United States

We introduce a new task of entailment relation aware paraphrase generation which aims at generating a paraphrase conforming to a given entailment relation (e.g. equivalent, forward entailing, or reverse entailing) with respect to a given
input. We propose a reinforcement learning-based weakly-supervised paraphrasing system, ERAP, that can be trained using existing paraphrase and natural language inference (NLI) corpora without an explicit task-specific corpus. A combination of automated and human evaluations show that ERAP generates paraphrases conforming to the specified entailment relation and are of good quality as compared to the baselines and uncontrolled paraphrasing systems. Using ERAP for augmenting training data for downstream textual entailment task improves performance over an uncontrolled paraphrasing system, and introduces fewer training artifacts, indicating the benefit of explicit control during paraphrasing.

AAAI 2022

Entailment Relation Aware Paraphrase Generation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

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. 

Poisoning attacks are emerging threats to deep neural networks where the adversaries attempt to compromise the models by injecting malicious data points in the clean training data. Poisoning attacks target either the availability or integrity of a model. The availability attack aims to degrade the overall accuracy while the integrity attack causes misclassification only for specific instances without affecting the accuracy of clean data. Although clean-label integrity attacks are proven to be effective in recent studies, the feasibility of clean-label availability attacks remains unclear. This paper, for the first time, proposes a clean-label approach, CLPA, for the poisoning availability attack. We reveal that due to the intrinsic imperfection of classifiers, naturally misclassified inputs can be considered as a special type of poisoned data, which we refer to as "natural poisoned data''. We then propose a two-phase generative adversarial net (GAN) based poisoned data generation framework along with a triplet loss function for synthesizing clean-label poisoned samples that locate in a similar distribution as natural poisoned data. The generated poisoned data are plausible to human perception and can also bypass the singular vector decomposition (SVD) based defense. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet dataset over a variety type of models. Codes are available at: https://github.com/bxz9200/CLPA.

CLPA: Clean-Label Poisoning Availability Attacks Using Generative Adversarial Nets

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated great success in representation learning for graph-structured data. The layer-wise graph convolution in GNNs is shown to be powerful at capturing graph topology. During this process, GNNs are usually guided by pre-defined kernels such as Laplacian matrix, adjacency matrix, or their variants. However, the adoptions of pre-defined kernels may restrain the generalities to different graphs: mismatch between graph and kernel would entail sub-optimal performance. For example, GNNs that focus on low-frequency information may not achieve satisfactory performance when high-frequency information is significant for the graphs, and vice versa. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel framework - i.e., namely Adaptive Kernel Graph Neural Network (AKGNN) - which learns to adapt to the optimal graph kernel in a unified manner at the first attempt. In the proposed AKGNN, we first design a data-driven graph kernel learning mechanism, which adaptively modulates the balance between all-pass and low-pass filters by modifying the maximal eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian. Through this process, AKGNN learns the optimal threshold between high and low frequency signals to relieve the generality problem. Later, we further reduce the number of parameters by a parameterization trick and enhance the expressive power by a global readout function. Extensive experiments are conducted on acknowledged benchmark datasets and promising results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed AKGNN by comparison with state-of-the-art GNNs. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jumxglhf/AKGNN.

Adaptive Kernel Graph Neural Network

DatalogMTL is an extension of Datalog with operators from metric temporal logic which has received significant attention in recent years. It is a highly expressive knowledge representation language that is well-suited for applications in temporal ontology-based query answering and stream processing. Reasoning in DatalogMTL is, however, of high computational complexity, making implementation challenging and hindering its adoption in applications. In this paper, we present a novel approach for practical reasoning in DatalogMTL which combines materialisation (a.k.a. forward chaining) with automata-based techniques. We have implemented this approach in a reasoner called MeTeoR and evaluated its performance using a temporal extension of the Lehigh University Benchmark and a benchmark based on real-world meteorological data. Our experiments show that MeTeoR is a scalable system which enables reasoning over complex temporal rules and datasets involving tens of millions of temporal facts.

MeTeoR: Practical Reasoning in Datalog with Metric Temporal Operators

The paper presents a characterization of logic programs with aggregates based on many-sorted generalization of operator SM that refers neither to grounding nor to fixpoints. This characterization introduces new symbols for aggregate operations and aggregate elements, whose meaning is fixed by adding appropriate axioms to the result of the SM transformation. We prove that for programs without positive recursion through aggregates our semantics coincides with the semantics of the answer set solver Clingo.

Axiomatization of Aggregates in Answer Set Programming

The quadratic memory complexity of transformers prevents long document summarization in low computational resource scenarios. State-of-the-art models need to apply input truncation, thus discarding and ignoring potential summary-relevant contents, leading to a performance drop. Furthermore, this loss is generally destructive for semantic text analytics in high-impact domains such as the legal one. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic self-segmentation (Se3) approach for long document summarization to address the critical problems of low-resource regimes, namely to process inputs longer than the GPU memory capacity and produce accurate summaries despite the availability of only a few dozens of training instances. Se3 segments a long input into semantically coherent chunks, allowing transformers to summarize very long documents without truncation by summarizing each chunk and concatenating the results. Experimental outcomes show the approach significantly improves the performance of abstractive summarization transformers, even with just a dozen of labeled data, achieving new state-of-the-art results on two legal datasets of different domains and contents. Finally, we report ablation studies to evaluate each contribution of the components of our method to the performance gain.

Semantic Self-Segmentation for Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Documents in Low-Resource Regimes

Optimal transport (OT) plays an essential role in various areas like machine learning and deep learning.
 However, computing discrete optimal transport plan for large scale problems with adequate accuracy and efficiency is still highly challenging. 
 Recently, methods based on the Sinkhorn algorithm add an entropy regularizer to the prime problem and get a trade off between efficiency and accuracy. 
 In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to further improve the efficiency and accuracy based on Nesterov's smoothing technique. 
 Basically, the non-smooth c-transform of the Kantorovich potential is approximated by the smooth Log-Sum-Exp function, which finally smooths the original non-smooth Kantorovich dual functional. The smooth Kantorovich functional can be optimized by the fast proximal gradient algorithm (FISTA) efficiently. Theoretically, the computational complexity of the proposed method is lower than 
current estimation of the Sinkhorn algorithm in terms of the precision.
 Empirically, compared with the Sinkhorn algorithm, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves faster convergence and better accuracy with the same parameter.

Efficient Optimal Transport Algorithm by Accelerated Gradient Descent

Utterance rewriting aims to recover coreferences and omitted information from the latest turn of a multi-turn dialogue. Recently, methods that tag rather than linearly generate sequences have proven stronger in both in- and out-of-domain rewriting settings. This is due to a tagger's smaller search space as it can only copy tokens from the dialogue context. However, these methods may suffer from low coverage when phrases that must be added to a source utterance cannot be covered by a single context span. This can occur in languages like English that introduce tokens such as prepositions into the rewrite for grammaticality. We propose a hierarchical context tagger (HCT) that mitigates this issue by predicting slotted rules (e.g., "besides _") whose slots are later filled with context spans. HCT (i) tags the source string with token-level edit actions and slotted rules and (ii) fills in the resulting rule slots with spans from the dialogue context. This rule tagging allows HCT to add out-of-context tokens and multiple spans at once; we further cluster the rules to truncate the long tail of the rule distribution. Experiments on several benchmarks show that HCT can outperform state-of-the-art rewriting systems by ~2 BLEU points.

Hierarchical Context Tagging for Utterance Rewriting

Deep neural networks have become the driving force of modern image recognition systems. However, the vulnerability of neural networks against adversarial attacks poses a serious threat to the people affected by these systems. In this paper, we focus on a real-world threat model where a Man-in-the-Middle adversary maliciously intercepts and perturbs images web users upload online. This type of attack can raise severe ethical concerns on top of simple performance degradation. To prevent this attack, we devise a novel bi-level optimization algorithm that finds points in the vicinity of natural images that are robust to adversarial perturbations. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet show our method can effectively robustify natural images within the given modification budget. We also show the proposed method can improve robustness when jointly used with randomized smoothing.

Preemptive Image Robustification for Protecting Users Against Man-in-the-Middle Adversarial Attacks

Along with the evolution of deep neural networks (DNNs) in many real-world applications, the complexity of model building has also dramatically increased. Therefore, it is vital to protect the intellectual property (IP) of the model builder and ensure the trustworthiness of the deployed models. Meanwhile, adversarial attacks on DNNs (e.g., backdoor and poisoning attacks) that seek to inject malicious behaviors have been investigated recently, demanding a means for verifying the integrity of the deployed model to protect the users. This paper presents a novel DNN authentication framework DeepAuth that embeds a unique and fragile signature to each protected DNN model. Our approach exploits sensitive key samples that are well crafted from the input space to latent space and then to logit space for producing signatures. After embedding, each model will respond distinctively to these key samples, which creates a model-unique signature as a strong tool for authentication and user identity. The signature embedding process is also designed to ensure the fragility of the signature, which can be used to detect malicious modifications such that an illegitimate user or an altered model should not have the intact signature. Extensive evaluations on various models over a wide range of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed DeepAuth.

DeepAuth: A DNN Authentication Framework by Model-Unique and Fragile Signature Embedding

Sub-seasonal forecasting (SSF) is the prediction of key climate variables such as temperature and precipitation on the 2-week to 2-month time horizon. Skillful SSF would have substantial societal value in areas such as agricultural productivity, hydrology and water resource management, and emergency planning for extreme events such as droughts and wildfires. Despite its societal importance, SSF has stayed a challenging problem compared to both short-term weather forecasting and long-term seasonal forecasting. Recent studies have shown the potential of machine learning (ML) models to advance SSF. In this paper, for the first time, we perform a fine-grained comparison of a suite of modern ML models with start-of-the-art physics-based dynamical models from the Subseasonal Experiment (SubX) project for SSF in the western contiguous United States. Additionally, we explore mechanisms to enhance the ML models by using forecasts from dynamical models. Empirical results illustrate that, on average, ML models outperform dynamical models while the ML models tend to generate forecasts with conservative magnitude compared to the SubX models. Further, we illustrate that ML models make forecasting errors under extreme weather conditions, e.g., cold waves due to the polar vortex, highlighting the need for separate models for extreme events. Finally, we show that suitably incorporating dynamical model forecasts as inputs to ML models can substantially improve the forecasting performance of the ML models. The SSF dataset constructed for the work and code for the ML models are released along with the paper for the benefit of the artificial intelligence community.

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CLPA: Clean-Label Poisoning Availability Attacks Using Generative Adversarial Nets

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