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While Machine Comprehension (MC) has attracted extensive research interests in recent years, existing approaches mainly belong to the category of Machine Reading Comprehension task which mines textual inputs (paragraphs and questions) to predict the answers (choices or text spans). However, there are a lot of MC tasks that accept audio input in addition to the textual input, e.g. English listening comprehension test. In this paper, we target the problem of Audio-Oriented Multimodal Machine Comprehension, and its goal is to answer questions based on the given audio and textual information. To solve this problem, we propose a Dynamic Inter- and Intra-modality Attention (DIIA) model to effectively fuse the two modalities (audio and textual). DIIA can work as an independent component and thus be easily integrated into existing MC models. Moreover, we further develop a Multimodal Knowledge Distillation (MKD) module to enable our multimodal MC model to accurately predict the answers based only on either the text or the audio. As a result, the proposed approach can handle various tasks including: Audio-Oriented Multimodal Machine Comprehension, Machine Reading Comprehension and Machine Listening Comprehension, in a single model, making fair comparisons possible between our model and the existing unimodal MC models. Experimental results and analysis prove the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. First, the proposed DIIA boosts the baseline models by up to 21.08% in terms of accuracy; Second, under the unimodal scenarios, the MKD module allows our multimodal MC model to significantly outperform the unimodal models by up to 18.87%, which are trained and tested with only audio or textual data.

AAAI 2021

Audio-Oriented Multimodal Machine Comprehension via Dynamic Inter- and Intra-Modality Attention

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open question: Under what conditions is the policy iteration method robustly stable from a dynamical systems perspective? Using advanced stability results in control theory, it is shown that policy iteration for LQR is inherently robust to small errors in the learning process and enjoys small-disturbance input-to-state stability: whenever the error in each iteration is bounded and small, the solutions of the policy iteration algorithm are also bounded, and, moreover, enter and stay in a small neighborhood of the optimal LQR solution. As an application, a novel off-policy optimistic least-squares policy iteration for the LQR problem is proposed, when the system dynamics are subjected to additive stochastic disturbances. The proposed new results in robust reinforcement learning are validated by a numerical example.

Robust Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study in Linear Quadratic Regulation

Image matting is a key technique for image and video editing and composition. Conventionally, deep learning approaches take the whole input image and an associated trimap to infer the alpha matte using convolutional neural networks. Such approaches set state-of-the-arts in image matting; however, they may fail in real-world matting applications due to hardware limitations, since real-world input images for matting are mostly of very high resolution. In this paper, we propose HDMatt, a first deep learning based image matting approach for high-resolution inputs. More concretely, HDMatt runs matting in a patch-based crop-and-stitch manner for high-resolution inputs with a novel module design to address the contextual dependency and consistency issues between different patches. Compared with vanilla patch-based inference which computes each patch independently, we explicitly model the cross-patch contextual dependency with a newly-proposed Cross-Patch Contextual module (CPC) guided by the given trimap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its necessity for high-resolution inputs. Our HDMatt approach also sets new state-of-the-art performance on Adobe Image Matting and AlphaMatting benchmarks and produce impressive visual results on more real-world high-resolution images.

High-Resolution Deep Image Matting

We present any-precision deep neural networks (DNNs), which are trained with a new method that allows the learned DNNs to be flexible in numerical precision during inference. The same model in runtime can be flexibly and directly set to different bit-widths, by truncating the least significant bits, to support dynamic speed and accuracy trade-off. When all layers are set to low-bits, we show that the model achieved accuracy comparable to dedicated models trained at the same precision. This nice property facilitates flexible deployment of deep learning models in real-world applications, where in practice trade-offs between model accuracy and runtime efficiency are often sought. Previous literature presents solutions to train models at each individual fixed efficiency/accuracy trade-off point. But how to produce a model flexible in runtime precision is largely unexplored. When the demand of efficiency/accuracy trade-off varies from time to time or even dynamically changes in runtime, it is infeasible to re-train models accordingly, and the storage budget may forbid keeping multiple models. Our proposed framework achieves this flexibility without performance degradation. More importantly, we demonstrate that this achievement is agnostic to model architectures and applicable to multiple vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Any-Precision-DNNs.

Any-Precision Deep Neural Networks

We present simple algorithms for batched stochastic multi-armed bandit and batched stochastic linear bandit problems. We prove bounds for their expected regrets that improve and extend the best known regret bounds of Gao, Han, Ren, and Zhou (NeurIPS 2019), for any number of batches.
In particular, our algorithms in both settings achieve the optimal expected regrets by using only a logarithmic number of batches. 
We also study the batched adversarial multi-armed bandit problem for the first time and provide the optimal regret, up to logarithmic factors, of any algorithm with predetermined batch sizes.

Regret Bounds for Batched Bandits

This paper studies the problem of unsupervised domain adaption in the universal scenario, in which only some of the classes are shared between the source and target domains. We present a scoring scheme that is effective in identifying the samples of the shared classes. The score is used to select samples in the target domain for which to apply specific losses during training; pseudo-labels for high scoring samples and confidence regularization for low scoring samples. Taken together, our method is shown to outperform, by a sizeable margin, the current state of the art on the literature benchmarks.

Sample Selection for Universal Domain Adaptation

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) maintains the entire probability distribution of the reward-to-go, i.e. the return, providing more learning signals that account for the uncertainty associated with policy performance, which may be beneficial for trading off exploration and exploitation and policy learning in general. Previous works in distributional RL focused mainly on computing the state-action-return distributions, here we model the state-return distributions. This enables us to translate successful conventional RL algorithms that are based on state values into distributional RL. We formulate the distributional Bellman operation as an inference-based auto-encoding process that minimises Wasserstein metrics between target/model return distributions. The proposed algorithm, BDPG (Bayesian Distributional Policy Gradients), uses adversarial training in joint-contrastive learning to estimate a variational posterior from the returns. Moreover, we can now interpret the return prediction uncertainty as an information gain, which allows to obtain a new curiosity measure that helps BDPG steer exploration actively and efficiently. We demonstrate in a suite of Atari 2600 games and MuJoCo tasks, including well known hard-exploration challenges, how BDPG learns generally faster and with higher asymptotic performance than reference distributional RL algorithms.

Bayesian Distributional Policy Gradients

A common assumption in multimodal learning is the completeness of training data, i.e., full modalities are available in all training examples. Although there exists research endeavor in developing novel methods to tackle the incompleteness of testing data, e.g., modalities are partially missing in testing examples, few of them can handle incomplete training modalities. The problem becomes even more challenging if considering the case of severely missing, e.g., ninety percent of training examples may have incomplete modalities. For the first time in the literature, this paper formally studies multimodal learning with missing modality in terms of flexibility (missing modalities in training, testing, or both) and efficiency (most training data have incomplete modality). Technically, we propose a new method named SMIL that leverages Bayesian meta-learning in uniformly achieving both objectives. To validate our idea, we conduct a series of experiments on three popular benchmarks: MM-IMDb, CMU-MOSI, and avMNIST. The results prove the state-of-the-art performance of SMIL over existing methods and generative baselines including autoencoders and generative adversarial networks.

SMIL: Multimodal Learning with Severely Missing Modality

With the marriage of federated machine learning and recommender systems for privacy-aware preference modeling and personalization, there comes a new research branch called federated recommender systems aiming to build a recommendation model in a distributed way, i.e., each user is represented as a distributed client where his/her original rating data are not shared with the server or the other clients. Notice that, besides the sensitive information of a specific rating score assigned to a certain item by a user, the information of a user's rated set of items shall also be well protected. Some very recent works propose to randomly sample some unrated items for each user and then assign some virtual ratings, so that the server can not identify the scores and the set of rated items easily during the server-client interactions. However, the virtual ratings assigned to the randomly sampled items will inevitably introduce some noise to the model training process, which will then cause loss in recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless federated recommendation method (FedRec++) by allocating some denoising clients (i.e., users) to eliminate the noise in a privacy-aware manner. We further analyse our FedRec++ in terms of security and losslessness, and discuss its generality in the context of existing works. Extensive empirical studies clearly show the effectiveness of our FedRec++ in providing accurate and privacy-aware recommendation without much additional communication cost.

FedRec++: Lossless Federated Recommendation with Explicit Feedback

With the increasing popularity of graph-based learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) emerge as the essential tool for gaining insights from graphs.
However, unlike the conventional CNNs that have been extensively explored and exhaustively tested, people are still worrying about the GNNs' robustness under the critical settings, such as financial services.
The main reason is that existing GNNs usually serve as a black-box in predicting and do not provide the uncertainty on the predictions.
On the other side, the recent advancement of Bayesian deep learning on CNNs has demonstrated its success of quantifying and explaining such uncertainties to fortify CNN models.
Motivated by these observations, we propose UAG, the first systematic solution to defend adversarial attacks on GNNs through identifying and exploiting hierarchical uncertainties in GNNs.
UAG develops a Bayesian uncertainty technique to explicitly capture uncertainties in GNNs and further employs an uncertainty-aware attention technique to defend adversarial attacks on GNNs. Intensive experiments show that our proposed defense approach outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions by a significant margin.

UAG: Uncertainty-Aware Attention Graph Neural Network for Defending Adversarial Attacks

While various neural machine translation (NMT) methods have integrated mono-lingual syntax knowledge into the linguistic representation of sequence-to-sequence, no research is available on aligning the syntactic structures of target language with the corresponding source language syntactic structures. This work shows the first attempt of a source-target bilingual syntactic alignment approach SyntAligner by mutual information maximization-based self-supervised neural deep modeling. Building on the word alignment for NMT, our SyntAligner firstly aligns the syntactic structures of source and target sentences and then maximizes their mutual dependency by introducing a lower bound on their mutual information. In SyntAligner, the syntactic structure of span granularity is represented by transforming source or target word hidden state into a source or target syntactic span vector. A border-sensitive span attention mechanism then captures the correlation between the source and target syntactic span vectors, which also captures the self-attention between span border-words as alignment bias. Lastly, a self-supervised bilingual syntactic mutual information maximization-based learning objective dynamically samples the aligned syntactic spans to maximize their mutual dependency. Experiment results on three typical NMT tasks: WMT'14 English to German, IWSLT'14 German to English, and NC'11 English to French show the SyntAligner effectiveness and universality of syntactic alignment.

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