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Text content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking methods represent watermarks by replacing words in original sentences with synonyms from handcrafted lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), but they do not consider the substitution&#39;s impact on the overall sentence&#39;s meaning. Recently, a transformer-based network was proposed to embed watermarks by modifying the unobtrusive words (e.g., function words), which also impair the sentence&#39;s logical and semantic coherence. Besides, one well-trained network fails on other different types of text content.
 To address the limitations mentioned above, we propose a natural language watermarking scheme based on context-aware lexical substitution (LS). Specifically, we employ BERT to suggest LS candidates by inferring the semantic relatedness between the candidates and the original sentence. Based on this, a selection strategy in terms of synchronicity and substitutability is further designed to test whether a word is exactly suitable for carrying the watermark signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under both objective and subjective metrics, our watermarking scheme can well preserve the semantic integrity of original sentences and has a better transferability than existing methods. Besides, the proposed LS approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the Stanford Word Substitution Benchmark.

AAAI 2022

Tracing Text Provenance via Context-Aware Lexical Substitution

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Text content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking methods represent watermarks by replacing words in original sentences with synonyms from handcrafted lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), but they do not consider the substitution's impact on the overall sentence's meaning. Recently, a transformer-based network was proposed to embed watermarks by modifying the unobtrusive words (e.g., function words), which also impair the sentence's logical and semantic coherence. Besides, one well-trained network fails on other different types of text content.
 To address the limitations mentioned above, we propose a natural language watermarking scheme based on context-aware lexical substitution (LS). Specifically, we employ BERT to suggest LS candidates by inferring the semantic relatedness between the candidates and the original sentence. Based on this, a selection strategy in terms of synchronicity and substitutability is further designed to test whether a word is exactly suitable for carrying the watermark signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under both objective and subjective metrics, our watermarking scheme can well preserve the semantic integrity of original sentences and has a better transferability than existing methods. Besides, the proposed LS approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the Stanford Word Substitution Benchmark.

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. 

Adversarial training is so far the most effective strategy in defending against adversarial examples. However, it suffers from high computational costs due to the iterative adversarial attacks in each training step. Recent studies show that it is possible to achieve fast Adversarial Training by performing a single-step attack with random initialization. However, such an approach still lags behind state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithms on both stability and model robustness. In this work, we develop a new understanding towards Fast Adversarial Training, by viewing random initialization as performing randomized smoothing for better optimization of the inner maximization problem. Following this new perspective, we also propose a new initialization strategy, backward smoothing, to further improve the stability and model robustness over single-step robust training methods.
 Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves similar model robustness as the original TRADES method while using much less training time (~3x improvement with the same training schedule).

Efficient Robust Training via Backward Smoothing

We propose an end-to-end image compression and analysis model with Transformers, targeting to the cloud-based image classification application. Instead of placing an existing Transformer-based image classification model directly after an image codec, we aim to redesign the Vision Transformer (ViT) model to perform image classification from the compressed features and facilitate image compression with the long-term information from the Transformer. Specifically, we first replace the patchify stem (i.e., image splitting and embedding) of the ViT model with a lightweight image encoder modelled by a convolutional neural network. The compressed features generated by the image encoder are injected convolutional inductive bias and are fed to the Transformer for image classification bypassing image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a feature aggregation module to fuse the compressed features with the selected intermediate features of the Transformer, and feed the aggregated features to a deconvolutional neural network for image reconstruction. The aggregated features can obtain the long-term information from the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer and improve the compression performance. The rate-distortion-accuracy optimization problem is finally solved by a two-step training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both the image compression and the classification tasks.

Towards End-to-End Image Compression and Analysis with Transformers

We formalize a voting model for plurality elections that combines Iterative Voting and Calculus of Voting. Each iteration, autonomous agents simultaneously maximize the utility they expect from candidates. Agents are aware of neither other individuals' preferences or choices, nor of the distribution of preferences. They know only of candidates' latest vote shares and with that calculate expected rewards from each candidate, pondering the probability that voting for each would alter the election. We define the general form of those pivotal probabilities, then we derive efficient exact and approximated calculations. Lastly, we prove formally the model converges with asymptotically large electorates and show via simulations that it nearly always converges even with very few agents.

Iterative Calculus of Voting under Plurality

Offline reinforcement learning aims to maximize the expected cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. The basic principle of current offline reinforcement learning methods is to restrict the policy to the offline dataset action space. However, they ignore the case where the dataset's trajectories fail to cover the state space completely. Especially, when the dataset's size is limited, it is likely that the agent would encounter unseen states during test time. Prior policy-constrained methods are incapable of correcting the state deviation, and may lead the agent to its unexpected regions further. In this paper, we propose the state deviation correction (SDC) method to constrain the policy's induced state distribution by penalizing the out-of-distribution states which might appear during the test period. We first perturb the states sampled from the logged dataset, then simulate noisy next states on the basis of a dynamics model and the policy. We then train the policy to minimize the distances between the noisy next states and the offline dataset. In this manner, we allow the trained policy to guide the agent to its familiar regions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in a GridWorld setup, offline Mujoco control suite, and a modified offline Mujoco dataset with a finite number of valuable samples.

State Deviation Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in supervised deep learning methods are enabling remote measurements of photoplethysmography-based physiological signals using facial videos. The performance of these supervised methods, however, are dependent on the availability of large labelled data. Contrastive learning as a self-supervised method has recently achieved state-of-the-art performances in learning representative data features by maximising mutual information between different augmented views. However, existing data augmentation techniques for contrastive learning are not designed to learn physiological signals from videos and often fail when there are complicated noise and subtle and periodic colour/shape variations between video frames. To address these problems, we present a novel self-supervised spatiotemporal learning framework for remote physiological signal representation learning, where there is a lack of labelled training data. Firstly, we propose a landmark-based spatial augmentation that splits the face into several informative parts based on the Shafer's dichromatic reï¬‚ection model to characterise subtle skin colour fluctuations. We also formulate a sparsity-based temporal augmentation exploiting Nyquistâ€“Shannon sampling theorem to effectively capture periodic temporal changes by modelling physiological signal features. Furthermore, we introduce a constrained spatiotemporal loss which generates pseudo-labels for augmented video clips. It is used to regulate the training process and handle complicated noise. We evaluated our framework on 3 public datasets and demonstrated superior performances than other self-supervised methods and achieved competitive accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Dylan-H-Wang/SLF-RPM.

Self-Supervised Representation Learning Framework for Remote Physiological Measurement Using Spatiotemporal Augmentation Loss

Traditional symbolic reasoning engines, while attractive for their precision and explicability, have a few major drawbacks: the use of brittle inference procedures that rely on exact matching (unification) of logical terms, an inability to deal with uncertainty, and the need for a precompiled rule-base of knowledge (the â€œknowledge acquisitionâ€ problem). To address these issues, we devise a novel logical reasoner called Braid, that supports probabilistic rules, and uses the notion of custom unification functions and dynamic rule generation to overcome the brittle matching and knowledge-gap problem prevalent in traditional reasoners. In this paper, we describe the reasoning algorithms used in Braid, and their implementation in a distributed task-based framework that builds proof/explanation graphs for an input query. We use a simple QA example from a children's story to motivate Braid's design and explain how the various components work together to produce a coherent logical explanation. Finally, we evaluate Braid on the ROC Story Cloze test and achieve close to state-of-the-art results while providing frame-based explanations.

Braid: Weaving Symbolic and Neural Knowledge into Coherent Logical Explanations

Understanding how the predictions of deep learning models are formed during the training process is crucial to improve model performance and fix model defects, especially when we need to investigate nontrivial training strategies such as active learning, and track the root cause of unexpected training results such as performance degeneration.

In this work, we propose a time-travelling visual solution DeepVisualInsight (DVI), aiming to manifest the spatio-temporal causality while training a deep learning image classifier. The spatio-temporal causality demonstrates how the gradient-descent algorithm and various training data sampling techniques can influence and reshape the layout of learnt input representation and the classification boundaries in consecutive epochs. Such causality allows us to observe and analyze the whole learning process in the visible low dimensional space. Technically, we propose four spatial and temporal properties and design our visualization solution to satisfy them. These properties preserve the most important information when projecting and inverse-projecting input samples between the visible low-dimensional and the invisible high-dimensional space, for causal analyses. Our extensive experiments show that, comparing to baseline approaches, we achieve the best visualization performance regarding the spatial/temporal properties and visualization efficiency. Moreover, our case study shows that our visual solution can well reflect the characteristics of various training scenarios, showing good potential of DVI as a debugging tool for analyzing deep learning training processes.

DeepVisualInsight: Time-Travelling Visualization for Spatio-Temporal Causality of Deep Classification Training

Online on-demand ridesourcing service has played a huge role in transforming urban transportation. A central function in most on-demand ridesourcing platforms is to dynamically assign drivers to rider requests that could balance the request waiting times and the driver pick-up distances. To deal with the online nature of this problem, existing literature either divides the time horizon into short windows and applies a static offline assignment algorithm within each window or assumes a fully online setting that makes decisions for each request immediately upon its arrival. In this paper, we propose a more realistic model for the driver-request assignment that bridges the above two settings together. Our model allows the requests to wait after their arrival but assumes that they may leave at any time following a quitting function. Under this model, we design an efficient algorithm for assigning available drivers to requests in real-time. Our algorithm is able to incorporate future estimated driver arrivals into consideration and make strategic waiting and matching decisions that could balance the waiting time and pick-up distance of the assignment. We prove that our algorithm is optimal ex-ante in the single-request setting, and demonstrate its effectiveness in the general multi-request setting through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Real-Time Driver-Request Assignment in Ridesourcing

Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (xMRC) is a challenging task due to the lack of training data in low-resource languages. Recent approaches use training data only in a resource-rich language (such as English) to fine-tune large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained language models, which transfer knowledge from resource-rich languages (source) to low-resource languages (target). Due to the big difference between languages, the model fine-tuned only by the source language may not perform well for target languages. In our study, we make an interesting observation that while the top 1 result predicted by the previous approaches may often fail to hit the ground-truth answer, there are still good chances for the correct answer to be contained in the set of top k predicted results. Intuitively, the previous approaches have empowered the model certain level of capability to roughly distinguish good answers from bad ones. However, without sufficient training data, it is not powerful enough to capture the nuances between the accurate answer and those approximate ones. Based on this observation, we develop a two-stage approach to enhance the model performance. The first stage targets at recall; we design a hard-learning (HL) algorithm to maximize the likelihood that the top k predictions contain the accurate answer. The second stage focuses on precision, where an answer-aware contrastive learning (AA-CL) mechanism is developed to learn the minute difference between the accurate answer and other candidates. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines on two cross-lingual MRC benchmark datasets.

From Good to Best: Two-Stage Training for Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension

Homogeneous instance segmentation aims to identify each instance in an image where all interested instances belong to the same category, such as plant leaves and microscopic cells. Recently, proposal-free methods, which straightforwardly generate instance-aware information to group pixels into different instances, have received increasing attention due to their efficient pipeline. However, they often fail to distinguish adjacent instances due to similar appearances, dense distribution and ambiguous boundaries of instances in homogeneous images. In this paper, we propose a pixel-embedded affinity modeling method for homogeneous instance segmentation, which is able to preserve the semantic information of instances and improve the distinguishability of adjacent instances. Instead of predicting affinity directly, we propose a self-correlation module to explicitly model the pairwise relationships between pixels, by estimating the similarity between embeddings generated from the input image through CNNs. Based on the self-correlation module, we further design a cross-correlation module to maintain the semantic consistency between instances. Specifically, we map the transformed input images with different views and appearances into the same embedding space, and then mutually estimate the pairwise relationships of embeddings generated from the original input and its transformed variants. In addition, to integrate the global instance information, we introduce an embedding pyramid module to model affinity on different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate the versatile and superior performance of our method on three representative datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/weih527/Pixel-Embedded-Affinity.

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