Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization

The quadratic computational and memory complexities of large Transformers have limited their scalability for long document summarization. In this paper, we propose Hepos, a novel efficient encoder-decoder attention with head-wise positional strides to effectively pinpoint salient information from the source. We further conduct a systematic study of existing efficient self-attentions. Combined with Hepos, we are able to process ten times more tokens than existing models that use full attentions. For evaluation, we present a new dataset, GovReport, with significantly longer documents and summaries. Results show that our models produce significantly higher ROUGE scores than competitive comparisons, including new state-of-the-art results on PubMed. Human evaluation also shows that our models generate more informative summaries with fewer unfaithful errors.

Attention Head Masking for Inference Time Content Selection in Abstractive Summarization

How can we effectively inform content selection in Transformer-based abstractive summarization models? In this work, we present a simple-yet-effective attention head masking technique, which is applied on encoder-decoder attentions to pinpoint salient content at inference time. Using attention head masking, we are able to reveal the relation between encoder-decoder attentions and content selection behaviors of summarization models. We then demonstrate its effectiveness on three document summarization datasets based on both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Importantly, our models outperform prior state-of-the-art models on CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets. Moreover, our inference-time masking technique is also data-efficient, requiring only 20% of the training samples to outperform BART fine-tuned on the full CNN/DailyMail dataset.

Inference Time Style Control for Summarization

How to generate summaries of different styles without requiring corpora in the target styles, or training separate models? We present two novel methods that can be deployed during summary decoding on any pre-trained Transformer-based summarization model. (1) Decoder state adjustment instantly modifies decoder final states with externally trained style scorers, to iteratively refine the output against a target style. (2) Word unit prediction constrains the word usage to impose strong lexical control during generation. In experiments of summarizing with simplicity control, automatic evaluation and human judges both find our models producing outputs in simpler languages while still informative. We also generate news headlines with various ideological leanings, which can be distinguished by humans with a reasonable probability.

MD-MTL: An Ensemble Med-Multi-Task Learning Package for DiseaseScores Prediction and Multi-Level Risk Factor Analysis

While many machine learning methods have been used for medical prediction and risk factor analysis on healthcare data, most prior research has involved single-task learning (STL) methods. However, healthcare research often involves multiple related tasks. For instance, implementation of disease scores prediction and risk factor analysis in multiple subgroups of patients simultaneously and risk factor analysis at multi-levels synchronously. In this paper, we developed a new ensemble machine learning Python package based on multi-task learning (MTL), referred to as the Med-Multi-Task Learning (MD-MTL) package and applied it in predicting disease scores of patients, and in carrying out risk factor analysis on multiple subgroups of patients simultaneously. Our experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the utility of the MD-MTL package, and show the advantage of MTL (vs. STL), when analyzing data that is organized into different categories (tasks, which can be various age groups, different levels of disease severity, etc.).

Annotation-Efficient Learning for Medical Image Segmentation based on Noisy Pseudo Labels and Adversarial Learning

Despite that deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, its success relies on a large set of manually annotated images for training that are expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose an annotation-efficient learning framework for segmentation tasks that avoids annotations of training images, where we use an improved Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to learn from a set of unpaired medical images and auxiliary masks obtained either from a shape model or public datasets. We first use the GAN to generate pseudo labels for our training images under the implicit high-level shape constraint represented by a Variational Auto-encoder (VAE)-based discriminator with the help of the auxiliary masks, and build a Discriminator-guided Generator Channel Calibration (DGCC) module which employs our discriminator's feedback to calibrate the generator for better pseudo labels. To learn from the pseudo labels that are noisy, we further introduce a noise-robust iterative learning method using noise-weighted Dice loss. We validated our framework with two situations: objects with a simple shape model like optic disc in fundus images and fetal head in ultrasound images, and complex structures like lung in X-Ray images and liver in CT images. Experimental results demonstrated that 1) Our VAE-based discriminator and DGCC module help to obtain high-quality pseudo labels. 2) Our proposed noise-robust learning method can effectively overcome the effect of noisy pseudo labels. 3) The segmentation performance of our method without using annotations of training images is close or even comparable to that of learning from human annotations.

Adaptive Federated Learning and Digital Twin for Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) enables distributed intelligent services varying with the dynamic and realtime industrial devices to achieve Industry 4.0 benefits. In this paper, we consider a new architecture of digital twin empowered Industrial IoT where digital twins capture the characteristics of industrial devices to assist federated learning. Noticing that digital twins may bring estimation deviations from the actual value of device state, a trusted based aggregation is proposed in federated learning to alleviate the effects of such deviation. We adaptively adjust the aggregation frequency of federated learning based on Lyapunov dynamic deficit queue and deep reinforcement learning, to improve the learning performance under the resource constraints. To further adapt to the heterogeneity of Industrial IoT, a clustering-based asynchronous federated learning framework is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed framework is superior to the benchmark in terms of learning accuracy, convergence, and energy saving.

PAIR: Planning and Iterative Refinement in Pre-trained Transformers for Long Text Generation

Pre-trained Transformers have enabled impressive breakthroughs in generating long and fluent text, yet their outputs are often "rambling" without coherently arranged content. In this work, we present a novel content-controlled text generation framework, PAIR, with planning and iterative refinement, which is built upon a large model, BART. We first adapt the BERT model to automatically construct the content plans, consisting of keyphrase assignments and their corresponding sentence-level positions. The BART model is employed for generation without modifying its structure. We then propose a refinement algorithm to gradually enhance the generation quality within the sequence-to-sequence framework. Evaluation with automatic metrics shows that adding planning consistently improves the generation quality on three distinct domains, with an average of 20 BLEU points and 12 METEOR points improvements. In addition, human judges rate our system outputs to be more relevant and coherent than comparisons without planning.

XREF: Entity Linking for Chinese News Comments with Supplementary Article Reference

Automatic identification of mentioned entities in social media posts facilitates quick digestion of trending topics and popular opinions. Nonetheless, this remains a challenging task due to limited context and diverse name variations. In this paper, we study the problem of entity linking for Chinese news comments given mentions' spans. We hypothesize that comments often refer to entities in the corresponding news article, as well as topics involving the entities. We therefore propose a novel model, XREF, that leverages attention mechanisms to (1) pinpoint relevant context within comments, and (2) detect supporting entities from the news article. To improve training, we make two contributions: (a) we propose a supervised attention loss in addition to the standard cross entropy, and (b) we develop a weakly supervised training scheme to utilize the large-scale unlabeled corpus. Two new datasets in entertainment and product domains are collected and annotated for experiments. Our proposed method outperforms previous methods on both datasets.

Vision-Based Fall Event Detection in Complex Background Using Attention Guided Bi-directional LSTM

Fall event detection, as one of the greatest risks to the elderly, has been a hot research issue in the solitary scene in recent years. Nevertheless, there are few researches on the fall event detection in complex background. Different from most conventional background subtraction methods which depend on background modeling, Mask R-CNN method based on deep learning technique can clearly extract the moving object in noise background. We further propose an attention guided Bi-directional LSTM model for the final fall event detection. To demonstrate the efficiency, the proposed method is verified in the public dataset and self-build dataset. Evaluation of the algorithm performances in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods indicates that the proposed design is accurate and robust, which means it is suitable for the task of fall event detection in complex situation.