To explore the limit of dialogue generation pre-training, we present the models of PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on both Chinese and English social media conversations. To train such large models, we adopt the architecture of unified transformer with high computation and parameter efficiency. In addition, we carry out multi-party aware pre-training to better distinguish the characteristic information in social media conversations. With such designs, PLATO-XL successfully achieves superior performances as compared to other approaches in both Chinese and English chitchat. We further explore the capacity of PLATO-XL on other conversational tasks, such as knowledge grounded dialogue and task-oriented conversation. The experimental results indicate that PLATO-XL obtains state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI.
Network representation learning (NRL) advances the conventional graph mining of social networks, knowledge graphs, and complex biomedical and physics information networks. Over dozens of network representation learning algorithms have been reported in the literature. Most of them focus on learning node embeddings for homogeneous networks, but they differ in the specific encoding schemes and specific types of node semantics captured and used for learning node embedding. This survey paper reviews the design principles and the different node embedding techniques for network representation learning over homogeneous networks. To facilitate the comparison of different node embedding algorithms, we introduce a unified reference framework to divide and generalize the node embedding learning process on a given network into preprocessing steps, node feature extraction steps and node embedding model training for a NRL task such as link prediction and node clustering. With this unifying reference framework, we highlight the representative methods, models, and techniques used at different stages of the node embedding model learning process. This survey not only helps researchers and practitioners to gain an in-depth understanding of different network representation learning techniques but also provides practical guidelines for designing and developing the next generation of network representation learning algorithms and systems.
Machine learning models that incorporate concept learning as an intermediate step in their decision making process can match the performance of black-box predictive models while retaining the ability to explain outcomes in human understandable terms. However, we demonstrate that the concept representations learned by these models encode information beyond the pre-defined concepts, and that natural mitigation strategies do not fully work, rendering the interpretation of the downstream prediction misleading. We describe the mechanism underlying the information leakage and suggest recourse for mitigating its effects.
In this paper, we present our approaches for the case law retrieval and the legal case entailment task in the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) 2021. As first stage retrieval methods combined with neural re-ranking methods using contextualized language models like BERT achieved great performance improvements for information retrieval in the web and news domain, we evaluate these methods for the legal domain. A distinct characteristic of legal case retrieval is that the query case and case description in the corpus tend to be long documents and therefore exceed the input length of BERT. We address this challenge by combining lexical and dense retrieval methods on the paragraph-level of the cases for the first stage retrieval. Here we demonstrate that the retrieval on the paragraph-level outperforms the retrieval on the document-level. Furthermore the experiments suggest that dense retrieval methods outperform lexical retrieval. For re-ranking we address the problem of long documents by summarizing the cases and fine-tuning a BERT-based re-ranker with the summaries. Overall, our best results were obtained with a combination of BM25 and dense passage retrieval using domain-specific embeddings.
As the field of remote sensing is evolving, we witness the accumulation of information from several modalities, such as multispectral (MS), hyperspectral (HSI), LiDAR etc. Each of these modalities possess its own distinct characteristics and when combined synergistically, perform very well in the recognition and classification tasks. However, fusing multiple modalities in remote sensing is cumbersome due to highly disparate domains. Furthermore, the existing methods do not facilitate cross-modal interactions. To this end, we propose a novel transformer based fusion method for HSI and LiDAR modalities. The model is composed of stacked auto encoders that harness the cross key-value pairs for HSI and LiDAR, thus establishing a communication between the two modalities, while simultaneously using the CNNs to extract the spectral and spatial information from HSI and LiDAR. We test our model on Houston (Data Fusion Contest - 2013) and MUUFL Gulfport datasets and achieve competitive results.
In recent years, neural paraphrase generation based on Seq2Seq has achieved superior performance, however, the generated paraphrase still has the problem of lack of diversity. In this paper, we focus on improving the diversity between the generated paraphrase and the original sentence, i.e., making generated paraphrase different from the original sentence as much as possible. We propose BTmPG (Back-Translation guided multi-round Paraphrase Generation), which leverages multi-round paraphrase generation to improve diversity and employs back-translation to preserve semantic information. We evaluate BTmPG on two benchmark datasets. Both automatic and human evaluation show BTmPG can improve the diversity of paraphrase while preserving the semantics of the original sentence.
Recently, the misinformation problem has been addressed with a crowdsourcing-based approach: to assess the truthfulness of a statement, instead of relying on a few experts, a crowd of non-expert is exploited. We study whether crowdsourcing is an effective and reliable method to assess truthfulness during a pandemic, targeting statements related to COVID-19, thus addressing (mis)information that is both related to a sensitive and personal issue and very recent as compared to when the judgment is done. In our experiments, crowd workers are asked to assess the truthfulness of statements, and to provide evidence for the assessments. Besides showing that the crowd is able to accurately judge the truthfulness of the statements, we report results on workers behavior, agreement among workers, effect of aggregation functions, of scales transformations, and of workers background and bias. We perform a longitudinal study by re-launching the task multiple times with both novice and experienced workers, deriving important insights on how the behavior and quality change over time. Our results show that: workers are able to detect and objectively categorize online (mis)information related to COVID-19; both crowdsourced and expert judgments can be transformed and aggregated to improve quality; worker background and other signals (e.g., source of information, behavior) impact the quality of the data. The longitudinal study demonstrates that the time-span has a major effect on the quality of the judgments, for both novice and experienced workers. Finally, we provide an extensive failure analysis of the statements misjudged by the crowd-workers.
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning is a decentralized paradigm in sequential decision making where agents distributed over a network iteratively collaborate with neighbors to maximize global (network-wide) notions of rewards. Exact computations typically involve a complexity that scales exponentially with the number of agents. To address this curse of dimensionality, we design a scalable algorithm based on the Natural Policy Gradient framework that uses local information and only requires agents to communicate with neighbors within a certain range. Under standard assumptions on the spatial decay of correlations for the transition dynamics of the underlying Markov process and the localized learning policy, we show that our algorithm converges to the globally optimal policy with a dimension-free statistical and computational complexity, incurring a localization error that does not depend on the number of agents and converges to zero exponentially fast as a function of the range of communication.
When directly using existing text generation datasets for controllable generation, we are facing the problem of not having the domain knowledge and thus the aspects that could be controlled are limited.A typical example is when using CNN/Daily Mail dataset for controllable text summarization, there is no guided information on the emphasis of summary sentences. A more useful text generator should leverage both the input text and control variables to guide the generation, which can only be built with deep understanding of the domain knowledge. Motivated by this vi-sion, our paper introduces a new text generation dataset, named MReD. Our new dataset consists of 7,089 meta-reviews and all its 45k meta-review sentences are manually annotated as one of the carefully defined 9 categories, including abstract, strength, decision, etc. We present experimental results on start-of-the-art summarization models, and propose methods for controlled generation on both extractive and abstractive models using our annotated data. By exploring various settings and analaysing the model behavior with respect to the control inputs, we demonstrate the challenges and values of our dataset. MReD allows us to have a better understanding of the meta-review corpora and enlarge the research room for controllable text generation.
We introduce a conceptually simple yet effective model for self-supervised representation learning with graph data. It follows the previous methods that generate two views of an input graph through data augmentation. However, unlike contrastive methods that focus on instance-level discrimination, we optimize an innovative feature-level objective inspired by classical Canonical Correlation Analysis. Compared with other works, our approach requires none of the parameterized mutual information estimator, additional projector, asymmetric structures, and most importantly, negative samples which can be costly. We show that the new objective essentially 1) aims at discarding augmentation-variant information by learning invariant representations, and 2) can prevent degenerated solutions by decorrelating features in different dimensions. Our theoretical analysis further provides an understanding for the new objective which can be equivalently seen as an instantiation of the Information Bottleneck Principle under the self-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our method performs competitively on seven public graph datasets.