Deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly pre-trained language models (PLMs), have been revealed to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, the adversarial examples generated by many mainstream word-level adversarial attack models are neither valid nor natural, leading to the loss of semantic maintenance, grammaticality, and human imperceptibility. Based on the exceptional capacity of language understanding and generation of large language models (LLMs), we propose LLM-Attack, which aims at generating both valid and natural adversarial examples with LLMs. The method consists of two stages: word importance ranking (which searches for the most vulnerable words) and word synonym replacement (which substitutes them with their synonyms obtained from LLMs). Experimental results on the Movie Review (MR), IMDB, and Yelp Review Polarity datasets against the baseline adversarial attack models illustrate the effectiveness of LLM-Attack, and it outperforms the baselines in human and GPT-4 evaluation by a significant margin. The model can generate adversarial examples that are typically valid and natural, with the preservation of semantic meaning, grammaticality, and human imperceptibility.

Panoramic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging visual grounding task that aims to segment visual objects in images based on dense narrative captions. The current state-of-the-art methods first refine the representation of phrase by aggregating the most similar $k$ image pixels, and then match the refined text representations with the pixels of the image feature map to generate segmentation results. However, simply aggregating sampled image features ignores the contextual information, which can lead to phrase-to-pixel mis-match. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework called Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network (DRMN), whose main idea is to bring deformable attention in the iterative process of feature learning to incorporate essential context information of different scales of pixels. DRMN iteratively re-encodes pixels with the deformable attention network after updating the feature representation of the top-$k$ most similar pixels. As such, DRMN can lead to accurate yet discriminative pixel representations, purify the top-$k$ most similar pixels, and consequently alleviate the phrase-to-pixel mis-match substantially.Experimental results show that our novel design significantly improves the matching results between text phrases and image pixels. Concretely, DRMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the PNG benchmark with an average recall improvement 3.5%. The codes are available in: https://github.com/JaMesLiMers/DRMN.

With the boom of Large Language Models (LLMs), the research of solving Math Word Problem (MWP) has recently made great progress. However, there are few studies to examine the security of LLMs in math solving ability. Instead of attacking prompts in the use of LLMs, we propose a MathAttack model to attack MWP samples which are closer to the essence of security in solving math problems. Compared to traditional text adversarial attack, it is essential to preserve the mathematical logic of original MWPs during the attacking. To this end, we propose logical entity recognition to identify logical entries which are then frozen. Subsequently, the remaining text are attacked by adopting a word-level attacker. Furthermore, we propose a new dataset RobustMath to evaluate the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. Extensive experiments on our RobustMath and two another math benchmark datasets GSM8K and MultiAirth show that MathAttack could effectively attack the math solving ability of LLMs. In the experiments, we observe that (1) Our adversarial samples from higher-accuracy LLMs are also effective for attacking LLMs with lower accuracy (e.g., transfer from larger to smaller-size LLMs, or from few-shot to zero-shot prompts); (2) Complex MWPs (such as more solving steps, longer text, more numbers) are more vulnerable to attack; (3) We can improve the robustness of LLMs by using our adversarial samples in few-shot prompts. Finally, we hope our practice and observation can serve as an important attempt towards enhancing the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. We will release our code and dataset.

Math word problems (MWPs) require analyzing text descriptions and generating mathematical equations to derive solutions. Existing works focus on solving MWPs with two types of solvers: tree-based solver and large language model (LLM) solver. However, these approaches always solve MWPs by a single solver, which will bring the following problems: (1) Single type of solver is hard to solve all types of MWPs well. (2) A single solver will result in poor performance due to over-fitting. To address these challenges, this paper utilizes multiple ensemble approaches to improve MWP-solving ability. Firstly, We propose a problem type classifier that combines the strengths of the tree-based solver and the LLM solver. This ensemble approach leverages their respective advantages and broadens the range of MWPs that can be solved. Furthermore, we also apply ensemble techniques to both tree-based solver and LLM solver to improve their performance. For the tree-based solver, we propose an ensemble learning framework based on ten-fold cross-validation and voting mechanism. In the LLM solver, we adopt self-consistency (SC) method to improve answer selection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these ensemble approaches in enhancing MWP-solving ability. The comprehensive evaluation showcases improved performance, validating the advantages of our proposed approach. Our code is available at this url: https://github.com/zhouzihao501/NLPCC2023-Shared-Task3-ChineseMWP.

During the continuous evolution of one organism's ancestry, its genes accumulate extensive experiences and knowledge, enabling newborn descendants to rapidly adapt to their specific environments. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel machine learning paradigm Learngene to enable learning models to incorporate three key characteristics of genes. (i) Accumulating: the knowledge is accumulated during the continuous learning of an ancestry model. (ii) Condensing: the extensive accumulated knowledge is condensed into a much more compact information piece, i.e., learngene. (iii) Inheriting: the condensed learngene is inherited to make it easier for descendant models to adapt to new environments. Since accumulating has been studied in well-established paradigms like large-scale pre-training and lifelong learning, we focus on condensing and inheriting, which induces three key issues and we provide the preliminary solutions to these issues in this paper: (i) Learngene Form: the learngene is set to a few integral layers that can preserve significance. (ii) Learngene Condensing: we identify which layers among the ancestry model have the most similarity as one pseudo descendant model. (iii) Learngene Inheriting: to construct distinct descendant models for the specific downstream tasks, we stack some randomly initialized layers to the learngene layers. Extensive experiments across various settings, including using different network architectures like Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on different datasets, are carried out to confirm four advantages of Learngene: it makes the descendant models 1) converge more quickly, 2) exhibit less sensitivity to hyperparameters, 3) perform better, and 4) require fewer training samples to converge.

Solving math word problem (MWP) with AI techniques has recently made great progress with the success of deep neural networks (DNN), but it is far from being solved. We argue that the ability of learning by analogy is essential for an MWP solver to better understand same problems which may typically be formulated in diverse ways. However most existing works exploit the shortcut learning to train MWP solvers simply based on samples with a single question. In lack of diverse questions, these methods merely learn shallow heuristics. In this paper, we make a first attempt to solve MWPs by generating diverse yet consistent questions/equations. Given a typical MWP including the scenario description, question, and equation (i.e., answer), we first generate multiple consistent equations via a group of heuristic rules. We then feed them to a question generator together with the scenario to obtain the corresponding diverse questions, forming a new MWP with a variety of questions and equations. Finally we engage a data filter to remove those unreasonable MWPs, keeping the high-quality augmented ones. To evaluate the ability of learning by analogy for an MWP solver, we generate a new MWP dataset (called DiverseMath23K) with diverse questions by extending the current benchmark Math23K. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can generate high-quality diverse questions with corresponding equations, further leading to performance improvement on Diverse-Math23K. The code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/zhouzihao501/DiverseMWP

Question Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a re-design of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG models for different QG datasets, which is resource-intensive and ungeneralizable. To solve the problems, we propose a model named Unified-QG based on lifelong learning techniques, which can continually learn QG tasks across different datasets and formats. Specifically, we first build a format-convert encoding to transform different kinds of QG formats into a unified representation. Then, a method named \emph{STRIDER} (\emph{S}imilari\emph{T}y \emph{R}egular\emph{I}zed \emph{D}ifficult \emph{E}xample \emph{R}eplay) is built to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in continual QG learning. Extensive experiments were conducted on $8$ QG datasets across $4$ QG formats (answer-extraction, answer-abstraction, multi-choice, and boolean QG) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our Unified-QG can effectively and continually adapt to QG tasks when datasets and formats vary. In addition, we verify the ability of a single trained Unified-QG model in improving $8$ Question Answering (QA) systems' performance through generating synthetic QA data.

Although deep learning has made significant progress on fixed large-scale datasets, it typically encounters challenges regarding improperly detecting new/unseen classes in the open-world classification, over-parametrized, and overfitting small samples. In contrast, biological systems can overcome the above difficulties very well. Individuals inherit an innate gene from collective creatures that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and can learn new skills through a few examples. Inspired by this, we propose a practical collective-individual paradigm where open-world tasks are trained in sequence using an evolution (expandable) network. To be specific, we innovatively introduce learngene that inherits the meta-knowledge from the collective model and reconstructs a new lightweight individual model for the target task, to realize the collective-individual paradigm. Particularly, we present a novel criterion that can discover the learngene in the collective model, according to the gradient information. Finally, the individual model is trained only with a few samples in the absence of the source data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in an extensive empirical study and theoretical analysis.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) receive great attentions recently due to its excellent performance in image generation, transformation, and super-resolution. However, GAN has rarely been studied and trained for classification, leading that the generated images may not be appropriate for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Classifier (GAC) particularly for low-resolution Handwriting Character Recognition. Specifically, involving additionally a classifier in the training process of normal GANs, GAC is calibrated for learning suitable structures and restored characters images that benefits the classification. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve remarkable performance in handwriting characters 8x super-resolution, approximately 10% and 20% higher than the present state-of-the-art methods respectively on benchmark data CASIA-HWDB1.1 and MNIST.