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Question answering (QA) models for reading comprehension tend to learn shortcut solutions rather than the solutions intended by QA datasets.
QA models that have learned shortcut solutions can achieve human-level performance in shortcut examples where shortcuts are valid, but these same behaviors degrade generalization potential on anti-shortcut examples where shortcuts are invalid.
Various methods have been proposed to mitigate this problem, but they do not fully take the characteristics of shortcuts themselves into account.
We assume that the learnability of shortcuts, i.e., how easy it is to learn a shortcut, is useful to mitigate the problem.
Thus, we first examine the learnability of the representative shortcuts on extractive and multiple-choice QA datasets.
Behavioral tests using biased training sets reveal that shortcuts that exploit answer positions and word-label correlations are preferentially learned for extractive and multiple-choice QA, respectively.
We find that the more learnable a shortcut is, the flatter and deeper the loss landscape is around the shortcut solution in the parameter space.
We also find that the availability of the preferred shortcuts tends to make the task easier to perform from an information-theoretic viewpoint.
Lastly, we experimentally show that the learnability of shortcuts can be utilized to construct an effective QA training set; the more learnable a shortcut is, the smaller the proportion of anti-shortcut examples required to achieve comparable performance on shortcut and anti-shortcut examples.
We claim that the learnability of shortcuts should be considered when designing mitigation methods.

AAAI 2023

Which Shortcut Solution Do Question Answering Models Prefer to Learn?

spurious correlation

shortcut learning

question answering

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COLING 2022

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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.

Previous remote sensing recognition approaches predomi-
nantly perform well on the training-testing dataset. Howev-
er, due to large style discrepancies not only among mul-
tidomain datasets but also within a single domain, they suf-
fer from obvious performance degradation when applied to
unseen domains. In this paper, we propose a style-content
metric learning framework to address the generalizable re-
mote sensing object recognition issue. Specifically, we first-
ly design an inter-class dispersion metric to encourage the
model to make decision based on content rather than the
style, which is achieved by dispersing predictions gener-
ated from the contents of both positive sample and nega-
tive sample and the style of input image. Secondly, we pro-
pose an intra-class compactness metric to force the model
to be less style-biased by compacting classifier’s prediction-
s from the content of input image and the styles of posi-
tive sample and negative sample. Lastly, we design an intra-
class interaction metric to improve model’s recognition ac-
curacy by pulling in classifier’s predictions obtained from
the input image and positive sample. Extensive experiments
on four datasets show that our style-content metric learn-
ing achieves superior generalization performance against the
state-of-the-art competitors. Code and model are available at:
https://github.com/wdzhao123/TSCM.

Style-Content Metric Learning for Multidomain Remote Sensing Object Recognition

Multi-view clustering has gained broad attention owing to its capacity to exploit complementary information across multiple data views. Although existing methods demonstrate delightful clustering performance, most of them are of high time complexity and cannot handle large-scale data. Matrix factorization-based models are a representative of solving this problem. However, they assume that the views share a dimension-fixed consensus coefficient matrix and view-specific base matrices, limiting their representability. Moreover, a series of large-scale algorithms that bear one or more hyperparameters are impractical in real-world applications. To address the two issues, we propose an auto-weighted multi-view clustering (AWMVC) algorithm. Specifically, AWMVC first learns coefficient matrices from corresponding base matrices of different dimensions, then fuses them to obtain an optimal consensus matrix. By mapping original features into distinctive low-dimensional spaces, we can attain more comprehensive knowledge, thus obtaining better clustering results. Moreover, we design a six-step alternative optimization algorithm proven to be convergent theoretically. Also, AWMVC shows excellent performance on various benchmark datasets compared with existing ones. The code of AWMVC is publicly available at https://github.com/wanxinhang/AAAI-2023-AWMVC.

Auto-weighted Multi-view Clustering for Large-scale Data

A core step of mining human mobility data is to learn accurate representations for user-generated check-in sequences. The learned representations should be able to fully describe the spatial-temporal mobility patterns of users and the high-level semantics of traveling. However, existing check-in sequence representation learning is usually implicitly achieved by end-to-end models designed for specific downstream tasks, resulting in unsatisfactory generalizable abilities and poor performance. Besides, although the sequence representation learning models that follow the contrastive learning pre-training paradigm have achieved breakthroughs in many fields like NLP, they fail to simultaneously consider the unique spatial-temporal characteristics of check-in sequences and need manual adjustments on the data augmentation strategies. So, directly applying them to check-in sequences cannot yield a meaningful pretext task. To this end, in this paper we propose a contrastive pre-training model with adversarial perturbations for check-in sequence representation learning (CACSR). Firstly, we design a novel spatial-temporal augmentation block for disturbing the spatial-temporal features of check-in sequences in the latent space to relieve the stress of designing manual data augmentation strategies. Secondly, to construct an effective contrastive pretext task, we generate “hard” positive and negative pairs for the check-in sequence by adversarial training. These two designs encourage the model to capture the high-level spatial-temporal patterns and semantics of check-in sequences while ignoring the noisy and unimportant details. We demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of CACSR on two kinds of downstream tasks using three real-world datasets. The results show that our model outperforms both the state-of-the-art pre-training methods and the end-to-end models.

Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Perturbations for Check-in Sequence Representation Learning

Consistency and realness have always been the two critical issues of image super-resolution. While the realness has been dramatically improved with the use of GAN prior, the state-of-the-art methods still suffer inconsistencies in local structures and colors (e.g., tooth and eyes). In this paper, we show that these inconsistencies can be analytically eliminated by learning only the null-space component while fixing the range-space part. Further, we design a pooling-based decomposition (PD), a universal range-null space decomposition for super-resolution tasks, which is concise, fast, and parameter-free. PD can be easily applied to state-of-the-art GAN Prior based SR methods to eliminate their inconsistencies, neither compromise the realness nor bring extra parameters or computational costs. Besides, our ablation studies reveal that PD can replace pixel-wise losses for training and achieve better generalization performance when facing unseen downsamplings or even real-world degradation. Experiments show that the use of PD refreshes state-of-the-art SR performance and speeds up the convergence of training up to 2~10 times.

GAN Prior based Null-Space Learning for Consistent Super-Resolution

Many NLP tasks can be regarded as a selection problem from a set of options, such as classification tasks, multi-choice question answering, etc. Textual entailment (TE) has been shown as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach to dealing with those selection problems. TE treats input texts as premises (P), options as hypotheses (H), then handles the selection problem by modeling (P, H) pairwise. Two limitations: first, the pairwise modeling is unaware of other options, which is less intuitive since humans often determine the best options by comparing competing candidates; second, the inference process of pairwise TE is time-consuming, especially when the option space is large. To deal with the two issues, this work first proposes a contextualized TE model (Context-TE) by appending other k options as the context of the current (P, H) modeling. Context-TE is able to learn more reliable decision for the H since it considers various context. Second, we speed up Context-TE by coming up with Parallel-TE, which learns the decisions of multiple options simultaneously. Parallel-TE significantly improves the inference speed while keeping comparable performance with Context-TE. Our methods are evaluated on three tasks (ultra-fine entity typing, intent detection and multi-choice QA) that are typical selection problems with different sizes of options. Experiments show our models set new SOTA performance; particularly, Parallel-TE is faster than the pairwise TE by k times in inference.

Learning to Select from Multiple Options

Cake-cutting is a fundamental model of dividing a heterogeneous resource, such as land, broadcast time, and advertisement space. In this study, we consider the problem of dividing indivisible goods fairly under the connectivity constraints of a path. We prove that a connected division of indivisible items satisfying a discrete counterpart of envy-freeness, called {\em envy-freeness up to one good} (EF1), always exists for any number of agents $n$ with monotone valuations. Our result settles an open question raised by Bil\`o et al. (2019), who proved that an EF1 connected division always exists for the number of agents $n \le 4$. Moreover, the proof can be extended to show the following (1) ``secretive" and (2) ``extra" versions: (1) for $n$ agents with monotone valuations, the path can be divided into $n$ connected bundles such that an EF1 assignment of the remaining bundles can be made to the other agents for any selection made by the “secretive agent”; (2) for $n+1$ agents with monotone valuations, the path can be divided into $n$ connected bundles such that when any ``extra agent” leaves, an EF1 assignment of the bundles can be made to the remaining agents.  

How to cut a discrete cake fairly

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER), aiming to address the limitation of labeled resources in the target domain, is a challenging yet important task. Most existing studies alleviate the data discrepancy across different domains at the coarse level via combing NER with language modelings or introducing domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT). Notably, source and target domains tend to share more fine-grained local information within denser subsequences than global information within the whole sequence, such that subsequence features are easier to transfer, which has not been explored well. Besides, compared to token-level representation, subsequence-level information can help the model distinguish different meanings of the same word in different domains. In this paper, we propose to incorporate subsequence-level features for promoting the cross-domain NER. In detail, we first utilize a pre-trained encoder to extract the global information. Then, we re-express each sentence as a group of subsequences and propose a novel bidirectional memory recurrent unit (BMRU) to capture features from the subsequences. Finally, an adaptive coupling unit (ACU) is proposed to combine global information and subsequence features for predicting entity labels. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our model, which achieves the state of the art performance.

A Simple yet Effective Subsequence-Enhanced Approach for Cross-Domain NER

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving distributed deep learning paradigm that involves substantial communication and computation effort, which is a problem for resource-constrained mobile and IoT devices. Model pruning/sparsification develops sparse models that could solve this problem, but existing sparsification solutions cannot satisfy at the same time the requirements for low bidirectional communication overhead between the server and the clients, low computation overhead at the clients, and good model accuracy, under the FL assumption that the server does not have access to raw data to fine-tune the pruned models. We propose Complement Sparsification (CS), a pruning mechanism that satisfies all these requirements through a complementary and collaborative pruning done at the server and the clients.  At each round, CS creates a global sparse model that contains the weights that capture the general data distribution of all clients, while the clients create local sparse models with the weights pruned from the global model to capture the local trends. For improved model performance, these two types of complementary sparse models are aggregated into a dense model in each round, which is subsequently pruned in an iterative process. CS requires little computation overhead on the top of vanilla FL for both the server and the clients. We demonstrate that CS is an approximation of vanilla FL and, thus, its models perform well. We evaluate CS experimentally with two popular FL benchmark datasets. CS achieves substantial reduction in bidirectional communication, while achieving performance comparable with vanilla FL. In addition, CS outperforms baseline pruning mechanisms for FL. 

Complement Sparsification: Low-Overhead Model Pruning for Federated Learning

Learning descriptive 3D features is crucial for understanding 3D scenes with diverse objects and complex structures. However, it is usually unknown whether important geometric attributes and scene context obtain enough emphasis in an end-to-end trained 3D scene understanding network. To guide 3D feature learning toward important geometric attributes and scene context, we explore the help of textual scene descriptions. Given some free-form descriptions paired with 3D scenes, we extract the knowledge regarding the object relationships and object attributes. We then inject the knowledge to 3D feature learning through three classification-based auxiliary tasks. This language-assisted training can be combined with modern object detection and instance segmentation methods to promote 3D semantic scene understanding, especially in a label-deficient regime. Moreover, the 3D feature learned with language assistance is better aligned with the language features, which can benefit various 3D-language multimodal tasks. Experiments on several benchmarks of 3D-only and 3D-language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our language-assisted 3D feature learning.  Code is available at https://github.com/Asterisci/Language-Assisted-3D.

Language-Assisted 3D Feature Learning for Semantic Scene Understanding

Data uncertainty is commonly observed in the images for face
recognition (FR). However, deep learning algorithms often make
predictions with high confidence even for uncertain or irrelevant
inputs. Intuitively, FR algorithms can benefit from both the estimation of uncertainty and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD)
samples. Taking a probabilistic view of the current classification
model, the temperature scalar is exactly the scale of uncertainty
noise implicitly added in the softmax function. Meanwhile, the
uncertainty of images in a dataset should follow a prior distribution. Based on the observation, a unified framework for uncertainty
modeling and FR, Random Temperature Scaling (RTS), is proposed
to learn a reliable FR algorithm. The benefits of RTS are two-fold.
(1) In the training phase, it can adjust the learning strength of clean
and noisy samples for stability and accuracy. (2) In the test phase, it
can provide a score of confidence to detect uncertain, low-quality
and even OOD samples, without training on extra labels. Extensive
experiments on FR benchmarks demonstrate that the magnitude of
variance in RTS, which serves as an OOD detection metric, is closely
related to the uncertainty of the input image. RTS can achieve top
performance on both the FR and OOD detection tasks. Moreover,
the model trained with RTS can perform robustly on datasets with
noise. The proposed module is light-weight and only adds negligible
computation cost to the training and test processes.

Which Shortcut Solution Do Question Answering Models Prefer to Learn?

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Style-Content Metric Learning for Multidomain Remote Sensing Object Recognition

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