United States

Many companies make use of customer service chats to help the customer and try to solve their problem. However, customer service data is confidential and as such, cannot easily be shared in the research community. This also implies that these
data are rarely labeled, making it difficult to take advantage of it with machine learning methods. In this paper we present the first work on a customer’s problem status prediction and identification of problematic conversations. Given very small
subsets of labeled textual conversations and unlabeled ones, we propose a semi-supervised framework dedicated to customer service data leveraging speaker role information to adapt the model to the domain and the task using a two-step process. Our framework, Task-Adaptive Fine-tuning, goes from predicting customer satisfaction to identifying the status of the customer’s problem, with the latter being the main objective of the multi-task setting. It outperforms recent inductive semi-supervised approaches on this novel task while only considering a relatively low number of parameters to train on during the final target task. We believe it can not only serve models dedicated to customer service but also to any other application making use of confidential conversational data where labeled sets are rare. Source code is available at https://github.com/gguibon/taft

AAAI 2023

An Adaptive Layer to Leverage both Domain and Task Specific Information from Scarce Data

snlp: text classification

ml: transfer

ml: classification and regression

ml: semi-supervised learning

ml: applications

domain adaptation

multi-task learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Real-world classification tasks often show an extremely imbalanced problem. The extreme imbalance will cause a strong bias that the decision boundary of the classifier is completely dominated by the categories with abundant samples, which are also called the head categories. Current methods have alleviated the imbalanced impact from mainly three aspects: class re-balance, decoupling and domain adaptation. However, the existing criterion with the winner-take-all strategy still leads to the crowding problem in the eigenspace. The head categories with many samples can extract features more accurately, but occupy most of the eigenspace. The tail categories sharing the rest of the narrow eigenspace are too crowded together to accurately extract features. Above these issues, we propose a novel T-distributed spherical metric for equalized eigenspace in the imbalanced classification, which has the following innovations: 1) We design the T-distributed spherical metric, which has the characteristics of high kurtosis. Instead of the winner-take-all strategy, the T-distributed spherical metric produces a high logit only when the extracted feature is close enough to the category center, without a strong bias against other categories. 2) The T-distributed spherical metric is integrated into the classifier, which is able to equalize the eigenspace for alleviating the crowding issue in the imbalanced problem. The equalized eigenspace by the T-distributed spherical classifier is capable of improving the accuracy of the tail categories while maintaining the accuracy of the head, which significantly promotes the intraclass compactness and interclass separability of features. Extensive experiments on large-scale imbalanced datasets verify our method, which shows superior results in the long-tailed CIFAR-100/-10 with the imbalanced ratio IR = 100/50. Our method also achieves excellent results on the large-scale ImageNet-LT dataset and the iNaturalist dataset with various backbones. In addition, we provide a case study of the real clinical classification of pancreatic tumor subtypes with 6 categories. Among them, the largest number of PDAC accounts for 315 cases, and the least CP has only 8 cases. After 4-fold cross-validation, we achieved a top-1 accuracy of 69.04%.

T-distributed Spherical Feature Representation for Imbalanced Classification

Recently, video question answering has attracted growing attention. It involves answering a question based on a fine-grained understanding of video multi-modal information. Most existing methods have successfully explored the deep understanding of visual modality. We argue that a deep understanding of linguistic modality is also essential for answer reasoning, especially for videos that contain character dialogues. To this end, we propose an Inferential Knowledge-Enhanced Integrated Reasoning method. Our method consists of two main components: 1) an Inferential Knowledge Reasoner to generate inferential knowledge for linguistic modality inputs that reveals deeper semantics, including the implicit causes, effects, mental states, etc. 2) an Integrated Reasoning Mechanism to enhance video content understanding and answer reasoning by leveraging the generated inferential knowledge. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvement on two mainstream datasets. The ablation study further demonstrates the effectiveness of each component of our approach.

Inferential Knowledge-Enhanced Integrated Reasoning for Video Question Answering

Table structure recognition (TSR) aims at extracting tables in images into machine-understandable formats. Recent methods solve this problem by predicting the adjacency relations of detected cell boxes, or learning to generate the corresponding markup sequences from the table images. However, they either count on additional heuristic rules to recover the table structures, or require a huge amount of training data and time-consuming sequential decoders. In this paper, we propose an alternative paradigm. We model TSR as a logical location regression problem and propose a new TSR framework called LORE, standing for LOgical location REgression network, which for the first time combines logical location regression together with spatial location regression of table cells. Our proposed LORE is conceptually simpler, easier to train and more accurate than previous TSR models of other paradigms. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that LORE consistently outperforms prior arts.

LORE: Logical Location Regression Network for Table Structure Recognition

Visible thermal person re-identification (VT-ReID) suffers from inter-modality discrepancy and intra-identity variations. Distribution alignment is a popular solution for VT-ReID, however, it is usually restricted to the influence of the intra-identity variations. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Modality Earth Mover's Distance (CM-EMD) that can alleviate the impact of the intra-identity variations during modality alignment. CM-EMD selects an optimal transport strategy and assigns high weights to pairs that have a smaller intra-identity variation. In this manner, the model will focus on reducing the inter-modality discrepancy while paying less attention to intra-identity variations, leading to a more effective modality alignment. Moreover, we introduce two techniques to improve the advantage of CM-EMD. First, Cross-Modality Discrimination Learning (CM-DL) is designed to overcome the discrimination degradation problem caused by modality alignment. By reducing the ratio between intra-identity and inter-identity variances, CM-DL leads the model to learn more discriminative representations. Second, we construct the Multi-Granularity Structure (MGS), enabling us to align modalities from both coarse- and fine-grained levels with the proposed CM-EMD. Extensive experiments show the benefits of the proposed CM-EMD and its auxiliary techniques (CM-DL and MGS). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two VT-ReID benchmarks.

Cross-Modality Earth Mover‚Äôs Distance for Visible Thermal Person Re-Identification

Real depth super-resolution (DSR), unlike synthetic settings, is a challenging task due to the structural distortion and the edge noise caused by the natural degradation in real-world low-resolution (LR) depth maps. These defeats result in significant structure inconsistency between the depth map and the RGB guidance, which potentially confuses the RGB-structure guidance and thereby degrades the DSR quality. In this paper, we propose a novel structure flow-guided DSR framework, where a cross-modality flow map is learned to guide the RGB-structure information transferring for precise depth upsampling. Specifically, our framework consists of a cross-modality flow-guided upsampling network (CFUNet) and a flow-enhanced pyramid edge attention network (PEANet). CFUNet contains a trilateral self-attention module combining both the geometric and semantic correlations for reliable cross-modality flow learning. Then, the learned flow maps are combined with the grid-sampling mechanism for coarse high-resolution (HR) depth prediction. PEANet targets at integrating the learned flow map as the edge attention into a pyramid network to hierarchically learn the edge-focused guidance feature for depth edge refinement. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic DSR datasets verify that our approach achieves excellent performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Structure Flow-Guided Network for Real Depth Super-Resolution

In this paper, we present a new question-answering (QA) based key-value pair extraction approach, called KVPFormer, to robustly extracting key-value relationships between entities from form-like document images. Specifically, KVPFormer first identifies key entities from all entities in an image with a Transformer encoder, then takes these key entities as questions and feeds them into a Transformer decoder to predict their corresponding answers (i.e., value entities) in parallel. To achieve higher answer prediction accuracy, we propose a coarse-to-fine answer prediction approach further, which first extracts multiple answer candidates for each identified question in the coarse stage and then selects the most likely one among these candidates in the fine stage. In this way, the learning difficulty of answer prediction can be effectively reduced so that the prediction accuracy can be improved. Moreover, we introduce a spatial compatibility attention bias into the self-attention/cross-attention mechanism for KVPFormer to better model the spatial interactions between entities. With these new techniques, our proposed KVPFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on FUNSD and XFUND datasets, outperforming the previous best-performing method by 7.2% and 13.2% in F1 score, respectively.

A Question-Answering Approach to Key Value Pair Extraction from Form-like Document Images

Without an assigned task, a suitable intrinsic objective for an agent is to explore the environment efficiently. However, the pursuit of exploration will inevitably bring more safety risks.
An under-explored aspect of reinforcement learning is how to achieve safe efficient exploration when the task is unknown.
In this paper, we propose a practical Constrained Entropy Maximization (CEM) algorithm to solve task-agnostic safe exploration problems, which naturally require a finite horizon and undiscounted constraints on safety costs.
The CEM algorithm aims to learn a policy that maximizes the state entropy under the premise of safety.
To avoid approximating the state density in complex domains, CEM leverages a $k$-nearest neighbor entropy estimator to evaluate the efficiency of exploration.
In terms of safety, CEM minimizes the safety costs, and adaptively trades off safety and exploration based on the current constraint satisfaction. We empirically show that CEM allows learning a safe exploration policy in complex continuous-control domains, and the learned policy benefits downstream tasks in safety and sample efficiency.

CEM: Constrained Entropy Maximization for Task-Agnostic Safe Exploration

Recently a multi-agent variant of the classical multi-armed bandit was proposed to tackle fairness issues in online learning. Inspired by a long line of work in social choice and economics, the goal is to optimize the Nash social welfare instead of the total utility. Unfortunately previous algorithms either are not efficient or achieve sub-optimal regret in terms of the number of rounds $T$. We propose a new efficient algorithm with lower regret than even previous inefficient ones. For $N$ agents, $K$ arms, and $T$ rounds, our approach has a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{NKT} + NK)$. This is an improvement to the previous approach, which has regret bound of $\tilde{O}( \min(NK, \sqrt{N} K^{3/2})\sqrt{T})$. We also complement our efficient algorithm with an inefficient approach with  $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\na\ts} + \np^3\na)$ regret. The experimental findings confirm the effectiveness of our efficient algorithm compared to the previous approaches.

An Efficient Algorithm for Fair Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandit with Low Regret

We propose new differential privacy solutions for when external \emph{invariants} and \emph{integer} constraints are simultaneously enforced on the data product. These requirements arise in real world applications of private data curation, including the  public release of the 2020 U.S. Decennial Census. They pose a great challenge to the production of provably private data products with adequate statistical usability. We propose \emph{integer subspace differential privacy} to rigorously articulate the privacy guarantee when data products maintain both the invariants and integer characteristics, and demonstrate the composition and post-processing properties of our proposal. To address the challenge of sampling from a potentially highly restricted discrete space, we devise a pair of unbiased additive mechanisms, the generalized Laplace and the generalized Gaussian mechanisms, by solving the Diophantine equations as defined by the constraints. The proposed mechanisms have good accuracy, with errors exhibiting sub-exponential and sub-Gaussian tail probabilities respectively. To implement our proposal, we design an MCMC algorithm and supply empirical convergence assessment using estimated upper bounds on the total variation distance via $L$-lag coupling. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal with applications to a synthetic problem with intersecting invariants, a sensitive contingency table with known margins, and the 2010 Census county-level demonstration data with mandated fixed state population totals.

Integer Subspace Differential Privacy

Cloud masking is both a fundamental and a critical task in the vast majority of Earth observation problems across social sectors, including agriculture, energy, water, etc. The sheer volume of satellite imagery to be processed has fast-climbed to a scale (e.g., $>$10 PBs/year) that is prohibitive for manual processing.
Meanwhile, generating reliable cloud masks and image composite is increasingly challenging due to the continued distribution-shifts in the imagery collected by existing sensors and the ever-growing variety of sensors and platforms. Moreover, labeled samples are scarce and geographically limited compared to the needs in real large-scale applications. In related work, traditional remote sensing methods are often physics-based and rely on special spectral signatures from multi- or hyper-spectral bands, which are often not available in data collected by many -- and especially more recent -- high-resolution platforms. Machine learning and deep learning based methods, on the other hand, often require large volumes of up-to-date training data to be reliable and generalizable over space. We propose an autonomous image composition and masking (Auto-CM) framework to learn to solve the fundamental tasks in a label-free manner, by leveraging different dynamics of events in both geographic domains and time-series. Our experiments show that Auto-CM outperforms existing methods on a wide-range of data with different satellite platforms, geographic regions and bands.

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An Adaptive Layer to Leverage both Domain and Task Specific Information from Scarce Data

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T-distributed Spherical Feature Representation for Imbalanced Classification

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