Approximate better, Attack stronger: Adversarial Example Generation via Asymptotically Gaussian Mixture Distribution

Strong adversarial examples are the keys to evaluating and enhancing the robustness of deep neural networks. The popular adversarial attack algorithms maximize the non-concave loss function using the gradient ascent. However, the performance of each attack is usually sensitive to, for instance, minor image transformations due to insufficient information (only one input example, few white-box source models and unknown defense strategies). Hence, the crafted adversarial examples are prone to overfit the source model, which limits their transferability to unidentified architectures. In this paper, we propose Multiple Asymptotically Normal Distribution Attacks (MultiANDA), a novel method that explicitly characterizes adversarial perturbations from a learned distribution. Specifically, we approximate the posterior distribution over the perturbations by taking advantage of the asymptotic normality property of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA), then apply the ensemble strategy on this procedure to estimate a Gaussian mixture model for a better exploration of the potential optimization space. Drawing perturbations from the learned distribution allow us to generate any number of adversarial examples for each input. The approximated posterior essentially describes the stationary distribution of SGA iterations, which captures the geometric information around the local optimum. Thus, the samples drawn from the distribution reliably maintain the transferability. Our proposed method outperforms nine state-of-the-art black-box attacks on deep learning models with or without defenses through extensive experiments on seven normally trained and seven defence models.

Divert More Attention to Vision-Language Tracking

Relying on Transformer for complex visual feature learning, object tracking has witnessed the new standard for state-of-the-arts (SOTAs). However, this advancement accompanies by larger training data and longer training period, making tracking increasingly expensive. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Transformer-reliance is not necessary and the pure ConvNets are still competitive and even better yet more economical and friendly in achieving SOTA tracking. Our solution is to unleash the power of multimodal vision-language (VL) tracking, simply using ConvNets. The essence lies in learning novel unified-adaptive VL representations with our modality mixer (ModaMixer) and asymmetrical ConvNet search. We show that our unified-adaptive VL representation, learned purely with the ConvNets, is a simple yet strong alternative to Transformer visual features, by unbelievably improving a CNN-based Siamese tracker by 14.5% in SUC on challenging LaSOT (50.7% > 65.2%), even outperforming several Transformer-based SOTA trackers. Besides empirical results, we theoretically analyze our approach to evidence its effectiveness. By revealing the potential of VL representation, we expect the community to divert more attention to VL tracking and hope to open more possibilities for future tracking beyond Transformer. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/JudasDie/SOTS.

Hyperbolic Relevance Matching for Neural Keyphrase Extraction

Keyphrase extraction is a fundamental task in natural language processing and information retrieval that aims to extract a set of phrases with important information from a source document. Identifying important keyphrase is the central component of the keyphrase extraction task, and its main challenge is how to represent information comprehensively and discriminate importance accurately. In this paper, to address these issues, we design a new hyperbolic matching model (HyperMatch) to represent phrases and documents in the same hyperbolic space and explicitly estimate the phrase-document relevance via the Poincar\'e distance as the important score of each phrase. Specifically, to capture the hierarchical syntactic and semantic structure information, HyperMatch takes advantage of the hidden representations in multiple layers of RoBERTa and integrates them as the word embeddings via an adaptive mixing layer. Meanwhile, considering the hierarchical structure hidden in the document, HyperMatch embeds both phrases and documents in the same hyperbolic space via a hyperbolic phrase encoder and a hyperbolic document encoder. This strategy can further enhance the estimation of phrase-document relevance due to the good properties of hyperbolic space. In this setting, the keyphrase extraction can be taken as a matching problem and effectively implemented by minimizing a hyperbolic margin-based triplet loss. Extensive experiments are conducted on six benchmarks and demonstrate that HyperMatch outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Learning Target-aware Representation for Visual Tracking via Informative Interactions

We introduce a novel backbone architecture to improve target-perception ability of feature representation for tracking. Specifically, having observed that de facto frameworks perform feature matching simply using the outputs from backbone for target localization, there is no direct feedback from the matching module to the backbone network, especially the shallow layers. More concretely, only the matching module can directly access the target information (in the reference frame), while the representation learning of candidate frame is blind to the reference target. As a consequence, the accumulation effect of target-irrelevant interference in the shallow stages may degrade the feature quality of deeper layers. In this paper, we approach the problem from a different angle by conducting multiple branch-wise interactions inside the Siamese-like backbone networks (InBN). At the core of InBN is a general interaction modeler (GIM) that injects the prior knowledge of reference image to different stages of the backbone network, leading to better target-perception and robust distractor-resistance of candidate feature representation with negligible computation cost. The proposed GIM module and InBN mechanism are general and applicable to different backbone types including CNN and Transformer for improvements, as evidenced by our extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks. In particular, the CNN version (based on SiamCAR) improves the baseline with 3.2/6.9 absolute gains of SUC on LaSOT/TNL2K, respectively. The Transformer version obtains SUC scores of 65.7/52.0 on LaSOT/TNL2K, which are on par with recent state of the arts. Code and models will be released.

Topic-Aware Encoding for Extractive Summarization

Document summarization provides an instrument for faster understanding the collection of text documents and has several real-life applications. With the growth of online text data, numerous summarization models have been proposed recently. The Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) based neural summarization model is the most widely used in the summarization field due to its high performance. This is because semantic information and structure information in the text is adequately considered when encoding. However, the existing extractive summarization models pay little attention to and use the central topic information to assist the generation of summaries, which leads to models not ensuring the generated summary under the primary topic. A lengthy document can span several topics, and a single summary cannot do justice to all the topics. Therefore, the key to generating a high-quality summary is determining the central topic and building a summary based on it, especially for a long document. We propose a topic-aware encoding for document summarization to deal with this issue. This model effectively combines syntactic-level and topic-level information to build a comprehensive sentence representation. Specifically, a neural topic model is added in the neural-based sentence-level representation learning to adequately consider the central topic information for capturing the critical content in the original document. The experimental results on three public datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Reinforced Abstractive Summarization with Adaptive Length Controlling

Document summarization, as a fundamental task in natural language generation, aims to generate a short and coherent summary for a given document. Controllable summarization, especially of the length, is an important issue for some practical applications, especially how to trade-off the length constraint and information integrity. In this paper, we propose an \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{L}ength \textbf{C}ontrolling \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{ALCO}) method to leverage two-stage abstractive summarization model via reinforcement learning. ALCO incorporates length constraint into the stage of sentence extraction to penalize the overlength extracted sentences. Meanwhile, a saliency estimation mechanism is designed to preserve the salient information in the generated sentences. A series of experiments have been conducted on a wildly-used benchmark dataset \textit{CNN/Daily Mail}. The results have shown that ALCO performs better than the popular baselines in terms of length controllability and content preservation.

Reinforcing Semantic-Symmetry for Document Summarization

Document summarization condenses a long document into a short version with salient information and accurate semantic descriptions. The main issue is how to make the output summary semantically consistent with the input document. To reach this goal, recently, researchers have focused on supervised end-to-end hybrid approaches, which contain an extractor module and abstractor module. Among them, the extractor identifies the salient sentences from the input document, and the abstractor generates a summary from the salient sentences. This model successfully keeps the consistency between the generated summary and the reference summary via various strategies (e.g., reinforcement learning). There are two semantic gaps when training the hybrid model (one is between document and extracted sentences, and the other is between extracted sentences and summary). However, they are not explicitly considered in the existing methods, which usually results in a semantic bias of summary. To mitigate the above issue, in this paper, a new \textbf{r}einforcing s\textbf{e}mantic-\textbf{sy}mmetry learning \textbf{m}odel is proposed for document summarization (\textbf{ReSyM}). ReSyM introduces a semantic-consistency reward in the extractor to bridge the first gap. A semantic dual-reward is designed to bridge the second gap in the abstractor. The whole document summarization process is implemented via reinforcement learning with a hybrid reward mechanism (combining the above two rewards). Moreover, a comprehensive sentence representation learning method is presented to sufficiently capture the information from the original document. A series of experiments have been conducted on two wildly used benchmark datasets CNN/Daily Mail and BigPatent. The results have shown the superiority of ReSyM by comparing it with the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of various evaluation metrics.

Importance Estimation from Multiple Perspectives for Keyphrase Extraction

Keyphrase extraction is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing, which usually contains two main parts: candidate keyphrase extraction and keyphrase importance estimation. From the view of human understanding documents, we typically measure the importance of phrase according to its syntactic accuracy, information saliency, and concept consistency simultaneously. However, most existing keyphrase extraction approaches only focus on the part of them, which leads to biased results. In this paper, we propose a new approach to estimate the importance of keyphrase from multiple perspectives (called as \textit{KIEMP}) and further improve the performance of keyphrase extraction. Specifically, \textit{KIEMP} estimates the importance of phrase with three modules: a chunking module to measure its syntactic accuracy, a ranking module to check its information saliency, and a matching module to judge the concept (i.e., topic) consistency between phrase and the whole document. These three modules are seamlessly jointed together via an end-to-end multi-task learning model, which is helpful for three parts to enhance each other and balance the effects of three perspectives. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets show that \textit{KIEMP} outperforms the existing state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction approaches in most cases.