Thailand

We propose PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction, and then uses this knowledge to ground language. We factorize PIGLeT into a physical dynamics model, and a separate language model. Our dynamics model learns not just what objects are but also what they do: glass cups break when thrown, plastic ones don&#39;t. We then use it as the interface to our language model, giving us a unified model of linguistic form and grounded meaning. PIGLeT can read a sentence, simulate neurally what might happen next, and then communicate that result through a literal symbolic representation, or natural language. 

Experimental results show that our model effectively learns world dynamics, along with how to communicate them. It is able to correctly forecast what happens next given an English sentence over 80% of the time, outperforming a 100x larger, text-to-text approach by over 10%. Likewise, its natural language summaries of physical interactions are also judged by humans as more accurate than LM alternatives. We present comprehensive analysis showing room for future work.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

PIGLeT: Language Grounding Through Neuro-Symbolic Interaction in a 3D World

embodied ai

neuro-symbolic

language grounding

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

We propose PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction, and then uses this knowledge to ground language. We factorize PIGLeT into a physical dynamics model, and a separate language model. Our dynamics model learns not just what objects are but also what they do: glass cups break when thrown, plastic ones don't. We then use it as the interface to our language model, giving us a unified model of linguistic form and grounded meaning. PIGLeT can read a sentence, simulate neurally what might happen next, and then communicate that result through a literal symbolic representation, or natural language. 

Experimental results show that our model effectively learns world dynamics, along with how to communicate them. It is able to correctly forecast what happens next given an English sentence over 80% of the time, outperforming a 100x larger, text-to-text approach by over 10%. Likewise, its natural language summaries of physical interactions are also judged by humans as more accurate than LM alternatives. We present comprehensive analysis showing room for future work.

technical paper

kNN-MT, recently proposed by Khandelwal et al. (2020a), successfully combines pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to improve the translation accuracy. However, the traditional kNN algorithm used in kNN-MT simply retrieves a same number of nearest neighbors for each target token, which may cause prediction errors when the retrieved neighbors include noises. In this paper, we propose Adaptive kNN-MT to dynamically determine the number of k for each target token. We achieve this by introducing a light-weight Meta-k Network, which can be efficiently trained with only a few training samples. On four benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively filter out the noises in retrieval results and significantly outperforms the vanilla kNN-MT model. Even more noteworthy is that the Meta-k Network learned on one domain could be directly applied to other domains and obtain consistent improvements, illustrating the generality of our method. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/adaptive-knn-mt.

Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

Dense video event captioning aims to generate a sequence of descriptive captions for each event in a long untrimmed video. Video-level context provides important information and facilities the model to generate consistent and less redundant captions between events. In this paper, we introduce a novel Hierarchical Context-aware Network for dense video event captioning (HCN) to capture context from various aspects. In detail, the model leverages local and global context with different mechanisms to jointly learn to generate coherent captions. The local context module performs full interaction between neighbor frames and the global context module selectively attends to previous or future events. According to our extensive experiment on both Youcook2 and Activitynet Captioning datasets, the video-level HCN model outperforms the event-level context-agnostic model by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/KirkGuo/HCN.

Hierarchical Context-aware Network for Dense Video Event Captioning

Generating image captions with user intention is an emerging need. The recently published Localized Narratives dataset takes mouse traces as another input to the image captioning task, which is an intuitive and efficient way for a user to control what to describe in the image. However, how to effectively employ traces to improve generation quality and controllability is still under exploration. This paper aims to solve this problem by proposing a novel model called LoopCAG, which connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a Loop manner, engaged explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process. Precisely, each generated sentence is temporally aligned to the corresponding trace sequence through a contrastive learning strategy. Besides, each generated text token is supervised to attend to the correct visual objects under heuristic spatial attention guidance. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our LoopCAG model learns better correspondence among the three modalities (vision, language, and traces) and achieves SOTA performance on trace-controlled image captioning task. Moreover, the controllability and explainability of LoopCAG are validated by analyzing spatial and temporal sensitivity during the generation process.

Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally

Active learning promises to alleviate the massive data needs of supervised machine learning: it has successfully improved sample efficiency by an order of magnitude on traditional tasks like topic classification and object recognition. However, we uncover a striking contrast to this promise: across 5 models and 4 datasets on the task of visual question answering, a wide variety of active learning approaches fail to outperform random selection. To understand this discrepancy, we profile 8 active learning methods on a per-example basis, and identify the problem as collective outliers -- groups of examples that active learning methods prefer to acquire but models fail to learn (e.g., questions that ask about text in images or require external knowledge). Through systematic ablation experiments and qualitative visualizations, we verify that collective outliers are a general phenomenon responsible for degrading pool-based active learning. Notably, we show that active learning sample efficiency increases significantly as the number of collective outliers in the active learning pool decreases. We conclude with a discussion and prescriptive recommendations for mitigating the effects of these outliers in future work.

Mind Your Outliers! Investigating the Negative Impact of Outliers on Active Learning for Visual Question Answering

Understanding manipulated media, from automatically generated `deepfakes' to manually edited ones, raises novel research challenges. Because the vast majority of edited or manipulated images are benign, such as photoshopped images for visual enhancements, the key challenge is to understand the complex layers of underlying intents of media edits and their implications with respect to disinformation. 

In this paper, we study Edited Media Frames, a new formalism to understand visual media manipulation as structured annotations with respect to the intents, emotional reactions, attacks on individuals, and the overall implications of disinformation. We introduce a dataset for our task, EMU, with 56k question-answer pairs written in rich natural language. We evaluate a wide variety of vision-and-language models for our task, and introduce a new model PELICAN, which builds upon recent progress in pretrained multimodal representations. Our model obtains promising results on our dataset, with humans rating its answers as accurate 48.2% of the time. At the same time, there is still much work to be done -- and we provide analysis that highlights areas for further progress.

Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning About the Intent and Implications of Visual Misinformation

In this work, we propose BertGCN, a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. BertGCN constructs a heterogeneous graph over the dataset and represents documents as nodes using BERT representations. By jointly training the BERT and GCN modules within BertGCN, the proposed model is able to leverage the advantages of both worlds: large-scale pretraining which takes the advantage of the massive amount of raw data and transductive learning which jointly learns representations for both training data and unlabeled test data by propagating label influence through graph convolution. Experiments show that BertGCN achieves SOTA performances on a wide range of text classification datasets.

BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT

Neural machine translation systems are known to be vulnerable to adversarial test inputs, however, as we show in this paper, these systems are also vulnerable to training attacks. Specifically, we propose a poisoning attack in which a malicious adversary inserts a small poisoned sample of monolingual text into the training set of a system trained using back-translation. This sample is designed to induce a specific, targeted translation behaviour, such as peddling misinformation. We present two methods for crafting poisoned examples, and show that only a tiny handful of instances, amounting to only 0.02% of the training set, is sufficient to enact a successful attack. We outline a defence method against said attacks, which partly ameliorates the problem. However, we stress that this is a blind-spot in modern NMT, demanding immediate attention.

Putting words into the system's mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets from sentences, where each triplet includes an entity, its associated sentiment, and the opinion span explaining the reason for the sentiment.
Most existing research addresses this problem in a multi-stage pipeline manner, which neglects the mutual information between such three elements and has the problem of error propagation. In this paper, we propose a Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced aspect Sentiment triplet Extraction model S3E2 to fully exploit the syntactic and semantic relationships between the triplet elements and jointly extract them.
Specifically, we design a Graph-Sequence duel representation and modeling paradigm for the task of ASTE: we represent the semantic and syntactic relationships between word pairs in a sentence by graph and encode it by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), as well as modeling the original sentence by LSTM to preserve the sequential information. Under this setting, we further apply a more efficient inference strategy for the extraction of triplets.
Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets show that S3E2 significantly outperforms existing approaches, which proves our S3E2's superiority and flexibility in an end-to-end fashion.

Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Adapting a model to a handful of personalized data is challenging, especially when it has gigantic parameters, such as a Transformer-based pretrained model. The standard way of fine-tuning all the parameters necessitates storing a huge model for each user. In this work, we introduce a lightweight approach dubbed UserAdapter, which clamps hundred millions of parameters of the Transformer model and optimizes a tiny user-specific vector. We take sentiment analysis as a test bed, and collect datasets of reviews from Yelp and IMDB respectively. Results show that, on both datasets, UserAdapter achieves better accuracy than the standard fine-tuned Transformer-based pre-trained model. More importantly, UserAdapter offers an efficient way to produce a personalized Transformer model with less than 0.5\% parameters added for each user.

UserAdapter: Few-Shot User Learning in Sentiment Analysis

Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. 
Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of figurative language, and counterfactual reasoning skills, which are all important abilities for advanced natural language understanding (NLU).
However, there is currently no dataset aiming to test these abilities.
In this paper, we present RiddleSense, a new multiple-choice question answering task,
which comes with the first large dataset (5.7k examples) for answering riddle-style commonsense questions. 
We systematically evaluate a wide range of models over the \textsc{RiddleSense} challenge and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance --- suggesting intriguing future research in the direction of higher-order commonsense reasoning and linguistic creativity towards building advanced NLU systems.

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