The field of compositional generalization is currently experiencing a renaissance in AI, as novel problem settings and algorithms motivated by various practical applications are being introduced, building on top of the classical compositional generalization problem. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of top recent developments in multiple real-life applications of the compositional generalization. Specifically, we introduce a taxonomy of common applications and summarize the state-of-the-art for each of those domains. Furthermore, we identify important current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to the future of this burgeoning field.
As a predictive measure of the treatment outcome in psychotherapy, the working alliance measures the agreement of the patient and the therapist in terms of their bond, task and goal. Long been a clinical quantity estimated by the patients' and therapists' self-evaluative reports, we believe that the working alliance can be better characterized using natural language processing technique directly in the dialogue transcribed in each therapy session. In this work, we propose the Working Alliance Transformer (WAT), a Transformer-based classification model that has a psychological state encoder which infers the working alliance scores by projecting the embedding of the dialogues turns onto the embedding space of the clinical inventory for working alliance. We evaluate our method in a real-world dataset with over 950 therapy sessions with anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and suicidal patients and demonstrate an empirical advantage of using information about the therapeutic states in this sequence classification task of psychotherapy dialogues.
In recent years, reinforcement learning and bandits have transformed a wide range of real-world applications including healthcare, finance, recommendation systems, robotics, and last but not least, the speech and natural language processing. While most speech and language applications of reinforcement learning algorithms are centered around improving the training of deep neural networks with its flexible optimization properties, there are still many grounds to explore to utilize the benefits of reinforcement learning, such as its reward-driven adaptability, state representations, temporal structures and generalizability. In this survey, we present an overview of recent advancements of reinforcement learning and bandits, and discuss how they can be effectively employed to solve speech and natural language processing problems with models that are adaptive, interactive and scalable.
Emerging research frontiers and computational advances have gradually transformed cognitive science into a multidisciplinary and data-driven field. As a result, there is a proliferation of cognitive theories investigated and interpreted from different academic lens and in different levels of abstraction. We formulate this applied aspect of this challenge as the computational cognitive inference, and describe the major routes of computational approaches. To balance the potential optimism alongside the speed and scale of the data-driven era of cognitive science, we propose to inspect this trend in more empirical terms by identifying the operational challenges, societal impacts and ethical guidelines in conducting research and interpreting results from the computational inference in cognitive science.
We propose a recommendation system that suggests treatment strategies to a therapist during the psychotherapy session in real-time. Our system uses a turn-level rating mechanism that predicts the therapeutic outcome by computing a similarity score between the deep embedding of a scoring inventory, and the current sentence that the patient is speaking. The system automatically transcribes a continuous audio stream and separates it into turns of the patient and of the therapist using an online registration-free diarization method. The dialogue pairs along with their computed ratings are then fed into a deep reinforcement learning recommender where the sessions are treated as users and the topics are treated as items. Other than evaluating the empirical advantages of the core components on existing datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this system in a web app.
Knowledge management systems are in high demand for industrial researchers, chemical or research enterprises, or evidence-based decision making. However, existing systems have limitations in categorizing and organizing paper insights or relationships. Traditional databases are usually disjoint with logging systems, which limit its utility in generating concise, collated overviews. In this work, we briefly survey existing approaches of this problem space and propose a unified framework that utilizes relational databases to log hierarchical information to facilitate the research and writing process, or generate useful knowledge from references or insights from connected concepts. This framework of knowledge management system enables novel functionalities encompassing improved hierarchical notetaking, AI-assisted brainstorming, and multi-directional relationships. Potential applications include managing inventories and changes for manufacture or research enterprises, or generating analytic reports with evidence-based decision making.
The absence of a conventional association between the cell-cell cohabitation and its emergent dynamics into cliques during development has hindered our understanding of how cell populations proliferate, differentiate, and compete, i.e. the cell ecology. With the recent advancement of the single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), we can potentially describe such a link by constructing network graphs that characterize the similarity of the gene expression profiles of the cell-specific transcriptional programs, and analyzing these graphs systematically using the summary statistics informed by the algebraic topology. We propose the single-cell topological simplicial analysis (scTSA). Applying this approach to the single-cell gene expression profiles from local networks of cells in different developmental stages with different outcomes reveals a previously unseen topology of cellular ecology. These networks contain an abundance of cliques of single-cell profiles bound into cavities that guide the emergence of more complicated habitation forms. We visualize these ecological patterns with topological simplicial architectures of these networks, compared with the null models. Benchmarked on the single-cell RNA-seq data of zebrafish embryogenesis spanning 38,731 cells, 25 cell types and 12 time steps, our approach highlights the gastrulation as the most critical stage, consistent with consensus in developmental biology. As a nonlinear, model-independent, and unsupervised framework, our approach can also be applied to tracing multi-scale cell lineage, identifying critical stages, or creating pseudo-time series.
In this work, we compare different neural topic modeling methods in learning the topical propensities of different psychiatric conditions from the psychotherapy session transcripts parsed from speech recordings. We also incorporate temporal modeling to put this additional interpretability to action by parsing out topic similarities as a time series in a turn-level resolution. We believe this topic modeling framework can offer interpretable insights for the therapist to optimally decide his or her strategy and improve the psychotherapy effectiveness.
The therapeutic working alliance is an important predictor of the outcome of the psychotherapy treatment. In practice, the working alliance is estimated from a set of scoring questionnaires in an inventory that both the patient and the therapists fill out. In this work, we propose an analytical framework of directly inferring the therapeutic working alliance from the natural language within the psychotherapy sessions in a turn-level resolution with deep embeddings such as the Doc2Vec and SentenceBERT models. The transcript of each psychotherapy session can be transcribed and generated in real-time from the session speech recordings, and these embedded dialogues are compared with the distributed representations of the statements in the working alliance inventory. We demonstrate, in a real-world dataset with over 950 sessions of psychotherapy treatments in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and suicidal patients, the effectiveness of this method in mapping out trajectories of patient-therapist alignment and the interpretability that can offer insights in clinical psychiatry. We believe such a framework can be provide timely feedback to the therapist regarding the quality of the conversation in interview sessions.
Understanding the deep representations of complex networks is an important step of building interpretable and trustworthy machine learning applications in the age of internet. Global surrogate models that approximate the predictions of a black box model (e.g. an artificial or biological neural net) are usually used to provide valuable theoretical insights for the model interpretability. In order to evaluate how well a surrogate model can account for the representation in another model, we need to develop inference methods for model comparison. Previous studies have compared models and brains in terms of their representational geometries (characterized by the matrix of distances between representations of the input patterns in a model layer or cortical area). In this study, we propose to explore these summary statistical descriptions of representations in models and brains as part of a broader class of statistics that emphasize the topology as well as the geometry of representations. The topological summary statistics build on topological data analysis (TDA) and other graph-based methods. We evaluate these statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity that they afford when used for model selection, with the goal to relate different neural network models to each other and to make inferences about the computational mechanism that might best account for a black box representation. These new methods enable brain and computer scientists to visualize the dynamic representational transformations learned by brains and models, and to perform model-comparative statistical inference.