When exposed to an item in a recommender system, a user may consume it (known as success exposure) or neglect it (known as failure exposure). The recently proposed methods that consider both success and failure exposure merely regard failure exposure as a constant prior, thus being capable of neither modeling various user behavior nor adapting to overdispersed data. In this paper, we propose a novel model, hierarchical negative binomial factorization, which models data dispersion via a hierarchical Bayesian structure, thus alleviating the effect of data overdispersion to help with performance gain for recommendation. Moreover, we factorize the dispersion of zero entries approximately into two low-rank matrices, thus reducing the updating time linear to the number of nonzero entries. The experiment shows that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art Poisson-based methods merely with a slight loss of inference speed.

Hierarchical Negative Binomial Factorization for Recommender Systems on Implicit Feedback

Large scale machine learning and deep models are extremely data-hungry. Unfortunately, obtaining large amounts of labeled data is expensive, and training state-of-the-art models (with hyperparameter tuning) requires significant computing resources and time. Secondly, real-world data is noisy and imbalanced. As a result, several recent papers try to make the training process more efficient and robust. However, most existing work either focuses on robustness or efficiency, but not both. In this work, we introduce GLISTER, a GeneraLIzation based data Subset selecTion for Efficient and Robust learning framework. We formulate GLISTER as a mixed discrete-continuous bi-level optimization problem to select a subset of the training data, which maximizes the log-likelihood on a held-out validation set. We then analyze GLISTER for simple classifiers such as gaussian and multinomial naive-bayes, k-nearest neighbor classifier, and linear regression and show connections to submodularity. Next, we propose an iterative online algorithm GLISTER-ONLINE, which performs data selection iteratively along with the parameter updates, and can be applied to any loss-based learning algorithm. We then show that for a rich class of loss functions including cross-entropy, hinge-loss, squared-loss, and logistic-loss, the inner discrete data selection is an instance of (weakly) submodular optimization, and we analyze conditions for which GLISTER-ONLINE reduces the validation loss and converges. Finally, we propose GLISTER-ACTIVE, an extension to batch active learning, and we empirically demonstrate the performance of GLISTER on a wide range of tasks including, (a) data selection to reduce training time, (b) robust learning under label noise and imbalance settings, and (c) batch-active learning with a number of deep and shallow models. We show that our framework improves upon the state of the art both in efficiency and accuracy (in cases (a) and (c)) and is more efficient compared to other state-of-the-art robust learning algorithms in case (b). The code for GLISTER is at: https://github.com/dssresearch/GLISTER.

GLISTER: Generalization Based Data Subset Selection for Efficient and Robust Learning

Hyperparameter optimization (HO) is an important problem in machine learning which is normally formulated as a bilevel optimization problem. Gradient-based methods are dominant in bilevel optimization due to their high scalability to the number of hyperparameters, especially in a deep learning problem. However, traditional gradient-based bilevel optimization methods need intermediate steps to obtain the exact or approximate gradient of hyperparameters, namely hypergradient, for the upper-level objective, whose complexity is high especially for high dimensional datasets. Recently, a penalty method has been proposed to avoid the computation of the hypergradient, which speeds up the gradient-based BHO methods. However, the penalty method may result in a very large number of constraints, which greatly limits the efficiency of this method, especially for high dimensional data problems. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a doubly stochastic gradient descent algorithm (DSGPHO) to improve the efficiency of the penalty method.  Importantly, we not only prove the proposed method can converge to the KKT condition of the original problem in a convex setting, but also provide the convergence rate of  DSGPHO which is the first result in the references of gradient-based bilevel optimization as far as we know. We compare our method with three state-of-the-art gradient-based methods in three tasks, i.e., data denoising, few-shot learning, and training data poisoning, using several large-scale benchmark datasets. All the results demonstrate that our method outperforms or is comparable to the existing methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Improved Penalty Method via Doubly Stochastic Gradients for Bilevel Hyperparameter Optimization

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a powerful algorithmic framework for optimally solving classical multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problems, where time is discretized into the time steps. Continuous-time CBS (CCBS) is a recently proposed version of CBS that guarantees optimal solutions without the need to discretize time. However, the  scalability of CCBS is limited because it does not include any known improvements of CBS. In this paper, we begin to close this gap and explore how to adapt successful CBS improvements, namely, prioritizing conflicts (PC), disjoint splitting (DS), and high-level heuristics, to the continuous time setting of CCBS. These adaptions are not trivial, and require careful handling of different types of constraints, applying a generalized version of the Safe interval path planning (SIPP) algorithm, and extending the notion of cardinal conflicts. We evaluate the effect of the suggested enhancements by running experiments both on general graphs and 2^k-neighborhood grids. CCBS with these improvements significantly outperforms vanilla CCBS, solving problems with almost twice as many agents in some cases and pushing the limits of multi-agent path finding in continuous-time domains.

Improving Continuous-Time Conflict Based Search

Inverse multiobjective optimization provides a general framework for the unsupervised learning task of inferring parameters of a multiobjective decision making problem (DMP), based on a set of observed decisions from the human expert. However, the performance of this framework relies critically on the availability of an accurate DMP, sufficient decisions of high quality, and a parameter space that contains enough information about the DMP. To hedge against the uncertainties in the hypothetical DMP, the data, and the  parameter space, we investigate in this paper the distributionally robust approach for inverse multiobjective optimization. Specifically, we leverage the Wasserstein metric to construct a ball centered at the empirical distribution of these decisions. We then formulate a Wasserstein distributionally robust inverse multiobjective optimization problem (WRO-IMOP) that minimizes a worst-case expected loss function, where the worst case is taken over all distributions in the Wasserstein ball. We  show that the excess risk of the WRO-IMOP estimator has a sub-linear convergence rate. Furthermore, we propose the semi-infinite reformulations of the WRO-IMOP and develop a cutting-plane algorithm that converges to an approximate solution in finite iterations. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both a synthetic multiobjective quadratic program and a real world portfolio optimization problem.

Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Inverse Multiobjective Optimization

Recent advances in machine learning have led to increased deployment of black-box classifiers across a wide variety of applications. In many such situations there is a critical need to both reliably assess the performance of these pre-trained models and to perform this assessment in a label-efficient manner (given that labels may be scarce and costly to collect).  In this paper, we introduce an active Bayesian  approach for assessment of classifier performance  to satisfy the desiderata of both reliability and label-efficiency. We begin by developing inference strategies to quantify uncertainty for common assessment metrics such as accuracy, misclassification cost, and   calibration error. We then propose a general framework for active Bayesian assessment using inferred uncertainty to guide  efficient selection of instances for labeling, enabling better performance assessment with fewer labels. We demonstrate  significant gains from  our proposed active Bayesian approach   via a series of systematic empirical experiments assessing the performance of modern neural classifiers (e.g., ResNet and BERT) on several standard image and text classification datasets.

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