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Neural Module Networks (NMNs) have been quite successful in incorporating explicit reasoning as learnable modules in various question answering tasks, including the most generic form of numerical reasoning over text in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). However to achieve this, contemporary Neural Module Networks models obtain strong supervision in form of specialized program annotation from the QA pairs through various heuristic parsing and exhaustive computation of all possible discrete operations on discrete arguments. Consequently they fail to generalize to more open-ended settings without such supervision. Hence, we propose Weakly Supervised Neuro-Symbolic Module Network (WNSMN) trained with answers as the sole supervision for numerical reasoning based MRC. WNSMN learns to execute a noisy heuristic program obtained from the dependency parse of the query, as discrete actions over both neural and symbolic reasoning modules and trains it end-to-end in a reinforcement learning framework with discrete reward from answer matching. On the subset of DROP having numerical answers, WNSMN outperforms NMN by 32% and the reasoning-free generative language model GenBERT by 8% in exact match accuracy under comparable weakly supervised settings. This showcases the effectiveness of modular networks that can handle explicit discrete reasoning over noisy programs in an end-to-end manner.

AAAI 2022

Weakly Supervised Neuro-Symbolic Module Networks for Numerical Reasoning over Text

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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. 

In online algorithm selection (OAS), instances of an algorithmic problem class are presented to an agent one after another, and the agent has to quickly select a presumably best algorithm from a fixed set of candidate algorithms. For decision problems such as satisfiability (SAT), quality typically refers to the algorithm's runtime. As the latter is known to exhibit a heavy-tail distribution, an algorithm is normally stopped when exceeding a predefined upper time limit. As a consequence, machine learning methods used to optimize an algorithm selection strategy in a data-driven manner need to deal with right-censored samples, a problem that has received little attention in the literature so far. In this work, we revisit multi-armed bandit algorithms for OAS and discuss their capability of dealing with the problem. Moreover, we adapt them towards runtime-oriented losses, allowing for partially censored data while keeping a space- and time-complexity independent of the time horizon. In an extensive experimental evaluation on an adapted version of the ASlib benchmark, we demonstrate that theoretically well-founded methods based on Thompson sampling perform specifically strong and improve in comparison to existing methods.

Machine Learning for Online Algorithm Selection under Censored Feedback

Graph comparison deals with identifying similarities and dissimilarities between graphs. A major obstacle is the unknown alignment of graphs, as well as the lack of accurate and inexpensive comparison metrics. In this work we introduce the filter graph distance. It is an optimal transport based distance which drives graph comparison through the probability distribution of filtered graph signals. 
 This creates a highly flexible distance, capable of prioritising different spectral information in observed graphs, offering a wide range of choices for a comparison metric. We tackle the problem of graph alignment by computing graph permutations that minimise our new filter distances, which implicitly solves the graph comparison problem. 
 We then propose a new approximate cost function that circumvents many computational difficulties inherent to graph comparison and permits the exploitation of fast algorithms such as mirror gradient descent, without grossly sacrificing the performance. We finally propose a novel algorithm derived from a stochastic version of mirror gradient descent, which accommodates the non-convexity of the alignment problem, offering a good trade-off between performance accuracy and speed. The experiments on graph alignment and classification show that the flexibility gained through filter graph distances can have a significant impact on performance, while the difference in speed offered by the approximation cost makes the framework applicable in practical settings.

fGOT: Graph Distances based on Filters and Optimal Transport

The new generation of language models is reported to solve some extraordinary tasks the models were never trained for specifically, in few-shot or zero-shot settings. However, these reports usually cherry-pick the tasks, use the best prompts, and unwrap or extract the solutions leniently even if they are followed by nonsensical text. In sum, they are specialised results for one domain, a particular way of using the models and interpreting the results. In this paper, we present a novel theoretical evaluation framework and a distinctive experimental study assessing language models as general-purpose systems when used directly by human prompters --- in the wild. For a useful and safe interaction in these increasingly more common conditions, we need to understand when the model fails because of a lack of capability or a misunderstanding of the user's intents. Our results indicate that language models such as GPT-3 have limited understanding of the human command; far from becoming general-purpose systems in the wild.

How General-Purpose Is a Language Model? Usefulness and Safety with Human Prompters in the Wild

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) with leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neurons, can be operated in an event-driven manner and have internal states to retain information over time, providing opportunities for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing, especially on edge devices. Note, however, many representative works on SNNs do not fully demonstrate the usefulness of their inherent recurrence (membrane potential retaining information about the past) for sequential learning. Most of the works train SNNs to recognize static images by artificially expanded input representation in time through rate coding. We show that SNNs can be trained for practical sequential tasks by proposing modifications to a network of LIF neurons that enable internal states to learn long sequences and make their inherent recurrence resilient to the vanishing gradient problem. We then develop a training scheme to train the proposed SNNs with improved inherent recurrence dynamics. Our training scheme allows spiking neurons to produce multi-bit outputs (as opposed to binary spikes) which help mitigate the mismatch between a derivative of spiking neurons' activation function and a surrogate derivative used to overcome spiking neurons' non-differentiability. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed SNN architecture on TIMIT and LibriSpeech 100h speech recognition dataset yields accuracy comparable to that of LSTMs (within 1.10% and 0.36%, respectively), but with 2x fewer parameters than LSTMs. The sparse SNN outputs also lead to 10.13x and 11.14x savings in multiplication operations compared to GRUs, which are generally considered as a lightweight alternative to LSTMs, on TIMIT and LibriSpeech 100h datasets, respectively.

Spiking Neural Networks with Improved Inherent Recurrence Dynamics for Sequential Learning

Interpretability is crucial to understand the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs). Many interpretation methods help to understand the decision-making of DNNs by generating saliency maps that highlight parts of the input image that contribute the most to the prediction made by the DNN. In this paper we design a backdoor attack that alters the saliency map produced by the network for an input image with a specific trigger pattern while not losing the prediction performance significantly. The saliency maps are incorporated in the penalty term of the objective function that is used to train a deep model and its influence on model training is conditioned upon the presence of a trigger. We design two types of attacks: a targeted attack that enforces a specific modification of the saliency map and a non-targeted attack when the importance scores of the top pixels from the original saliency map are significantly reduced. We perform empirical evaluations of the proposed backdoor attacks on gradient-based interpretation methods, Grad-CAM and SimpleGrad, and a gradient-free scheme, VisualBackProp, for a variety of deep learning architectures. We show that our attacks constitute a serious security threat to the reliability of the interpretation methods when deploying models developed by untrusted sources. We furthermore show that existing backdoor defense mechanisms are ineffective in detecting our attacks. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed methodology can be used in an inverted setting, where the correct saliency map can be obtained only in the presence of a trigger (key), effectively making the interpretation system available only to selected users.

Backdoor Attacks on the DNN Interpretation System

In recent years, we have seen significant steps taken in the development of self-driving cars. Multiple companies are starting to roll out impressive systems that work in a variety of settings. These systems can sometimes give the impression that full self-driving is just around the corner and that we would soon build cars without even a steering wheel. The increase in the level of autonomy and control given to an AI provides an opportunity for new modes of human-vehicle interaction. However, surveys have shown that giving more control to an AI in self-driving cars is accompanied by a degree of uneasiness by passengers. In an attempt to alleviate this issue, recent works have taken a natural language-oriented approach by allowing the passenger to give commands that refer to specific objects in the visual scene. Nevertheless, this is only half the task as the car should also understand the physical destination of the command, which is what we focus on in this paper. We propose an extension in which we annotate the 3D destination that the car needs to reach after executing the given command and evaluate multiple different baselines on predicting this destination location. Additionally, we introduce a model that outperforms the prior works adapted for this particular setting.

Predicting Physical World Destinations for Commands Given to Self-Driving Cars

One of challenges of artificial intelligence as a whole is robustness. Many issues such as adversarial examples, out of distribution performance, Clever Hans phenomena, and the wider areas of AI evaluation and explainable AI, have to do with the following question: Did the system fail because it is a hard instance or because something else? In this paper we address this question with a generic method for estimating IRT-based instance difficulty for a wide range of AI domains covering several areas, from supervised feature-based classification to automated reasoning. We show how to estimate difficulty systematically using off-the-shelf machine learning regression models. We illustrate the usefulness of this estimation for a range of applications.

When AI Difficulty Is Easy: The Explanatory Power of Predicting IRT Difficulty

Near-term quantum hardware can support two-qubit operations only on the qubits that can interact with each other. Therefore, to execute an arbitrary quantum circuit on the hardware, compilers have to first perform the task of qubit routing, i.e., to transform the quantum circuit either by inserting additional SWAP gates or by reversing existing CNOT gates to satisfy the connectivity constraints of the target topology. The depth of the transformed quantum circuits is minimized by utilizing the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) to perform qubit routing by making it both construct each action and search over the space of all actions. It is aided in performing these tasks by a Graph neural network that evaluates the value function and action probabilities for each state. Along with this, we propose a new method of adding mutex-lock like variables in our state representation which helps factor in the parallelization of the scheduled operations, thereby pruning the depth of the output circuit. Overall, our procedure (referred to as QRoute) performs qubit routing in a hardware agnostic manner, and it outperforms other available qubit routing implementations on various circuit benchmarks.

Qubit Routing Using Graph Neural Network Aided Monte Carlo Tree Search

Argumentation frameworks (AFs) are a core formalism in the field of formal argumentation. As most standard computational tasks regarding AFs are hard for the first or second level of the Polynomial Hierarchy, a variety of algorithmic approaches to achieve manageable runtimes have been considered in the past. Among them, the backdoor-approach and the treewidth-approach turned out to yield fixed-parameter tractable fragments. However, many applications yield high parameter values for these methods, often rendering them infeasible in practice. We introduce the backdoor-treewidth approach for abstract argumentation, combining the best of both worlds with a guaranteed parameter value that does not exceed the minimum of the backdoor- and treewidth-parameter. In particular, we formally define backdoor-treewidth and establish fixed-parameter tractability for standard reasoning tasks of abstract argumentation. Moreover, we provide systems to find and exploit backdoors of small width, and conduct systematic experiments evaluating the new parameter.

Tractable Abstract Argumentation via Backdoor-Treewidth

We introduce novel methods for encoding acyclicity and s-t-reachability constraints for propositional formulas with underlying directed graphs, based on vertex elimination graphs, which makes them suitable for cases where the underlying graph has a low directed elimination width. In contrast to solvers with ad hoc constraint propagators for graph constraints such as GraphSAT, our methods encode these constraints as standard propositional clauses, making them directly applicable with any SAT solver. An empirical study demonstrates that our methods do often outperform both earlier encodings of these constraints as well as GraphSAT especially when underlying graphs have a low directed elimination width.

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