Modeling Uncertainty in Personalized Emotion Prediction with Normalizing Flows

Designing predictive models for subjective problems in natural language processing (NLP) remains challenging. This is mainly due to its non-deterministic nature and different perceptions of the content by different humans. It may be solved by Personalized Natural Language Processing (PNLP), where the model exploits additional information about the reader to make more accurate predictions. However, current approaches require complete information about the recipients to be straight embedded. Besides, the recent methods focus on deterministic inference or simple frequency-based estimations of the probabilities. In this work, we overcome this limitation by proposing a novel approach to capture the uncertainty of the forecast using conditional Normalizing Flows. This allows us to model complex multimodal distributions and to compare various models using negative log-likelihood (NLL). In addition, the new solution allows for various interpretations of possible reader perception thanks to the available sampling function. We validated our method on three challenging, subjective NLP tasks, including emotion recognition and hate speech. The comparative analysis of generalized and personalized approaches revealed that our personalized solutions significantly outperform the baseline and provide more precise uncertainty estimates. The impact on the text interpretability and uncertainty studies are presented as well. The information brought by the developed methods makes it possible to build hybrid models whose effectiveness surpasses classic solutions. In addition, an analysis and visualization of the probabilities of the given decisions for texts with high entropy of annotations and annotators with mixed views were carried out.

TreeFlow: Going beyond Tree-based Gaussian Probabilistic Regression

The tree-based ensembles are known for their outstanding performance for classification and regression problems characterized by feature vectors represented by mixed-type variables from various ranges and domains. However, considering regression problems, they are primarily designed to provide deterministic responses or model the uncertainty of the output with a Gaussian distribution. In this work, we introduce TreeFlow, the tree-based approach that combines the benefits of using tree ensembles with capabilities of modeling flexible probability distributions using normalizing flows. The main idea of the solution is to use a tree-based model as a feature extractor and combine it with a conditional variant of normalizing flow. Consequently, our approach is capable of modeling complex distributions for the regression outputs. We evaluate the proposed method on challenging regression benchmarks with varying volume, feature characteristics, and target dimensionality. We obtain the SOTA results on datasets with non-gaussian target distributions and competitive results on gaussian ones compared to tree-based regression baselines.

Flow Plugin Network for conditional generation

Generative models have gained many researchers' attention in the last years resulting in models such as StyleGAN for human face generation or PointFlow for the 3D point cloud generation. However, by default, we cannot control its sampling process, i.e., we cannot generate a sample with a specific set of attributes. The current approach is model retraining with additional inputs and different architecture, which requires time and computational resources. We propose a novel approach that enables to a generation of objects with a given set of attributes without retraining the base model. For this purpose, we utilize the normalizing flow models - Conditional Masked Autoregressive Flow and Conditional Real NVP, as a Flow Plugin Network (FPN).

PluGeN: Multi-Label Conditional Generation From Pre-Trained Models

Modern generative models achieve excellent quality in a variety of tasks including image or text generation and chemical molecule modeling. However, existing methods often lack the essential ability to generate examples with requested properties, such as the age of the person in the photo or the weight of the generated molecule. Incorporating such additional conditioning factors would require rebuilding the entire architecture and optimizing the parameters from scratch. Moreover, it is difficult to disentangle selected attributes so that to perform edits of only one attribute while leaving the others unchanged. To overcome these limitations we propose PluGeN (Plugin Generative Network), a simple yet effective generative technique that can be used as a plugin to pre-trained generative models. The idea behind our approach is to transform the entangled latent representation using a flow-based module into a multi-dimensional space where the values of each attribute are modeled as an independent one-dimensional distribution. In consequence, PluGeN can generate new samples with desired attributes as well as manipulate labeled attributes of existing examples. Due to the disentangling of the latent representation, we are even able to generate samples with rare or unseen combinations of attributes in the dataset, such as a young person with gray hair, men with make-up, or women with beards. We combined PluGeN with GAN and VAE models and applied it to conditional generation and manipulation of images and chemical molecule modeling. Experiments demonstrate that PluGeN preserves the quality of backbone models while adding the ability to control the values of labeled attributes.