Ireland

This work introduces the Adaptor library that transposes the traditional model-centric training to objective-centric approach, composing the training process from applications of selected objectives in a given schedule.
We overview how can multiple research directions benefit from enhanced objective-centric experimentation and we find the most potential applications in multi-task training, custom objectives development, dynamic training curricula, or domain adaptation.
Our paper also demonstrates the practical applicability of Adaptor in selected unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios.

ACL 2022

Adaptor: Objective-Centric Adaptation Framework for Language Models

multi-objective training

training framework

multi-task training

software

domain adaptation

robustness

machine translation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

demo

There is a growing need to model interactions between data modalities (e.g., vision, language) — both to improve AI predictions on existing tasks and to enable new applications. In the recent field of multimodal medical AI, integrating multiple modalities has gained widespread popularity as multimodal models have proven to improve performance, robustness, require less training samples and add complementary information. ​​

To improve technical reproducibility and transparency for multimodal medical tasks as well as speed up progress across medical AI, we present ViLMedic, a Vision-and- Language medical library. ​

Ultimately, we hope our reproducible pipelines can enable clinical translation and create real impact.​

ViLMedic: a framework for research at the intersection of vision and language in medical AI

Data modification, either via additional training datasets, data augmentation, debiasing, and dataset filtering, has been proposed as an effective solution for generalizing to out-of-domain (OOD) inputs, in both natural language processing and computer vision literature. However, the effect of data modification on adversarial robustness remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of common data modification strategies and evaluate not only their in-domain and OOD performance, but also their adversarial robustness (AR). We also present results on a two-dimensional synthetic dataset to visualize the effect of each method on the training distribution. This work serves as an empirical study towards understanding the relationship between generalizing to unseen domains and defending against adversarial perturbations. Our findings suggest that more data (either via additional datasets or data augmentation) benefits both OOD accuracy and AR. However, data filtering (previously shown to improve OOD accuracy on natural language inference) hurts OOD accuracy on other tasks such as question answering and image classification. We provide insights from our experiments to inform future work in this direction.

Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness

This presentation concisely describes our proposed weight regularizer that mitigates alignment distortion during iteratively pruning and fine-tuning Transformer models. This leads to improved zero-shot performance across languages which are not used during training over multiple tasks within the XGLUE benchmark.

Aligned Weight Regularizers for Pruning Pretrained Neural Networks

We explore how a multi-modal transformer trained for generation of longer image descriptions learns syntactic and semantic representations about entities and relations grounded in objects at the level of masked self-attention (text generation) and cross-modal attention (information fusion). We observe that cross-attention learns the visual grounding of noun phrases into objects and high-level semantic information about spatial relations, while text-to-text attention captures low-level syntactic knowledge between words. This concludes that language models in a multi-modal task learn different semantic information about objects and relations cross-modally and uni-modally (text-only).

Attention as Grounding: Exploring Textual and Cross-Modal Attention on Entities and Relations in Language-and-Vision Transformer

We measure our approach’s significant effects (improvements and deteriorations) using two statistical tests. First, we apply the Almost Stochastic Order test (ASO) (Dror et al., 2019). It is a statistical test designed to handle the non-normal distributed empirical results of neural networks by allowing some minor violations in the stochastic order (see paper line 318-333). However, since ASO is not widely accepted in the community, we applied the more common Mann-Whitney U-Test (Mann & Whitney, 1947) which is equivalent to the Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test (McKnight & Najab, 2010). It is a widely used adaption of the Wilcoxon Rank Signed Sum test (Wilcoxon, 1945) to handle independent instead of dependent variables. Additionally, we did not consider other parametric tests like the Student’s t-test since our observations do not match the basic assumptions of these tests.

Composing Structure-Aware Batches for Pairwise Sentence Classification

We investigate Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which outputs a segmentation map corresponding to the natural language description. Addressing RIS efficiently requires considering the interactions happening across visual and linguistic modalities and the interactions within each modality. Existing methods are limited because they either compute different forms of interactions sequentially (leading to error propagation) or ignore intramodal interactions. We address this limitation by performing all three interactions simultaneously through a Synchronous Multi-Modal Fusion Module (SFM). Moreover, to produce refined segmentation masks, we propose a novel Hierarchical Cross-Modal Aggregation Module (HCAM), where linguistic features facilitate the exchange of contextual information across the visual hierarchy. We present thorough ablation studies and validate our approach's performance on four benchmark datasets, showing considerable performance gains over the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Comprehensive Multi-Modal Interactions for Referring Image Segmentation

Humans are able to perceive, understand and reason about causal events. Developing models with similar physical and causal understanding capabilities is a long-standing goal of artificial intelligence. As a step towards this direction, we introduce CRAFT, a new video question answering dataset that requires causal reasoning about physical forces and object interactions. It contains 58K video and question pairs that are generated from 10K videos from 20 different virtual environments, containing various objects in motion that interact with each other and the scene. Two question categories in CRAFT include previously studied descriptive and counterfactual questions. Additionally, inspired by the Force Dynamics Theory in cognitive linguistics, we introduce a new causal question category that involves understanding the causal interactions between objects through notions like cause, enable, and prevent. Our results show that even though the questions in CRAFT are easy for humans, the tested baseline models, including existing state-of-the-art methods, do not yet deal with the challenges posed in our benchmark.

CRAFT: A Benchmark for Causal Reasoning About Forces and inTeractions

We propose a framework to modularize the training of neural language models that use diverse forms of sentence-external context (including metadata) by eliminating the need to jointly train sentence-external and within-sentence encoders.
Our approach, contextual universal embeddings (CUE), trains LMs on one set of context, such as date and author, and adapts to novel metadata types, such as article title, or previous sentence.The model consists of a pretrained neural sentence LM, a BERT-based context encoder, and a masked transformer decoder that estimates LM probabilities using sentence-internal and sentence-external information.
When context or metadata are unavailable, our model learns to combine contextual and sentence-internal information using noisy oracle unigram embeddings as a proxy. Real contextual information can be introduced later and used to adapt a small number of parameters that map contextual data into the decoder's embedding space. We validate the CUE framework on a NYTimes text corpus with multiple metadata types, for which the LM perplexity can be lowered from 36.6 to 27.4 by conditioning on context. Bootstrapping a contextual LM with only a subset of the context/metadata during training retains 85% of the achievable gain.Training the model initially with proxy context retains 64% of the perplexity gain after adapting to real context. Furthermore, we can swap one type of pretrained sentence LM for another without retraining the context encoders, by only adapting the decoder model. Overall, we obtain a modular framework that allows incremental, scalable training of context-enhanced LMs.

CUE Vectors: Modular Training of Language Models Conditioned on Diverse Contextual Signals

Prompting language models (LMs) with training examples and task descriptions has been seen as critical to recent successes in few-shot learning. In this work, we show that finetuning LMs in the few-shot setting can considerably reduce the need for prompt engineering. In fact, one can use null prompts, prompts that contain neither task-specific templates nor training examples, and achieve competitive accuracy to manually tuned prompts across a wide range of tasks. While finetuning LMs does introduce new parameters for each downstream task, we show that this memory overhead can be substantially reduced: finetuning only the bias terms can achieve comparable or better accuracy than standard finetuning while only updating 0.1% of the parameters. All in all, we recommend finetuning LMs for few-shot learning as it is more accurate, robust to different prompts, and can be made nearly as efficient as using frozen LMs.

Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models

In document classification for, e.g., legal and biomedical text, we often deal with hundreds of classes, including very infrequent ones, as well as temporal concept drift caused by the influence of real world events, e.g., policy changes, conflicts, or pandemics. Class imbalance and drift can sometimes be mitigated by resampling the training data to simulate (or compensate for) a known target distribution, but what if the target distribution is determined by unknown future events? Instead of simply resampling uniformly to hedge our bets, we focus on the underlying optimization algorithms used to train such document classifiers and evaluate several group-robust optimization algorithms, initially proposed to mitigate group-level disparities. Reframing group-robust algorithms as adaptation algorithms under concept drift, we find that Invariant Risk Minimization and Spectral Decoupling outperform sampling-based approaches to class imbalance and concept drift, and lead to much better performance on minority classes. The effect is more pronounced the larger the label set.

Adaptor: Objective-Centric Adaptation Framework for Language Models

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Next from ACL 2022

ViLMedic: a framework for research at the intersection of vision and language in medical AI

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Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness