United States

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing a machine that can understand video story is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of video story. Moreover, researches on how to evaluate the degree of video understanding based on human cognitive process have not progressed as yet. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focuses on two perspectives: 1) Hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) Character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama &quot;Another Miss Oh&quot; and it contains 17,983 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we suggest Multi-level Context Matching model which hierarchically understands character-centered representations of video to answer questions. We release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes, and we expect our work to provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.

AAAI 2021

DramaQA: Character-Centered Video Story Understanding with Hierarchical QA

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing a machine that can understand video story is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of video story. Moreover, researches on how to evaluate the degree of video understanding based on human cognitive process have not progressed as yet. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focuses on two perspectives: 1) Hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) Character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 17,983 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we suggest Multi-level Context Matching model which hierarchically understands character-centered representations of video to answer questions. We release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes, and we expect our work to provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.

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. 

Existing methods of adversarial attacks successfully generate adversarial examples to confuse Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) of image classification and object detection, resulting in wrong predictions. However, these methods are difficult to attack models of video object tracking, because the tracking algorithms could handle sequential information across video frames and the categories of targets tracked are normally unknown in advance. In this paper, we propose a Unified and Effective Network, named UEN, to attack visual object tracking models. 
There are several appealing characteristics of UEN:
(1) UEN could produce various invisible adversarial  perturbations according to different attack settings by using only one simple end-to-end network with three ingenious loss function;
(2) UEN could generate general visible adversarial patch patterns to attack the advanced trackers in the real-world;
(3) Extensive experiments show that UEN is able to attack many state-of-the-art trackers effectively (e.g. SiamRPN-based networks and DiMP) on popular tracking datasets including OTB100, UAV123, and GOT10K, making online real-time attacks possible. The attack results outperform the introduced baseline in terms of attacking ability and attacking efficiency.

A Unified Multi-Scenario Attacking Network for Visual Object Tracking

Understanding real-world networks is a core research endeavor within the last two decades. Network Creation Games are a promising approach for this from a game-theoretic perspective. In these games, selfish agents corresponding to nodes in a network strategically decide which links to form to optimize their centrality. Many versions have been introduced and analyzed, but none of them fits to modeling the evolution of social networks. In real-world social networks connections are often established by recommendations from common acquaintances or by a chain of such recommendations. Thus establishing and maintaining a contact with a friend of a friend is easier than connecting to complete strangers. This explains the high clustering, i.e., the abundance of triangles, in real-world social networks. 

We propose and analyze a network creation model inspired by real-world social networks. In our model edges are formed via bilateral consent of both endpoints and the cost for establishing and maintaining an edge is proportional to the distance of the endpoints before establishing the connection. We provide results for generic cost functions which essentially only must be convex functions in the distance of the endpoints without the respective edge. For this broad class of cost functions we provide many structural properties of equilibrium networks and prove (almost) tight bounds on the diameter, the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability. Moreover, as a proof-of-concept we show via experiments that the created equilibrium networks of our model indeed closely mimic real-world social networks. We observe degree distributions that seem to follow a power-law, high clustering, and low diameters. This can be seen as a promising first step towards game-theoretic network creation models that predict networks featuring all core real-world properties.

Selfish Creation of Social Networks

Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, including quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a ProbSparse self-attention mechanism, which achieves O(L log L) in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.

Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting

We expand the literature on the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous item auctions by considering settings with correlated values; we do this via the fundamental economic model of interdependent values (IDV).
	It is well-known that in multi-item settings with private values, correlated values can lead to bad PoA, which can be polynomially large in the number of agents~n.
	In the more general model of IDV, we show that the PoA can be polynomially large even in single-item settings.
	On the positive side, we identify a natural condition on information dispersion in the market, which enables good PoA guarantees. 
	Under this condition, we show that for single-item settings, the PoA of standard mechanisms degrades gracefully.
	For settings with multiple items we show a separation between two domains: 
	If there are more buyers, we devise a new simultaneous item auction with good PoA, under limited information asymmetry.
	To the best of our knowledge, this is the first positive PoA result for correlated values in multi-item settings.
	The main technical difficulty in establishing this result is that the standard tool for establishing PoA results --- the smoothness framework --- is unsuitable for IDV settings, and so we must introduce new techniques to address the unique challenges imposed by such settings.
	In the domain of more items, we establish impossibility results even for surprisingly simple scenarios.

PoA of Simple Auctions with Interdependent Values

Understanding model performance on unlabeled data is a fundamental challenge of developing, deploying, and maintaining AI systems. Model performance is typically evaluated using test sets or periodic manual quality assessments, both of which require laborious manual data labeling. Automated performance prediction techniques aim to mitigate this burden, but potential inaccuracy and a lack of trust in their predictions has prevented their widespread adoption. We address this core problem of performance prediction uncertainty with a method to compute prediction intervals for model performance. Our methodology uses transfer learning to train an uncertainty model to estimate the uncertainty of model performance predictions. We evaluate our approach across a wide range of drift conditions and show substantial improvement over competitive baselines. We believe this result makes prediction intervals, and performance prediction in general, significantly more practical for real-world use.

Learning Prediction Intervals for Model Performance

The NP-hard Material Consumption Scheduling Problem and closely related problems have been thoroughly studied since the 1980's. Roughly speaking, the problem deals with minimizing the makespan when scheduling jobs that consume non-renewable resources. We focus on the single-machine case without preemption: from time to time, the resources of the machine are (partially) replenished, thus allowing for meeting a necessary pre-condition for processing further jobs, each of which having individual resource demands. We initiate a systematic exploration of the parameterized computational complexity landscape of the problem, providing parameterized tractability as well as intractability results. Doing so, we mainly investigate how parameters related to the resource supplies influence the computational complexity. Thereby, we get a deepened understanding of this fundamental scheduling problem.

A Multivariate Complexity Analysis of the Material Consumption Scheduling Problem

The missing values, widely existed in multivariate time series data, hinder the effective data analysis. Existing time series imputation methods do not make full use of the label information in real-life time series data. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised generative adversarial network model, named SSGAN, for missing value imputation in multivariate time series data. It consists of three players, i.e., a generator, a discriminator, and a classifier. The classifier predicts labels of time series data, and thus it drives the generator to estimate the missing values (or components), conditioned on observed components and data labels at the same time. We introduce a temporal reminder matrix to help the discriminator better distinguish the observed components from the imputed ones. Moreover, we theoretically prove that, SSGAN using the temporal reminder matrix and the classifier does learn to estimate missing values converging to the true data distribution when the Nash equilibrium is achieved. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets demonstrate that, SSGAN yields a more than 15% gain in performance, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Generative Semi-Supervised Learning for Multivariate Time Series Imputation

Protecting privacy in gradient-based learning has become increasingly critical as more sensitive information is being used. Many existing solutions seek to protect the sensitive gradients by constraining the overall privacy cost within a constant budget, where the protection is hand-designed and empirically calibrated to boost the utility of the resulting model. However, it remains challenging to choose the proper protection adapted for specific constraints so that the utility is maximized. To this end, we propose a novel Learning-to-Protect algorithm that automatically learns a model-based protector from a set of non-private learning tasks. The learned protector can be applied to private learning tasks to improve utility within the specific privacy budget constraint. Our empirical studies on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve a superior utility with a given privacy constraint and generalize well to new private datasets distributed differently as compared to the hand-designed competitors.

Learning Model-Based Privacy Protection under Budget Constraints

With the prevalence of location based services, activity trajectories are being generated at a rapid pace. The activity trajectory data enriches traditional trajectory data with semantic activities of users, which not only shows where the users have been, but also the preference of users. However, the large volume of data is expensive for people to explore. To address this issue, we study the problem of Diversity-aware Activity Trajectory Selection (DaATS). Given a region of interest for a user, it finds a small number of representative activity trajectories that can provide the user with a broad coverage of different aspects of the region. The problem is challenging in both the efficiency of trajectory similarity computation and subset selection. To tackle the two challenges, we propose a novel solution by: (1) exploiting a deep metric learning method to speedup the similarity computation; and (2) proving that DaATS is an NP-hard problem, and developing an efficient approximation algorithm with performance guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our proposal significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Towards Efficient Selection of Activity Trajectories Based on Diversity and Coverage

Human intelligence exhibits compositional generalization (i.e., the capacity to
understand and produce unseen combinations of seen components), but current neural seq2seq models lack such ability. In this paper, we revisit iterative back-translation, a simple yet effective semi-supervised method, to investigate whether and how it can improve compositional generalization. In this work:
(1) We first empirically show that iterative back-translation substantially improves the performance on compositional generalization benchmarks (CFQ and SCAN).
(2) To understand why iterative back-translation is useful, we carefully examine the performance gains and find that iterative back-translation can increasingly correct errors in pseudo-parallel data.
(3) To further encourage this mechanism, we propose curriculum iterative back-translation, which better improves the quality of pseudo-parallel data, thus further improving the performance.

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