Gradient based Feature Attribution in Explainable AI: A Technical Review

The surge in black-box AI models has prompted the need to explain the internal mechanism and justify their reliability, especially in high-stakes applications, such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Due to the lack of a rigorous definition of explainable AI (XAI), a plethora of research related to explainability, interpretability, and transparency has been developed to explain and analyze the model from various perspectives. Consequently, with an exhaustive list of papers, it becomes challenging to have a comprehensive overview of XAI research from all aspects. Considering the popularity of neural networks in AI research, we narrow our focus to a specific area of XAI research: gradient based explanations, which can be directly adopted for neural network models. In this review, we systematically explore gradient based explanation methods to date and introduce a novel taxonomy to categorize them into four distinct classes. Then, we present the essence of technique details in chronological order and underscore the evolution of algorithms. Next, we introduce both human and quantitative evaluations to measure algorithm performance. More importantly, we demonstrate the general challenges in XAI and specific challenges in gradient based explanations. We hope that this survey can help researchers understand state-of-the-art progress and their corresponding disadvantages, which could spark their interest in addressing these issues in future work.

Generative AI for Synthetic Data Generation: Methods, Challenges and the Future

The recent surge in research focused on generating synthetic data from large language models (LLMs), especially for scenarios with limited data availability, marks a notable shift in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Their ability to perform comparably to real-world data positions this approach as a compelling solution to low-resource challenges. This paper delves into advanced technologies that leverage these gigantic LLMs for the generation of task-specific training data. We outline methodologies, evaluation techniques, and practical applications, discuss the current limitations, and suggest potential pathways for future research.

Training on Synthetic Data Beats Real Data in Multimodal Relation Extraction

The task of multimodal relation extraction has attracted significant research attention, but progress is constrained by the scarcity of available training data. One natural thought is to extend existing datasets with cross-modal generative models. In this paper, we consider a novel problem setting, where only unimodal data, either text or image, are available during training. We aim to train a multimodal classifier from synthetic data that perform well on real multimodal test data. However, training with synthetic data suffers from two obstacles: lack of data diversity and label information loss. To alleviate the issues, we propose Mutual Information-aware Multimodal Iterated Relational dAta GEneration (MI2RAGE), which applies Chained Cross-modal Generation (CCG) to promote diversity in the generated data and exploits a teacher network to select valuable training samples with high mutual information with the ground-truth labels. Comparing our method to direct training on synthetic data, we observed a significant improvement of 24.06% F1 with synthetic text and 26.42% F1 with synthetic images. Notably, our best model trained on completely synthetic images outperforms prior state-of-the-art models trained on real multimodal data by a margin of 3.76% in F1. Our codebase will be made available upon acceptance.

Training Multimedia Event Extraction With Generated Images and Captions

Contemporary news reporting increasingly features multimedia content, motivating research on multimedia event extraction. However, the task lacks annotated multimodal training data and artificially generated training data suffer from the distribution shift from the real-world data. In this paper, we propose Cross-modality Augmented Multimedia Event Learning (CAMEL), which successfully utilizes artificially generated multimodal training data and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Conditioned on unimodal training data, we generate multimodal training data using off-the-shelf image generators like Stable Diffusion and image captioners like BLIP. In order to learn robust features that are effective across domains, we devise an iterative and gradual annealing training strategy. Substantial experiments show that CAMEL surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on the M2E2 benchmark. On multimedia events in particular, we outperform the prior SOTA by 4.2\% F1 on event mention identification and by 9.8\% F1 on argument identification, which demonstrates that CAMEL learns synergistic representations from the two modalities.

On the Domain Adaptation and Generalization of Pretrained Language Models: A Survey

Recent advances in NLP are brought by a range of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs). These PLMs have brought significant performance gains for a range of NLP tasks, circumventing the need to customize complex designs for specific tasks. However, most current work focus on finetuning PLMs on a domain-specific datasets, ignoring the fact that the domain gap can lead to overfitting and even performance drop. Therefore, it is practically important to find an appropriate method to effectively adapt PLMs to a target domain of interest. Recently, a range of methods have been proposed to achieve this purpose. Early surveys on domain adaptation are not suitable for PLMs due to the sophisticated behavior exhibited by PLMs from traditional models trained from scratch and that domain adaptation of PLMs need to be redesigned to take effect. This paper aims to provide a survey on these newly proposed methods and shed light in how to apply traditional machine learning methods to newly evolved and future technologies. By examining the issues of deploying PLMs for downstream tasks, we propose a taxonomy of domain adaptation approaches from a machine learning system view, covering methods for input augmentation, model optimization and personalization. We discuss and compare those methods and suggest promising future research directions.

Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation

Prompt tuning, or the conditioning of a frozen pretrained language model (PLM) with soft prompts learned from data, has demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prompt tuning requires a large training dataset to be effective and is outperformed by finetuning the entire PLM in data-scarce regimes. Previous work \citep{gu-etal-2022-ppt,vu-etal-2022-spot} proposed to transfer soft prompts pretrained on the source domain to the target domain. In this paper, we explore domain adaptation for prompt tuning, a problem setting where unlabeled data from the target domain are available during pretraining. We propose bOosting Prompt TunIng with doMain Adaptation (OPTIMA), which regularizes the decision boundary to be smooth around regions where source and target data distributions are similar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OPTIMA significantly enhances the transferability and sample-efficiency of prompt tuning compared to strong baselines. Moreover, in few-shot settings, OPTIMA exceeds full-model tuning by a large margin.

A Generic Algorithm for Top-K On-Shelf Utility Mining

On-shelf utility mining (OSUM) is an emerging research direction in data mining. It aims to discover itemsets that have high relative utility in their selling time period. Compared with traditional utility mining, OSUM can find more practical and meaningful patterns in real-life applications. However, there is a major drawback to traditional OSUM. For normal users, it is hard to define a minimum threshold minutil for mining the right amount of on-shelf high utility itemsets. On one hand, if the threshold is set too high, the number of patterns would not be enough. On the other hand, if the threshold is set too low, too many patterns will be discovered and cause an unnecessary waste of time and memory consumption. To address this issue, the user usually directly specifies a parameter k, where only the top-k high relative utility itemsets would be considered. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a generic algorithm named TOIT for mining Top-k On-shelf hIgh-utility paTterns to solve this problem. TOIT applies a novel strategy to raise the minutil based on the on-shelf datasets. Besides, two novel upper-bound strategies named subtree utility and local utility are applied to prune the search space. By adopting the strategies mentioned above, the TOIT algorithm can narrow the search space as early as possible, improve the mining efficiency, and reduce the memory consumption, so it can obtain better performance than other algorithms. A series of experiments have been conducted on real datasets with different styles to compare the effects with the state-of-the-art KOSHU algorithm. The experimental results showed that TOIT outperforms KOSHU in both running time and memory consumption.

A mechanistic-based data-driven approach to accelerate structural topology optimization through finite element convolutional neural network (FE-CNN)

In this paper, a mechanistic data-driven approach is proposed to accelerate structural topology optimization, employing an in-house developed finite element convolutional neural network (FE-CNN). Our approach can be divided into two stages: offline training, and online optimization. During offline training, a mapping function is built between high and low resolution representations of a given design domain. The mapping is expressed by a FE-CNN, which targets a common objective function value (e.g., structural compliance) across design domains of differing resolutions. During online optimization, an arbitrary design domain of high resolution is reduced to low resolution through the trained mapping function. The original high-resolution domain is thus designed by computations performed on only the low-resolution version, followed by an inverse mapping back to the high-resolution domain. Numerical examples demonstrate that this approach can accelerate optimization by up to an order of magnitude in computational time. Our proposed approach therefore shows great potential to overcome the curse-of-dimensionality incurred by density-based structural topology optimization. The limitation of our present approach is also discussed.

Latent-Optimized Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sarcasm Detection

The existence of multiple datasets for sarcasm detection prompts us to apply transfer learning to exploit their commonality. The adversarial neural transfer (ANT) framework utilizes multiple loss terms that encourage the source-domain and the target-domain feature distributions to be similar while optimizing for domain-specific performance. However, these objectives may be in conflict, which can lead to optimization difficulties and sometimes diminished transfer. We propose a generalized latent optimization strategy that allows different losses to accommodate each other and improves training dynamics. The proposed method outperforms transfer learning and meta-learning baselines. In particular, we achieve 10.02% absolute performance gain over the previous state of the art on the iSarcasm dataset.

Federated Learning with Diversified Preference for Humor Recognition

Understanding humor is critical to creative language modeling with many applications in human-AI interaction. However, due to differences in the cognitive systems of the audience, the perception of humor can be highly subjective. Thus, a given passage can be regarded as funny to different degrees by different readers. This makes training humorous text recognition models that can adapt to diverse humor preferences highly challenging. In this paper, we propose the FedHumor approach to recognize humorous text contents in a personalized manner through federated learning (FL). It is a federated BERT model capable of jointly considering the overall distribution of humor scores with humor labels by individuals for given texts. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant advantages of FedHumor in recognizing humor contents accurately for people with diverse humor preferences compared to 9 state-of-the-art humor recognition approaches.