Deep Learning
Unsupervised Natural Language Inference Using PHL Triplet Generation
Varshney, Neeraj, Banerjee, Pratyay, Gokhale, Tejas, Baral, Chitta
Transformer-based models have achieved impressive performance on various Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmarks, when trained on respective training datasets. However, in certain cases, training samples may not be available or collecting them could be time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this work, we address this challenge and present an explorative study on unsupervised NLI, a paradigm in which no human-annotated training samples are available. We investigate NLI under three challenging settings: PH, P, and NPH that differ in the extent of unlabeled data available for learning. As a solution, we propose a procedural data generation approach that leverages a set of sentence transformations to collect PHL (Premise, Hypothesis, Label) triplets for training NLI models, bypassing the need for human-annotated training datasets. Comprehensive experiments show that this approach results in accuracies of 66.75%, 65.9%, 65.39% in PH, P, NPH settings respectively, outperforming all existing baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning our models with as little as ~0.1% of the training dataset (500 samples) leads to 12.2% higher accuracy than the model trained from scratch on the same 500 instances.
TorchEsegeta: Framework for Interpretability and Explainability of Image-based Deep Learning Models
Chatterjee, Soumick, Das, Arnab, Mandal, Chirag, Mukhopadhyay, Budhaditya, Vipinraj, Manish, Shukla, Aniruddh, Rao, Rajatha Nagaraja, Sarasaen, Chompunuch, Speck, Oliver, Nürnberger, Andreas
Clinicians are often very sceptical about applying automatic image processing approaches, especially deep learning based methods, in practice. One main reason for this is the black-box nature of these approaches and the inherent problem of missing insights of the automatically derived decisions. In order to increase trust in these methods, this paper presents approaches that help to interpret and explain the results of deep learning algorithms by depicting the anatomical areas which influence the decision of the algorithm most. Moreover, this research presents a unified framework, TorchEsegeta, for applying various interpretability and explainability techniques for deep learning models and generate visual interpretations and explanations for clinicians to corroborate their clinical findings. In addition, this will aid in gaining confidence in such methods. The framework builds on existing interpretability and explainability techniques that are currently focusing on classification models, extending them to segmentation tasks. In addition, these methods have been adapted to 3D models for volumetric analysis. The proposed framework provides methods to quantitatively compare visual explanations using infidelity and sensitivity metrics. This framework can be used by data scientists to perform post-hoc interpretations and explanations of their models, develop more explainable tools and present the findings to clinicians to increase their faith in such models. The proposed framework was evaluated based on a use case scenario of vessel segmentation models trained on Time-of-fight (TOF) Magnetic Resonance Angiogram (MRA) images of the human brain. Quantitative and qualitative results of a comparative study of different models and interpretability methods are presented. Furthermore, this paper provides an extensive overview of several existing interpretability and explainability methods.
Information-Theoretic Measures of Dataset Difficulty
Ethayarajh, Kawin, Choi, Yejin, Swayamdipta, Swabha
Estimating the difficulty of a dataset typically involves comparing state-of-the-art models to humans; the bigger the performance gap, the harder the dataset is said to be. Not only is this framework informal, but it also provides little understanding of how difficult each instance is, or what attributes make it difficult for a given model. To address these problems, we propose an information-theoretic perspective, framing dataset difficulty as the absence of $\textit{usable information}$. Measuring usable information is as easy as measuring performance, but has certain theoretical advantages. While the latter only allows us to compare different models w.r.t the same dataset, the former also allows us to compare different datasets w.r.t the same model. We then introduce $\textit{pointwise}$ $\mathcal{V}-$$\textit{information}$ (PVI) for measuring the difficulty of individual instances, where instances with higher PVI are easier for model $\mathcal{V}$. By manipulating the input before measuring usable information, we can understand $\textit{why}$ a dataset is easy or difficult for a given model, which we use to discover annotation artefacts in widely-used benchmarks.
A Neural Network Ensemble Approach to System Identification
Negrini, Elisa, Citti, Giovanna, Capogna, Luca
We present a new algorithm for learning unknown governing equations from trajectory data, using and ensemble of neural networks. Given samples of solutions $x(t)$ to an unknown dynamical system $\dot{x}(t)=f(t,x(t))$, we approximate the function $f$ using an ensemble of neural networks. We express the equation in integral form and use Euler method to predict the solution at every successive time step using at each iteration a different neural network as a prior for $f$. This procedure yields M-1 time-independent networks, where M is the number of time steps at which $x(t)$ is observed. Finally, we obtain a single function $f(t,x(t))$ by neural network interpolation. Unlike our earlier work, where we numerically computed the derivatives of data, and used them as target in a Lipschitz regularized neural network to approximate $f$, our new method avoids numerical differentiations, which are unstable in presence of noise. We test the new algorithm on multiple examples both with and without noise in the data. We empirically show that generalization and recovery of the governing equation improve by adding a Lipschitz regularization term in our loss function and that this method improves our previous one especially in presence of noise, when numerical differentiation provides low quality target data. Finally, we compare our results with the method proposed by Raissi, et al. arXiv:1801.01236 (2018) and with SINDy.
Robustness of different loss functions and their impact on networks learning capability
Recent developments in AI have made it ubiquitous, every industry is trying to adopt some form of intelligent processing of their data. Despite so many advances in the field, AIs full capability is yet to be exploited by the industry. Industries that involve some risk factors still remain cautious about the usage of AI due to the lack of trust in such autonomous systems. Present-day AI might be very good in a lot of things but it is very bad in reasoning and this behavior of AI can lead to catastrophic results. Autonomous cars crashing into a person or a drone getting stuck in a tree are a few examples where AI decisions lead to catastrophic results. To develop insight and generate an explanation about the learning capability of AI, we will try to analyze the working of loss functions. For our case, we will use two sets of loss functions, generalized loss functions like Binary cross-entropy or BCE and specialized loss functions like Dice loss or focal loss. Through a series of experiments, we will establish whether combining different loss functions is better than using a single loss function and if yes, then what is the reason behind it. In order to establish the difference between generalized loss and specialized losses, we will train several models using the above-mentioned losses and then compare their robustness on adversarial examples. In particular, we will look at how fast the accuracy of different models decreases when we change the pixels corresponding to the most salient gradients.
When Combating Hype, Proceed with Caution
In an effort to avoid reinforcing widespread hype about the capabilities of state-of-the-art language technology, researchers have developed practices in framing and citation that serve to deemphasize the field's successes. Though well-meaning, these practices often yield misleading or even false claims about the limits of our best technology. This is a problem, and it may be more serious than it looks: It limits our ability to mitigate short-term harms from NLP deployments and it limits our ability to prepare for the potentially enormous impacts of more distant future advances. This paper urges researchers to be careful about these claims and suggests some research directions and communication strategies that will make it easier to avoid or rebut them.
Explainable Student Performance Prediction With Personalized Attention for Explaining Why A Student Fails
Niu, Kun, Cao, Xipeng, Yu, Yicong
As student failure rates continue to increase in higher education, predicting student performance in the following semester has become a significant demand. Personalized student performance prediction helps educators gain a comprehensive view of student status and effectively intervene in advance. However, existing works scarcely consider the explainability of student performance prediction, which educators are most concerned about. In this paper, we propose a novel Explainable Student performance prediction method with Personalized Attention (ESPA) by utilizing relationships in student profiles and prior knowledge of related courses. The designed Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) architecture extracts the semantic information in the paths with specific patterns. As for leveraging similar paths' internal relations, a local and global-level attention mechanism is proposed to distinguish the influence of different students or courses for making predictions. Hence, valid reasoning on paths can be applied to predict the performance of students. The ESPA consistently outperforms the other state-of-the-art models for student performance prediction, and the results are intuitively explainable. This work can help educators better understand the different impacts of behavior on students' studies.
PG$^2$Net: Personalized and Group Preferences Guided Network for Next Place Prediction
Li, Huifeng, Wang, Bin, Xia, Fan, Zhai, Xi, Zhu, Sulei, Xu, Yanyan
Predicting the next place to visit is a key in human mobility behavior modeling, which plays a significant role in various fields, such as epidemic control, urban planning, traffic management, and travel recommendation. To achieve this, one typical solution is designing modules based on RNN to capture their preferences to various locations. Although these RNN-based methods can effectively learn individual's hidden personalized preferences to her visited places, the interactions among users can only be weakly learned through the representations of locations. Targeting this, we propose an end-to-end framework named personalized and group preference guided network (PG$^2$Net), considering the users' preferences to various places at both individual and collective levels. Specifically, PG$^2$Net concatenates Bi-LSTM and attention mechanism to capture each user's long-term mobility tendency. To learn population's group preferences, we utilize spatial and temporal information of the visitations to construct a spatio-temporal dependency module. We adopt a graph embedding method to map users' trajectory into a hidden space, capturing their sequential relation. In addition, we devise an auxiliary loss to learn the vectorial representation of her next location. Experiment results on two Foursquare check-in datasets and one mobile phone dataset indicate the advantages of our model compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Source codes are available at https://github.com/urbanmobility/PG2Net.
Knowledge-driven Active Learning
Ciravegna, Gabriele, Precioso, Frederic, Gori, Marco
In the last few years, Deep Learning models have become increasingly popular. However, their deployment is still precluded in those contexts where the amount of supervised data is limited and manual labelling expensive. Active learning strategies aim at solving this problem by requiring supervision only on few unlabelled samples, which improve the most model performances after adding them to the training set. Most strategies are based on uncertain sample selection, and even often restricted to samples lying close to the decision boundary. Here we propose a very different approach, taking into consideration domain knowledge. Indeed, in the case of multi-label classification, the relationships among classes offer a way to spot incoherent predictions, i.e., predictions where the model may most likely need supervision. We have developed a framework where first-order-logic knowledge is converted into constraints and their violation is checked as a natural guide for sample selection. We empirically demonstrate that knowledge-driven strategy outperforms standard strategies, particularly on those datasets where domain knowledge is complete. Furthermore, we show how the proposed approach enables discovering data distributions lying far from training data. Finally, the proposed knowledge-driven strategy can be also easily used in object-detection problems where standard uncertainty-based techniques are difficult to apply.
Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks
Chen, Yangyi, Qi, Fanchao, Liu, Zhiyuan, Sun, Maosong
Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent security threat in deep learning. When a deep neural model is injected with a backdoor, it will behave normally on standard inputs but give adversary-specified predictions once the input contains specific backdoor triggers. Current textual backdoor attacks have poor attack performance in some tough situations. In this paper, we find two simple tricks that can make existing textual backdoor attacks much more harmful. The first trick is to add an extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data during the training of the victim model, and the second one is to use all the clean training data rather than remove the original clean data corresponding to the poisoned data. These two tricks are universally applicable to different attack models. We conduct experiments in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low poisoning rate, and label-consistent attacks. Experimental results show that the two tricks can significantly improve attack performance. This paper exhibits the great potential harmfulness of backdoor attacks. All the code and data will be made public to facilitate further research.