United States

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are a special form of data annotation in which annotators identify rationales (most significant text tokens) when assigning labels to data instances, and write out explanations for the labels in natural language based on the rationales. NLEs have been shown to capture human reasoning better, but not as beneficial for natural language inference (NLI). In this paper, we analyze two primary flaws in the way NLEs are currently used to train explanation generators for language inference tasks. We find that the explanation generators do not take into account the variability inherent in human explanation of labels, and that the current explanation generation models generate spurious explanations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework, LIREx, that incorporates both a rationale-enabled explanation generator and an instance selector to select only relevant, plausible NLEs to augment NLI models. When evaluated on the standardized SNLI data set, LIREx achieved an accuracy of 91.87%, an improvement of 0.32 over the baseline and matching the best-reported performance on the data set. It also achieves significantly better performance than previous studies when transferred to the out-of-domain MultiNLI data set. Qualitative analysis shows that LIREx generates flexible, faithful, and relevant NLEs that allow the model to be more robust to spurious explanations. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaoxy92/LIREx.

AAAI 2021

LIREx: Augmenting Language Inference with Relevant Explanations

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EMNLP 2022

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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. 

Machine learning (ML) is ubiquitous in modern life. Since it is being deployed in technologies that affect our privacy and safety, it is often crucial to understand the reasoning behind its decisions, warranting the need for explainable AI. Rule-based models, such as decision trees, decision lists, and decision sets, are conventionally deemed to be the most interpretable. Recent work uses propositional satisfiability (SAT) solving (and its optimization variants) to generate minimum-size decision sets. Motivated by limited practical scalability of these earlier methods, this paper proposes a novel approach to learn minimum-size decision sets by enumerating individual rules of the target decision set independently of each other, and then solving a set cover problem to select a subset of rules. The approach makes use of modern maximum satisfiability and integer linear programming technologies. Experiments on a wide range of publicly available datasets demonstrate the advantage of the new approach over the state of the art in SAT-based decision set learning.

A Scalable Two Stage Approach to Computing Optimal Decision Sets

Mathematical modeling is a standard approach to solve many real-world problems and diversity of solutions is an important issue, emerging in applying solutions obtained from mathematical models to real-world problems. Many studies have been devoted to finding diverse solutions. Baste et al. (Algorithms 2019, IJCAI 2020) recently initiated the study of computing diverse solutions of combinatorial problems from the perspective of fixed-parameter tractability. They considered problems of finding r solutions that maximize some diversity measures (the minimum or sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them) and gave some fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for the diverse version of several well-known problems, such as Vertex Cover, Feedback Vertex Set, d-Hitting Set}, and problems on bounded-treewidth graphs. In this work, we further investigate the (fixed-parameter) tractability of problems of finding diverse spanning trees, paths, and several subgraphs. In particular, we show that, given a graph G and an integer r, the problem of computing r spanning trees of G maximizing the sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them can be solved in polynomial time.  To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first polynomial-time solvable case for finding diverse solutions of unbounded size.

Finding Diverse Trees, Paths, and More

In multi-event survival analysis, one aims to predict the probability of multiple different events occurring over some time horizon. One typically assumes that the timing of events is drawn from some distribution conditioned on an individual's covariates. However, during training, one does not have access to this distribution, and the natural variation in the observed event times makes the task of survival prediction challenging, on top of the potential interdependence among events. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach for multi-event survival analysis that models the probability of event occurrence hierarchically at different time scales, using coarse predictions (e.g., monthly predictions) to iteratively guide predictions at finer and finer grained time scales (e.g., daily predictions). We evaluate the proposed approach across several publicly available datasets in terms of both intra-event, inter-individual (global) and intra-individual, inter-event (local) consistency. We show that the proposed method consistently outperforms well-accepted and commonly used approaches to multi-event survival analysis. When estimating survival curves for Alzheimer's disease and mortality, our approach achieves a C-index of 0.91 (95% CI 0.88-0.93) and a local consistency score of 0.97 (95% CI 0.94-0.98) compared to a C-index of 0.75 (95% CI 0.70-0.80) and a local consistency score of 0.94 (95% CI 0.91-0.97) when modeling each event separately. Overall, our approach improves the accuracy of survival predictions by iteratively reducing the original task to a set of nested, simpler subtasks.

A Hierarchical Approach to Multi-Event Survival Analysis

Recent research has pointed to a limitation of word-level neural language models with softmax outputs. This limitation, known as the softmax bottleneck refers to the inability of these models to produce high-rank log probability (log P) matrices. Various solutions have been proposed to break this bottleneck, including Mixture of Softmaxes, SigSoftmax, and Linear Monotonic Softmax with Piecewise Linear Increasing Functions. They were reported to offer better performance in terms of perplexity on test data. A natural perception from these results is a strong positive correlation between the rank of the log P matrix and the model's performance. In this work, we show via an extensive empirical study that such a correlation is fairly weak and that the high-rank of the log P matrix is neither necessary nor sufficient for better test perplexity. Although our results are empirical, they are established in part via the construction of a rich family of models, which we call Generalized SigSoftmax. They are able to create diverse ranks for the log P matrices. We also present an investigation as to why the proposed solutions achieve better performance.

On the Softmax Bottleneck of Recurrent Language Models

Knowledge distillation is considered as a training and compression strategy in which two neural networks, namely a teacher and a student, are coupled together during training. The teacher network is supposed to be a trustworthy predictor and the student tries to mimic its predictions. Usually, a student with a lighter architecture is selected so we can achieve compression and yet deliver high-quality results. In such a setting, distillation only happens for final predictions whereas the student could also benefit from teacherâ€™s supervision for internal components.

Motivated by this, we studied the problem of distillation for intermediate layers. Since there might not be a one-to-one alignment between student and teacher layers, existing techniques skip some teacher layers and only distill from a subset of them. This shortcoming directly impacts quality, so we instead propose a combinatorial technique which relies on attention. Our model fuses teacher-side information and takes each layerâ€™s significance into consideration, then it performs distillation between combined teacher layers and those of the student. Using our technique, we distilled a 12-layer BERT (Devlin et al. 2019) into 6-, 4-, and 2-layer counterparts and evaluated them on GLUE tasks (Wang et al. 2018). Experimental results show that our combinatorial approach is able to outperform other existing techniques.

ALP-KD: Attention-Based Layer Projection for Knowledge Distillation

Large capacity machine learning (ML) models are prone to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether the target sample is a member of the target model's training dataset. The serious privacy concerns due to the membership inference have motivated multiple defenses against MIAs, e.g., differential privacy and adversarial regularization. Unfortunately, these defenses produce ML models with unacceptably low classification performances.

Our work proposes a new defense, called distillation for membership privacy (DMP), against MIAs that preserves the utility of the resulting models significantly better than prior defenses.  DMP leverages knowledge distillation to train ML models with membership privacy. We provide a novel criterion to tune the data used for knowledge transfer in order to amplify the membership privacy of DMP.

Our extensive evaluation shows that DMP provides significantly better tradeoffs between membership privacy and classification accuracies compared to state-of-the-art MIA defenses. For instance, DMP achieves ~100% accuracy improvement over adversarial regularization for DenseNet trained on CIFAR100, for similar membership privacy (measured using MIA risk): when the MIA risk is 53.7%, adversarially regularized DenseNet is 33.6% accurate, while DMP-trained DenseNet is 65.3% accurate. We have released our code at github.com/vrt1shjwlkr/AAAI21-MIA-Defense.

Membership Privacy for Machine Learning Models through Knowledge Transfer

Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation has been intensively studied due to the low cost of the pixel-level annotation for synthetic data. The most common approaches try to generate images or features mimicking the distribution in the target domain while preserving the semantic contents in the source domain so that a model can be trained with annotations from the latter. However, such methods highly rely on an image translator or feature extractor trained in an elaborated mechanism including adversarial training, which brings in extra complexity and instability in the adaptation process. Furthermore, these methods mainly focus on taking advantage of the labeled source dataset, leaving the unlabeled target dataset not fully utilized. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional style-induced domain adaptation method, called BiSIDA, that employs consistency regularization to efficiently exploit information from the unlabeled target domain dataset, requiring only a simple neural style transfer model. BiSIDA aligns domains by not only transferring source images into the style of target images but also transferring target images into the style of source images to perform high-dimensional perturbation on the unlabeled target images, which is crucial to the success in applying consistency regularization in segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments show that our BiSIDA achieves new state-of-the-art on two commonly-used synthetic-to-real domain adaptation benchmarks: GTA5-to-CityScapes and SYNTHIA-to-CityScapes. Code and pretrained style transfer model are available at: https://github.com/wangkaihong/BiSIDA.

Consistency Regularization with High-Dimensional Non-Adversarial Source-Guided Perturbation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Segmentation

Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is a central problem in Auction Design. Theoretical approaches to the problem have hit some limits in the past decades and analytical solutions are known for only a few simple settings. Computational approaches to the problem through the use of LPs  have their own set of limitations. Building on the success of deep learning, a new approach was recently proposed by  Duetting et al. (2019) in which the auction is modeled by a feed-forward neural network and the design problem is framed as a learning problem. The neural architectures used in that work are general purpose and do not take advantage of any of the symmetries the problem could present, such as permutation equivariance. In this work, we consider auction design problems that have permutation-equivariant symmetry and construct a neural architecture that is capable of perfectly recovering the permutation-equivariant optimal mechanism, which we show is not possible with the previous architecture. We demonstrate that permutation-equivariant architectures are not only capable of recovering previous results, they also have better generalization properties.

A Permutation-Equivariant Neural Network Architecture for Auction Design

This paper focuses on a core task in computational sustainability and statistical ecology: species distribution modeling (SDM). In SDM, the occurrence pattern of a species on a landscape is predicted by environmental features based on observations at a set of locations. At first, SDM may appear to be a binary classification problem, and one might be inclined to employ classic tools (e.g., logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks) to tackle it. However, wildlife surveys introduce structured noise (especially under-counting) in the species observations. If unaccounted for, these observation errors systematically bias SDMs. To address the unique challenges of SDM, this paper proposes a framework called StatEcoNet. Specifically, this work employs a graphical generative model in statistical ecology to serve as the skeleton of the proposed computational framework and carefully integrates neural networks under the framework. The advantages of StatEcoNet over related approaches are demonstrated on simulated datasets as well as bird species data. Since SDMs are critical tools for ecological science and natural resource management, StatEcoNet may offer boosted computational and analytical powers to a wide range of applications that have significant social impacts, e.g., the study and conservation of threatened species.

StatEcoNet: Statistical Ecology Neural Networks for Species Distribution Modeling

Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models' propensity to "hallucinate" facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.

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