Despite superior performance in many situations, deep neural networks are often vulnerable to adversarial examples and distribution shifts, limiting model generalization ability in real-world applications. To alleviate these problems, recent approaches leverage distributional robustness optimization (DRO) to find the most challenging distribution, and then minimize loss function over this most challenging distribution. Regardless of achieving some improvements, these DRO approaches have some obvious limitations. First, they purely focus on local regularization to strengthen model robustness, missing a global regularization effect which is useful in many real-world applications (e.g., domain adaptation, domain generalization, and adversarial machine learning). Second, the loss functions in the existing DRO approaches operate in only the most challenging distribution, hence decouple with the original distribution, leading to a restrictive modeling capability. In this paper, we propose a novel regularization technique, following the veins of Wasserstein-based DRO framework. Specifically, we define a particular joint distribution and Wasserstein-based uncertainty, allowing us to couple the original and most challenging distributions for enhancing modeling capability and applying both local and global regularizations. Empirical studies on different learning problems demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing regularization approaches in various domains: semi-supervised learning, domain adaptation, domain generalization, and adversarial machine learning.

Feeld Notes is a column about a middle-aged woman who suddenly realizes she wants to have sex again--and the beguiling app she uses to do it. Not to imply I get liked by a lot of men--ha!--but of the men who do like my profile, a significant percentage of them are substantially younger than I am. Listen, I'm not a cougar, an appellation that, by definition, suggests a certain predatory instinct. As I've explained previously, I don't have it in me. But I'd be lying if I said that that some part of me isn't delighted to think that the pictures and the words on my profile project a sort of youthful exuberance.

There are significant regional inequities in health resources around the world. It has become one of the most focused topics to improve health services for data-scarce hospitals and promote health equity through knowledge sharing among medical institutions. Because electronic medical records (EMRs) contain sensitive personal information, privacy protection is unavoidable and essential for multi-hospital collaboration. In this paper, for a common disease in ICU patients, sepsis, we propose a novel cross-center collaborative learning framework guided by medical knowledge, SofaNet, to achieve early recognition of this disease. The Sepsis-3 guideline, published in 2016, defines that sepsis can be diagnosed by satisfying both suspicion of infection and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) greater than or equal to 2. Based on this knowledge, SofaNet adopts a multi-channel GRU structure to predict SOFA values of different systems, which can be seen as an auxiliary task to generate better health status representations for sepsis recognition. Moreover, we only achieve feature distribution alignment in the hidden space during cross-center collaborative learning, which ensures secure and compliant knowledge transfer without raw data exchange. Extensive experiments on two open clinical datasets, MIMIC-III and Challenge, demonstrate that SofaNet can benefit early sepsis recognition when hospitals only have limited EMRs.

The use of algorithms for decision-making in higher education is steadily growing, promising cost-savings to institutions and personalized service for students but also raising ethical challenges around surveillance, fairness, and interpretation of data. To address the lack of systematic understanding of how these algorithms are currently designed, we reviewed an extensive corpus of papers proposing algorithms for decision-making in higher education. We categorized them based on input data, computational method, and target outcome, and then investigated the interrelations of these factors with the application of human-centered lenses: theoretical, participatory, or speculative design. We found that the models are trending towards deep learning, and increased use of student personal data and protected attributes, with the target scope expanding towards automated decisions. However, despite the associated decrease in interpretability and explainability, current development predominantly fails to incorporate human-centered lenses. We discuss the challenges with these trends and advocate for a human-centered approach.

Human-in-the-loop optimization utilizes human expertise to guide machine optimizers iteratively and search for an optimal solution in a solution space. While prior empirical studies mainly investigated novices, we analyzed the impact of the levels of expertise on the outcome quality and corresponding subjective satisfaction. We conducted a study (N=60) in text, photo, and 3D mesh optimization contexts. We found that novices can achieve an expert level of quality performance, but participants with higher expertise led to more optimization iteration with more explicit preference while keeping satisfaction low. In contrast, novices were more easily satisfied and terminated faster. Therefore, we identified that experts seek more diverse outcomes while the machine reaches optimal results, and the observed behavior can be used as a performance indicator for human-in-the-loop system designers to improve underlying models. We inform future research to be cautious about the impact of user expertise when designing human-in-the-loop systems.

In deep learning, transferring information from a pretrained network to a downstream task by finetuning has many benefits. The choice of task head plays an important role in fine-tuning, as the pretrained and downstream tasks are usually different. Although there exist many different designs for finetuning, a full understanding of when and why these algorithms work has been elusive. We analyze how the choice of task head controls feature adaptation and hence influences the downstream performance. By decomposing the learning dynamics of adaptation, we find that the key aspect is the training accuracy and loss at the beginning of finetuning, which determines the "energy" available for the feature's adaptation. We identify a significant trend in the effect of changes in this initial energy on the resulting features after fine-tuning. Specifically, as the energy increases, the Euclidean and cosine distances between the resulting and original features increase, while their dot products (and the resulting features' norm) first increase and then decrease. Inspired by this, we give several practical principles that lead to better downstream performance. We analytically prove this trend in an overparamterized linear setting and verify its applicability to different experimental settings.

Despite recent progress in abstractive summarization, models often generate summaries with factual errors. Numerous approaches to detect these errors have been proposed, the most popular of which are question answering (QA)-based factuality metrics. These have been shown to work well at predicting summary-level factuality and have potential to localize errors within summaries, but this latter capability has not been systematically evaluated in past research. In this paper, we conduct the first such analysis and find that, contrary to our expectations, QA-based frameworks fail to correctly identify error spans in generated summaries and are outperformed by trivial exact match baselines. Our analysis reveals a major reason for such poor localization: questions generated by the QG module often inherit errors from non-factual summaries which are then propagated further into downstream modules. Moreover, even human-in-the-loop question generation cannot easily offset these problems. Our experiments conclusively show that there exist fundamental issues with localization using the QA framework which cannot be fixed solely by stronger QA and QG models.

This work presents BanglaNLG, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating natural language generation (NLG) models in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language. We aggregate six challenging conditional text generation tasks under the BanglaNLG benchmark, introducing a new dataset on dialogue generation in the process. Furthermore, using a clean corpus of 27.5 GB of Bangla data, we pretrain BanglaT5, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer language model for Bangla. BanglaT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in all of these tasks, outperforming several multilingual models by up to 9% absolute gain and 32% relative gain. We are making the new dialogue dataset and the BanglaT5 model publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/BanglaNLG in the hope of advancing future research on Bangla NLG.

The artificial intelligence application ChatGPT has already been banned in some state schools over concerns it could help students cheat, but some Australian MPs had no such qualms when they delivered speeches partially written by the tool in parliament this week. ChatGPT has a reputation for saying a lot without saying much at all, so perhaps it's ideally suited to the job of parliamentary speechwriter – or maybe it's smarter than we give it credit for. To find out, we searched Hansard for parliamentary speeches made by Australian MPs in 2020 and asked ChatGPT to opine on the same subjects – ranging from the role the arts play in society to the government's obligation to provide good dental care. See if you can tell them apart.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely searched in recommendation with various types of solutions. Recent success of Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) in CF demonstrates the effectiveness of modeling high-order relationships through graphs, while repetitive graph convolution and iterative batch optimization limit their efficiency. Instead, item similarity models attempt to construct direct relationships through efficient interaction encoding. Despite their great performance, the growing item numbers result in quadratic growth in similarity modeling process, posing critical scalability problems. In this paper, we investigate the graph sampling strategy adopted in latest GCN model for efficiency improving, and identify the potential item group structure in the sampled graph. Based on this, we propose a novel item similarity model which introduces graph partitioning to restrict the item similarity modeling within each partition. Specifically, we show that the spectral information of the original graph is well in preserving global-level information. Then, it is added to fine-tune local item similarities with a new data augmentation strategy acted as partition-aware prior knowledge, jointly to cope with the information loss brought by partitioning. Experiments carried out on 4 datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art GCN models with 10x speed-up and item similarity models with 95\% parameter storage savings.