Ireland

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.

ACL 2022

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

filtering

vision

generalization

evaluation

robustness

adversarial

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

findings / work in progress

# 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). 

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.

Improved Multi-label Classification under Temporal Concept Drift: Rethinking Group-Robust Algorithms in a Label-Wise Setting

We present a comprehensive study of sparse attention patterns in Transformer models. We first question the need for pre-training with sparse attention and present experiments showing that an efficient fine-tuning only approach yields a slightly worse but still competitive model. Then we compare the widely used local attention pattern and the less-well-studied global attention pattern, demonstrating that global patterns have several unique advantages. We also demonstrate that a flexible approach to attention, with different patterns across different layers of the model, is beneficial for some tasks. Drawing on this insight, we propose a novel Adaptive Axis Attention method, which learns—during fine-tuning—different attention patterns for each Transformer layer depending on the downstream task. Rather than choosing a fixed attention pattern, the adaptive axis attention method identifies important tokens—for each task and model layer—and focuses attention on those. It does not require pre-training to accommodate the sparse patterns and demonstrates competitive and sometimes better performance against fixed sparse attention patterns that require resource-intensive pre-training.

Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning: Beyond Fixed Sparse Attention Patterns

This work investigates how to "program" language models by changing how data is input to the language model. We particularly focus on the setting of open-domain applications, such as search and personal assistants, which must support the wide range of rare "tail" facts and entities that users ask about. Popular "base" language models (LMs) struggle to generalize to the tail. To improve generalization, there is a long line of work proposing knowledge-aware model, which start with a base model, identify entities in the training and evaluation text by linking to a structured knowledge base of entities, and then change the model by modifying the architecture or introducing auxiliary loss terms, to better learn entity properties. In this work, we ask to what extent can we match the quality of those model modifications, with a simple alternative: using a base model and only changing the data. We propose metadata shaping, a method which inserts the readily available entity metadata (e.g. types and descriptions) from the same linked knowledge base as the baseline methods, into examples at train and inference time based on mutual information. We then simply use the base model to learn from and perform inference on the resulting shaped examples. While simple, metadata shaping is quite effective. On standard evaluation benchmarks for knowledge-enhanced LMs, the method exceeds the base-LM baseline by an average of 4.3 F1 points and achieves state-of-the-art results. We further show the gains are on average 4.4x larger for the slice of examples containing tail vs. popular entities.

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Aligned Weight Regularizers for Pruning Pretrained Neural Networks

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