Adaptive Fair Representation Learning for Personalized Fairness in Recommendations via Information Alignment

Personalized fairness in recommendations has been attracting increasing attention from researchers. The existing works often treat a fairness requirement, represented as a collection of sensitive attributes, as a hyper-parameter, and pursue extreme fairness by completely removing information of sensitive attributes from the learned fair embedding, which suffer from two challenges: huge training cost incurred by the explosion of attribute combinations, and the suboptimal trade-off between fairness and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Fair Representation Learning (AFRL) model, which achieves a real personalized fairness due to its advantage of training only one model to adaptively serve different fairness requirements during inference phase. Particularly, AFRL treats fairness requirements as inputs and can learn an attribute-specific embedding for each attribute from the unfair user embedding, which endows AFRL with the adaptability during inference phase to determine the non-sensitive attributes under the guidance of the user's unique fairness requirement. To achieve a better trade-off between fairness and accuracy in recommendations, AFRL conducts a novel Information Alignment to exactly preserve discriminative information of non-sensitive attributes and incorporate a debiased collaborative embedding into the fair embedding to capture attribute-independent collaborative signals, without loss of fairness. Finally, the extensive experiments conducted on real datasets together with the sound theoretical analysis demonstrate the superiority of AFRL.

Federated Learning Empowered by Generative Content

Federated learning (FL) enables leveraging distributed private data for model training in a privacy-preserving way. However, data heterogeneity significantly limits the performance of current FL methods. In this paper, we propose a novel FL framework termed FedGC, designed to mitigate data heterogeneity issues by diversifying private data with generative content. FedGC is a simple-to-implement framework as it only introduces a one-shot step of data generation. In data generation, we summarize three crucial and worth-exploring aspects (budget allocation, prompt design, and generation guidance) and propose three solution candidates for each aspect. Specifically, to achieve a better trade-off between data diversity and fidelity for generation guidance, we propose to generate data based on the guidance of prompts and real data simultaneously. The generated data is then merged with private data to facilitate local model training. Such generative data increases the diversity of private data to prevent each client from fitting the potentially biased private data, alleviating the issue of data heterogeneity. We conduct a systematic empirical study on FedGC, covering diverse baselines, datasets, scenarios, and modalities. Interesting findings include (1) FedGC consistently and significantly enhances the performance of FL methods, even when notable disparities exist between generative and private data; (2) FedGC achieves both better performance and privacy-preservation. We wish this work can inspire future works to further explore the potential of enhancing FL with generative content.

AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models

Information-seeking conversation, which aims to help users gather information through conversation, has achieved great progress in recent years. However, the research is still stymied by the scarcity of training data. To alleviate this problem, we propose AutoConv for synthetic conversation generation, which takes advantage of the few-shot learning ability and generation capacity of large language models (LLM). Specifically, we formulate the conversation generation problem as a language modeling task, then finetune an LLM with a few human conversations to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and use it for generating synthetic conversations with high quality. Experimental results on two frequently-used datasets verify that AutoConv has substantial improvements over strong baselines and alleviates the dependence on human annotation. In addition, we also provide several analysis studies to promote future research.

Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions

In this work we try to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Due to the inherent dynamic nature of the real world, factual questions frequently involve a symbolic constraint: time, solving these questions necessitates not only extensive world knowledge, but also advanced reasoning ability to satisfy the temporal constraints. Despite the remarkable intelligence exhibited by LLMs in various NLP tasks, our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems continue to pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. To solve these time-sensitive factual questions, considering that modern LLMs possess superior ability in both natural language understanding and programming,we endeavor to leverage LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code, and thereby grasp the desired knowledge along with the underlying symbolic constraint.

NER-to-MRC: Named-Entity Recognition Completely Solving as Machine Reading Comprehension

Named-entity recognition (NER) detects texts with predefined semantic labels and is an essential building block for natural language processing (NLP). Notably, recent NER research focuses on utilizing massive extra data, including pre-training corpora and incorporating search engines. However, these methods suffer from high costs associated with data collection and pre-training, and additional training process of the retrieved data from search engines. To address the above challenges, we completely frame NER as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem, called NER-to-MRC, by leveraging MRC with its ability to exploit existing data efficiently. Several prior works have been dedicated to employing MRC-based solutions for tackling the NER problem, several challenges persist: i) the reliance on manually designed prompts; ii) the limited MRC approaches to data reconstruction, which fails to achieve performance on par with methods utilizing extensive additional data. Thus, our NER-to-MRC conversion consists of two components: i) transform the NER task into a form suitable for the model to solve with MRC in a efficient manner; ii) apply the MRC reasoning strategy to the model. We experiment on 6 benchmark datasets from three domains and achieve state-of-the-art performance without external data, up to 11.24% improvement on the WNUT-16 dataset.

Solving Math Word Problem via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenge problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.8% increase over best baselines.

Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective

We propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learners that is format agnostic, i.e., it is compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks, such as text classification, commonsense reasoning, coreference resolution, and sentiment analysis. Zero-shot learning aims to train a model on a given task such that it can address new learning tasks without any additional training. Our approach converts zero-shot learning into multiple-choice tasks, avoiding problems in commonly used large-scale generative models such as FLAN. It not only adds generalization ability to models but also significantly reduces the number of parameters. Our method shares the merits of efficient training and deployment. Our approach shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as natural language inference and text classification. Our model achieves this success with only 235M parameters, which is substantially smaller than state-of-the-art models with billions of parameters. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-CCNL/Fengshenbang-LM .

Fengshenbang 1.0: Being the Foundation of Chinese Cognitive Intelligence

Nowadays, foundation models become one of fundamental infrastructures in artificial intelligence, paving ways to the general intelligence. However, the reality presents two urgent challenges: existing foundation models are dominated by the English-language community; users are often given limited resources and thus cannot always use foundation models. To support the development of the Chinese-language community, we introduce an open-source project, called Fengshenbang, which leads by the research center for Cognitive Computing and Natural Language (CCNL). Our project has comprehensive capabilities, including large pre-trained models, user-friendly APIs, benchmarks, datasets, and others. We wrap all these in three sub-projects: the Fengshenbang Model, the Fengshen Framework, and the Fengshen Benchmark. An open-source roadmap, Fengshenbang, aims to re-evaluate the open-source community of Chinese pre-trained large-scale models, prompting the development of the entire Chinese large-scale model community. We also want to build a user-centered open-source ecosystem to allow individuals to access the desired models to match their computing resources. Furthermore, we invite companies, colleges, and research institutions to collaborate with us to build the large-scale open-source model-based ecosystem. We hope that this project will be the foundation of Chinese cognitive intelligence.

Molecular Substructure-Aware Network for Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Concomitant administration of drugs can cause drug-drug interactions (DDIs). Some drug combinations are beneficial, but other ones may cause negative effects which are previously unrecorded. Previous works on DDI prediction usually rely on hand-engineered domain knowledge, which is laborious to obtain. In this work, we propose a novel model, Molecular Substructure-Aware Network (MSAN), to effectively predict potential DDIs from molecular structures of drug pairs. We adopt a Transformer-like substructure extraction module to acquire a fixed number of representative vectors that are associated with various substructure patterns of the drug molecule. Then, interaction strength between the two drugs' substructures will be captured by a similarity-based interaction module. We also perform a substructure dropping augmentation before graph encoding to alleviate overfitting. Experimental results from a real-world dataset reveal that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance. We also show that the predictions of our model are highly interpretable through a case study.

REAPS: Towards Better Recognition of Fine-grained Images by Region Attending and Part Sequencing

Fine-grained image recognition has been a hot research topic in computer vision due to its various applications. The-state-of-the-art is the part/region-based approaches that first localize discriminative parts/regions, and then learn their fine-grained features. However, these approaches have some inherent drawbacks: 1) the discriminative feature representation of an object is prone to be disturbed by complicated background; 2) it is unreasonable and inflexible to fix the number of salient parts, because the intended parts may be unavailable under certain circumstances due to occlusion or incompleteness, and 3) the spatial correlation among different salient parts has not been thoroughly exploited (if not completely neglected). To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper we propose a new, simple yet robust method by building part sequence model on the attended object region. Concretely, we first try to alleviate the background effect by using a region attention mechanism to generate the attended region from the original image. Then, instead of localizing different salient parts and extracting their features separately, we learn the part representation implicitly by applying a mapping function on the serialized features of the object. Finally, we combine the region attending network and the part sequence learning network into a unified framework that can be trained end-to-end with only image-level labels. Our extensive experiments on three fine-grained benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves the state of the art performance.