Several studies have compared the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of models in computer vision and NLP. They report a frequent positive correlation and some surprisingly never even observe an inverse correlation indicative of a necessary trade-off. The possibility of inverse patterns is important to determine whether ID performance can serve as a proxy for OOD generalization capabilities. This paper shows with multiple datasets that inverse correlations between ID and OOD performance do happen in real-world data - not only in theoretical worst-case settings. We also explain theoretically how these cases can arise even in a minimal linear setting, and why past studies could miss such cases due to a biased selection of models. Our observations lead to recommendations that contradict those found in much of the current literature. - High OOD performance sometimes requires trading off ID performance. - Focusing on ID performance alone may not lead to optimal OOD performance. It may produce diminishing (eventually negative) returns in OOD performance. - In these cases, studies on OOD generalization that use ID performance for model selection (a common recommended practice) will necessarily miss the best-performing models, making these studies blind to a whole range of phenomena.

Breakthroughs in deep learning and memory networks have made major advances in natural language understanding. Language is sequential and information carried through the sequence can be captured through memory networks. Learning the sequence is one of the key aspects in learning the language. However, memory networks are not capable of holding infinitely long sequences in their memories and are limited by various constraints such as the vanishing or exploding gradient problem. Therefore, natural language understanding models are affected when presented with long sequential text. We introduce Long Term Memory network (LTM) to learn from infinitely long sequences. LTM gives priority to the current inputs to allow it to have a high impact. Language modeling is an important factor in natural language understanding. LTM was tested in language modeling, which requires long term memory. LTM is tested on Penn Tree bank dataset, Google Billion Word dataset and WikiText-2 dataset. We compare LTM with other language models which require long term memory.

Users' physical safety is an increasing concern as the market for intelligent systems continues to grow, where unconstrained systems may recommend users dangerous actions that can lead to serious injury. Covertly unsafe text is an area of particular interest, as such text may arise from everyday scenarios and are challenging to detect as harmful. We propose FARM, a novel framework leveraging external knowledge for trustworthy rationale generation in the context of safety. In particular, FARM foveates on missing knowledge to qualify the information required to reason in specific scenarios and retrieves this information with attribution to trustworthy sources. This knowledge is used to both classify the safety of the original text and generate human-interpretable rationales, shedding light on the risk of systems to specific user groups and helping both stakeholders manage the risks of their systems and policymakers to provide concrete safeguards for consumer safety. Our experiments show that FARM obtains state-of-the-art results on the SafeText dataset, showing absolute improvement in safety classification accuracy by 5.9%.

Speech super-resolution (SSR) aims to recover a high resolution (HR) speech from its corresponding low resolution (LR) counterpart. Recent SSR methods focus more on the reconstruction of the magnitude spectrogram, ignoring the importance of phase reconstruction, thereby limiting the recovery quality. To address this issue, we propose mdctGAN, a novel SSR framework based on modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT). By adversarial learning in the MDCT domain, our method reconstructs HR speeches in a phase-aware manner without vocoders or additional post-processing. Furthermore, by learning frequency consistent features with self-attentive mechanism, mdctGAN guarantees a high quality speech reconstruction. For VCTK corpus dataset, the experiment results show that our model produces natural auditory quality with high MOS and PESQ scores. It also achieves the state-of-the-art log-spectral-distance (LSD) performance on 48 kHz target resolution from various input rates. Code is available from https://github.com/neoncloud/mdctGAN

We propose and study Complementary Concept Generation (CCGen): given a concept of interest, e.g., "Digital Cameras", generating a list of complementary concepts, e.g., 1) Camera Lenses 2) Batteries 3) Camera Cases 4) Memory Cards 5) Battery Chargers. CCGen is beneficial for various applications like query suggestion and item recommendation, especially in the e-commerce domain. To solve CCGen, we propose to train language models to generate ranked lists of concepts with a two-step training strategy. We also teach the models to generate explanations by incorporating explanations distilled from large teacher models. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that our model can generate high-quality concepts complementary to the input concept while producing explanations to justify the predictions.

Online Learning (OL) is a field of research that is increasingly gaining attention both in academia and industry. One of the main challenges of OL is the inherent presence of concept drifts, which are commonly defined as unforeseeable changes in the statistical properties of an incoming data stream over time. The detection of concept drifts typically involves analyzing the error rates produced by an underlying OL algorithm in order to identify if a concept drift occurred or not, such that the OL algorithm can adapt accordingly. Current concept-drift detectors perform very well, i.e., with low false negative rates, but they still tend to exhibit high false positive rates in the concept-drift detection. This may impact the performance of the learner and result in an undue amount of computational resources spent on retraining a model that actually still performs within its expected range. In this paper, we propose OPTWIN, our "OPTimal WINdow" concept drift detector. OPTWIN uses a sliding window of events over an incoming data stream to track the errors of an OL algorithm. The novelty of OPTWIN is to consider both the means and the variances of the error rates produced by a learner in order to split the sliding window into two provably optimal sub-windows, such that the split occurs at the earliest event at which a statistically significant difference according to either the $t$- or the $f$-tests occurred. We assessed OPTWIN over the MOA framework, using ADWIN, DDM, EDDM, STEPD and ECDD as baselines over 7 synthetic and real-world datasets, and in the presence of both sudden and gradual concept drifts. In our experiments, we show that OPTWIN surpasses the F1-score of the baselines in a statistically significant manner while maintaining a lower detection delay and saving up to 21% of time spent on retraining the models.

The personalized dialogue explores the consistent relationship between dialogue generation and personality. Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from three resources: sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. However, sparse structured persona attributes are explicit but uninformative, dense persona texts contain rich persona descriptions with much noise, and dialogue history query is both noisy and uninformative for persona modeling. In this work, we combine the advantages of the three resources to obtain a richer and more accurate persona. We design a Contrastive Latent Variable-based model (CLV) that clusters the dense persona descriptions into sparse categories, which are combined with the history query to generate personalized responses. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate our model's superiority in personalization.

We introduce a new Information Extraction (IE) task dubbed Instruction-based IE, which aims to ask the system to follow specific instructions or guidelines to extract information. To facilitate research in this area, we construct a dataset called InstructIE, consisting of 270,000 weakly supervised data from Chinese Wikipedia and 1,000 high-quality crowdsourced annotated instances. We further evaluate the performance of various baseline models on the InstructIE dataset. The results reveal that although current models exhibit promising performance, there is still room for improvement. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive case study analysis, underlining the challenges inherent in the Instruction-based IE task. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/llm.

Stereotype benchmark datasets are crucial to detect and mitigate social stereotypes about groups of people in NLP models. However, existing datasets are limited in size and coverage, and are largely restricted to stereotypes prevalent in the Western society. This is especially problematic as language technologies gain hold across the globe. To address this gap, we present SeeGULL, a broad-coverage stereotype dataset, built by utilizing generative capabilities of large language models such as PaLM, and GPT-3, and leveraging a globally diverse rater pool to validate the prevalence of those stereotypes in society. SeeGULL is in English, and contains stereotypes about identity groups spanning 178 countries across 8 different geo-political regions across 6 continents, as well as state-level identities within the US and India. We also include fine-grained offensiveness scores for different stereotypes and demonstrate their global disparities. Furthermore, we include comparative annotations about the same groups by annotators living in the region vs. those that are based in North America, and demonstrate that within-region stereotypes about groups differ from those prevalent in North America. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains stereotype examples that may be offensive.

Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have advanced techniques for training 3D detectors, particularly on large-scale lidar data. Surprisingly, although semantic class labels naturally follow a long-tailed distribution, contemporary benchmarks focus on only a few common classes (e.g., pedestrian and car) and neglect many rare classes in-the-tail (e.g., debris and stroller). However, AVs must still detect rare classes to ensure safe operation. Moreover, semantic classes are often organized within a hierarchy, e.g., tail classes such as child and construction-worker are arguably subclasses of pedestrian. However, such hierarchical relationships are often ignored, which may lead to misleading estimates of performance and missed opportunities for algorithmic innovation. We address these challenges by formally studying the problem of Long-Tailed 3D Detection (LT3D), which evaluates on all classes, including those in-the-tail. We evaluate and innovate upon popular 3D detection codebases, such as CenterPoint and PointPillars, adapting them for LT3D. We develop hierarchical losses that promote feature sharing across common-vs-rare classes, as well as improved detection metrics that award partial credit to "reasonable" mistakes respecting the hierarchy (e.g., mistaking a child for an adult). Finally, we point out that fine-grained tail class accuracy is particularly improved via multimodal fusion of RGB images with LiDAR; simply put, small fine-grained classes are challenging to identify from sparse (lidar) geometry alone, suggesting that multimodal cues are crucial to long-tailed 3D detection. Our modifications improve accuracy by 5% AP on average for all classes, and dramatically improve AP for rare classes (e.g., stroller AP improves from 3.6 to 31.6)! Our code is available at https://github.com/neeharperi/LT3D