United States

Recent results show that features of adversarially trained networks for classification, in addition to being robust, enable desirable properties such as invertibility. 
The latter property may seem counter-intuitive as it is widely accepted by the community that classification models should only capture the minimal information (features) required for the task. 
Motivated by this discrepancy, we investigate the dual relationship between Adversarial Training and Information Theory. We show that the Adversarial Training can improve linear transferability to new tasks, from which arises a new trade-off between transferability of representations and accuracy on the source task. We validate our results employing robust networks trained on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet on several datasets. 
Moreover, we show that Adversarial Training reduces Fisher information of representations about the input and of the weights about the task, and we provide a theoretical argument which explains the invertibility of deterministic networks without violating the principle of minimality. Finally, we leverage our theoretical insights to remarkably improve the quality of reconstructed images through inversion.

AAAI 2021

Adversarial Training Reduces Information and Improves Transferability

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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. 

Submodular maximization has attracted much attention due to its wide application and attractive property. Previous works mainly considered one single objective function, while there can be multiple ones in practice. As the objectives are usually conflicting, there exists a set of Pareto optimal solutions, attaining different optimal trade-offs among multiple objectives. In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the regret ratio in multi-objective submodular maximization, which is to find at most k solutions to approximate the whole Pareto set as well as possible. We propose a new algorithm RRMS by sampling representative weight vectors and solving the corresponding weighted sums of objective functions using some given \alpha-approximation algorithm for single-objective submodular maximization. We prove that the regret ratio of the output of RRMS is upper bounded by 1-\alpha+O(\sqrt{d-1}\cdot(\frac{d}{k-d})^{\frac{1}{d-1}}), where d is the number of objectives. This is the first theoretical guarantee for the situation with more than two objectives. When d=2, it reaches the (1-\alpha+O(1/k))-guarantee of the only existing algorithm Polytope. Empirical results on the applications of multi-objective weighted maximum coverage and Max-Cut show the superior performance of RRMS over Polytope.

Multi-Objective Submodular Maximization by Regret Ratio Minimization with Theoretical Guarantee

Learning-based classifiers are susceptible to adversarial examples. Existing defence methods are mostly devised on individual classifiers. Recent studies showed that it is viable to increase adversarial robustness by promoting diversity over an ensemble of models. In this paper, we propose adversarial defence by encouraging ensemble diversity on learning high-level feature representations and gradient dispersion in simultaneous training of deep ensemble networks. We perform extensive evaluations under white-box and black-box attacks including transferred examples and adaptive attacks. Our approach achieves a significant gain of up to 52% in adversarial robustness, compared with the baseline and the state-of-the-art method on image benchmarks with complex data scenes. The proposed approach complements the defence paradigm of adversarial training, and can further boost the performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/ALIS-Lab/AAAI2021-PDD.

Adversarial Defense by Diversified Simultaneous Training of Deep Ensembles

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) causes a sudden turnover to bad at some checkpoints and thus needs the intervention of intensive care unit (ICU). This resulted in urgent and large needs of ICUs posed great risks to the medical system. Estimating the mortality of critical in-patients who were not admitted into the ICU will be valuable to optimize the management and assignment of ICU. Retrospective, 733 in-patients diagnosed with COVID-19 at a local hospital (Wuhan, China), as of March 18, 2020. Demographic, clinical and laboratory results were collected and analyzed using machine learning to build a predictive model. Considering the shortage of ICU beds at the beginning of disease emergence, we defined the mortality for those patients who were predicted to be in needing ICU care yet they did not as Missing-ICU (MI)-mortality. To estimate MI-mortality, a prognostic classification model was built to identify the in-patients who may need ICU care. Its predictive accuracy was 0.8288, with an AUC of 0.9119. On our cohort of 733 patients, 25 in-patients who have been predicted by our model that they should need ICU, yet they did not enter ICU due to lack of shorting ICU wards. Our analysis had shown that the MI-mortality is 41%, yet the mortality of ICU is 32%, implying that enough bed of ICU in treating patients in critical conditions.

Savable but Lost Lives when ICU Is Overloaded: A Model from 733 Patients in Epicenter Wuhan, China

Researches have demonstrated that low bit-width (e.g., INT8) quantization can be employed to accelerate the inference process. It makes the gradient quantization very promising since the backward propagation requires approximately twice more computation than forward one. Due to the variability and uncertainty of gradient distribution, a lot of methods have been proposed to attain training stability. However, most of them ignore the channel-wise gradient distributions and the impact of gradients with different magnitudes, resulting in the degradation of final accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel INT8 quantization training framework for convolutional neural network to address the above issues. Specifically, we adopt Gradient Vectorized Quantization to quantize the gradient, based on the observation that layer-wise gradients contain multiple distributions along the channel dimension. Then, Magnitude-aware Clipping Strategy is introduced by taking the magnitudes of gradients into consideration when minimizing the quantization error, and we present a theoretical derivation to solve the quantization parameters of different distributions. Experimental results on broad range of computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection and video classification, demonstrate that the proposed Distribution Adaptive INT8 Quantization training method has achieved almost lossless training accuracy for different backbones, including ResNet, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, VGG and AlexNet, which is superior to the state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, we further implement the INT8 kernel that can accelerate the training iteration more than 200% under the latest Turing architecture, i.e., our method excels on both training accuracy and speed.

Distribution Adaptive INT8 Quantization for Training CNNs

We study the setting in which a mobile searcher must locate a hidden target in a bounded or unbounded search domain, with no information about the hider's position. In particular, we consider online search, in which the performance of the search strategy is evaluated by its worst case competitive ratio. We introduce a multi-criteria search problem in which the searcher has a budget on its allotted search time, and the objective is to design strategies that are competitively efficient, respect the budget, and maximize the total searched ground. We give analytically optimal strategies for the line and the star domains, and efficient heuristics for general networks.

Online Search with Maximum Clearance

Envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) are two well-known extensions of envy-freeness for the case of indivisible items. It is shown that EF1 can always be guaranteed for agents with subadditive valuations. In sharp contrast, it is unknown whether or not an EFX allocation always exists, even for four agents and additive valuations. In addition, the best approximation guarantee for EFX is (Ï† âˆ’ 1) â‰ƒ 0.61 by Amanitidis et al..
In order to find a middle ground to bridge this gap, in this paper we suggest another fairness criterion, namely envy-freeness up to a random good or EFR, which is weaker than EFX, yet stronger than EF1. For this notion, we provide a polynomial-time 0.73-approximation allocation algorithm. For our algorithm we introduce Nash Social Welfare Matching which makes a connection between Nash Social Welfare and envy freeness.

Almost Envy-Freeness, Envy-Rank, and Nash Social Welfare Matchings

AI solutions are heavily dependant on the quality and accuracy of the input training data, however the training data may not always fully reflect the most up-to-date policy landscape or may be missing business logic. The advances in explainability have opened the possibility of allowing users to interact with interpretable explanations of ML predictions in order to inject modifications or constraints that more accurately reflect current realities of the system. In this paper, we present a solution which leverages the predictive power of ML models while allowing the user to specify modifications to decision boundaries. Our interactive overlay approach achieves this goal without requiring model retraining, making it appropriate for systems that need to apply instant changes to their decision making. We demonstrate that user feedback rules can be layered with the ML predictions to provide immediate changes which in turn supports learning with less data.

User Driven Model Adjustment via Boolean Rule Explanations

Cross-entropy loss combined with softmax is one of the most commonly used supervision components in most existing segmentation methods. The softmax loss is typically good at optimizing the inter-class difference, but not good at reducing the intra-class variation, which can be suboptimal for semantic segmentation task. In this paper, we propose a Consistent-Separable Feature Representation Network to model the Consistent-Separable (C-S) features, which are intra-class consistent and inter-class separable, improving the discriminative power of the deep features. Specifically, we develop a Consistent-Separable Feature Learning Module to obtain C-S features through a new loss, called Class-Aware Consistency loss. This loss function is proposed to force the deep features to be consistent among the same class and apart between different classes. Moreover, we design an Adaptive feature Aggregation Module to fuse the C-S features and original features from backbone for the better semantic prediction. We show that compared with various baselines, the proposed method brings consistent performance improvement. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes (82.6% mIoU in test set), ADE20K (46.65% mIoU in validation set), COCO Stuff (41.3% mIoU in validation set) and PASCAL Context (55.9% mIoU in test set).

Consistent-Separable Feature Representation for Semantic Segmentation

Existing techniques to adapt semantic segmentation networks across source and target domains within deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) deal with all the samples from the two domains in a global or category-aware manner. They do not consider an inter-class variation within the target domain itself or estimated category, providing the limitation to encode the domains having a multi-modal data distribution. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a learnable clustering module, and a novel domain adaptation framework, called cross-domain grouping and alignment. To cluster the samples across domains with an aim to maximize the domain alignment without forgetting precise segmentation ability on the source domain, we present two loss functions, in particular, for encouraging semantic consistency and orthogonality among the clusters. We also present a loss so as to solve a class imbalance problem, which is the other limitation of the previous methods. Our experiments show that our method consistently boosts the adaptation performance in semantic segmentation, outperforming the state-of-the-arts on various domain adaptation settings.

Cross-Domain Grouping and Alignment for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unlabeled data exploitation and interpretability are usually both required in reality. They, however, are conducted independently, and very few works try to connect the two. For unlabeled data exploitation, state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) results have been achieved via encouraging the consistency of model output on data perturbation, that is, consistency assumption. However, it remains hard for users to understand how particular decisions are made by state-of-the-art SSL models. To this end, in this paper we first disclose that the consistency assumption is closely related to causality invariance, where causality invariance lies in the main reason why the consistency assumption is valid. We then propose ECT (Explanation Consistency Training) which encourages a consistent reason of model decision under data perturbation. ECT employs model explanation as a surrogate of the causality of model output, which is able to bridge state-of-the-art interpretability to SSL models and alleviate the high complexity of causality. We realize ECT-SM for vision and ECT-ATT for NLP tasks. Experimental results on real-world data sets validate the highly competitive performance and better explanation of the proposed algorithms.

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