United States

Spreadsheets are an important and unique type of business document for data storage, analysis and presentation. The distinction between spreadsheets and most other types of digital documents lies in that spreadsheets provide users with high flexibility of data organization on the grid. Existing related techniques mainly focus on the tabular data and are incompetent in understanding the entire sheet. On the one hand, spreadsheets have no explicit separation across tabular data and other information, leaving a gap for the deployment of such techniques. On the other hand, pervasive data dependence and semantic relations across the sheet require comprehensive modeling of all the information rather than only the tables. In this paper, we propose SheetPT, the first pre-training technique on spreadsheets to enable effective representation learning under this scenario. For computational effectiveness and efficiency, we propose the coherent chunk, an intermediate semantic unit of sheet structure; and we accordingly devise a hierarchical attention-based architecture to capture contextual information across different structural granularities. Three pre-training objectives are also designed to ensure sufficient training against millions of spreadsheets. Two representative downstream tasks, formula prediction and sheet structure recognition are utilized to evaluate its capability and the prominent results reveal its superiority over existing state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI 2023

SheetPT: Spreadsheet Pre-training Based on Hierarchical Attention Network

text mining

representation learning

language model

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

Classic option pricing models, such as the Black-Scholes formula, often depend on some rigid assumptions on the dynamics of the underlying asset prices. These assumptions are inevitably violated in practice and thus induce the model risk. To mitigate this, robust option pricing that only requires the no-arbitrage principle has attracted a great deal of attention among researchers. In this paper, we give new robust upper bounds for option prices based on a novel {\it $\eta$-momentum trading strategy}. Our bounds for European options are tighter for most common moneyness, volatility, and expiration date setups than those presented in (\citeauthor{DKM16} \citeyear{DKM16}). Our bounds for average strike Asian options are the first closed-form robust upper bounds for those options. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our bounds significantly outperform the benchmarks for both European and Asian options. 

Tighter Robust Upper Bounds for Options via No-Regret Learning

Inspired by the recent success of sequence modeling in RL and the use of   masked language model for pre-training, we propose a masked model for pre-training in RL, RePreM (Representation Pre-training with Masked Model), which trains the encoder combined with transformer blocks to predict the masked states or actions in a trajectory. RePreM is simple but effective compared to existing representation pre-training methods in RL. It avoids algorithmic sophistication (such as data augmentation or estimating multiple models) with sequence modeling and generates a representation that captures long-term dynamics well. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RePreM in various tasks, including dynamic prediction, transfer learning, and sample-efficient RL with both value-based and actor-critic methods. Moreover, we show that RePreM scales well with dataset size, dataset quality, and the scale of the encoder, which indicates its potential towards big RL models.

RePreM: Representation Pre-training with Masked Model for Reinforcement Learning

Although k-means clustering has been widely studied due to its simplicity, these methods still have the following two fatal drawbacks. Firstly, they need to initialize the cluster centers, which causes unstable clustering performance. Secondly, they have poor performance on non-Gaussian datasets. Inspired by the affinity matrix, we propose a novel multi-view k-means based on the adjacency matrix. It maps the affinity matrix to the distance matrix according to the principle that every sample has a small distance from the points in its neighborhood and a large distance from the points outside of the neighborhood. Moreover, this method well exploits the complementary information embedded in different views by minimizing the tensor Schatten p-norm regularizer on the third-order tensor which consists of cluster assignment matrices of different views. Additionally, this method avoids initializing cluster centroids to obtain stable performance. And there is no need to compute the means of clusters so that our model is not sensitive to outliers. Experiment on a toy dataset shows the excellent performance on non-Gaussian datasets. And other experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Centerless Multi-View K-means Based on The Adjacency Matrix

Biomedical entity linking (EL) is the task of linking mentions in a biomedical document to corresponding entities in a knowledge base (KB). The challenge in biomedical EL lies in leveraging mention context to select the most appropriate entity among possible candidates. Although some EL models achieve competitive results by retrieving candidate entities and then exploiting context to re-rank them, these re-ranking models concatenate mention context with one candidate at a time. They lack fine-grained interaction among candidates, and potentially cannot handle ambiguous mentions when facing candidates both with high lexical similarity. We cope with this issue using a re-ranking model based on prompt tuning, which represents mention context and all candidates at once, letting candidates in comparison attend to each other. We also propose a KB-enhanced self-supervised pretraining strategy. Instead of large-scale pretraining on biomedical EL data in previous work, we use masked language modeling with synonyms from KB. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on 3 biomedical EL datasets: NCBI disease, BC5CDR and COMETA, showing the effectiveness of cross-entity interaction and KB-enhanced pretraining strategy.

Improving Biomedical Entity Linking with Cross-Entity Interaction

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) models are proposed to accelerate the inference process while maintaining relatively high performance. However, existing NAT models are difficult to achieve the desired efficiency-quality
trade-off. For one thing, fully NAT models with efficient inference perform inferior to their autoregressive counterparts. For another, iterative NAT models can, though, achieve comparable performance while diminishing the advantage of speed. In this paper, we propose RenewNAT, a flexible framework with high efficiency and effectiveness, to incorporate the merits of fully and iterative NAT models. RenewNAT first generates the potential translation results and then renews them in a single pass. It can achieve significant performance improvements at the same expense as traditional NAT models (without introducing additional model parameters and decoding latency). Experimental results on various translation benchmarks (e.g., 4 WMT) show that our framework consistently improves the performance of strong fully NAT methods (e.g., GLAT and DSLP) without additional speed overhead.

RenewNAT: Renewing Potential Translation for Non-Autoregressive Transformer

 Lottery tickets (LTs) is able to discover accurate and sparse subnetworks that could be trained in isolation to match the performance of dense networks. Ensemble, in parallel, is one of the oldest time-proven tricks in machine learning to improve performance by combining the output of multiple independent models. However, the benefits of ensemble in the context of LTs will be diluted since ensemble does not directly lead to stronger sparse subnetworks, but leverages their predictions for a better decision. In this work, we first observe that directly averaging the weights of the adjacent learned subnetworks significantly boosts the performance of LTs. Encouraged by this observation, we further propose an alternative way to perform an ``ensemble'' over the subnetworks identified by iterative magnitude pruning via a simple interpolating strategy. We call our method "Lottery Pools". In contrast to the naive ensemble which brings no performance gains to each single subnetwork, Lottery Pools yields much stronger sparse subnetworks than the original LTs without requiring any extra training or inference cost. Across various modern architectures on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, we show that our method achieves significant performance gains in both, in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Impressively, evaluated with VGG-16 and ResNet-18, the produced sparse subnetworks outperform the original LTs by up to 1.88% on CIFAR-100 and 2.36\% on CIFAR-100-C; the resulting dense network surpasses the pre-trained dense-model up to 2.22% on CIFAR-100 and 2.38% on CIFAR-100-C.

Lottery Pools: Winning More by Interpolating Tickets without Increasing Training or Inference Cost

In many scenarios of black-box optimization, evaluating the objective function values of solutions is expensive, while comparing a pair of solutions is relatively cheap, which yields the dueling black-box optimization. The side effect of dueling optimization is that it doubles the dimension of solution space and exacerbates the dimensionality scalability issue of black-box optimization, e.g., Bayesian optimization. To address this issue, the existing dueling optimization methods fix one solution when dueling throughout the optimization process, but it may reduce their efficacy. Fortunately, it has been observed that, in recommendation systems, the dueling results are mainly determined by the latent human preferences. In this paper, we abstract this phenomenon as the preferential intrinsic dimension and inject it into the dueling Bayesian optimization, resulting in the preferential embedding dueling Bayesian optimization (PE-DBO). PE-DBO decouples optimization and pairwise comparison via the preferential embedding matrix. Optimization is performed in the preferential intrinsic subspace with much lower dimensionality, while pairwise comparison is completed in the original dueling solution space. Theoretically, we disclose that the preference function can be approximately preserved in the lower-dimensional preferential intrinsic subspace. Experiment results verify that, on molecule discovery and web page recommendation dueling optimization tasks, the preferential intrinsic dimension exists and PE-DBO is superior in scalability compared with that of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

High-Dimensional Dueling Optimization with Preference Embedding

Attack Ensemble (AE), which combines multiple attacks together, provides a reliable way to evaluate adversarial robustness. In practice, AEs are often constructed and tuned by human experts, which however tends to be sub-optimal and time-consuming. In this work, we present AutoAE, a conceptually simple approach for automatically constructing AEs. In brief, AutoAE repeatedly adds the attack and its iteration steps to the ensemble that maximizes ensemble improvement per additional iteration consumed. We show theoretically that AutoAE yields AEs provably within a constant factor of the optimal for a given defense. We then use AutoAE to construct two AEs for $l_{\infty}$ and $l_2$ attacks, and apply them without any tuning or adaptation to 45 top adversarial defenses on the RobustBench leaderboard. In all except one cases we achieve equal or better (often the latter) robustness evaluation than existing AEs, and notably, in 29 cases we achieve better robustness evaluation than the best known one. Such performance of AutoAE shows itself as a reliable evaluation protocol for adversarial robustness, which further indicates the huge potential of automatic AE construction. Code is available at https://github.com/LeegerPENG/AutoAE.

Reliable Robustness Evaluation via Automatically Constructed Attack Ensembles

The spiking neural network (SNN) using leaky-integrated-and-fire (LIF) neurons has been commonly used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. However, the LIF neuron is still relatively simple compared to that in the biological brain. Further research on more types of neurons with different scales of neuronal dynamics is necessary. Here we introduce four types of neuronal dynamics to post-process the sequential patterns generated from the spiking transformer to get the complex dynamic neuron improved spiking transformer neural network (DyTr-SNN). We found that the DyTr-SNN could handle the non-toy automatic speech recognition task well, representing a lower phoneme error rate, lower computational cost, and higher robustness. These results indicate that the further cooperation of SNNs and neural dynamics at the neuron and network scales might have much in store for the future, especially on the ASR tasks.

Complex dynamic neurons improved spiking transformer network for efficient automatic speech recognition

The multi-view data with incomplete information hinder the effective data analysis. Existing multi-view imputation methods that learn the mapping between complete view and completely missing view are not able to deal with the common multi-view data with missing feature information. In this paper, we propose a generative imputation model named Git with optimal transport theory to jointly impute the missing features/values, conditional on all observed values from the multi-view data. Git consists of two modules, i.e., a multi-view joint generator (MJG) and a masking energy discriminator (MED). The generator MJG incorporates a joint autoencoder with the multiple imputation rule to learn the data distribution from all observed multi-view data. The discriminator MED leverages a new masking energy divergence function to make Git differentiable for imputation enhancement. Extensive experiments on several real-world multi-view data sets demonstrate that, Git yields over 35% accuracy gain, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

SheetPT: Spreadsheet Pre-training Based on Hierarchical Attention Network

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Tighter Robust Upper Bounds for Options via No-Regret Learning

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