The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.

Deep neural networks are widely known to be susceptible to adversarial examples, which can cause incorrect predictions through subtle input modifications. These adversarial examples tend to be transferable between models, but targeted attacks still have lower attack success rates due to significant variations in decision boundaries. To enhance the transferability of targeted adversarial examples, we propose introducing competition into the optimization process. Our idea is to craft adversarial perturbations in the presence of two new types of competitor noises: adversarial perturbations towards different target classes and friendly perturbations towards the correct class. With these competitors, even if an adversarial example deceives a network to extract specific features leading to the target class, this disturbance can be suppressed by other competitors. Therefore, within this competition, adversarial examples should take different attack strategies by leveraging more diverse features to overwhelm their interference, leading to improving their transferability to different models. Considering the computational complexity, we efficiently simulate various interference from these two types of competitors in feature space by randomly mixing up stored clean features in the model inference and named this method Clean Feature Mixup (CFM). Our extensive experimental results on the ImageNet-Compatible and CIFAR-10 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the existing baselines with a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/dreamflake/CFM.

News articles are driven by the informational sources journalists use in reporting. Modeling when, how and why sources get used together in stories can help us better understand the information we consume and even help journalists with the task of producing it. In this work, we take steps toward this goal by constructing the largest and widest-ranging annotated dataset, to date, of informational sources used in news writing. We show that our dataset can be used to train high-performing models for information detection and source attribution. We further introduce a novel task, source prediction, to study the compositionality of sources in news articles. We show good performance on this task, which we argue is an important proof for narrative science exploring the internal structure of news articles and aiding in planning-based language generation, and an important step towards a source-recommendation system to aid journalists.

In Lifelong Learning (LL), agents continually learn as they encounter new conditions and tasks. Most current LL is limited to a single agent that learns tasks sequentially. Dedicated LL machinery is then deployed to mitigate the forgetting of old tasks as new tasks are learned. This is inherently slow. We propose a new Shared Knowledge Lifelong Learning (SKILL) challenge, which deploys a decentralized population of LL agents that each sequentially learn different tasks, with all agents operating independently and in parallel. After learning their respective tasks, agents share and consolidate their knowledge over a decentralized communication network, so that, in the end, all agents can master all tasks. We present one solution to SKILL which uses Lightweight Lifelong Learning (LLL) agents, where the goal is to facilitate efficient sharing by minimizing the fraction of the agent that is specialized for any given task. Each LLL agent thus consists of a common task-agnostic immutable part, where most parameters are, and individual task-specific modules that contain fewer parameters but are adapted to each task. Agents share their task-specific modules, plus summary information ("task anchors") representing their tasks in the common task-agnostic latent space of all agents. Receiving agents register each received task-specific module using the corresponding anchor. Thus, every agent improves its ability to solve new tasks each time new task-specific modules and anchors are received. On a new, very challenging SKILL-102 dataset with 102 image classification tasks (5,033 classes in total, 2,041,225 training, 243,464 validation, and 243,464 test images), we achieve much higher (and SOTA) accuracy over 8 LL baselines, while also achieving near perfect parallelization. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/gyhandy/Shared-Knowledge-Lifelong-Learning

The remarkable capabilities of large language models have been accompanied by a persistent drawback: the generation of false and unsubstantiated claims commonly known as "hallucinations". To combat this issue, recent research has introduced approaches that involve editing and attributing the outputs of language models, particularly through prompt-based editing. However, the inference cost and speed of using large language models for editing currently bottleneck prompt-based methods. These bottlenecks motivate the training of compact editors, which is challenging due to the scarcity of training data for this purpose. To overcome these challenges, we exploit the power of large language models to introduce corruptions (i.e., noise) into text and subsequently fine-tune compact editors to denoise the corruptions by incorporating relevant evidence. Our methodology is entirely unsupervised and provides us with faux hallucinations for training in any domain. Our Petite Unsupervised Research and Revision model, PURR, not only improves attribution over existing editing methods based on fine-tuning and prompting, but also achieves faster execution times by orders of magnitude.

Despite their impressive performance in classification, neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. These attacks are small perturbations of the input data designed to fool the model. Naturally, a question arises regarding the potential connection between the architecture, settings, or properties of the model and the nature of the attack. In this work, we aim to shed light on this problem by focusing on the implicit bias of the neural network, which refers to its inherent inclination to favor specific patterns or outcomes. Specifically, we investigate one aspect of the implicit bias, which involves the essential Fourier frequencies required for accurate image classification. We conduct tests to assess the statistical relationship between these frequencies and those necessary for a successful attack. To delve into this relationship, we propose a new method that can uncover non-linear correlations between sets of coordinates, which, in our case, are the aforementioned frequencies. By exploiting the entanglement between intrinsic dimension and correlation, we provide empirical evidence that the network bias in Fourier space and the target frequencies of adversarial attacks are closely tied.

Most judicial decisions involve the interpretation of legal texts; as such, judicial opinion requires the use of language as a medium to comment on or draw attention to other language. Language used this way is called metalanguage. We develop an annotation schema for categorizing types of legal metalanguage and apply our schema to a set of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, yielding a corpus totaling 59k tokens. We remark on several patterns observed in the kinds of metalanguage used by the justices.

The usefulness of part-of-speech tags for parsing has been heavily questioned due to the success of word-contextualized parsers. Yet, most studies are limited to coarse-grained tags and high quality written content; while we know little about their influence when it comes to models in production that face lexical errors. We expand these setups and design an adversarial attack to verify if the use of morphological information by parsers: (i) contributes to error propagation or (ii) if on the other hand it can play a role to correct mistakes that word-only neural parsers make. The results on 14 diverse UD treebanks show that under such attacks, for transition- and graph-based models their use contributes to degrade the performance even faster, while for the (lower-performing) sequence labeling parsers they are helpful. We also show that if morphological tags were utopically robust against lexical perturbations, they would be able to correct parsing mistakes.

We consider dyadic zero-shot event extraction (EE) to identify actions between pairs of actors. The \emph{zero-shot} setting allows social scientists or other non-computational researchers to extract any customized, user-specified set of events without training, resulting in a \emph{dyadic} event database, allowing insight into sociopolitical relational dynamics among actors and the higher level organizations or countries they represent. Unfortunately, we find that current zero-shot EE methods perform poorly for the task, with issues including word sense ambiguity, modality mismatch, and efficiency. Straightforward application of large language model prompting typically performs even worse. We address these challenges with a new fine-grained, multi-stage generative question-answer method, using a Monte Carlo approach to exploit and overcome the randomness of generative outputs. It performs 90\% fewer queries than a previous approach, with strong performance on the widely-used Automatic Content Extraction dataset. Finally, we extend our method to extract affiliations of actor arguments and demonstrate our method and findings on a dyadic international relations case study.

Dual encoders are now the dominant architecture for dense retrieval. Yet, we have little understanding of how they represent text, and why this leads to good performance. In this work, we shed light on this question via distributions over the vocabulary. We propose to interpret the vector representations produced by dual encoders by projecting them into the model's vocabulary space. We show that the resulting projections contain rich semantic information, and draw connection between them and sparse retrieval. We find that this view can offer an explanation for some of the failure cases of dense retrievers. For example, we observe that the inability of models to handle tail entities is correlated with a tendency of the token distributions to forget some of the tokens of those entities. We leverage this insight and propose a simple way to enrich query and passage representations with lexical information at inference time, and show that this significantly improves performance compared to the original model in zero-shot settings, and specifically on the BEIR benchmark.