Self-supervised representation learning (SSL) methods provide an effective label-free initial condition for fine-tuning downstream tasks. However, in numerous realistic scenarios, the downstream task might be biased with respect to the target label distribution. This in turn moves the learned fine-tuned model posterior away from the initial (label) bias-free self-supervised model posterior. In this work, we re-interpret SSL fine-tuning under the lens of Bayesian continual learning and consider regularization through the Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) framework. We demonstrate that self-regularization against an initial SSL backbone improves worst sub-group performance in Waterbirds by 5% and Celeb-A by 2% when using the ViT-B/16 architecture. Furthermore, to help simplify the use of EWC with SSL, we pre-compute and publicly release the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), evaluated with 10,000 ImageNet-1K variates evaluated on large modern SSL architectures including ViT-B/16 and ResNet50 trained with DINO.

Legal and ethical restrictions on accessing relevant data inhibit data science research in critical domains such as health, finance, and education. Synthetic data generation algorithms with privacy guarantees are emerging as a paradigm to break this data logjam. Existing approaches, however, assume that the data holders supply their raw data to a trusted curator, who uses it as fuel for synthetic data generation. This severely limits the applicability, as much of the valuable data in the world is locked up in silos, controlled by entities who cannot show their data to each other or a central aggregator without raising privacy concerns. To overcome this roadblock, we propose the first solution in which data holders only share encrypted data for differentially private synthetic data generation. Data holders send shares to servers who perform Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) computations while the original data stays encrypted. We instantiate this idea in an MPC protocol for the Multiplicative Weights with Exponential Mechanism (MWEM) algorithm to generate synthetic data based on real data originating from many data holders without reliance on a single point of failure.

Phenomenology is the rigorous descriptive study of conscious experience. Recent attempts to formalize Husserlian phenomenology provide us with a mathematical model of perception as a function of prior knowledge and expectation. In this paper, we re-examine elements of Husserlian phenomenology through the lens of active inference. In doing so, we aim to advance the project of computational phenomenology, as recently outlined by proponents of active inference. We propose that key aspects of Husserl's descriptions of consciousness can be mapped onto aspects of the generative models associated with the active inference approach. We first briefly review active inference. We then discuss Husserl's phenomenology, with a focus on time consciousness. Finally, we present our mapping from Husserlian phenomenology to active inference.

We present Stanceosaurus, a new corpus of 28,033 tweets in English, Hindi, and Arabic annotated with stance towards 251 misinformation claims. As far as we are aware, it is the largest corpus annotated with stance towards misinformation claims. The claims in Stanceosaurus originate from 15 fact-checking sources that cover diverse geographical regions and cultures. Unlike existing stance datasets, we introduce a more fine-grained 5-class labeling strategy with additional subcategories to distinguish implicit stance. Pre-trained transformer-based stance classifiers that are fine-tuned on our corpus show good generalization on unseen claims and regional claims from countries outside the training data. Cross-lingual experiments demonstrate Stanceosaurus' capability of training multi-lingual models, achieving 53.1 F1 on Hindi and 50.4 F1 on Arabic without any target-language fine-tuning. Finally, we show how a domain adaptation method can be used to improve performance on Stanceosaurus using additional RumourEval-2019 data. We make Stanceosaurus publicly available to the research community and hope it will encourage further work on misinformation identification across languages and cultures.

Fine tuning self supervised pretrained models using pseudo labels can effectively improve speech recognition performance. But, low quality pseudo labels can misguide decision boundaries and degrade performance. We propose a simple yet effective strategy to filter low quality pseudo labels to alleviate this problem. Specifically, pseudo-labels are produced over the entire training set and filtered via average probability scores calculated from the model output. Subsequently, an optimal percentage of utterances with high probability scores are considered reliable training data with trustworthy labels. The model is iteratively updated to correct the unreliable pseudo labels to minimize the effect of noisy labels. The process above is repeated until unreliable pseudo abels have been adequately corrected. Extensive experiments on LibriSpeech show that these filtered samples enable the refined model to yield more correct predictions, leading to better ASR performances under various experimental settings.

Multi-task learning, in which several tasks are jointly learned by a single model, allows NLP models to share information from multiple annotations and may facilitate better predictions when the tasks are inter-related. This technique, however, requires annotating the same text with multiple annotation schemes which may be costly and laborious. Active learning (AL) has been demonstrated to optimize annotation processes by iteratively selecting unlabeled examples whose annotation is most valuable for the NLP model. Yet, multi-task active learning (MT-AL) has not been applied to state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer-based NLP models. This paper aims to close this gap. We explore various multi-task selection criteria in three realistic multi-task scenarios, reflecting different relations between the participating tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-task compared to single-task selection. Our results suggest that MT-AL can be effectively used in order to minimize annotation efforts for multi-task NLP models.

A significant percentage of COVID-19 survivors experience ongoing multisystemic symptoms that often affect daily living, a condition known as Long Covid or post-acute-sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, identifying scientific articles relevant to Long Covid is challenging since there is no standardized or consensus terminology. We developed an iterative human-in-the-loop machine learning framework combining data programming with active learning into a robust ensemble model, demonstrating higher specificity and considerably higher sensitivity than other methods. Analysis of the Long Covid collection shows that (1) most Long Covid articles do not refer to Long Covid by any name (2) when the condition is named, the name used most frequently in the literature is Long Covid, and (3) Long Covid is associated with disorders in a wide variety of body systems.

Recently, the relationship between automated and human evaluation of topic models has been called into question. Method developers have staked the efficacy of new topic model variants on automated measures, and their failure to approximate human preferences places these models on uncertain ground. Moreover, existing evaluation paradigms are often divorced from real-world use. Motivated by content analysis as a dominant real-world use case for topic modeling, we analyze two related aspects of topic models that affect their effectiveness and trustworthiness in practice for that purpose: the stability of their estimates and the extent to which the model's discovered categories align with human-determined categories in the data. We find that neural topic models fare worse in both respects compared to an established classical method. We take a step toward addressing both issues in tandem by demonstrating that a straightforward ensembling method can reliably outperform the members of the ensemble.

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors contained in Chinese text. In the long term, researchers regard CGEC as a task with a certain degree of uncertainty, that is, an ungrammatical sentence may often have multiple references. However, we argue that even though this is a very reasonable hypothesis, it is too harsh for the intelligence of the mainstream models in this era. In this paper, we first discover that multiple references do not actually bring positive gains to model training. On the contrary, it is beneficial to the CGEC model if the model can pay attention to small but essential data during the training process. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called OneTarget to improve the focus ability of the CGEC models and thus improve the CGEC performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the correctness of our discovery and the effectiveness of our proposed method.

In September 2021, the "One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence" project (AI100) issued the second report of its planned long-term periodic assessment of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society. It was written by a panel of 17 study authors, each of whom is deeply rooted in AI research, chaired by Michael Littman of Brown University. The report, entitled "Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms," answers a set of 14 questions probing critical areas of AI development addressing the major risks and dangers of AI, its effects on society, its public perception and the future of the field. The report concludes that AI has made a major leap from the lab to people's lives in recent years, which increases the urgency to understand its potential negative effects. The questions were developed by the AI100 Standing Committee, chaired by Peter Stone of the University of Texas at Austin, consisting of a group of AI leaders with expertise in computer science, sociology, ethics, economics, and other disciplines.