Causal discovery algorithms aim at untangling complex causal relationships from data. Here, we study causal discovery and inference methods based on staged tree models, which can represent complex and asymmetric causal relationships between categorical variables. We provide a first graphical representation of the equivalence class of a staged tree, by looking only at a specific subset of its underlying independences. We further define a new pre-metric, inspired by the widely used structural intervention distance, to quantify the closeness between two staged trees in terms of their corresponding causal inference statements. A simulation study highlights the efficacy of staged trees in uncovering complexes, asymmetric causal relationships from data, and real-world data applications illustrate their use in practical causal analysis.

Data augmentations are effective in improving the invariance of learning machines. We argue that the core challenge of data augmentations lies in designing data transformations that preserve labels. This is relatively straightforward for images, but much more challenging for graphs. In this work, we propose GraphAug, a novel automated data augmentation method aiming at computing label-invariant augmentations for graph classification. Instead of using uniform transformations as in existing studies, GraphAug uses an automated augmentation model to avoid compromising critical label-related information of the graph, thereby producing label-invariant augmentations at most times. To ensure label-invariance, we develop a training method based on reinforcement learning to maximize an estimated label-invariance probability. Experiments show that GraphAug outperforms previous graph augmentation methods on various graph classification tasks.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be strong predictors, but their prediction strategies can rarely be understood. With recent advances in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), approaches are available to explore the reasoning behind those complex models' predictions. Among post-hoc attribution methods, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) shows high performance. For deeper quantitative analysis, manual approaches exist, but without the right tools they are unnecessarily labor intensive. In this software paper, we introduce three software packages targeted at scientists to explore model reasoning using attribution approaches and beyond: (1) Zennit - a highly customizable and intuitive attribution framework implementing LRP and related approaches in PyTorch, (2) CoRelAy - a framework to easily and quickly construct quantitative analysis pipelines for dataset-wide analyses of explanations, and (3) ViRelAy - a web-application to interactively explore data, attributions, and analysis results. With this, we provide a standardized implementation solution for XAI, to contribute towards more reproducibility in our field.

A fundamental question in neurolinguistics concerns the brain regions involved in syntactic and semantic processing during speech comprehension, both at the lexical (word processing) and supra-lexical levels (sentence and discourse processing). To what extent are these regions separated or intertwined? To address this question, we trained a lexical language model, Glove, and a supra-lexical language model, GPT-2, on a text corpus from which we selectively removed either syntactic or semantic information. We then assessed to what extent these information-restricted models were able to predict the time-courses of fMRI signal of humans listening to naturalistic text. We also manipulated the size of contextual information provided to GPT-2 in order to determine the windows of integration of brain regions involved in supra-lexical processing. Our analyses show that, while most brain regions involved in language are sensitive to both syntactic and semantic variables, the relative magnitudes of these effects vary a lot across these regions. Furthermore, we found an asymmetry between the left and right hemispheres, with semantic and syntactic processing being more dissociated in the left hemisphere than in the right, and the left and right hemispheres showing respectively greater sensitivity to short and long contexts. The use of information-restricted NLP models thus shed new light on the spatial organization of syntactic processing, semantic processing and compositionality.

In visual instruction-following dialogue games, players can engage in repair mechanisms in face of an ambiguous or underspecified instruction that cannot be fully mapped to actions in the world. In this work, we annotate Instruction Clarification Requests (iCRs) in CoDraw, an existing dataset of interactions in a multimodal collaborative dialogue game. We show that it contains lexically and semantically diverse iCRs being produced self-motivatedly by players deciding to clarify in order to solve the task successfully. With 8.8k iCRs found in 9.9k dialogues, CoDraw-iCR (v1) is a large spontaneous iCR corpus, making it a valuable resource for data-driven research on clarification in dialogue. We then formalise and provide baseline models for two tasks: Determining when to make an iCR and how to recognise them, in order to investigate to what extent these tasks are learnable from data.

Analogical reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and holds an important place in various fields. However, previous studies mainly focus on single-modal analogical reasoning and ignore taking advantage of structure knowledge. Notably, the research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that information from multimodal sources always brings more powerful cognitive transfer than single modality sources. To this end, we introduce the new task of multimodal analogical reasoning over knowledge graphs, which requires multimodal reasoning ability with the help of background knowledge. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Analogical Reasoning dataSet (MARS) and a multimodal knowledge graph MarKG. We evaluate with multimodal knowledge graph embedding and pre-trained Transformer baselines, illustrating the potential challenges of the proposed task. We further propose a novel model-agnostic Multimodal analogical reasoning framework with Transformer (MarT) motivated by the structure mapping theory, which can obtain better performance. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKG_Analogy.

Due to its property of not requiring prior knowledge of the environment, reinforcement learning has significant potential for quantum control problems. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of continuous control policies based on deep deterministic policy gradient. To solve the sparse reward signal in quantum learning control problems, we propose an auxiliary task-based deep reinforcement learning (AT-DRL) for quantum control. In particular, we first design a guided reward function based on the fidelity of quantum states that enables incremental fidelity improvement. Then, we introduce the concept of an auxiliary task whose network shares parameters with the main network to predict the reward provided by the environment (called the main task). The auxiliary task learns synchronously with the main task, allowing one to select the most relevant features of the environment, thus aiding the agent in comprehending how to achieve the desired state. The numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed AT-DRL can provide a solution to the sparse reward in quantum systems, and has great potential in designing control pulses that achieve efficient quantum state preparation.

Temporal distributional shifts, with underlying dynamics changing over time, frequently occur in real-world time series, and pose a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose a novel deep sequence model based on the Koopman theory for time series forecasting: Koopman Neural Forecaster (KNF) that leverages DNNs to learn the linear Koopman space and the coefficients of chosen measurement functions. KNF imposes appropriate inductive biases for improved robustness against distributional shifts, employing both a global operator to learn shared characteristics, and a local operator to capture changing dynamics, as well as a specially-designed feedback loop to continuously update the learnt operators over time for rapidly varying behaviors. We demonstrate that KNF achieves the superior performance compared to the alternatives, on multiple time series datasets that are shown to suffer from distribution shifts. Temporal distribution shifts frequently occur in real-world time-series applications, from forecasting stock prices to detecting and monitoring sensory measures, to predicting fashion trend based sales. Such distribution shifts over time may due to the data being generated in a highly-dynamic and non-stationary environment, abrupt changes that are difficult to predict, or constantly evolving trends in the underlying data distribution (Gama et al., 2014). Temporal distribution shifts pose a fundamental challenge for time-series forecasting (Kuznetsov & Mohri, 2020). There are two scenarios of distribution shifts. When the distribution shifts only occur between the training and test domains, meta learning and transfer learning approaches (Jin et al., 2021; Oreshkin et al., 2021) have been developed.

In this paper, we focus on ensemble UQ techniques, either Bayesian Recent advances in deep neural networks have demonstrated or non-Bayesian, as this group is less explored compared to remarkable performance in a wide variety of applications, the solely Bayesian techniques. An ensemble model aggregates ranging from recommendation systems and improving user the predictions of multiple individual base-learners (or experience to natural language processing and speech recognition ensemble members), which in our case are neural networks (Abiodun et al. 2018). Nevertheless, blindly relying (NNs), and the empirical variance of their predictions gives on the outcome of these models can have harmful effects, an approximate measure of uncertainty. The idea behind this especially in high-stake domains such as healthcare heuristic is highly intuitive: the more the base-learners disagree and autonomous driving, as models can provide inaccurate on the outcome, the more uncertain they are. Therefore, predictions when queried in out-of-distribution data the goal of ensemble members is to have a great level points (Amodei et al. 2016). Consequently, correctly quantifying of disagreement (variability) in the areas where little or no the uncertainty of models' predictions is an admissible data is available, and to have a high level of agreement in mechanism to distinguish where a model can or cannot regions with abundance of data (Pearce et al. 2018).

With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated on English, while multilingual models and non-English languages have received comparatively little attention. This paper presents a survey of fairness in multilingual and non-English contexts, highlighting the shortcomings of current research and the difficulties faced by methods designed for English. We contend that the multitude of diverse cultures and languages across the world makes it infeasible to achieve comprehensive coverage in terms of constructing fairness datasets. Thus, the measurement and mitigation of biases must evolve beyond the current dataset-driven practices that are narrowly focused on specific dimensions and types of biases and, therefore, impossible to scale across languages and cultures.