United States

Lexical taxonomies, a special kind of knowledge graph, are essential for natural language understanding. This paper studies the problem of lexical taxonomy embedding. Most existing graph embedding methods are difficult to apply to lexical taxonomies since 1) they ignore implicit but important information, namely, sibling relations, which are not explicitly mentioned in lexical taxonomies and 2) there are lots of polysemous terms in lexical taxonomies. In this paper, we propose a novel method for lexical taxonomy embedding. This method optimizes an objective function that models both hyponym-hypernym relations and sibling relations. A term-level attention mechanism and a random walk based metric are then proposed to assist the modeling of these two kinds of relations, respectively. Finally, a novel training method based on curriculum learning is proposed. We conduct extensive experiments on two tasks to show that our approach outperforms other embedding methods and we use the learned term embeddings to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art models that are based on BERT and RoBERTa on text classification.

AAAI 2021

Learning Term Embeddings for Lexical Taxonomies

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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. 

Collecting supporting evidence from large corpora of text (e.g., Wikipedia) is of great challenge for open-domain Question Answering (QA). Especially, for multi-hop open-domain QA, scattered evidence pieces are required to be gathered together to support the answer extraction. In this paper, we propose a new retrieval target, hop, to collect the hidden reasoning evidence from Wikipedia for complex question answering. Specifically, the hop in this paper is defined as the combination of a hyperlink and the corresponding outbound link document. The hyperlink is encoded as the mention embedding which models the structured knowledge of how the outbound link entity is mentioned in the textual context, and the corresponding outbound link document is encoded as the document embedding representing the unstructured knowledge within it. Accordingly, we build HopRetriever which retrieves hops over Wikipedia to answer complex questions. Experiments on the HotpotQA dataset demonstrate that HopRetriever outperforms previously published evidence retrieval methods by large margins. Moreover, our approach also yields quantifiable interpretations of the evidence collection process.

HopRetriever: Retrieve Hops over Wikipedia to Answer Complex Questions

For prediction of interacting agents' trajectories,  we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture that hybridizes neural nets with game-theoretic reasoning, has interpretable intermediate representations, and transfers to downstream decision making. It uses a net that reveals preferences from the agents' past joint trajectory, and a differentiable implicit layer that maps these preferences to local Nash equilibria, forming the modes of the predicted future trajectory. Additionally, it learns an equilibrium refinement concept. For tractability, we introduce a new class of continuous potential games and an equilibrium-separating partition of the action space. We provide theoretical results for explicit gradients and soundness. In experiments, we evaluate our approach on two real-world data sets, where we predict highway drivers' merging trajectories, and on a simple decision-making transfer task.

Learning Game-Theoretic Models of Multiagent Trajectories Using Implicit Layers

It is well-known that second-order optimizer can accelerate the training of deep neural networks, however, the huge computation cost of second-order optimization makes it impractical to apply in real practice. In order to reduce the cost, many methods have been proposed to approximate a second-order matrix. Inspired by KFAC, we propose a novel Trace-based Hardware-driven layer-ORiented Natural Gradient Descent Computation method, called THOR, to make the second-order optimization applicable in the real application models. Specifically, we gradually increase the update interval and use the matrix trace to determine which blocks of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) need to be updated. Moreover, by resorting the power of hardware, we have designed a Hardware-driven approximation method for computing FIM to achieve better performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of THOR, we have conducted extensive experiments. The results show that training ResNet-50 on ImageNet with THOR only takes 66.7 minutes to achieve a top-1 accuracy of 75.9 % under an 8 Ascend 910 environment with MindSpore, a new deep learning computing framework. Moreover, with more computational resources, THOR can only takes 2.7 minutes to 75.9 % with 256 Ascend 910.

THOR, Trace-Based Hardware-Driven Layer-Oriented Natural Gradient Descent Computation

A well known result is that, given a consistent heuristic and no other source of information, A* does expand a minimal number of nodes up to tie-breaking. We extend this analysis for A* with dominance pruning, which exploits a dominance relation to eliminate some nodes during the search. We show that the expansion order of A* is not necessarily optimally efficient when considering dominance pruning with arbitrary dominance relations, but it remains optimally efficient under certain restrictions for the heuristic and dominance relation.

On the Optimal Efficiency of A* with Dominance Pruning

Modern  society  is  heavily  dependent  on  large  scale client-server  systems  with  applications  ranging  from Internet and Communication Services to sophisticated logistics and deployment of goods. To maintain and improve such a system, a careful study of client and server dynamics is needed â€“ e.g. response/service times, aver-age number of clients at given times, etc. To this end, one traditionally relies, within the queuing theory formalism,on parametric analysis and explicit distribution forms.However, parametric forms limit the modelâ€™s expressiveness and could struggle on extensively large datasets. We propose a novel data-driven approach towards queuing systems: the Deep Generative Service Times. Our methodology delivers a flexible and scalable model for service and response times. We leverage the representation capabilities of Recurrent Marked Point Processes for the temporal dynamics of clients, as well as Wasserstein Generative  Adversarial  Network  techniques,  to  learn deep generative models which are able to represent complex conditional service time distributions. We provide extensive experimental analysis on both empirical and synthetic datasets, showing the effectiveness of the proposed models

Learning Deep Generative Models for Queuing Systems

Recognition of human activities is an important task due to its far-reaching applications such as healthcare system, context-aware applications, and security monitoring. Recently, WiFi based human activity recognition (HAR) is becoming ubiquitous due to its non-invasiveness. Existing WiFi-based HAR methods regard WiFi signals as a temporal sequence of channel state information (CSI), and employ deep sequential models (e.g., RNN, LSTM) to automatically capture channel-over-time features. Although being remarkably effective, they suffer from two major drawbacks. Firstly, the granularity of a single temporal point is blindly elementary for representing meaningful CSI patterns.  Secondly, the time-over-channel features are also important, and could be a natural data augmentation. To address the drawbacks, we propose a novel Two-stream Convolution Augmented Human Activity Transformer (THAT) model. Our model proposes to utilize a two-stream structure to capture both time-over-channel and channel-over-time features, and use the multi-scale convolution augmented transformer to capture range-based patterns. Extensive experiments on four real experiment datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Two-Stream Convolution Augmented Transformer for Human Activity Recognition

Image-based virtual try-on aims to synthesize the customer image with an in-shop clothes image to acquire seamless and natural try-on results, which have attracted increasing attentions. The main procedures of image-based virtual try-on usually consist of clothes image generation and try-on image synthesis, whereas prior arts cannot guarantee satisfying clothes results when facing large geometric changes and complex clothes patterns, which further deteriorates the afterwards try-on results. To address this issue, we propose a novel virtual try-on network based on landmark-guided shape matching (LM-VTON). Specifically, the clothes image generation progressively learns the warped clothes and refined clothes in an end-to-end manner, where we introduce a landmark-based constraint in Thin-Plate Spline (TPS) warping to inject finer deformation constraints around the clothes. The try-on process synthesizes the warped clothes with personal characteristics via a semantic indicator. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on two public datasets validate the superiority of the proposed method, especially for challenging cases such as large geometric changes and complex clothes patterns.
Code will be available at https://github.com/lgqfhwy/LM-VTON.

Toward Realistic Virtual Try-On through Landmark Guided Shape Matching

News, as one of the fundamental social media types, typically contains both texts and images. Image selection, which involves choosing appropriate images according to some specified contexts, is crucial for formulating good news. However, it presents two challenges: where to place images and which images to use. The difficulties associated with this where-which problem lie in the fact that news typically contains linguistically rich text that delivers complex information and more than one image. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end two-stage framework to address these issues comprehensively. In the first stage, we identify key information in news by using location embeddings, which represent the local contextual information of each candidate location for image insertion. Then, in the second stage, we thoroughly examine the candidate images and select the most context-related ones to insert into each location identified in the first stage. We also introduce three insertion strategies to formulate different scenarios influencing the image selection procedure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent superiority of the proposed framework in image selection.

News Content Completion with Location-Aware Image Selection

Automatic song writing aims to compose a song (lyric and/or melody) by machine, which is an interesting topic in both academia and industry. In automatic song writing, lyric-to-melody generation and melody-to-lyric generation are two important tasks, both of which usually suffer from the following challenges: 1) the paired lyric and melody data are limited, which affects the generation quality of the two tasks, considering a lot of paired training data are needed due to the weak correlation between lyric and melody; 2) Strict alignments are required between lyric and melody, which relies on specific alignment modeling. In this paper, we propose SongMASS to address the above challenges, which leverages masked sequence to sequence (MASS) pre-training and attention based alignment modeling for lyric-to-melody and melody-to-lyric generation. Specifically, 1) we extend the original sentence-level MASS pre-training to song level to better capture long contextual information in music, and use a separate encoder and decoder for each modality (lyric or melody);  2) we leverage sentence-level attention mask and token-level attention constraint during training to enhance the alignment between lyric and melody. During inference, we use a dynamic programming strategy to obtain the alignment between each word/syllable in lyric and note in melody. We pre-train SongMASS on unpaired lyric and melody datasets, and both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that SongMASS generates lyric and melody with significantly better quality than the baseline method.

SongMASS: Automatic Song Writing with Pre-Training and Alignment Constraint

Question generation is a challenging task and has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Although previous studies have made great progress, there are still two main shortcomings: First, previous work did not simultaneously capture the sequence information and structure information hidden in the context, which results in poor results of the generated questions. Second, the generated questions cannot be answered by the given context. To tackle these issues, we propose an entity guided question generation model with contextual structure information and sequence information capturing. We use a Graph Convolutional Network and a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Network to capture the structure information and sequence information of the context, simultaneously. In addition, to improve the answerability of the generated questions, we use an entity-guided approach to obtain question type from the answer, and jointly encode the answer and question type. Both automatic and manual metrics show that our model can generate comparable questions with state-of-the-art models. Our code is available at https://github.com/VISLANG-Lab/EGSS.

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