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We present a dataset and classifier for detecting the language of white supremacist extremism, a growing issue in online hate speech. Our weakly supervised classifier is trained on large datasets of text from explicitly white supremacist domains paired with neutral and anti-racist data from similar domains. We demonstrate that this approach improves generalization performance to new domains. Incorporating anti-racist texts as counterexamples to white supremacist language mitigates bias.

Snapshot observation based source localization has been widely studied due to its accessibility and low cost. However, the interaction of users in existing methods does not be addressed in time-varying infection scenarios. So these methods have a decreased accuracy in heterogeneous interaction scenarios. To solve this critical issue, this paper proposes a sequence-to-sequence based localization framework called Temporal-sequence based Graph Attention Source Identification (TGASI) based on an inductive learning idea. More specifically, the encoder focuses on generating multiple features by estimating the influence probability between two users, and the decoder distinguishes the importance of prediction sources in different timestamps by a designed temporal attention mechanism. It's worth mentioning that the inductive learning idea ensures that TGASI can detect the sources in new scenarios without knowing other prior knowledge, which proves the scalability of TGASI. Comprehensive experiments with the SOTA methods demonstrate the higher detection performance and scalability in different scenarios of TGASI.

Feature interactions can play a crucial role in recommendation systems as they capture complex relationships between user preferences and item characteristics. Existing methods such as Deep & Cross Network (DCNv2) may suffer from high computational requirements due to their cross-layer operations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called blockwise feature interaction (BFI) to help alleviate this issue. By partitioning the feature interaction process into smaller blocks, we can significantly reduce both the memory footprint and the computational burden. Four variants (denoted by P, Q, T, S, respectively) of BFI have been developed and empirically compared. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieves close accuracy compared to the standard DCNv2, while greatly reducing the computational overhead and the number of parameters. This paper contributes to the development of efficient recommendation systems by providing a practical solution for improving feature interaction efficiency.

In this paper, we explore the new design space of extra-linguistic cues inspired by graphical tropes used in graphic novels and animation to enhance the expressiveness of social robots. To achieve this, we identified a set of cues that can be used to generate expressions, including smoke/steam/fog, water droplets, and bubbles. We prototyped devices that can generate these fluid expressions for a robot and conducted design sessions where eight designers explored the use and utility of the cues in conveying the robot's internal states in various design scenarios. Our analysis of the 22 designs, the associated design justifications, and the interviews with designers revealed patterns in how each cue was used, how they were combined with nonverbal cues, and where the participants drew their inspiration from. These findings informed the design of an integrated module called EmoPack, which can be used to augment the expressive capabilities of any robot platform.

Recent deep learning models can efficiently combine inputs from different modalities (e.g., images and text) and learn to align their latent representations, or to translate signals from one domain to another (as in image captioning, or text-to-image generation). However, current approaches mainly rely on brute-force supervised training over large multimodal datasets. In contrast, humans (and other animals) can learn useful multimodal representations from only sparse experience with matched cross-modal data. Here we evaluate the capabilities of a neural network architecture inspired by the cognitive notion of a "Global Workspace": a shared representation for two (or more) input modalities. Each modality is processed by a specialized system (pretrained on unimodal data, and subsequently frozen). The corresponding latent representations are then encoded to and decoded from a single shared workspace. Importantly, this architecture is amenable to self-supervised training via cycle-consistency: encoding-decoding sequences should approximate the identity function. For various pairings of vision-language modalities and across two datasets of varying complexity, we show that such an architecture can be trained to align and translate between two modalities with very little need for matched data (from 4 to 7 times less than a fully supervised approach). The global workspace representation can be used advantageously for downstream classification tasks and for robust transfer learning. Ablation studies reveal that both the shared workspace and the self-supervised cycle-consistency training are critical to the system's performance.

On December 7, 2020, Ghanaians participated in the polls to determine their president for the next four years. To gain insights from this presidential election, we conducted stance analysis (which is not always equivalent to sentiment analysis) to understand how Twitter, a popular social media platform, reflected the opinions of its users regarding the two main presidential candidates. We collected a total of 99,356 tweets using the Twitter API (Tweepy) and manually annotated 3,090 tweets into three classes: Against, Neutral, and Support. We then performed preprocessing on the tweets. The resulting dataset was evaluated using two lexicon-based approaches, VADER and TextBlob, as well as five supervised machine learning-based approaches: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Multinomial Na\"ive Bayes (MNB), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and Random Forest (RF), based on metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The best performance was achieved by Logistic Regression with an accuracy of 71.13%. We utilized Logistic Regression to classify all the extracted tweets and subsequently conducted an analysis and discussion of the results. For access to our data and code, please visit: https://github.com/ShesterG/Stance-Detection-Ghana-2020-Elections.git

This paper studies the relationship between a graph neural network (GNN) and a manifold neural network (MNN) when the graph is constructed from a set of points sampled from the manifold, thus encoding geometric information. We consider convolutional MNNs and GNNs where the manifold and the graph convolutions are respectively defined in terms of the Laplace-Beltrami operator and the graph Laplacian. Using the appropriate kernels, we analyze both dense and moderately sparse graphs. We prove non-asymptotic error bounds showing that convolutional filters and neural networks on these graphs converge to convolutional filters and neural networks on the continuous manifold. As a byproduct of this analysis, we observe an important trade-off between the discriminability of graph filters and their ability to approximate the desired behavior of manifold filters. We then discuss how this trade-off is ameliorated in neural networks due to the frequency mixing property of nonlinearities. We further derive a transferability corollary for geometric graphs sampled from the same manifold. We validate our results numerically on a navigation control problem and a point cloud classification task.

Catastrophic forgetting has been a major challenge in continual learning, where the model needs to learn new tasks with limited or no access to data from previously seen tasks. To tackle this challenge, methods based on knowledge distillation in feature space have been proposed and shown to reduce forgetting. However, most feature distillation methods directly constrain the new features to match the old ones, overlooking the need for plasticity. To achieve a better stability-plasticity trade-off, we propose Backward Feature Projection (BFP), a method for continual learning that allows the new features to change up to a learnable linear transformation of the old features. BFP preserves the linear separability of the old classes while allowing the emergence of new feature directions to accommodate new classes. BFP can be integrated with existing experience replay methods and boost performance by a significant margin. We also demonstrate that BFP helps learn a better representation space, in which linear separability is well preserved during continual learning and linear probing achieves high classification accuracy. The code can be found at https://github.com/rvl-lab-utoronto/BFP

We propose and analyze an approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for the matrix tensor product model, which is a generalization of the standard spiked matrix models that allows for multiple types of pairwise observations over a collection of latent variables. A key innovation for this algorithm is a method for optimally weighing and combining multiple estimates in each iteration. Building upon an AMP convergence theorem for non-separable functions, we prove a state evolution for non-separable functions that provides an asymptotically exact description of its performance in the high-dimensional limit. We leverage this state evolution result to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for recovery of the signal of interest. Such conditions depend on the singular values of a linear operator derived from an appropriate generalization of a signal-to-noise ratio for our model. Our results recover as special cases a number of recently proposed methods for contextual models (e.g., covariate assisted clustering) as well as inhomogeneous noise models.