Cross-lingual Data Transformation and Combination for Text Classification

Text classification is a fundamental task for text data mining. In order to train a generalizable model, a large volume of text must be collected. To address data insufficiency, cross-lingual data may occasionally be necessary. Cross-lingual data sources may however suffer from data incompatibility, as text written in different languages can hold distinct word sequences and semantic patterns. Machine translation and word embedding alignment provide an effective way to transform and combine data for cross-lingual data training. To the best of our knowledge, there has been little work done on evaluating how the methodology used to conduct semantic space transformation and data combination affects the performance of classification models trained from cross-lingual resources. In this paper, we systematically evaluated the performance of two commonly used CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) text classifiers with differing data transformation and combination strategies. Monolingual models were trained from English and French alongside their translated and aligned embeddings. Our results suggested that semantic space transformation may conditionally promote the performance of monolingual models. Bilingual models were trained from a combination of both English and French. Our results indicate that a cross-lingual classification model can significantly benefit from cross-lingual data by learning from translated or aligned embedding spaces.

Convergence of Adversarial Training in Overparametrized Networks

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e. inputs that are imperceptibly perturbed from natural data and yet incorrectly classified by the network. Adversarial training, a heuristic form of robust optimization that alternates between minimization and maximization steps, has proven to be among the most successful methods to train networks that are robust against a pre-defined family of perturbations. This paper provides a partial answer to the success of adversarial training. When the inner maximization problem can be solved to optimality, we prove that adversarial training finds a network of small robust train loss. When the maximization problem is solved by a heuristic algorithm, we prove that adversarial training finds a network of small robust surrogate train loss. The analysis technique leverages recent work on the analysis of neural networks via Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), combined with online-learning when the maximization is solved by a heuristic, and the expressiveness of the NTK kernel in the $\ell_\infty$-norm.

Understanding and Improving Transformer From a Multi-Particle Dynamic System Point of View

The Transformer architecture is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success, the design principle of the Transformer remains elusive. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective towards understanding the architecture: we show that the Transformer can be mathematically interpreted as a numerical Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for a convection-diffusion equation in a multi-particle dynamic system. In particular, how words in a sentence are abstracted into contexts by passing through the layers of the Transformer can be interpreted as approximating multiple particles' movement in the space using the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme and the Euler's method. Given this ODE's perspective, the rich literature of numerical analysis can be brought to guide us in designing effective structures beyond the Transformer. As an example, we propose to replace the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme by the Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme, a scheme that is more commonly used and with much lower local truncation errors. The Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme suggests that the self-attention and position-wise feed-forward network (FFN) sub-layers should not be treated equally. Instead, in each layer, two position-wise FFN sub-layers should be used, and the self-attention sub-layer is placed in between. This leads to a brand new architecture. Such an FFN-attention-FFN layer is "Macaron-like", and thus we call the network with this new architecture the Macaron Net. Through extensive experiments, we show that the Macaron Net is superior to the Transformer on both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. The reproducible codes and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/zhuohan123/macaron-net

Adversarially Robust Generalization Just Requires More Unlabeled Data

Neural network robustness has recently been highlighted by the existence of adversarial examples. Many previous works show that the learned networks do not perform well on perturbed test data, and significantly more labeled data is required to achieve adversarially robust generalization. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically show that with just more unlabeled data, we can learn a model with better adversarially robust generalization. The key insight of our results is based on a risk decomposition theorem, in which the expected robust risk is separated into two parts: the stability part which measures the prediction stability in the presence of perturbations, and the accuracy part which evaluates the standard classification accuracy. As the stability part does not depend on any label information, we can optimize this part using unlabeled data. We further prove that for a specific Gaussian mixture problem illustrated by \cite{schmidt2018adversarially}, adversarially robust generalization can be almost as easy as the standard generalization in supervised learning if a sufficiently large amount of unlabeled data is provided. Inspired by the theoretical findings, we propose a new algorithm called PASS by leveraging unlabeled data during adversarial training. We show that in the transductive and semi-supervised settings, PASS achieves higher robust accuracy and defense success rate on the Cifar-10 task.

Equipping Experts/Bandits with Long-term Memory

We propose the first reduction-based approach to obtaining long-term memory guarantees for online learning in the sense of Bousquet and Warmuth, 2002, by reducing the problem to achieving typical switching regret. Specifically, for the classical expert problem with $K$ actions and $T$ rounds, using our framework we develop various algorithms with a regret bound of order $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T(S\ln T + n \ln K)})$ compared to any sequence of experts with $S-1$ switches among $n \leq \min\{S, K\}$ distinct experts. In addition, by plugging specific adaptive algorithms into our framework we also achieve the best of both stochastic and adversarial environments simultaneously. This resolves an open problem of Warmuth and Koolen, 2014. Furthermore, we extend our results to the sparse multi-armed bandit setting and show both negative and positive results for long-term memory guarantees. As a side result, our lower bound also implies that sparse losses do not help improve the worst-case regret for contextual bandits, a sharp contrast with the non-contextual case.

Distributed Bandit Learning: Near-Optimal Regret with Efficient Communication

We study the problem of regret minimization for distributed bandits learning, in which $M$ agents work collaboratively to minimize their total regret under the coordination of a central server. Our goal is to design communication protocols with near-optimal regret and little communication cost, which is measured by the total amount of transmitted data. For distributed multi-armed bandits, we propose a protocol with near-optimal regret and only $O(M\log(MK))$ communication cost, where $K$ is the number of arms. The communication cost is independent of the time horizon $T$, has only logarithmic dependence on the number of arms, and matches the lower bound except for a logarithmic factor. For distributed $d$-dimensional linear bandits, we propose a protocol that achieves near-optimal regret and has communication cost of order $\tilde{O}(Md)$, which has only logarithmic dependence on $T$.

A Gram-Gauss-Newton Method Learning Overparameterized Deep Neural Networks for Regression Problems

First-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are currently the standard algorithm for training deep neural networks. Second-order methods, despite their better convergence rate, are rarely used in practice due to the prohibitive computational cost in calculating the second order information. In this paper, we propose a novel Gram-Gauss-Newton (GGN) algorithm to train deep neural networks for regression problems with square loss. Different from typical second-order methods that have heavy computational cost in each iteration, our proposed GGN only has minor overhead compared to first-order methods such as SGD. We also provide theoretical results to show that for sufficiently wide neural networks, the convergence rate of the GGN algorithm is quadratic. Preliminary experiments on regression tasks demonstrate that for training standard networks, the GGN algorithm converges faster and achieves better performance than SGD.

Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network

Previous cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment studies rely on entity embeddings derived only from monolingual KG structural information, which may fail at matching entities that have different facts in two KGs. In this paper, we introduce the topic entity graph, a local sub-graph of an entity, to represent entities with their contextual information in KG. From this view, the KB-alignment task can be formulated as a graph matching problem; and we further propose a graph-attention based solution, which first matches all entities in two topic entity graphs, and then jointly model the local matching information to derive a graph-level matching vector. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection

Modern object detectors rely heavily on rectangular bounding boxes, such as anchors, proposals and the final predictions, to represent objects at various recognition stages. The bounding box is convenient to use but provides only a coarse localization of objects and leads to a correspondingly coarse extraction of object features. In this paper, we present \textbf{RepPoints} (representative points), a new finer representation of objects as a set of sample points useful for both localization and recognition. Given ground truth localization and recognition targets for training, RepPoints learn to automatically arrange themselves in a manner that bounds the spatial extent of an object and indicates semantically significant local areas. They furthermore do not require the use of anchors to sample a space of bounding boxes. We show that an anchor-free object detector based on RepPoints, implemented without multi-scale training and testing, can be as effective as state-of-the-art anchor-based detection methods, with 42.8 AP and 65.0 $AP_{50}$ on the COCO test-dev detection benchmark.

Mimicking the In-Camera Color Pipeline for Camera-Aware Object Compositing

We present a method for compositing virtual objects into a photograph such that the object colors appear to have been processed by the photo's camera imaging pipeline. Compositing in such a camera-aware manner is essential for high realism, and it requires the color transformation in the photo's pipeline to be inferred, which is challenging due to the inherent one-to-many mapping that exists from a scene to a photo. To address this problem for the case of a single photo taken from an unknown camera, we propose a dual-learning approach in which the reverse color transformation (from the photo to the scene) is jointly estimated. Learning of the reverse transformation is used to facilitate learning of the forward mapping, by enforcing cycle consistency of the two processes. We additionally employ a feature sharing schema to extract evidence from the target photo in the reverse mapping to guide the forward color transformation. Our dual-learning approach achieves object compositing results that surpass those of alternative techniques.