On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmark

Dialogue safety problems severely limit the real-world deployment of neural conversational models and attract great research interests recently. We propose a taxonomy for dialogue safety specifically designed to capture unsafe behaviors that are unique in human-bot dialogue setting, with focuses on context-sensitive unsafety, which is under-explored in prior works. To spur research in this direction, we compile DiaSafety, a dataset of 6 unsafe categories with rich context-sensitive unsafe examples. Experiments show that existing utterance-level safety guarding tools fail catastrophically on our dataset. As a remedy, we train a context-level dialogue safety classifier to provide a strong baseline for context-sensitive dialogue unsafety detection. With our classifier, we perform safety evaluations on popular conversational models and show that existing dialogue systems are still stuck in context-sensitive safety problems.

Non-Autoregressive Translation with Layer-Wise Prediction and Deep Supervision

How do we perform efficient inference while retaining high translation quality? Existing neural machine translation models, such as Transformer, achieve high performance, but they decode words one by one, which is inefficient. Recent non-autoregressive translation models speed up the inference, but their quality is still inferior. In this work, we propose DSLP, a highly efficient and high-performance model for machine translation. The key insight is to train a non-autoregressive Transformer with Deep Supervision and feed additional Layer-wise Predictions. We conducted extensive experiments on four translation tasks (both directions of WMT'14 EN-DE and WMT'16 EN-RO). Results show that our approach consistently improves the BLEU scores compared with respective base models. Specifically, our best variant outperforms the autoregressive model on three translation tasks, while being 14.8 times more efficient in inference.

Simulated annealing for optimization of graphs and sequences

Optimization of discrete structures aims at generating a new structure with the better property given an existing one, which is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Different from the continuous optimization, the realistic applications of discrete optimization (e.g., text generation) are very challenging due to the complex and long-range constraints, including both syntax and semantics, in discrete structures. In this work, we present SAGS, a novel Simulated Annealing framework for Graph and Sequence optimization. The key idea is to integrate powerful neural networks into metaheuristics (e.g., simulated annealing, SA) to restrict the search space in discrete optimization. We start by defining a sophisticated objective function, involving the property of interest and pre-defined constraints (e.g., grammar validity). SAGS searches from the discrete space towards this objective by performing a sequence of local edits, where deep generative neural networks propose the editing content and thus can control the quality of editing. We evaluate SAGS on paraphrase generation and molecule generation for sequence optimization and graph optimization, respectively. Extensive results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing paraphrase generation methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluations. Further, SAGS also significantly outperforms all the previous methods in molecule generation.

Smart Home Energy Management: Sequence-to-Sequence Load Forecasting and Q-Learning

A smart home energy management system (HEMS) can contribute towards reducing the energy costs of customers; however, HEMS suffers from uncertainty in both energy generation and consumption patterns. In this paper, we propose a sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) learning-based supply and load prediction along with reinforcement learning-based HEMS control. We investigate how the prediction method affects the HEMS operation. First, we use Seq2Seq learning to predict photovoltaic (PV) power and home devices' load. We then apply Q-learning for offline optimization of HEMS based on the prediction results. Finally, we test the online performance of the trained Q-learning scheme with actual PV and load data. The Seq2Seq learning is compared with VARMA, SVR, and LSTM in both prediction and operation levels. The simulation results show that Seq2Seq performs better with a lower prediction error and online operation performance.

The Volctrans GLAT System: Non-autoregressive Translation Meets WMT21

This paper describes the Volctrans' submission to the WMT21 news translation shared task for German->English translation. We build a parallel (i.e., non-autoregressive) translation system using the Glancing Transformer, which enables fast and accurate parallel decoding in contrast to the currently prevailing autoregressive models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel translation system that can be scaled to such a practical scenario like WMT competition. More importantly, our parallel translation system achieves the best BLEU score (35.0) on German->English translation task, outperforming all strong autoregressive counterparts.

Learning from Peers: Transfer Reinforcement Learning for Joint Radio and Cache Resource Allocation in 5G Network Slicing

Radio access network (RAN) slicing is an important part of network slicing in 5G. The evolving network architecture requires the orchestration of multiple network resources such as radio and cache resources. In recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely applied for network slicing. However, most existing works do not take advantage of the knowledge transfer capability in ML. In this paper, we propose a transfer reinforcement learning (TRL) scheme for joint radio and cache resources allocation to serve 5G RAN slicing.We first define a hierarchical architecture for the joint resources allocation. Then we propose two TRL algorithms: Q-value transfer reinforcement learning (QTRL) and action selection transfer reinforcement learning (ASTRL). In the proposed schemes, learner agents utilize the expert agents' knowledge to improve their performance on target tasks. The proposed algorithms are compared with both the model-free Q-learning and the model-based priority proportional fairness and time-to-live (PPF-TTL) algorithms. Compared with Q-learning, QTRL and ASTRL present 23.9% lower delay for Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications slice and 41.6% higher throughput for enhanced Mobile Broad Band slice, while achieving significantly faster convergence than Q-learning. Moreover, 40.3% lower URLLC delay and almost twice eMBB throughput are observed with respect to PPF-TTL.

Physiological-Physical Feature Fusion for Automatic Voice Spoofing Detection

Speaker verification systems have been used in many production scenarios in recent years. Unfortunately, they are still highly prone to different kinds of spoofing attacks such as voice conversion and speech synthesis, etc. In this paper, we propose a new method base on physiological-physical feature fusion to deal with voice spoofing attacks. This method involves feature extraction, a densely connected convolutional neural network with squeeze and excitation block (SE-DenseNet), multi-scale residual neural network with squeeze and excitation block (SE-Res2Net) and feature fusion strategies. We first pre-trained a convolutional neural network using the speaker's voice and face in the video as surveillance signals. It can extract physiological features from speech. Then we use SE-DenseNet and SE-Res2Net to extract physical features. Such a densely connection pattern has high parameter efficiency and squeeze and excitation block can enhance the transmission of the feature. Finally, we integrate the two features into the SE-Densenet to identify the spoofing attacks. Experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 data set show that our model is effective for voice spoofing detection. In the logical access scenario, our model improves the tandem decision cost function (t-DCF) and equal error rate (EER) scores by 4% and 7%, respectively, compared with other methods. In the physical access scenario, our model improved t-DCF and EER scores by 8% and 10%, respectively.

MTG: A Benchmarking Suite for Multilingual Text Generation

We introduce MTG, a new benchmark suite for training and evaluating multilingual text generation. It is the first and largest text generation benchmark with 120k human-annotated multi-way parallel data for three tasks (story generation, question generation, and title generation) across four languages (English, German, French, and Spanish). Based on it, we set various evaluation scenarios and make a deep analysis of several popular multilingual generation models from different aspects. Our benchmark suite will encourage the multilingualism for text generation community with more human-annotated parallel data and more diverse generation scenarios.

EVA: An Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue System with Large-Scale Generative Pre-Training

Although pre-trained language models have remarkably enhanced the generation ability of dialogue systems, open-domain Chinese dialogue systems are still limited by the dialogue data and the model size compared with English ones. In this paper, we propose EVA, a Chinese dialogue system that contains the largest Chinese pre-trained dialogue model with 2.8B parameters. To build this model, we collect the largest Chinese dialogue dataset named WDC-Dialogue from various public social media. This dataset contains 1.4B context-response pairs and is used as the pre-training corpus of EVA. Extensive experiments on automatic and human evaluation show that EVA outperforms other Chinese pre-trained dialogue models especially in the multi-turn interaction of human-bot conversations.

Follow Your Path: a Progressive Method for Knowledge Distillation

Deep neural networks often have a huge number of parameters, which posts challenges in deployment in application scenarios with limited memory and computation capacity. Knowledge distillation is one approach to derive compact models from bigger ones. However, it has been observed that a converged heavy teacher model is strongly constrained for learning a compact student network and could make the optimization subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we propose ProKT, a new model-agnostic method by projecting the supervision signals of a teacher model into the student's parameter space. Such projection is implemented by decomposing the training objective into local intermediate targets with an approximate mirror descent technique. The proposed method could be less sensitive with the quirks during optimization which could result in a better local optimum. Experiments on both image and text datasets show that our proposed ProKT consistently achieves superior performance compared to other existing knowledge distillation methods.