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The problem of minimal cost path search is especially difficult when no useful heuristics are available. A common solution is roll-out-based search like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). However, MCTS is mostly used in stochastic or adversarial environments, with the goal to identify an agent&#39;s best next move. For this reason, even though single player versions of MCTS exist, most algorithms, including UCT, are not directly tailored to classical minimal cost path search. We present Plackett-Luce MCTS (PL-MCTS), a path search algorithm based on a probabilistic model over the qualities of successor nodes. We empirically show that PL-MCTS is competitive and often superior to the state of the art.

AAAI 2021

Single Player Monte-Carlo Tree Search Based on the Plackett-Luce Model

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

The problem of minimal cost path search is especially difficult when no useful heuristics are available. A common solution is roll-out-based search like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). However, MCTS is mostly used in stochastic or adversarial environments, with the goal to identify an agent's best next move. For this reason, even though single player versions of MCTS exist, most algorithms, including UCT, are not directly tailored to classical minimal cost path search. We present Plackett-Luce MCTS (PL-MCTS), a path search algorithm based on a probabilistic model over the qualities of successor nodes. We empirically show that PL-MCTS is competitive and often superior to the state of the art.

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. 

Sentence-level extractive summarization is a fundamental yet challenging task, and recent powerful approaches prefer to pick sentences sorted by the predicted probabilities until the length limit is reached, a.k.a. ``Top-K Strategy''. This length limit is fixed based on the validation set, resulting in the lack of flexibility. In this work, we propose a more flexible and accurate non-autoregressive method for single document extractive summarization, extracting a non-fixed number of summary sentences without the sorting step. We call our approach ThresSum as it picks sentences simultaneously and individually from the source document when the predicted probabilities exceed a threshold. During training, the model enhances sentence representation through iterative refinement and the intermediate latent variables receive some weak supervision with soft labels, which are generated progressively by adjusting the temperature with a knowledge distillation algorithm. Specifically, the temperature is initialized with high value and drops along with the iteration until a temperature of 1. Experimental results on CNN/DM and NYT datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of ThresSum, which significantly outperforms BERTSUMEXT with a substantial improvement of 0.74 ROUGE-1 score on CNN/DM. Our source code will be available on Github.

Flexible Non-Autoregressive Extractive Summarization with Threshold: How to Extract a Non-Fixed Number of Summary Sentences

The booming interest in adversarial attacks stems from a misalignment between human vision and a deep neural network (DNN), \ie~a human imperceptible perturbation fools the DNN. Moreover, a single perturbation, often called universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), can be generated to fool the DNN for most images. A similar misalignment phenomenon has also been observed in the deep steganography task, where a decoder network can retrieve a secret image back from a slightly perturbed cover image. We attempt explaining the success of both in a unified manner from the Fourier perspective. We perform task-specific and joint analysis and reveal that (a) frequency is a key factor that influences their performance based on the proposed entropy metric for quantifying the frequency distribution; (b) their success can be attributed to a DNN being highly sensitive to high-frequency content. We also perform feature layer analysis for providing deep insight on model generalization and robustness. Additionally, we propose two new variants of universal perturbations: (1) high-pass UAP (HP-UAP) being less visible to the human eye;  (2) Universal Secret Adversarial Perturbation (USAP) that simultaneously achieves attack and hiding.

Universal Adversarial Perturbations through the Lens of Deep Steganography: Towards a Fourier Perspective

Low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) is challenging, as the low-resource target language data cannot well train an ASR model. To solve this issue, meta-learning formulates ASR for each source language into many small ASR tasks and meta-learns a model initialization on all tasks from different source languages to access fast adaptation on unseen target languages.  However,  for different source languages, the quantity and difficulty vary greatly because of their different data scales and diverse phonological systems, which leads to task-quantity and task-difficulty imbalance issues and thus a failure of multilingual meta-learning ASR (MML-ASR).   In this work, we solve this problem by developing a novel adversarial meta sampling (AMS) approach to improve MML-ASR. When sampling tasks in MML-ASR, AMS adaptively determines the task sampling probability for each source language. Specifically, for each source language, if the query loss is large, it means that its tasks are not well sampled to train ASR model in terms of its quantity and difficulty and thus should be sampled more frequently for extra learning.  Inspired by this fact, we feed the historical task query loss of all source language domain into a  network to learn a task sampling policy for adversarially increasing the current query loss of MML-ASR. Thus, the learnt task sampling policy can master the learning situation of each language and thus predicts good task sampling probability for each language for more effective learning.  Finally, experiment results on two multilingual datasets show significant performance improvement when applying our AMS on MML-ASR, and also demonstrate the applicability of AMS to other low-resource speech tasks and transfer learning ASR approaches.

Adversarial Meta Sampling for Multilingual Low-Resource Speech Recognition

The e-commercial search engine is the primary gateway for customers to find desired products and engage in online shopping. Besides displaying items to optimize for a single objective (i.e., relevance), ranking items needs to satisfy some other business requirements in practice. Recently, traffic shaping was introduced to incorporate multiple objectives in a constrained optimization framework. However, many practical business requirements can not explicitly represented by linear constraints as in the existing work, and this may limit the scalablity of their framework. This paper presents a unified framework from the aspect of multi-objective welfare maximization where we regard all business requirements as objectives to optimize. Our framework can naturally incorporate a wide range of application-driven requirements. In addition to formulating the problem, we design an online traffic splitting algorithm that allows us to flexibly adjust the priorities of different objectives, and it has rigorous theoretical guarantees over the adversarial scenario. We also run experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate our algorithms.

Traffic Shaping in E-Commercial Search Engine: Multi-Objective Online Welfare Maximization

Automatic Feature Engineering (AFE) aims to extract useful knowledge for interpretable predictions given data for the machine learning tasks. Here, we develop AFE to extract dependency relationships that can be interpreted with functional formulas to discover physics meaning or new hypotheses for the problems of interest. We focus on materials science applications, where interpretable predictive modeling may provide principled understanding of materials systems and guide new materials discovery. It is often computationally prohibitive to exhaust all the potential relationships to construct and search the whole feature space to identify interpretable and predictive features. We develop and evaluate new AFE strategies by exploring a feature generation tree (FGT) with deep Q-network (DQN) for scalable and efficient exploration policies. The developed DQN-based AFE strategies are benchmarked with the existing AFE methods on several materials science datasets.

Physics-Constrained Automatic Feature Engineering for Predictive Modeling in Materials Science

Since the recent studies  (KDD'20) done by Krichene and Rendle on the sampling based top-k evaluation metric for recommendation,  there have been a lot of debate on the validity of using sampling for evaluating recommendation algorithms. Though their work and the recent work done by Li et. al. (KDD'20) have proposed some basic approach for mapping the sampling based metrics to their counter-part in the global evaluation which uses the entire dataset, there is still lack of understanding how sampling should be used for recommendation evaluation, and the proposed approaches either are rather ad-hoc or can only work on simple metrics, like Recall/Hit-Ratio. In this paper, we introduce some principled approach to derive the estimators of top-k metric based on sampling. Our approaches utilize the weighted MLE and maximal entropy approach to recover the global rank distribution and then utilize that for estimation. The experimental results shows significant advantages of using our approaches for evaluating recommendation algorithms based on top-k metrics.

On Estimating Recommendation Evaluation Metrics under Sampling

Making predictions that are fair with regard to protected attributes (race, gender, age, etc.) has become an important requirement for classification algorithms. Existing techniques derive a fair model from sampled labeled data relying on the assumption that training and testing data are identically and independently drawn (iid) from the same distribution. In practice, distribution shift can and does occur between training and testing datasets as the characteristics of individuals interacting with the machine learning system change. We investigate fairness under covariate shift, a relaxation of the iid assumption in which the inputs or covariates change while the conditional label distribution remains the same. We seek fair decisions under these assumptions on target data with unknown labels. We propose an approach that obtains the predictor that is robust to the worst-case testing performance while satisfying target fairness requirements and matching statistical properties of the source data. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on benchmark prediction tasks.

Robust Fairness under Covariate Shift

Multi-task learning has increased in importance due to its superior performance by learning multiple different tasks simultaneously and its ability to perform several different tasks using a single model. In medical phenotyping, task labels are costly to acquire and might contain a certain degree of label noise. This decreases the efficiency of using additional human labels as auxiliary tasks when applying multi-task learning to medical phenotyping. In this work, we proposed an effective multi-task learning framework, CO-TASK, to boost multi-task learning performance by generating auxiliary tasks through COmbination of TASK Labels. The proposed CO-TASK framework generates auxiliary tasks without additional labeling effort, is robust to a certain degree of label noise, and can be applied in parallel with various multi-task learning techniques.

We evaluated our performance using the CIFAR-MTL dataset and demonstrated its effectiveness in medical phenotyping using two large-scale ECG phenotyping datasets, an 18 diseases multi-label ECG-P18 dataset and an echocardiogram diagnostic from electrocardiogram dataset ECG-EchoLVH. On the CIFAR-MTL dataset, we doubled the average per-task performance gain of the multi-task learning model from 4.38% to 9.78%. With the proposed task-aware imbalance data sampler, the CO-TASK framework can effectively deal with the different imbalance ratios for the different tasks in electrocardiogram phenotyping datasets. The proposed framework combined with noisy annotations as minor tasks increased the sensitivity by 7.1% compared to the single-task model while maintaining the same specificity as the doctor annotations on the ECG-EchoLVH dataset.

Boosting Multi-task Learning through Combination of Task Labels - with Applications in ECG Phenotyping

Identifying causal effects from observational data is a pervasive challenge found throughout the empirical sciences. Very general methods have been developed to decide the identifiability of a causal quantity from a combination of observational data and causal knowledge about the underlying system. In practice, however, there are still challenges to estimating identifiable causal functionals from finite samples. Recently, a method known as double/debiased machine learning (DML) (Chernozhukov et al. 2018) has been proposed to learn parameters leveraging modern machine learning techniques, which is both robust to model misspecification and bias-reducing. Still, DML has only been used for causal estimation in settings when the back-door condition (also known as conditional ignorability) holds. In this paper, we develop a new, general class of estimators for any identifiable causal functionals that exhibit DML properties, which we name DML-ID. In particular, we introduce a complete identification algorithm that returns an influence function (IF) for any identifiable causal functional. We then construct the DML estimator based on the derived IF. We show that DML-ID estimators hold the key properties of debiasedness and doubly robustness. Simulation results corroborate with the theory.

Estimating Identifiable Causal Effects through Double Machine Learning

Data heterogeneity has been identified as one of the key features in federated learning but often overlooked in the lens of robustness to adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on characterizing and understanding its impact on backdooring attacks in federated learning through comprehensive experiments using synthetic and the LEAF benchmarks. The initial impression driven by our experimental results suggests that data heterogeneity is the dominant factor in the effectiveness of attacks and it may be a redemption for defending against backdooring as it makes the attack less efficient, more challenging to design effective attack strategies, and the attack result also becomes less predictable. However, with further investigations, we found data heterogeneity is more of a curse than a redemption as the attack effectiveness can be significantly boosted by simply adjusting the client-side backdooring timing. More importantly, data heterogeneity may result in overfitting at the local training of benign clients, which can be utilized by attackers to disguise themselves and fool skewed-feature based defenses. In addition, effective attack strategies can be made by adjusting attack data distribution. Finally, we discuss the potential directions of defending the curses brought by data heterogeneity. The results and lessons learned from our extensive experiments and analysis offer new insights for designing robust federated learning methods and systems.

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