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Sarcasm is a pervading linguistic phenomenon and highly challenging to explain due to its subjectivity, lack of context and deeply-felt opinion. In the multimodal setup, sarcasm is conveyed through the incongruity between the text and visual entities. Although recent approaches deal with sarcasm as a classification problem, it is unclear why an online post is identified as sarcastic. Without proper explanation, end users may not be able to perceive the underlying sense of irony. In this paper, we propose a novel problem -- Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) -- given a multimodal sarcastic post containing an image and a caption, we aim to generate a natural language explanation to reveal the intended sarcasm. To this end, we develop MORE, a new dataset with explanation of 3510 sarcastic multimodal posts. Each explanation is a natural language (English) sentence describing the hidden irony. We benchmark MORE by employing a multimodal Transformer-based architecture. It incorporates a cross-modal attention in the Transformer&#39;s encoder which attends to the distinguishing features between the two modalities. Subsequently, a BART-based auto-regressive decoder is used as the generator. Empirical results demonstrate convincing results over various baselines (adopted for MuSE) across five evaluation metrics. We also conduct human evaluation on predictions and obtain Fleiss&#39; Kappa score of 0.4 as a fair agreement among 25 evaluators.

AAAI 2022

Nice Perfume. How Long did You Marinate in It? Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation

### 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

Sarcasm is a pervading linguistic phenomenon and highly challenging to explain due to its subjectivity, lack of context and deeply-felt opinion. In the multimodal setup, sarcasm is conveyed through the incongruity between the text and visual entities. Although recent approaches deal with sarcasm as a classification problem, it is unclear why an online post is identified as sarcastic. Without proper explanation, end users may not be able to perceive the underlying sense of irony. In this paper, we propose a novel problem -- Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) -- given a multimodal sarcastic post containing an image and a caption, we aim to generate a natural language explanation to reveal the intended sarcasm. To this end, we develop MORE, a new dataset with explanation of 3510 sarcastic multimodal posts. Each explanation is a natural language (English) sentence describing the hidden irony. We benchmark MORE by employing a multimodal Transformer-based architecture. It incorporates a cross-modal attention in the Transformer's encoder which attends to the distinguishing features between the two modalities. Subsequently, a BART-based auto-regressive decoder is used as the generator. Empirical results demonstrate convincing results over various baselines (adopted for MuSE) across five evaluation metrics. We also conduct human evaluation on predictions and obtain Fleiss' Kappa score of 0.4 as a fair agreement among 25 evaluators.

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. 

Pre-trained models have proved to be powerful in enhancing task-oriented dialog systems. However, current pre-training methods mainly focus on enhancing dialog understanding and generation tasks while neglecting the exploitation of dialog policy. In this paper, we propose GALAXY, a novel pre-trained dialog model that explicitly learns dialog policy from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we introduce a dialog act prediction task for policy optimization during pre-training and employ a consistency regularization term to refine the learned representation with the help of unlabeled dialogs. We also implement a gating mechanism to weigh suitable unlabeled dialog samples. Empirical results show that GALAXY substantially improves the performance of task-oriented dialog systems, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets: In-Car, MultiWOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1, improving their end-to-end combined scores by 2.5, 5.3 and 5.5 points, respectively. We also show that GALAXY has a stronger few-shot ability than existing models under various low-resource settings. For reproducibility, we release the code and data at https://github.com/siat-nlp/GALAXY.

GALAXY: A Generative Pre-Trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection

Unsupervised/self-supervised pre-training methods for graph representation learning have recently attracted increasing research interests, and they are shown to be able to generalize to various downstream applications. Yet, the adversarial robustness of such pre-trained graph learning models remains largely unexplored. More importantly, most existing defense techniques designed for end-to-end graph representation learning methods require pre-specified label definitions, and thus cannot be directly applied to the pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised defense technique to robustify pre-trained deep graph models, so that the perturbations on the input graph can be successfully identified and blocked before the model is applied to different downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduce a mutual information-based measure, graph representation vulnerability (GRV), to quantify the robustness of graph encoders on the representation space. We then formulate an optimization problem to learn the graph representation by carefully balancing the trade-off between the expressive power and the robustness (i.e., GRV) of the graph encoder. The discrete nature of graph topology and the joint space of graph data make the optimization problem intractable to solve. To handle the above difficulty and to reduce computational expense, we further relax the problem and thus provide an approximate solution. Additionally, we explore a provable connection between the robustness of the unsupervised graph encoder and that of models on downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even without access to labels and tasks, our model is still able to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks on three downstream tasks (node classification, link prediction, and community detection) by an average of +16.5% compared with existing methods.

Unsupervised Adversarially Robust Representation Learning on Graphs

Given a query graph and a database of corpus graphs, a graph retrieval system aims to deliver the most relevant corpus graphs. Graph retrieval based on subgraph matching has a wide variety of applications, e.g., molecular fingerprint detection, circuit design, software analysis, and question answering. In such applications, a corpus graph is relevant to a query graph, if the query graph is (perfectly or approximately) a subgraph of the corpus graph. Existing neural graph retrieval models compare the node or graph embeddings of the query-corpus pairs, to compute the relevance scores between them. However, such models may not provide edge consistency between the query and corpus graphs. Moreover, they predominantly use symmetric relevance scores, which are not appropriate in the context of subgraph matching, since the underlying relevance score in subgraph search should be measured using the partial order induced by subgraph-supergraph relationship. Consequently, they show poor retrieval performance in the context of subgraph matching. In response, we propose ISONET, a novel interpretable neural edge alignment formulation, which is better able to learn the edge-consistent mapping necessary for subgraph matching. ISONET incorporates a new scoring mechanism which enforces an asymmetric relevance score, specifically tailored to subgraph matching. ISONET's design enables it to directly identify the underlying subgraph in a corpus graph, which is relevant to the given query graph. Our experiments on diverse datasets show that ISONET outperforms recent graph retrieval formulations and systems. Additionally, ISONET can provide interpretable alignments between query-corpus graph pairs during inference, despite being trained only using binary relevance labels of whole graphs during training, without any fine-grained ground truth information about node or edge alignments.

Interpretable Neural Subgraph Matching for Graph Retrieval

We investigate the statistical and computational requirements for distributed kernel ridge regression with randomized sketching (DKRR-RS) and successfully achieve the optimal learning rates with only a fraction of computations. More precisely, the proposed DKRR-RS combines sparse randomized sketching, divide-and-conquer and KRR to scale up kernel methods and successfully derives the same learning rate as the exact KRR with greatly reducing computational costs in expectation, at the basic setting, which outperforms previous state of the art solutions. Then, for the sake of the gap between theory and experiments, we derive the optimal learning rate in probability for DKRR-RS to reflect its generalization performance. Finally, to further improve the learning performance, we construct an efficient communication strategy for DKRR-RS and demonstrate the power of communications via theoretical assessment. An extensive experiment validates the effectiveness of DKRR-RS and the communication strategy on real datasets.

Distributed Randomized Sketching Kernel Learning

The Mixup scheme suggests mixing a pair of samples to create an augmented training sample and has gained considerable attention recently for improving the generalizability of neural networks. A straightforward and widely used extension of Mixup is to combine with regional dropout-like methods: removing random patches from a sample and replacing it with the features from another sample. Albeit their simplicity and effectiveness, these methods are prone to create harmful samples due to their randomness. To address this issue, 'maximum saliency' strategies were recently proposed: they select only the most informative features to prevent such a phenomenon. However, they now suffer from lack of sample diversification as they always deterministically select regions with maximum saliency, injecting bias into the augmented data. In this paper, we present, a novel, yet simple Mixup-variant that captures the best of both worlds. Our idea is two-fold. By stochastically sampling the features and â€˜grafting' them onto another sample, our method effectively generates diverse yet meaningful samples. Its second ingredient is to produce the label of the grafted sample by mixing the labels in a saliency-calibrated fashion, which rectifies supervision misguidance introduced by the random sampling procedure. Our experiments under CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet datasets show that our scheme outperforms the current state-of-the-art augmentation strategies not only in terms of classification accuracy, but is also superior in coping under stress conditions such as data corruption and object occlusion.

Saliency Grafting: Innocuous Attribution-Guided Mixup with Calibrated Label Mixing

The Moran process is a classic stochastic process that models invasion dynamics on graphs. A single mutant (e.g., a new opinion, strain, social trait etc.) invades a population of residents spread over the nodes of a graph. The mutant fitness advantage Î´>=0 determines how aggressively mutants propagate to their neighbors. The quantity of interest is the fixation probability, i.e., the probability that the initial mutant eventually takes over the whole population. However, in realistic settings, the invading mutant has an advantage only in certain locations. E.g., the ability to metabolize a certain sugar is an advantageous trait to bacteria only when the sugar is actually present in their surroundings. In this paper we introduce the positional Moran process, a natural generalization in which the mutant fitness advantage is only realized on specific nodes called active nodes, and study the problem of fixation maximization: given a budget k, choose a set of k active nodes that maximize the fixation probability of the invading mutant. We show that the problem is NP-hard, while the optimization function is not submodular, thus indicating strong computational hardness. We focus on two natural limits. In the limit of Î´ to infinity (strong selection), although the problem remains NP-hard, the optimization function becomes submodular and thus admits a constant-factor approximation using a simple greedy algorithm. In the limit of Î´ to 0 (weak selection), we show that we can obtain a tight approximation in O(n^{2Ã—Ï‰}) time, where Ï‰ is the matrix-multiplication exponent. An experimental evaluation of the new algorithms along with some proposed heuristics corroborates our results.

Fixation Maximization in the Positional Moran Process

In recent years, joint text-image embeddings have significantly improved thanks to the development of transformer-based Vision-Language models. Despite these advances, we still need to better understand the representations produced by those models. In this paper, we compare pre-trained and fine-tuned representations at a vision, language and multimodal level. To that end, we use a set of probing tasks to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art Vision-Language models and introduce new datasets specifically for multimodal probing. These datasets are carefully designed to address a range of multimodal capabilities while minimizing the potential for models to rely on bias. Although the results confirm the ability of Vision-Language models to understand color at a multimodal level, the models seem to prefer relying on bias in text data for object position and size. On semantically adversarial examples, we find that those models are able to pinpoint fine-grained multimodal differences. Finally, we also notice that fine-tuning a Vision-Language model on multimodal tasks does not necessarily improve its multimodal ability. We make all datasets and code available to replicate experiments.

Are Vision-Language Transformers Learning Multimodal Representations? A Probing Perspective.

Unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) is a per-pixel binary labeling problem which aims at separating the foreground object from the background in the video without using the ground truth (GT) mask of the foreground object. Most of the previous UVOS models use the first frame or the entire video as a reference frame to specify the mask of the foreground object. Our question is why the first frame should be selected as a reference frame or why the entire video should be used to specify the mask. We believe that we can select a better reference frame to achieve the better UVOS performance than using only the first frame or the entire video as a reference frame. In our paper, we propose Easy Frame Selector (EFS). The EFS enables us to select an "easy" reference frame that makes the subsequent VOS become easy, thereby improving the VOS performance. Furthermore, we propose a new framework named as Iterative Mask Prediction (IMP). In the framework, we repeat applying EFS to the given video and selecting an "easier" reference frame from the video than the previous iteration, increasing the VOS performance incrementally. The IMP consists of EFS, Bi-directional Mask Prediction (BMP), and Temporal Information Updating (TIU). From the proposed framework, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in three UVOS benchmark sets: DAVIS16, FBMS, and SegTrack-V2.

Iteratively Selecting an Easy Reference Frame Makes Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation Easier

Knowledge Distillation (KD), which is an effective model compression and acceleration technique, has been successfully applied to graph neural networks (GNNs) recently. Existing approaches utilize a single GNN model as the teacher to distill knowledge. However, we notice that GNN models with different number of layers demonstrate different classification abilities on nodes with different degrees. On the one hand, for nodes with high degrees, their local structures are dense and complex, hence more message passing is needed. Therefore, GNN models with more layers perform better. On the other hand, for nodes with low degrees, whose local structures are relatively sparse and simple, the repeated message passing can easily lead to over-smoothing. Thus, GNN models with less layers are more suitable. However, existing single-teacher GNN knowledge distillation approaches which are based on a single GNN model, are sub-optimal. To this end, we propose a novel approach to distill multi-scale knowledge, which learns from multiple GNN teacher models with different number of layers to capture the topological semantic at different scales. Instead of learning from the teacher models equally, the proposed method automatically assigns proper weights for each teacher model via an attention mechanism which enables the student to select teachers for different local structures. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method on four public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NKU-IIPLab/MSKD.

Multi-Scale Distillation from Multiple Graph Neural Networks

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the realistic use cases for fact-checkers will require verifying claims against evidence sources that could be affected by the same misinformation. Furthermore, the development of modern NLP tools that can produce coherent, fabricated content would allow malicious actors to systematically generate adversarial disinformation for fact-checkers.
  
In this work, we explore the sensitivity of automated fact-checkers to synthetic adversarial evidence in two simulated settings: ADVERSARIAL ADDITION, where we fabricate documents and add them to the evidence repository available to the fact-checking system, and ADVERSARIAL MODIFICATION, where existing evidence source documents in the repository are automatically altered. Our study across multiple models on three benchmarks demonstrates that these systems suffer significant performance drops against these attacks. Finally, we discuss the growing threat of modern NLG systems as generators of disinformation in the context of the challenges they pose to automated fact-checkers.

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