To many consumers, buying life insurance can be painful. Despite insurance companies' substantial investments over the past several years in digitizing customer onboarding and policy binding, progress has been slow and incremental and, for many companies, has fallen short of expectations. Many companies have failed to meaningfully scale their efforts to modernize underwriting. The recent COVID-19 lockdowns and ongoing physical-distancing protocols reinforce the need to rethink underwriting. More than ever, insurance companies must address customer and agent frustration with the still lengthy, high-touch, manual process. With COVID-19, paramedic home visits to conduct medical exams have become highly undesirable--especially for a "pushed" product that is not immediately crucial to the customer. In this environment, risk assessment must shift toward more remote, data-driven models, while distribution must shift from in-person interactions to more online interactions.

Sparsity of formal knowledge and roughness of non-ontological construction make sparsity problem particularly prominent in Open Knowledge Graphs (OpenKGs). Due to sparse links, learning effective representation for few-shot entities becomes difficult. We hypothesize that by introducing negative samples, a contrastive learning (CL) formulation could be beneficial in such scenarios. However, existing CL methods model KG triplets as binary objects of entities ignoring the relation-guided ternary propagation patterns and they are too generic, i.e., they ignore zero-shot, few-shot and synonymity problems that appear in OpenKGs. To address this, we propose TernaryCL, a CL framework based on ternary propagation patterns among head, relation and tail. TernaryCL designs Contrastive Entity and Contrastive Relation to mine ternary discriminative features with both negative entities and relations, introduces Contrastive Self to help zero- and few-shot entities learn discriminative features, Contrastive Synonym to model synonymous entities, and Contrastive Fusion to aggregate graph features from multiple paths. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of TernaryCL over state-of-the-art models.

We propose Okapi, a simple, efficient, and general method for robust semi-supervised learning based on online statistical matching. Our method uses a nearest-neighbours-based matching procedure to generate cross-domain views for a consistency loss, while eliminating statistical outliers. In order to perform the online matching in a runtime- and memory-efficient way, we draw upon the self-supervised literature and combine a memory bank with a slow-moving momentum encoder. The consistency loss is applied within the feature space, rather than on the predictive distribution, making the method agnostic to both the modality and the task in question. We experiment on the WILDS 2.0 datasets Sagawa et al., which significantly expands the range of modalities, applications, and shifts available for studying and benchmarking real-world unsupervised adaptation. Contrary to Sagawa et al., we show that it is in fact possible to leverage additional unlabelled data to improve upon empirical risk minimisation (ERM) results with the right method. Our method outperforms the baseline methods in terms of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation on the iWildCam (a multi-class classification task) and PovertyMap (a regression task) image datasets as well as the CivilComments (a binary classification task) text dataset. Furthermore, from a qualitative perspective, we show the matches obtained from the learned encoder are strongly semantically related. Code for our paper is publicly available at https://github.com/wearepal/okapi/.

Current abstractive summarization systems present important weaknesses which prevent their deployment in real-world applications, such as the omission of relevant information and the generation of factual inconsistencies (also known as hallucinations). At the same time, automatic evaluation metrics such as CTC scores have been recently proposed that exhibit a higher correlation with human judgments than traditional lexical-overlap metrics such as ROUGE. In this work, we intend to close the loop by leveraging the recent advances in summarization metrics to create quality-aware abstractive summarizers. Namely, we propose an energy-based model that learns to re-rank summaries according to one or a combination of these metrics. We experiment using several metrics to train our energy-based re-ranker and show that it consistently improves the scores achieved by the predicted summaries. Nonetheless, human evaluation results show that the re-ranking approach should be used with care for highly abstractive summaries, as the available metrics are not yet sufficiently reliable for this purpose.

Nonnegative Tucker Factorization (NTF) minimizes the euclidean distance or Kullback-Leibler divergence between the original data and its low-rank approximation which often suffers from grossly corruptions or outliers and the neglect of manifold structures of data. In particular, NTF suffers from rotational ambiguity, whose solutions with and without rotation transformations are equally in the sense of yielding the maximum likelihood. In this paper, we propose three Robust Manifold NTF algorithms to handle outliers by incorporating structural knowledge about the outliers. They first applies a half-quadratic optimization algorithm to transform the problem into a general weighted NTF where the weights are influenced by the outliers. Then, we introduce the correntropy induced metric, Huber function and Cauchy function for weights respectively, to handle the outliers. Finally, we introduce a manifold regularization to overcome the rotational ambiguity of NTF. We have compared the proposed method with a number of representative references covering major branches of NTF on a variety of real-world image databases. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under two evaluation metrics (accuracy and nmi).

Fighting online hate speech is a challenge that is usually addressed using Natural Language Processing via automatic detection and removal of hate content. Besides this approach, counter narratives have emerged as an effective tool employed by NGOs to respond to online hate on social media platforms. For this reason, Natural Language Generation is currently being studied as a way to automatize counter narrative writing. However, the existing resources necessary to train NLG models are limited to 2-turn interactions (a hate speech and a counter narrative as response), while in real life, interactions can consist of multiple turns. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for dialogical data collection, which combines the intervention of human expert annotators over machine generated dialogues obtained using 19 different configurations. The result of this work is DIALOCONAN, the first dataset comprising over 3000 fictitious multi-turn dialogues between a hater and an NGO operator, covering 6 targets of hate.

Subject to the huge semantic gap between natural and formal languages, neural semantic parsing is typically bottlenecked by its complexity of dealing with both input semantics and output syntax. Recent works have proposed several forms of supplementary supervision but none is generalized across multiple formal languages. This paper proposes a unified intermediate representation (IR) for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR. It has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. Therefore, a neural semantic parser can more precisely convert user queries into GraphQ IR, which can be later losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks including KQA Pro, Overnight, GrailQA, and MetaQA-Cypher under standard i.i.d., out-of-distribution, and low-resource settings validate GraphQ IR's superiority over the previous state-of-the-arts with a maximum 11% accuracy improvement.

Videos often capture objects, their visible properties, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. Objects also have physical properties such as mass, which the imaging pipeline is unable to directly capture. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relative object motion and the dynamics introduced by collisions. In this paper, we introduce CRIPP-VQA, a new video question answering dataset for reasoning about the implicit physical properties of objects in a scene. CRIPP-VQA contains videos of objects in motion, annotated with questions that involve counterfactual reasoning about the effect of actions, questions about planning in order to reach a goal, and descriptive questions about visible properties of objects. The CRIPP-VQA test set enables evaluation under several out-of-distribution settings -- videos with objects with masses, coefficients of friction, and initial velocities that are not observed in the training distribution. Our experiments reveal a surprising and significant performance gap in terms of answering questions about implicit properties (the focus of this paper) and explicit properties of objects (the focus of prior work).

CLIP yielded impressive results on zero-shot transfer learning tasks and is considered as a foundation model like BERT or GPT3. CLIP vision models that have a rich representation are pre-trained using the InfoNCE objective and natural language supervision before they are fine-tuned on particular tasks. Though CLIP excels at zero-shot transfer learning, it suffers from an explaining away problem, that is, it focuses on one or few features, while neglecting other relevant features. This problem is caused by insufficiently extracting the covariance structure in the original multi-modal data. We suggest to use modern Hopfield networks to tackle the problem of explaining away. Their retrieved embeddings have an enriched covariance structure derived from co-occurrences of features in the stored embeddings. However, modern Hopfield networks increase the saturation effect of the InfoNCE objective which hampers learning. We propose to use the InfoLOOB objective to mitigate this saturation effect. We introduce the novel "Contrastive Leave One Out Boost" (CLOOB), which uses modern Hopfield networks for covariance enrichment together with the InfoLOOB objective. In experiments we compare CLOOB to CLIP after pre-training on the Conceptual Captions and the YFCC dataset with respect to their zero-shot transfer learning performance on other datasets. CLOOB consistently outperforms CLIP at zero-shot transfer learning across all considered architectures and datasets.

Recently, discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), attributed to their comparable performance to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, while being more interpretable in their predictions. In this paper, we develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity, which learns a shared latent space for sentence-pair representation via vector quantization. Compared with previous models limited to local semantic contexts, our model can explore richer semantic information via topic modeling. We further boost the performance of semantic similarity by injecting the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model with a well-designed semantic-driven attention mechanism. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments across various English language datasets, that our model is able to surpass several strong neural baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.