Interpretable Sequence Classification Via Prototype Trajectory

We propose a novel interpretable recurrent neural network (RNN) model, called ProtoryNet, in which we introduce a new concept of prototype trajectories. Motivated by the prototype theory in modern linguistics, ProtoryNet makes a prediction by finding the most similar prototype for each sentence in a text sequence and feeding an RNN backbone with the proximity of each of the sentences to the prototypes. The RNN backbone then captures the temporal pattern of the prototypes, to which we refer as prototype trajectories. The prototype trajectories enable intuitive, fine-grained interpretation of how the model reached to the final prediction, resembling the process of how humans analyze paragraphs. Experiments conducted on multiple public data sets reveal that the proposed method not only is more interpretable but also is more accurate than the current state-of-the-art prototype-based method. Furthermore, we report a survey result indicating that human users find ProtoryNet more intuitive and easier to understand, compared to the other prototype-based methods.

Exploring and Predicting Transferability across NLP Tasks

Recent advances in NLP demonstrate the effectiveness of training large-scale language models and transferring them to downstream tasks. Can fine-tuning these models on tasks other than language modeling further improve performance? In this paper, we conduct an extensive study of the transferability between 33 NLP tasks across three broad classes of problems (text classification, question answering, and sequence labeling). Our results show that transfer learning is more beneficial than previously thought, especially when target task data is scarce, and can improve performance even when the source task is small or differs substantially from the target task (e.g., part-of-speech tagging transfers well to the DROP QA dataset). We also develop task embeddings that can be used to predict the most transferable source tasks for a given target task, and we validate their effectiveness in experiments controlled for source and target data size. Overall, our experiments reveal that factors such as source data size, task and domain similarity, and task complexity all play a role in determining transferability.

Task-adaptive Asymmetric Deep Cross-modal Hashing

Supervised cross-modal hashing aims to embed the semantic correlations of heterogeneous modality data into the binary hash codes with discriminative semantic labels. Because of its advantages on retrieval and storage efficiency, it is widely used for solving efficient cross-modal retrieval. However, existing researches equally handle the different tasks of cross-modal retrieval, and simply learn the same couple of hash functions in a symmetric way for them. Under such circumstance, the uniqueness of different cross-modal retrieval tasks are ignored and sub-optimal performance may be brought. Motivated by this, we present a Task-adaptive Asymmetric Deep Cross-modal Hashing (TA-ADCMH) method in this paper. It can learn task-adaptive hash functions for two sub-retrieval tasks via simultaneous modality representation and asymmetric hash learning. Unlike previous cross-modal hashing approaches, our learning framework jointly optimizes semantic preserving that transforms deep features of multimedia data into binary hash codes, and the semantic regression which directly regresses query modality representation to explicit label. With our model, the binary codes can effectively preserve semantic correlations across different modalities, meanwhile, adaptively capture the query semantics. The superiority of TA-ADCMH is proved on two standard datasets from many aspects.

Optimizing Traffic Lights with Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning and V2X communication

We consider a system to optimize duration of traffic signals using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. This system aims at analyzing independent and shared rewards for multi-agents to control duration of traffic lights. A learning agent traffic light gets information along its lanes within a circular V2X coverage. The duration cycles of traffic light are modeled as Markov decision Processes. We investigate four variations of reward functions. The first two are unshared-rewards: based on waiting number, and waiting time of vehicles between two cycles of traffic light. The third and fourth functions are: shared-rewards based on waiting cars, and waiting time for all agents. Each agent has a memory for optimization through target network and prioritized experience replay. We evaluate multi-agents through the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) simulator. The results prove effectiveness of the proposed system to optimize traffic signals and reduce average waiting cars to 41.5 % as compared to the traditional periodic traffic control system.

Interpretable Companions for Black-Box Models

We present an interpretable companion model for any pre-trained black-box classifiers. The idea is that for any input, a user can decide to either receive a prediction from the black-box model, with high accuracy but no explanations, or employ a companion rule to obtain an interpretable prediction with slightly lower accuracy. The companion model is trained from data and the predictions of the black-box model, with the objective combining area under the transparency--accuracy curve and model complexity. Our model provides flexible choices for practitioners who face the dilemma of choosing between always using interpretable models and always using black-box models for a predictive task, so users can, for any given input, take a step back to resort to an interpretable prediction if they find the predictive performance satisfying, or stick to the black-box model if the rules are unsatisfying. To show the value of companion models, we design a human evaluation on more than a hundred people to investigate the tolerable accuracy loss to gain interpretability for humans.

Early Predictions for Medical Crowdfunding: A Deep Learning Approach Using Diverse Inputs

Medical crowdfunding is a popular channel for people needing financial help paying medical bills to collect donations from large numbers of people. However, large heterogeneity exists in donations across cases, and fundraisers face significant uncertainty in whether their crowdfunding campaigns can meet fundraising goals. Therefore, it is important to provide early warnings for fundraisers if such a channel will eventually fail. In this study, we aim to develop novel algorithms to provide accurate and timely predictions of fundraising performance, to better inform fundraisers. In particular, we propose a new approach to combine time-series features and time-invariant features in the deep learning model, to process diverse sources of input data. Compared with baseline models, our model achieves better accuracy and requires a shorter observation window of the time-varying features from the campaign launch to provide robust predictions with high confidence. To extract interpretable insights, we further conduct a multivariate time-series clustering analysis and identify four typical temporal donation patterns. This demonstrates the heterogeneity in the features and how they relate to the fundraising outcome. The prediction model and the interpretable insights can be applied to assist fundraisers with better promoting their fundraising campaigns and can potentially help crowdfunding platforms to provide more timely feedback to all fundraisers. Our proposed framework is also generalizable to other fields where diverse structured and unstructured data are valuable for predictions.

Does Order Matter? An Empirical Study on Generating Multiple Keyphrases as a Sequence

Recently, concatenating multiple keyphrases as a target sequence has been proposed as a new learning paradigm for keyphrase generation. Existing studies concatenate target keyphrases in different orders but no study has examined the effects of ordering on models' behavior. In this paper, we propose several orderings for concatenation and inspect the important factors for training a successful keyphrase generation model. By running comprehensive comparisons, we observe one preferable ordering and summarize a number of empirical findings and challenges, which can shed light on future research on this line of work.

Model-Agnostic Linear Competitors -- When Interpretable Models Compete and Collaborate with Black-Box Models

Driven by an increasing need for model interpretability, interpretable models have become strong competitors for black-box models in many real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel type of model where interpretable models compete and collaborate with black-box models. We present the Model-Agnostic Linear Competitors (MALC) for partially interpretable classification. MALC is a hybrid model that uses linear models to locally substitute any black-box model, capturing subspaces that are most likely to be in a class while leaving the rest of the data to the black-box. MALC brings together the interpretable power of linear models and good predictive performance of a black-box model. We formulate the training of a MALC model as a convex optimization. The predictive accuracy and transparency (defined as the percentage of data captured by the linear models) balance through a carefully designed objective function and the optimization problem is solved with the accelerated proximal gradient method. Experiments show that MALC can effectively trade prediction accuracy for transparency and provide an efficient frontier that spans the entire spectrum of transparency.