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The problem of identifying a probabilistic context free grammar has two aspects: the first is determining the grammar&#39;s topology (the rules of the grammar) and the second is estimating probabilistic weights for each rule. Given the hardness results for learning context-free grammars in general, and probabilistic grammars in particular, most of the literature has concentrated on the second problem. In this work we address the first problem.  We restrict attention to structurally unambiguous weighted context-free grammars (SUWCFG) and provide a query learning algorithm for strucuturally unambiguous probabilistic context-free grammars  (SUPCFG). We show that SUWCFG can be represented using co-linear multiplicity tree automata (CMTA), and provide a polynomial learning algorithm that learns CMTAs.  We show that the learned CMTA can be converted into a probabilistic grammar, thus providing  a complete algorithm for learning  a strucutrally unambiguous probabilistic context free grammar (both the grammar topology and the probabilistic weights) using structured membership queries and structured equivalence queries. We demonstrate the usefulness of our algorithm in learning PCFGs over genomic data.

AAAI 2021

Learning of Structurally Unambiguous Probabilistic Grammars

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The problem of identifying a probabilistic context free grammar has two aspects: the first is determining the grammar's topology (the rules of the grammar) and the second is estimating probabilistic weights for each rule. Given the hardness results for learning context-free grammars in general, and probabilistic grammars in particular, most of the literature has concentrated on the second problem. In this work we address the first problem.  We restrict attention to structurally unambiguous weighted context-free grammars (SUWCFG) and provide a query learning algorithm for strucuturally unambiguous probabilistic context-free grammars  (SUPCFG). We show that SUWCFG can be represented using co-linear multiplicity tree automata (CMTA), and provide a polynomial learning algorithm that learns CMTAs.  We show that the learned CMTA can be converted into a probabilistic grammar, thus providing  a complete algorithm for learning  a strucutrally unambiguous probabilistic context free grammar (both the grammar topology and the probabilistic weights) using structured membership queries and structured equivalence queries. We demonstrate the usefulness of our algorithm in learning PCFGs over genomic data.

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. 

Robots operating in the real world must deal with uncertainty, be it due to working with humans who are unpredictable, or simply because they must operate in a dynamic environment. Ignoring the uncertainty is dangerous, while accounting for all possible outcomes is often computationally infeasible.
 One approach, which lies between ignoring the uncertainty completely and addressing it completely is using flexible plans with choice, formulated as Temporal Planning Networks (TPNs). This method has been successfully demonstrated to work in human-robot teamwork using the Pike executive, an online executive that unifies intent recognition and plan adaptation.
 However, one of the main challenges to using Pike is the need to manually specify the TPN. In this paper, we address this challenge by describing a technique for automatically synthesizing a TPN which covers multiple possible executions for a given temporal planning problem specified in PDDL 2.1. Our approach starts by using a diverse planner to generate multiple plans, and then merges them into a single TPN. As there were no available diverse planners for temporal planning, we first present a novel method for adapting an existing diverse planning method, based on top-k planning, to the temporal setting. We then describe how merging diverse plans into a single TPN is performed using constraint optimization. Finally, an empirical evaluation on a set of IPC benchmarks shows that our approach scales well, and generates TPNs which can generalize the set of plans they are generated from.

Automatic Generation of Flexible Plans via Diverse Temporal Planning

Consider a learning algorithm, which involves an internal call to an optimization routine such as a generalized eigenvalue problem, a cone programming problem or even sorting. Integrating such a method as layers within a trainable deep network in a numerically stable way is not simple â€“ for instance, only recently, strategies have emerged for eigendecomposition and differentiable sorting. We propose an efficient and differentiable solver for general linear programming problems which can be used in a plug and play manner within deep neural networks as a layer. Our development is inspired by a fascinating but not widely used link between dynamics of slime mold (physarum) and mathematical optimization schemes such as steepest descent. We describe our development and demonstrate the use of our solver in a video object segmentation task and meta-learning for few-shot learning. We review the relevant known results and provide a technical analysis describing its applicability for our use cases. Our solver performs comparably with a customized projected gradient descent method on the first task and outperforms the very recently proposed differentiable CVXPY solver on the second task. Experiments show that our solver converges quickly without the need for a feasible initial point. Interestingly, our scheme is easy to implement and can easily serve as layers whenever a learning procedure needs a fast approximate solution to a LP, within a larger network.

Physarum Powered Differentiable Linear Programming Layers and Applications

Sentence ordering aims at arranging a list of sentences in the correct order. Based on the observation that sentence order at different distances may rely on different types of information, we devise a new approach based on multi-granular orders between sentences. These orders form multiple constraint graphs, which are then encoded by Graph Isomorphism Networks and fused into sentence representations. Finally, sentence order is determined using the order-enhanced sentence representations. Our experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms all existing baselines significantly, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance. The results demonstrate the advantage of considering multiple types of order information and using graph neural networks to integrate sentence content and order information for the task. Our code is available at https://github.com/DaoD/ConstraintGraph4NSO.

Neural Sentence Ordering Based on Constraint Graphs

Federated multi-armed bandits (FMAB) is a new bandit paradigm that parallels the federated learning (FL) framework in supervised learning. It is inspired by practical applications in cognitive radio and recommender systems, and enjoys features that are analogous to FL. This paper proposes a general framework of FMAB and then studies two specific federated bandit models. We first study the approximate model where the heterogeneous local models are random realizations of the global model from an unknown distribution. This model introduces a new uncertainty of client sampling, as the global model may not be reliably learned even if the finite local models are perfectly known. Furthermore, this uncertainty cannot be quantified a priori without knowledge of the suboptimality gap. We solve the approximate model by proposing Federated Double UCB (Fed2-UCB), which constructs a novel â€œdouble UCBâ€ principle accounting for uncertainties from both arm and client sampling. We show that gradually admitting new clients is critical in achieving an O(log(T)) regret while explicitly considering the communication loss. The exact model, where the global bandit model is the exact average of heterogeneous local models, is then studied as a special case. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, the order-optimal regret can be achieved independent of the number of clients with a careful choice of the update periodicity. Experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Federated Multi-Armed Bandits

Currently the unified semantic role labeling (SRL) that achieves predicate identification and argument role labeling in an end-to-end manner has received growing interests. Recent works show that leveraging the syntax knowledge significantly enhances the SRL performances. In this paper, we investigate a novel unified SRL framework based on the sequence-to-sequence architecture with double enhancement in both the encoder and decoder sides. In the encoder side, we propose a novel label-aware graph convolutional network (LA-GCN) to encode both the syntactic dependent arcs and labels into BERT-based word representations. In the decoder side, we creatively design a pointer-network-based model for detecting predicates, arguments and roles jointly. Our pointer-net decoder is able to make decisions by consulting all the input elements in a global view, and meanwhile it is syntactic-aware by incorporating the syntax information from LA-GCN. Besides, a high-order interacted attention is introduced into the decoder for leveraging previously recognized triplets to help the current decision. Empirical experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms all existing graph-based methods on the CoNLL09 and Universal Proposition Bank datasets. In-depth analysis demonstrates that our model can effectively capture the correlations between syntactic and SRL structures.

Encoder-Decoder Based Unified Semantic Role Labeling with Label-Aware Syntax

Despite the popularity of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), the problem of uncertainty quantification (UQ) of CNN has been largely overlooked. Lack of efficient UQ tools severely limits the application of CNN in certain areas, such as medicine, where prediction uncertainty is critically important. Among the few existing UQ approaches that have been proposed for deep learning, none of them has theoretical consistency that can guarantee the uncertainty quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel bootstrap based framework for the estimation of prediction uncertainty. The inference procedure we use relies on convexified neural networks to establish the theoretical consistency of bootstrap. Our approach has a significantly less computational load than its competitors, as it relies on warm-starts at each bootstrap that avoids refitting the model from scratch. We further explore a novel transfer learning method so our framework can work on arbitrary neural networks. We experimentally demonstrate our approach has a much better performance compared to other baseline CNNs and state-of-the-art methods on various image datasets.

Uncertainty Quantification in CNN through the Bootstrap of Convex Neural Networks

Temporal relational modeling in video is essential for human action understanding, such as action recognition and action segmentation. Although Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have shown promising advantages in relation reasoning on many tasks, it is still a challenge to apply graph convolution networks on long video sequences effectively. The main reason is that large number of nodes (i.e., video frames) makes GCNs hard to capture and model temporal relations in videos. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we introduce an effective GCN module, Dilated Temporal Graph Reasoning Module (DTGRM), designed to model temporal relations and dependencies between video frames at various time spans. In particular, we capture and model temporal relations via constructing multi-level dilated temporal graphs where the nodes represent frames from different moments in video. Moreover, to enhance temporal reasoning ability of the proposed model, an auxiliary self-supervised task is proposed to encourage the dilated temporal graph reasoning module to find and correct wrong temporal relations in videos. Our DTGRM model outperforms state-of-the-art action segmentation models on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/redwang/DTGRM.

Temporal Relational Modeling with Self-Supervision for Action Segmentation

Collaborative learning has received huge interests due to its capability of exploiting the collective computing power of the wireless edge devices. However, during the learning process, model updates using local private samples and large-scale parameter exchanges among agents impose severe privacy concerns and communication bottleneck. In this paper, to address these problems, we propose two differentially private (DP) and communication efficient algorithms, called Q-DPSGD-1 and Q-DPSGD-2. In Q-DPSGD-1, each agent first performs local model updates by a DP gradient descent method to provide the DP guarantee and then quantizes the local model before transmitting it to neighbors to improve communication efficiency. In Q-DPSGD-2, each agent injects discrete Gaussian noise to enforce DP guarantee after first quantizing the local model. Moreover, we track the privacy loss of both approaches under the Renyi DP and provide convergence analysis for both convex and non-convex loss functions.  The proposed methods are evaluated in extensive experiments on real-world datasets and the empirical results validate our theoretical findings.

Differentially Private and Communication Efficient Collaborative Learning

It is common to evaluate a set of items by soliciting people to rate them. For example, universities ask students  to rate the teaching quality of their instructors, and conference organizers ask authors of submissions to evaluate the quality of the reviews. However, in these applications, students often give a higher rating to a course if they receive higher grades in a course, and authors often give a higher rating to the reviews if their papers are accepted to the conference. In this work, we call these external factors the "outcome" experienced by people, and consider the problem of mitigating these outcome-induced biases in the given ratings when some information about the outcome is available. We formulate the information about the outcome as a known partial ordering on the bias. We  propose a debiasing method by solving a regularized optimization problem under this ordering constraint, and also provide a carefully designed cross-validation method that adaptively chooses the appropriate amount of regularization. We provide theoretical guarantees on the performance of our algorithm, as well as experimental evaluations.

Debiasing Evaluations That Are Biased by Evaluations

Since most facial emotion recognition (FER) methods significantly rely on supervision information, they have a limit to analyzing emotions independently of persons. On the other hand, adversarial learning is a well-known approach for generalized representation learning because it never requires supervision information. This paper presents a new adversarial learning for FER. In detail, the proposed learning enables the FER network to better understand complex emotional elements inherent in strong emotions by adversarially learning weak emotion samples based on strong emotion samples. As a result, the proposed method can recognize the emotions independently of persons because it understands facial expressions more accurately. In addition, we propose a contrastive loss function for efficient adversarial learning. Finally, the proposed adversarial learning scheme was theoretically verified, and it was experimentally proven to show state of the art (SOTA) performance.

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