United States

Organizations that collect and sell data face increasing scrutiny for the discriminatory use of data. We propose a novel unsupervised approach to map data into a compressed binary representation independent of sensitive attributes. We show that in an information bottleneck framework,  a parsimonious representation should filter out information related to sensitive attributes if they are provided directly to the decoder. Empirical results show that the method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-fairness trade-off  and that explicit control of the entropy of the representation bit stream allows the user to move smoothly and simultaneously along both rate-distortion and rate-fairness curves.

AAAI 2021

Fair Representations by Compression

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. 

technical paper

We introduce a new (Ïµâ‚š, Î´â‚š)-differentially private algorithm for the k-means clustering problem. Given a dataset in Euclidean space, the k-means clustering problem requires one to find k points in that space such that the sum of squares of Euclidean distances between each data point and its closest respective point among the k returned is minimised. Although there exist privacy-preserving methods with good theoretical guarantees to solve this problem, in practice it is seen that it is the additive error which dictates the practical performance of these methods. By reducing the problem to a sequence of instances of maximum coverage on a grid, we are able to derive a new method that achieves lower additive error than previous works. For input datasets with cardinality n and diameter Î”, our algorithm has an O(Î”Â² (k logÂ² n  log(1/Î´â‚š)/Ïµâ‚š + k âˆš(d log(1/Î´â‚š))/Ïµâ‚š)) additive error whilst maintaining constant multiplicative error. We conclude with some experiments and find an improvement over previously implemented work for this problem.

Differentially Private k-Means via Exponential Mechanism and Max Cover

We study the complexity of determining a winning committee under the Chamberlin-Courant voting rule when voters' preferences are single-crossing on a line, or, more generally, on a tree. For the line, Skowron et al. (2015) describe an O(n^2mk) algorithm (where n, m, k are the number of voters, the number of candidates and the committee size, respectively); we show that a simple tweak improves the time complexity to O(nmk). We then improve this bound for k=Î©(log n) by reducing our problem to the k-link path problem for DAGs with concave Monge weights, obtaining a nm2^O(âˆš(log k log log n)) algorithm for the general case and a nearly linear algorithm for the Borda misrepresentation function. For trees, we point out an issue with the algorithm proposed by Clearwater, Puppe and Slinko (2015), and develop a O(nmk) algorithm for this case as well.

Proportional Representation under Single-Crossing Preferences Revisited

This paper introduces CloudLSTM, a new branch of recurrent neural models tailored to forecasting over data streams generated by geospatial point-cloud sources. We design a Dynamic Point-cloud Convolution (DConv) operator as the core component of CloudLSTMs, which performs convolution directly over point-clouds and extracts local spatial features from sets of neighboring points that surround different elements of the input. This operator maintains the permutation invariance of sequence-to-sequence learning frameworks, while representing neighboring correlations at each time step -- an important aspect in spatiotemporal predictive learning. The DConv operator resolves the grid-structural data requirements of existing spatiotemporal forecasting models and can be easily plugged into traditional LSTM architectures with sequence-to-sequence learning and attention mechanisms. We apply our proposed architecture to two representative, practical use cases that involve point-cloud streams, i.e. mobile service traffic forecasting and air quality indicator forecasting. Our results, obtained with real-world datasets collected in diverse scenarios for each use case, show that CloudLSTM delivers accurate long-term predictions, outperforming a variety of competitor neural network models.

CloudLSTM: A Recurrent Neural Model for Spatiotemporal Point-Cloud Stream Forecasting

We propose to study Automating Science Journalism (ASJ), the process of producing a layman's terms summary of a research article, as a new benchmark for long neural abstractive summarization and story generation. Automating science journalism is a challenging task as it requires paraphrasing complex scientific concepts to be grasped by the general public. Thus, we create a specialized dataset that contains scientific papers and their Science Daily press releases. We demonstrate numerous sequence to sequence (seq2seq) applications using Science Daily with the aim of facilitating further research on language generation, which requires extreme paraphrasing and coping with long research articles. We further improve the quality of the press releases using co-training with scientific abstracts of sources or partitioned press releases. Finally, we apply evaluation measures beyond ROUGE and we demonstrate improved performance for our method over strong baselines, which we further confirm by quantitative and qualitative evaluation.

We Can Explain Your Research in Layman's Terms: Towards Automating Science Journalism at Scale

We propose a new framework to learn non-parametric graphical models from continuous observational data.
Our method is based on concepts from information theory in order to discover independences and causality between variables: the conditional and multivariate mutual information (such as \cite{verny2017learning} for discrete models).
To estimate these quantities, we propose non-parametric estimators relying on the Bernstein copula and that are constructed by exploiting the relation between the mutual information and the copula entropy \cite{ma2011mutual, belalia2017testing}.
To our knowledge, this relation is only documented for the bivariate case and, for the need of our algorithms, is here extended to the conditional and multivariate mutual information. This framework leads to a new algorithm to learn continuous non-parametric Bayesian network. Moreover, we use this estimator to 
speed up the BIC algorithm proposed in \cite{elidan2010copula} by taking advantage of the decomposition of the likelihood function in a sum of mutual 
information \cite{koller2009probabilistic}. Finally, our method is compared in terms of performances and complexity with other state of the art techniques to learn Copula Bayesian Networks and shows superior results. In particular, it needs less data to recover the true structure and generalizes better on data that are not sampled from Gaussian distributions.

Learning Continuous High-Dimensional Models Using Mutual Information and Copula Bayesian Networks

Discourse information, as postulated by popular discourse theories, such as RST and PDTB, has been shown to improve an increasing number of downstream NLP tasks, showing positive effects and synergies of discourse with important real-world applications. While methods for incorporating discourse become more and more sophisticated, the growing need for robust and general discourse structures has not been sufficiently met by current discourse parsers, usually trained on small scale datasets in a strictly limited number of domains. This makes the prediction for arbitrary tasks noisy and unreliable. The overall resulting lack of high-quality, high-quantity discourse trees poses a severe limitation to further progress. 
In order the alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a new strategy to generate tree structures in a task-agnostic, unsupervised fashion by extending a latent tree induction framework with an auto-encoding objective. The proposed approach can be applied to any tree-structured objective, such as syntactic parsing, discourse parsing and others. However, due to the especially difficult annotation process to generate discourse trees, we initially develop a method to generate larger and more diverse discourse treebanks. In this paper we are inferring general tree structures of natural text in multiple domains, showing promising results on a diverse set of tasks.

Unsupervised Learning of Discourse Structures Using a Tree Autoencoder

Spurious correlations threaten the validity of statistical classifiers. While model accuracy may appear high when the test data is from the same distribution as the training data, it can quickly degrade when the test distribution changes. For example, it has been shown that classifiers perform poorly when humans make minor modifications to change the label of an example. One solution to increase model reliability and generalizability is to identify causal associations between features and classes. In this paper, we propose to train a robust text classifier by augmenting the training data with automatically generated counterfactual data. We first identify likely causal features using a statistical matching approach. Next, we generate counterfactual samples for the original training data by substituting causal features with their antonyms and then assigning opposite labels to the counterfactual samples. Finally, we combine the original data and counterfactual data to train a robust classifier. Experiments on two classification tasks show that a traditional classifier trained on the original data does very poorly on human-generated counterfactual samples (e.g., 10%-37% drop in accuracy). However, the classifier trained on the combined data is more robust and performs well on both the original test data and the counterfactual test data (e.g., 12%-25% increase in accuracy compared with the traditional classifier). Detailed analysis shows that the robust classifier makes meaningful and trustworthy predictions by emphasizing causal features and de-emphasizing non-causal features.

Robustness to Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via Automatically Generated Counterfactuals

Portfolio-based algorithm selection has seen tremendous practical success over the past two decades. This algorithm configuration procedure works by first selecting a portfolio of diverse algorithm parameter settings, and then, on a given problem instance, using an algorithm selector to choose a parameter setting from the portfolio with strong predicted performance. Oftentimes, both the portfolio and the algorithm selector are chosen using a training set of typical problem instances from the application domain at hand. In this paper, we provide the first provable guarantees for portfolio-based algorithm selection. We analyze how large the training set should be to ensure that the resulting algorithm selector's average performance over the training set is close to its future (expected) performance. This involves analyzing three key reasons why these two quantities may diverge: 1) the learning-theoretic complexity of the algorithm selector, 2) the size of the portfolio, and 3) the learning-theoretic complexity of the algorithm's performance as a function of its parameters. We introduce an end-to-end learning-theoretic analysis of the portfolio construction and algorithm selection together. We prove that if the portfolio is large, overfitting is inevitable, even with an extremely simple algorithm selector. With experiments, we illustrate a tradeoff exposed by our theoretical analysis: as we increase the portfolio size, we can hope to include a well-suited parameter setting for every possible problem instance, but it becomes impossible to avoid overfitting.

Generalization in Portfolio-Based Algorithm Selection

Weakly supervised temporal action localization is a challenging vision task due to the absence of ground-truth temporal locations of actions in the training videos. With only video-level supervision during training, most existing methods rely on a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework to predict the start and end frame of each action category in a video. However, the existing MIL-based approach has a major limitation of only capturing the most discriminative frames of an action, ignoring the full extent of an activity. Moreover, these methods  cannot model background activity effectively, which plays an important role in localizing foreground activities. In this paper, we present a novel framework named HAM-Net with a hybrid attention mechanism which includes temporal soft, semi-soft and hard attentions to address these issues. Our temporal soft attention module, guided by an auxiliary background class in the classification module, models the background activity by introducing an ``action-ness'' score for each video snippet. Moreover, our temporal semi-soft and hard attention modules, calculating two attention scores for each video snippet, help to focus on the less discriminative frames of an action to capture the full action boundary. Our proposed approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods by at least 2.2% mAP at IoU threshold 0.5 on the THUMOS14 dataset, and by at least 1.3% mAP at IoU threshold 0.75 on the ActivityNet1.2 dataset.

A Hybrid Attention Mechanism for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

It is highly desirable yet challenging to generate image captions that can describe novel objects which are unseen in caption-labeled training data, a capability that is evaluated in the novel object captioning challenge (nocaps). In this challenge, no additional image-caption training data, other than COCO Captions, is allowed for model training. Thus, conventional Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) methods cannot be applied. This paper presents VIsual VOcabulary pre-training (VIVO) that performs pre-training in the absence of caption annotations. By breaking the dependency of paired image-caption training data in VLP, VIVO can leverage large amounts of paired image-tag data to learn a visual vocabulary. This is done by pre-training a multi-layer Transformer model that learns to align image-level tags with their corresponding image region features. To address the unordered nature of image tags, VIVO uses a Hungarian matching loss with masked tag prediction to conduct pre-training.

We validate the effectiveness of VIVO by fine-tuning the pre-trained model for image captioning. In addition, we perform an analysis of the visual-text alignment inferred by our model. The results show that our model can not only generate fluent image captions that describe novel objects, but also identify the locations of these objects. Our single model has achieved new state-of-the-art results on nocaps and surpassed the human CIDEr score.

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