Playing Lottery Tickets in Style Transfer Models

Style transfer has achieved great success and attracted a wide range of attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its flexible application scenarios. However, the dependence on a pretty large VGG-based autoencoder leads to existing style transfer models having high parameter complexities, which limits their applications on resource-constrained devices. Compared with many other tasks, the compression of style transfer models has been less explored. Recently, the lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) has shown great potential in finding extremely sparse matching subnetworks which can achieve on par or even better performance than the original full networks when trained in isolation. In this work, we for the first time perform an empirical study to verify whether such trainable matching subnetworks also exist in style transfer models. Specifically, we take two most popular style transfer models, i.e., AdaIN and SANet, as the main testbeds, which represent global and local transformation based style transfer methods respectively. We carry out extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis, and draw the following conclusions. (1) Compared with fixing the VGG encoder, style transfer models can benefit more from training the whole network together. (2) Using iterative magnitude pruning, we find the matching subnetworks at 89.2% sparsity in AdaIN and 73.7% sparsity in SANet, which demonstrates that style transfer models can play lottery tickets too. (3) The feature transformation module should also be pruned to obtain a much sparser model without affecting the existence and quality of the matching subnetworks. (4) Besides AdaIN and SANet, other models such as LST, MANet, AdaAttN and MCCNet can also play lottery tickets, which shows that LTH can be generalized to various style transfer models.

PSP: Pre-trained Soft Prompts for Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization

Few-shot abstractive summarization has become a challenging task in natural language generation. To support it, we designed a novel soft prompts architecture coupled with a prompt pre-training plus fine-tuning paradigm that is effective and tunes only extremely light parameters. The soft prompts include continuous input embeddings across an encoder and a decoder to fit the structure of the generation models. Importantly, a novel inner-prompt placed in the text is introduced to capture document-level information. The aim is to devote attention to understanding the document that better prompts the model to generate document-related content. The first step in the summarization procedure is to conduct prompt pre-training with self-supervised pseudo-data. This teaches the model basic summarizing capabilities. The model is then fine-tuned with few-shot examples. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets show that our method, with only 0.1% of the parameters, outperforms full-model tuning where all model parameters are tuned. It also surpasses Prompt Tuning by a large margin and delivers competitive results against Prefix-Tuning with 3% of the parameters.

BFRnet: A deep learning-based MR background field removal method for QSM of the brain containing significant pathological susceptibility sources

Introduction: Background field removal (BFR) is a critical step required for successful quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM). However, eliminating the background field in brains containing significant susceptibility sources, such as intracranial hemorrhages, is challenging due to the relatively large scale of the field induced by these pathological susceptibility sources. Method: This study proposes a new deep learning-based method, BFRnet, to remove background field in healthy and hemorrhagic subjects. The network is built with the dual-frequency octave convolutions on the U-net architecture, trained with synthetic field maps containing significant susceptibility sources. The BFRnet method is compared with three conventional BFR methods and one previous deep learning method using simulated and in vivo brains from 4 healthy and 2 hemorrhagic subjects. Robustness against acquisition field-of-view (FOV) orientation and brain masking are also investigated. Results: For both simulation and in vivo experiments, BFRnet led to the best visually appealing results in the local field and QSM results with the minimum contrast loss and the most accurate hemorrhage susceptibility measurements among all five methods. In addition, BFRnet produced the most consistent local field and susceptibility maps between different sizes of brain masks, while conventional methods depend drastically on precise brain extraction and further brain edge erosions. It is also observed that BFRnet performed the best among all BFR methods for acquisition FOVs oblique to the main magnetic field. Conclusion: The proposed BFRnet improved the accuracy of local field reconstruction in the hemorrhagic subjects compared with conventional BFR algorithms. The BFRnet method was effective for acquisitions of titled orientations and retained whole brains without edge erosion as often required by traditional BFR methods.

Non-autoregressive Translation with Dependency-Aware Decoder

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models suffer from inferior translation quality due to removal of dependency on previous target tokens from inputs to the decoder. In this paper, we propose a novel and general approach to enhance the target dependency within the NAT decoder from two perspectives: decoder input and decoder self-attention. First, we transform the initial decoder input from the source language space to the target language space through a novel attentive transformation process. The transformation reassembles the decoder input based on target token embeddings and conditions the final output on the target-side information. Second, before NAT training, we introduce an effective forward-backward pre-training phase, implemented with different triangle attention masks. This pre-training phase enables the model to gradually learn bidirectional dependencies for the final NAT decoding process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approaches consistently improve highly competitive NAT models on four WMT translation directions by up to 1.88 BLEU score, while overall maintaining inference latency comparable to other fully NAT models.

Generalized Bandit Regret Minimizer Framework in Imperfect Information Extensive-Form Game

Regret minimization methods are a powerful tool for learning approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) in two-player zero-sum imperfect information extensive-form games (IIEGs). We consider the problem in the interactive bandit-feedback setting where we don't know the dynamics of the IIEG. In general, only the interactive trajectory and the reached terminal node value $v(z^t)$ are revealed. To learn NE, the regret minimizer is required to estimate the full-feedback loss gradient $\ell^t$ by $v(z^t)$ and minimize the regret. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for this learning setting. It presents a theoretical framework for the design and the modular analysis of the bandit regret minimization methods. We demonstrate that the most recent bandit regret minimization methods can be analyzed as a particular case of our framework. Following this framework, we describe a novel method SIX-OMD to learn approximate NE. It is model-free and extremely improves the best existing convergence rate from the order of $O(\sqrt{X B/T}+\sqrt{Y C/T})$ to $O(\sqrt{ M_{\mathcal{X}}/T} +\sqrt{ M_{\mathcal{Y}}/T})$. Moreover, SIX-OMD is computationally efficient as it needs to perform the current strategy and average strategy updates only along the sampled trajectory.

MutexMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Mutex-based Consistency Regularization

The core issue in semi-supervised learning (SSL) lies in how to effectively leverage unlabeled data, whereas most existing methods tend to put a great emphasis on the utilization of high-confidence samples yet seldom fully explore the usage of low-confidence samples. In this paper, we aim to utilize low-confidence samples in a novel way with our proposed mutex-based consistency regularization, namely MutexMatch. Specifically, the high-confidence samples are required to exactly predict "what it is" by conventional True-Positive Classifier, while the low-confidence samples are employed to achieve a simpler goal -- to predict with ease "what it is not" by True-Negative Classifier. In this sense, we not only mitigate the pseudo-labeling errors but also make full use of the low-confidence unlabeled data by consistency of dissimilarity degree. MutexMatch achieves superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, STL-10, and mini-ImageNet. More importantly, our method further shows superiority when the amount of labeled data is scarce, e.g., 92.23% accuracy with only 20 labeled data on CIFAR-10. Code has been released at https://github.com/NJUyued/MutexMatch4SSL.

Towards Explainable Evaluation Metrics for Natural Language Generation

Unlike classical lexical overlap metrics such as BLEU, most current evaluation metrics (such as BERTScore or MoverScore) are based on black-box language models such as BERT or XLM-R. They often achieve strong correlations with human judgments, but recent research indicates that the lower-quality classical metrics remain dominant, one of the potential reasons being that their decision processes are transparent. To foster more widespread acceptance of the novel high-quality metrics, explainability thus becomes crucial. In this concept paper, we identify key properties and propose key goals of explainable machine translation evaluation metrics. We also provide a synthesizing overview over recent approaches for explainable machine translation metrics and discuss how they relate to those goals and properties. Further, we conduct own novel experiments, which (among others) find that current adversarial NLP techniques are unsuitable for automatically identifying limitations of high-quality black-box evaluation metrics, as they are not meaning-preserving. Finally, we provide a vision of future approaches to explainable evaluation metrics and their evaluation. We hope that our work can help catalyze and guide future research on explainable evaluation metrics and, mediately, also contribute to better and more transparent text generation systems.

TCM-SD: A Large Dataset for Syndrome Differentiation in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a natural, safe, and effective therapy that has spread and been applied worldwide. The unique TCM diagnosis and treatment system requires a comprehensive analysis of a patient's symptoms hidden in the clinical record written in free text. Prior studies have shown that this system can be informationized and intelligentized with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as natural language processing (NLP). However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to support the further development of data-driven AI technology in TCM. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the core task of the TCM diagnosis and treatment system -- syndrome differentiation (SD) -- and we introduce the first public large-scale dataset for SD, called TCM-SD. Our dataset contains 54,152 real-world clinical records covering 148 syndromes. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale unlabelled textual corpus in the field of TCM and propose a domain-specific pre-trained language model, called ZY-BERT. We conducted experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline, reveal various challenges in SD, and prove the potential of domain-specific pre-trained language model. Our study and analysis reveal opportunities for incorporating computer science and linguistics knowledge to explore the empirical validity of TCM theories.

CYBORGS: Contrastively Bootstrapping Object Representations by Grounding in Segmentation

Many recent approaches in contrastive learning have worked to close the gap between pretraining on iconic images like ImageNet and pretraining on complex scenes like COCO. This gap exists largely because commonly used random crop augmentations obtain semantically inconsistent content in crowded scene images of diverse objects. Previous works use preprocessing pipelines to localize salient objects for improved cropping, but an end-to-end solution is still elusive. In this work, we propose a framework which accomplishes this goal via joint learning of representations and segmentation. We leverage segmentation masks to train a model with a mask-dependent contrastive loss, and use the partially trained model to bootstrap better masks. By iterating between these two components, we ground the contrastive updates in segmentation information, and simultaneously improve segmentation throughout pretraining. Experiments show our representations transfer robustly to downstream tasks in classification, detection and segmentation.

Ask to Understand: Question Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering

Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) requires the machine to answer complex questions by finding scattering clues and reasoning from multiple documents. Graph Network (GN) and Question Decomposition (QD) are two common approaches at present. The former uses the "black-box" reasoning process to capture the potential relationship between entities and sentences, thus achieving good performance. At the same time, the latter provides a clear reasoning logical route by decomposing multi-hop questions into simple single-hop sub-questions. In this paper, we propose a novel method to complete multi-hop QA from the perspective of Question Generation (QG). Specifically, we carefully design an end-to-end QG module on the basis of a classical QA module, which could help the model understand the context by asking inherently logical sub-questions, thus inheriting interpretability from the QD-based method and showing superior performance. Experiments on the HotpotQA dataset demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed QG module, human evaluation further clarifies its interpretability quantitatively, and thorough analysis shows that the QG module could generate better sub-questions than QD methods in terms of fluency, consistency, and diversity.