Towards Trustworthy Explanation: On Causal Rationalization

With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet, existing association-based approaches on rationalization cannot identify true rationales when two or more snippets are highly inter-correlated and thus provide a similar contribution to prediction accuracy, so-called spuriousness. To address this limitation, we novelly leverage two causal desiderata, non-spuriousness and efficiency, into rationalization from the causal inference perspective. We formally define a series of probabilities of causation based on a newly proposed structural causal model of rationalization, with its theoretical identification established as the main component of learning necessary and sufficient rationales. The superior performance of the proposed causal rationalization is demonstrated on real-world review and medical datasets with extensive experiments compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Differential Privacy for Class-based Data: A Practical Gaussian Mechanism

In this paper, we present a notion of differential privacy (DP) for data that comes from different classes. Here, the class-membership is private information that needs to be protected. The proposed method is an output perturbation mechanism that adds noise to the release of query response such that the analyst is unable to infer the underlying class-label. The proposed DP method is capable of not only protecting the privacy of class-based data but also meets quality metrics of accuracy and is computationally efficient and practical. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method empirically while outperforming the baseline additive Gaussian noise mechanism. We also examine a real-world application and apply the proposed DP method to the autoregression and moving average (ARMA) forecasting method, protecting the privacy of the underlying data source. Case studies on the real-world advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) measurements of household power consumption validate the excellent performance of the proposed DP method while also satisfying the accuracy of forecasted power consumption measurements.

AR-Diffusion: Auto-Regressive Diffusion Model for Text Generation

Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the realm of image generation due to their exceptional performance. Their success has been recently expanded to text generation via generating all tokens within a sequence concurrently. However, natural language exhibits a far more pronounced sequential dependency in comparison to images, and the majority of existing language models are trained with a left-to-right auto-regressive approach. To account for the inherent sequential characteristic of natural language, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion). AR-Diffusion ensures that the generation of tokens on the right depends on the generated ones on the left, a mechanism achieved through employing a dynamic number of denoising steps that vary based on token position. This results in tokens on the left undergoing fewer denoising steps than those on the right, thereby enabling them to generate earlier and subsequently influence the generation of tokens on the right. In a series of experiments on various text generation tasks, including text summarization, machine translation, and common sense generation, AR-Diffusion clearly demonstrated its superiority over existing diffusion language models and that it can be $100\times\sim600\times$ faster when achieving comparable results. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/AR-diffusion.

Fusion-Based Multi-User Semantic Communications for Wireless Image Transmission over Degraded Broadcast Channels

Degraded broadcast channels (DBC) are a typical multi-user communications scenario. There exist classic transmission methods, such as superposition coding with successive interference cancellation, to achieve the DBC capacity region. However, semantic communications method over DBC remains lack of in-depth research. To address this, we design a fusion-based multi-user semantic communications system for wireless image transmission over DBC in this paper. The proposed architecture supports a transmitter extracting semantic features for two users separately, and learns to dynamically fuse these semantic features into a joint latent representation for broadcasting. The key here is to design a flexible image semantic fusion (FISF) module to fuse the semantic features of two users, and to use a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based neural network to adjust the weights of different user semantic features for flexible adaptability to different users channels. Experiments present the semantic performance region based on the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of both users, and show that the proposed system dominates the traditional methods.

CDDM: Channel Denoising Diffusion Models for Wireless Communications

Diffusion models (DM) can gradually learn to remove noise, which have been widely used in artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) in recent years. The property of DM for removing noise leads us to wonder whether DM can be applied to wireless communications to help the receiver eliminate the channel noise. To address this, we propose channel denoising diffusion models (CDDM) for wireless communications in this paper. CDDM can be applied as a new physical layer module after the channel equalization to learn the distribution of the channel input signal, and then utilizes this learned knowledge to remove the channel noise. We design corresponding training and sampling algorithms for the forward diffusion process and the reverse sampling process of CDDM. Moreover, we apply CDDM to a semantic communications system based on joint source-channel coding (JSCC). Experimental results demonstrate that CDDM can further reduce the mean square error (MSE) after minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer, and the joint CDDM and JSCC system achieves better performance than the JSCC system and the traditional JPEG2000 with low-density parity-check (LDPC) code approach.

Differentially Private In-Context Learning

An important question in deploying large language models (LLMs) is how to augment LLMs with private data. We propose Differentially Private In-context Learning (DP-ICL) to enable LLMs to adapt to new tasks while maintaining privacy guarantees. DP-ICL performs private inference by establishing noisy consensus over an ensemble of exemplars using the Report-Noisy-Max mechanism. We evaluate DP-ICL on four benchmarks and find that it achieves comparable performance (<2\% degradation) with non-private ICL.

A Randomized Approach for Tight Privacy Accounting

Bounding privacy leakage over compositions, i.e., privacy accounting, is a key challenge in differential privacy (DP). However, the privacy parameter ($\varepsilon$ or $\delta$) is often easy to estimate but hard to bound. In this paper, we propose a new differential privacy paradigm called estimate-verify-release (EVR), which addresses the challenges of providing a strict upper bound for privacy parameter in DP compositions by converting an estimate of privacy parameter into a formal guarantee. The EVR paradigm first estimates the privacy parameter of a mechanism, then verifies whether it meets this guarantee, and finally releases the query output based on the verification result. The core component of the EVR is privacy verification. We develop a randomized privacy verifier using Monte Carlo (MC) technique. Furthermore, we propose an MC-based DP accountant that outperforms existing DP accounting techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation shows the newly proposed EVR paradigm improves the utility-privacy tradeoff for privacy-preserving machine learning.

V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset

Recent advances in detecting arbitrary objects in the real world are trained and evaluated on object detection datasets with a relatively restricted vocabulary. To facilitate the development of more general visual object detection, we propose V3Det, a vast vocabulary visual detection dataset with precisely annotated bounding boxes on massive images. V3Det has several appealing properties: 1) Vast Vocabulary: It contains bounding boxes of objects from 13,029 categories on real-world images, which is 10 times larger than the existing large vocabulary object detection dataset, e.g., LVIS. 2) Hierarchical Category Organization: The vast vocabulary of V3Det is organized by a hierarchical category tree which annotates the inclusion relationship among categories, encouraging the exploration of category relationships in vast and open vocabulary object detection. 3) Rich Annotations: V3Det comprises precisely annotated objects in 245k images and professional descriptions of each category written by human experts and a powerful chatbot. By offering a vast exploration space, V3Det enables extensive benchmarks on both vast and open vocabulary object detection, leading to new observations, practices, and insights for future research. It has the potential to serve as a cornerstone dataset for developing more general visual perception systems.

SoftCLIP: Softer Cross-modal Alignment Makes CLIP Stronger

During the preceding biennium, vision-language pre-training has achieved noteworthy success on several downstream tasks. Nevertheless, acquiring high-quality image-text pairs, where the pairs are entirely exclusive of each other, remains a challenging task, and noise exists in the commonly used datasets. To address this issue, we propose SoftCLIP, a novel approach that relaxes the strict one-to-one constraint and achieves a soft cross-modal alignment by introducing a softened target, which is generated from the fine-grained intra-modal self-similarity. The intra-modal guidance is indicative to enable two pairs have some local similarities and model many-to-many relationships between the two modalities. Besides, since the positive still dominates in the softened target distribution, we disentangle the negatives in the distribution to further boost the relation alignment with the negatives in the cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SoftCLIP. In particular, on ImageNet zero-shot classification task, using CC3M/CC12M as pre-training dataset, SoftCLIP brings a top-1 accuracy improvement of 6.8%/7.2% over the CLIP baseline.

Self-Consistent Learning: Cooperation between Generators and Discriminators

Using generated data to improve the performance of downstream discriminative models has recently gained popularity due to the great development of pre-trained language models. In most previous studies, generative models and discriminative models are trained separately and thus could not adapt to any changes in each other. As a result, the generated samples can easily deviate from the real data distribution, while the improvement of the discriminative model quickly reaches saturation. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) train generative models via an adversarial process with discriminative models to achieve joint training. However, the training of standard GANs is notoriously unstable and often falls short of convergence. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a $\textit{self-consistent learning}$ framework, in which a discriminator and a generator are cooperatively trained in a closed-loop form. The discriminator and the generator enhance each other during multiple rounds of alternating training until a scoring consensus is reached. This framework proves to be easy to train and free from instabilities such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Extensive experiments on sentence semantic matching demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework: the discriminator achieves 10+ AP of improvement on the zero-shot setting and new state-of-the-art performance on the full-data setting.