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Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is an AI challenge that requires machines to determine the correct answers to questions based on a given passage. MRC systems must not only answer questions when necessary but also tactfully abstain from answering when no answer is available according to the given passage. When unanswerable questions are involved in the MRC task, an essential verification module called verifier is especially required in addition to the encoder, though the latest practice on MRC modeling still mostly benefits from adopting well pre-trained language models as the encoder block by only focusing on the &quot;reading&quot;. This paper devotes itself to exploring better verifier design for the MRC task with unanswerable questions. Inspired by how humans solve reading comprehension questions, we proposed a retrospective reader (Retro-Reader) that integrates two stages of reading and verification strategies: 1) sketchy reading that briefly investigates the overall interactions of passage and question, and yields an initial judgment; 2) intensive reading that verifies the answer and gives the final prediction. The proposed reader is evaluated on two benchmark MRC challenge datasets SQuAD2.0 and NewsQA, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Significance tests show that our model is significantly better than strong baselines.

AAAI 2021

Retrospective Reader for Machine Reading Comprehension

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EMNLP 2022

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Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is an AI challenge that requires machines to determine the correct answers to questions based on a given passage. MRC systems must not only answer questions when necessary but also tactfully abstain from answering when no answer is available according to the given passage. When unanswerable questions are involved in the MRC task, an essential verification module called verifier is especially required in addition to the encoder, though the latest practice on MRC modeling still mostly benefits from adopting well pre-trained language models as the encoder block by only focusing on the "reading". This paper devotes itself to exploring better verifier design for the MRC task with unanswerable questions. Inspired by how humans solve reading comprehension questions, we proposed a retrospective reader (Retro-Reader) that integrates two stages of reading and verification strategies: 1) sketchy reading that briefly investigates the overall interactions of passage and question, and yields an initial judgment; 2) intensive reading that verifies the answer and gives the final prediction. The proposed reader is evaluated on two benchmark MRC challenge datasets SQuAD2.0 and NewsQA, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Significance tests show that our model is significantly better than strong baselines.

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. 

Panoramic X-ray (PX) provides a 2D picture of the patient's mouth in a panoramic view to help dentists observe the invisible disease inside the gum. However, it provides limited 2D information compared with cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT), another dental imaging method that generates a 3D picture of the oral cavity but with more radiation dose and a higher price. Consequently, it is of great interest to reconstruct the 3D structure from a 2D X-ray image, which can greatly explore the application of X-ray imaging in dental surgeries. In this paper, we propose a framework, named Oral-3D, to reconstruct the 3D oral cavity from a single PX image and prior information of the dental arch. Specifically, we first train a generative model to learn the cross-dimension transformation from 2D to 3D. Then we restore the shape of the oral cavity with a deformation module with the dental arch curve, which can be obtained simply by taking a photo of the patient's mouth. To be noted, Oral-3D can restore both the density of bony tissues and the curved mandible surface. Experimental results show that Oral-3D can efficiently and effectively reconstruct the 3D oral structure and show critical information in clinical applications, e.g., tooth pulling and dental implants. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore this domain transformation problem between these two imaging methods.

Oral-3D: Reconstructing the 3D Structure of Oral Cavity from Panoramic X-ray

Code completion has become an essential component of integrated development environments. Contemporary code completion methods rely on the abstract syntax tree (AST) to generate syntactically correct code. However, they cannot fully capture the sequential and repetitive patterns of writing code and the structural information of the AST. To alleviate these problems, we propose a new code completion approach named CCAG, which models the flattened sequence of a partial AST as an AST graph. CCAG uses our proposed AST Graph Attention Block to capture different dependencies in the AST graph for representation learning in code completion. The sub-tasks of code completion are optimized via multi-task learning in CCAG, and the task balance is automatically achieved using uncertainty without the need to tune task weights. The experimental results show that CCAG has superior performance than state-of-the-art approaches and it is able to provide intelligent code completion.

Code Completion by Modeling Flattened Abstract Syntax Trees as Graphs

Preferences play a key role in computational argumentation in AI, as they reflect various notions of argument strength vital for the representation of argumentation. Within central formal approaches to structured argumentation, preferential approaches are applied by lifting preferences over defeasible elements to rankings over sets of defeasible elements, in order to be able to compare the relative strength of two arguments and their respective defeasible constituents. To overcome the current gap in the scientific landscape, we give in this paper a general study of the critical component of lifting operators in structured argumentation. We survey existing lifting operators scattered in the literature of argumentation theory, social choice, and utility theory, and show fundamental relations and properties of these operators. Extending existing works from argumentation and social choice, we propose a list of postulates for lifting operations, and give a complete picture of (non-)satisfaction for the considered operators. Based on our postulates, we present impossibility results, stating for which sets of postulates there is no hope of satisfaction, and for two main lifting operators presented in structured argumentation, Elitist and Democratic, we give a full characterization in terms of our postulates.

Ranking Sets of Defeasible Elements in Preferential Approaches to Structured Argumentation: Postulates, Relations, and Characterizations

With the progression of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), image translation methods has achieved increasingly remarkable performance. However, most available methods can only achieve image level translation, which is unable to precisely control the regions to be translated. In this paper, we propose a novel self-adaptive region translation network (SART) for region-level translation, which uses region-adaptive instance normalization (RIN) and a region matching loss (RML) for this task. We first encode the style and content image for each region with style and content encoder. To translate both shape and texture of the target region, we inject region-adaptive style features into the decoder by RIN. To ensure independent translation among different regions, RML is proposed to measure the similarity between the non-translated/translated regions of content and translated images. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, i.e. Morph, RaFD and CelebAMask-HQ, suggest that our approach demonstrate obvious improvement over state-of-the-art methods like StarGAN, SEAN and FUNIT. Our approach has further advantages in precise control of the regions to be translated. As a result, region level expression changes and step-by-step make-up can be achieved. The video demo is available at (https://youtu.be/DvIdmcR2LEc).

Translate the Facial Regions You Like Using Self-Adaptive Region Translation

The pre-training models such as BERT have achieved great results in various natural language processing problems. However, a large number of parameters need significant amounts of memory and the consumption of inference time, which makes it difficult to deploy them on edge devices. In this work, we propose a knowledge distillation method LRC-BERT based on contrastive learning to fit the output of the intermediate layer from the angular distance aspect, which is not considered by the existing distillation methods. Furthermore, we introduce a gradient perturbation-based training architecture in the training phase to increase the robustness of LRC-BERT, which is the first attempt in knowledge distillation. Additionally, in order to better capture the distribution characteristics of the intermediate layer, we design a two-stage training method for the total distillation loss. Finally, by verifying 8 datasets on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, the performance of the proposed LRC-BERT exceeds the existing state-of-the-art methods, which proves the effectiveness of our method.

LRC-BERT: Latent-Representation Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Understanding

Automated planning with neural network transition models is a two stage approach to solving planning problems with unknown transition models. The first stage of the approach learns the unknown transition model from data as a neural network model, and the second stage of the approach compiles the learned model to either a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model or a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model, and optimize it using an off-the-shelf solver. The previous studies have shown that both models have their advantages and disadvantages. Namely, the MILP model can be solved optimally using a branch-and-bound algorithm but has been experimentally shown not to scale well for neural networks with multiple hidden layers. In contrast, the RNN model can be solved effectively using a gradient descent algorithm but can only work under very restrictive assumptions. In this paper, we focus on improving the effectiveness of solving the second stage of the approach by introducing (i) a novel Lagrangian RNN architecture that can model the previously ignored components of the planning problem as Lagrangian functions, and (ii) a novel framework that unifies the MILP and the Lagrangian RNN models such that the weakness of one model is complemented by the strength of the other. Experimentally, we show that our unifying framework significantly outperforms the standalone MILP model by solving 80% more problem instances, and showcase the ability of our unifying framework to find high quality solutions to challenging automated planning problems with unknown transition models.

A Unified Framework for Planning with Learned Neural Network Transition Models

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is one of the important tasks required for autonomous navigation and social robots in human environments. Previous studies focused on estimating social forces among individual pedestrians. However, they did not consider the social forces of groups on pedestrians, which results in over-collision avoidance problems. To address this problem, we present a Disentangled Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Network (DMRGCN) for socially entangled pedestrian trajectory prediction. We first introduce a novel disentangled multi-scale aggregation to better represent social interactions, among pedestrians on a weighted graph. For the aggregation, we construct the multi-relational weighted graphs based on distances and relative displacements among pedestrians. In the prediction step, we propose a global temporal aggregation to alleviate accumulated errors for pedestrians changing their directions. Finally, we apply DropEdge into our DMRGCN to avoid the over-fitting issue on relatively small pedestrian trajectory datasets. Through the effective incorporation of the three parts within an end-to-end framework, DMRGCN achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of challenging trajectory prediction benchmarks.

Disentangled Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Effective emotion inference from user queries helps to give a more personified response for Voice Dialogue Applications(VDAs). The tremendous amounts of VDA users bring in diverse emotion expressions. How to achieve a high emotion inferring performance from large-scale Internet Voice Data in VDAs? Traditionally, researches on speech emotion recognition are based on acted voice datasets, which have limited speakers but strong and clear emotion expressions. Inspired by this, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to leverage acted voice data with strong emotion expressions to enhance large-scale unlabeled internet voice data with diverse emotion expressions for emotion inferring. Specifically, we propose a novel semi-supervised multi-modal curriculum augmentation deep learning framework. First, to learn more general emotion cues, we adopt a curriculum learning based epoch-wise training strategy, which trains our model guided by strong and balanced emotion samples from acted voice data and sub-sequently leverages weak and unbalanced emotion samples from internet voice data.Second, to employ more diverse emotion expressions, we design a Multi-path Mix-match Multimodal Deep Neural Network(MMMD), which effectively learns feature representations for multiple modalities and trains labeled and unlabeled data in hybrid semi-supervised methods for superior generalization and robustness. Experiments on an internet voice dataset with 500,000 utterances show our method outperforms (+10.09% in terms of F1) several alternative baselines,  while an acted corpus with 2,397 utterances contributes 4.35%. To further compare our method with state-of-the-art techniques in traditionally acted voice datasets, we also conduct experiments on public dataset IEMOCAP. The results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Inferring Emotion from Large-Scale Internet Voice Data: A Semi-Supervised Curriculum Augmentation Based Deep Learning Approach

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the electrical measurement of cardiac activity, whereas Photoplethysmogram (PPG) is the optical measurement of volumetric changes in blood circulation. While both signals are used for heart rate monitoring, from a medical perspective, ECG is more useful as it carries additional cardiac information. Despite many attempts toward incorporating ECG sensing in smartwatches or similar wearable devices for continuous and reliable cardiac monitoring, PPG sensors are the main feasible sensing solution available. In order to tackle this problem, we propose CardioGAN, an adversarial model which takes PPG as input and generates ECG as output. The proposed network utilizes an attention-based generator to learn local salient features, as well as dual discriminators to preserve the integrity of generated data in both time and frequency domains. Our experiments show that the ECG generated by CardioGAN provides more reliable heart rate measurements compared to the original input PPG, reducing the error from 9.74 beats per minute (measured from the PPG) to 2.89 (measured from the generated ECG).

CardioGAN: Attentive Generative Adversarial Network with Dual Discriminators for Synthesis of ECG from PPG

Presence of haze in images obscures underlying information, which is undesirable in applications requiring accurate environment information. To recover such an image, a dehazing algorithm should localize and recover affected regions while ensuring consistency between recovered and its neighboring regions. However owing to fixed receptive field of convolutional kernels and non uniform haze distribution, assuring consistency between regions is difficult. In this paper, we utilize an encoder-decoder based network architecture to perform the task of dehazing and integrate an spatially aware channel attention mechanism to enhance features of interest beyond the receptive field of traditional conventional kernels. To ensure performance consistency across diverse range of haze densities, we utilize greedy localized data augmentation mechanism. Synthetic datasets are typically used to ensure a large amount of paired training samples, however the methodology to generate such samples introduces a gap between them and real images while accounting for only uniform haze distribution and overlooking more realistic scenario of non-uniform haze distribution resulting in inferior dehazing performance when evaluated on real datasets. Despite this, the abundance of paired samples within synthetic datasets cannot be ignored. Thus to ensure performance consistency across diverse datasets, we train the proposed network within an adversarial prior-guided framework that relies on a generated image along with its low and high frequency components to determine if properties of dehazed images matches those of ground truth. We preform extensive experiments to validate the dehazing and domain invariance performance of proposed framework across diverse domains and report state-of-the-art (SoTA) results. The source code with pretrained models will be available at https://github.com/PS06/DIDH.

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