Canada

Modern language modeling tasks are often underspecified: for a given token prediction, many words may satisfy the user’s intent of producing natural language at inference time, however only one word will minimize the task’s loss function at training time. We introduce a simple causal mechanism to describe the role underspecification plays in the generation of spurious correlations. Despite its simplicity, our causal model directly informs the development of two lightweight black-box evaluation methods, that we apply to gendered pronoun resolution tasks on a wide range of LLMs to 1) aid in the detection of inference-time task underspecification by exploiting 2) previously unreported gender vs. time and gender vs. location spurious correlations on LLMs with a range of A) sizes: from BERT-base to GPT-3.5, B) pre-training objectives: from masked &amp; autoregressive language modeling to a mixture of these objectives, and C) training stages: from pre-training only to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Code and open-source demos available at https://github.com/2dot71mily/uspec.

AAAI 2024

Underspecification in Language Modeling Tasks: A Causality-Informed Study of Gendered Pronoun Resolution

nlp: (large) language models

and evaluation of nlp models

nlp: interpretability

causality

analysis

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
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you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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ACL 2023

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.

Modern language modeling tasks are often underspecified: for a given token prediction, many words may satisfy the user’s intent of producing natural language at inference time, however only one word will minimize the task’s loss function at training time. We introduce a simple causal mechanism to describe the role underspecification plays in the generation of spurious correlations. Despite its simplicity, our causal model directly informs the development of two lightweight black-box evaluation methods, that we apply to gendered pronoun resolution tasks on a wide range of LLMs to 1) aid in the detection of inference-time task underspecification by exploiting 2) previously unreported gender vs. time and gender vs. location spurious correlations on LLMs with a range of A) sizes: from BERT-base to GPT-3.5, B) pre-training objectives: from masked & autoregressive language modeling to a mixture of these objectives, and C) training stages: from pre-training only to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Code and open-source demos available at https://github.com/2dot71mily/uspec.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

The rapid evolution of speech synthesis and voice conversion has raised substantial concerns due to the potential misuse of such technology, prompting a pressing need for effective audio deepfake detection mechanisms. Existing detection models have shown remarkable success in discriminating known deepfake audio, but struggle when encountering new attack types. To address this challenge, one of the emergent effective approaches is continual learning. In this paper, we propose a continual learning approach called Radian Weight Modification (RWM) for audio deepfake detection. The fundamental concept underlying RWM involves categorizing all classes into two groups: those with compact feature distributions across tasks, such as genuine audio, and those with more spread-out distributions, like various types of fake audio. These distinctions are quantified by means of the in-class cosine distance, which subsequently serves as the basis for RWM to introduce a trainable gradient modification direction for distinct data types. Experimental evaluations against mainstream continual learning methods reveal the superiority of RWM in terms of knowledge acquisition and mitigating forgetting in audio deepfake detection. Furthermore, RWM's applicability extends beyond audio deepfake detection, demonstrating its potential significance in diverse machine learning domains such as image recognition.

What to Remember: Self-Adaptive Continual Learning for Audio Deepfake Detection

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial settings, such as linear MDP or general function approximation with strong assumptions and independent data, which lack guidance for practical use. The coupling of deep learning and Bellman residuals makes this problem challenging, in addition to the difficulty of data dependence. In this paper, we establish a non-asymptotic estimation error of pessimistic offline RL using general neural network approximation with $\mathcal{C}$-mixing data regarding the structure of networks, the dimension of datasets, and the concentrability of data coverage, under mild assumptions. Our result shows that the estimation error consists of two parts: the first converges to zero at a desired rate on the sample size with partially controllable concentrability, and the second becomes negligible if the residual constraint is tight. This result demonstrates the explicit efficiency of deep adversarial offline RL frameworks. We utilize the empirical process tool for $\mathcal{C}$-mixing sequences and the neural network approximation theory for the H\"{o}lder class to achieve this. We also develop methods to bound the Bellman estimation error caused by function approximation with empirical Bellman constraint perturbations. Additionally, we present a result that lessens the curse of dimensionality using data with low intrinsic dimensionality and function classes with low complexity. Our estimation provides valuable insights into the development of deep offline RL and guidance for algorithm model design.

Neural Network Approximation for Pessimistic Offline Reinforcement Learning

Pan-sharpening aims to leverage the high-frequency signal of the panchromatic (PAN) image to enhance the resolution of its corresponding multi-spectral (MS) image. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to prioritize learning the low-frequency components during the training process, which limits the restoration of high-frequency edge details in MS images. To overcome this limitation, we treat pan-sharpening as a coarse-to-fine high-frequency restoration problem and propose a novel method for achieving high-quality restoration of edge information in MS images. Specifically, to effectively obtain fine-grained multi-scale contextual features, we design a Band-limited Multi-scale High-frequency Generator (BMHG) that generates high-frequency signals from the PAN image within different bandwidths. During training, higher-frequency signals are progressively injected into the MS image, and corresponding residual blocks are introduced into the network simultaneously. This design enables gradients to flow from later to earlier blocks smoothly, encouraging intermediate blocks to concentrate on missing details. Furthermore, to address the issue of pixel position misalignment arising from multi-scale features fusion, we propose a Spatial-spectral Implicit Image Function (SIIF) that employs implicit neural representation to effectively represent and fuse spatial and spectral features in the continuous domain. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of quantitative and visual measurements for high-frequency detail recovery.

Progressive High-Frequency Reconstruction for Pan-Sharpening with Implicit Neural Representation

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has achieved a rapid search for excellent architectures by optimizing architecture parameters through gradient descent. However, this efficiency comes with a significant challenge: the risk of premature convergence to local optima, resulting in subpar performance that falls short of expectations. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective method called Evolutionary Gradient-Based Neural Architecture Search (EG-NAS). Our approach combines the strengths of both gradient descent and evolutionary strategy, allowing for the exploration of various optimization directions during the architecture search process. To begin with, we continue to employ gradient descent for updating network parameters to ensure efficiency. Subsequently, to mitigate the risk of premature convergence, we introduce an evolutionary strategy with global search capabilities to optimize the architecture parameters. By leveraging the best of both worlds, our method strikes a balance between efficient exploration and exploitation of the search space. Moreover, we have redefined the fitness function to not only consider accuracy but also account for individual similarity. This inclusion enhances the diversity and accuracy of the optimized directions identified by the evolutionary strategy. Extensive experiments on various datasets and search spaces demonstrate that EG-NAS achieves highly competitive performance at significantly low search costs compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/caicaicheng/EG-NAS.

EG-NAS: Neural Architecture Search with Fast Evolutionary Exploration

Neural population coding can represent continuous information by neurons with a series of discrete preferred stimuli, and we find that the bell-shaped tuning curve plays an important role in this mechanism. Inspired by this, we incorporate a bell-shaped tuning curve into the discrete group convolution to achieve continuous group equivariance. Simply, we modulate group convolution kernels by Gauss functions to obtain bell-shaped tuning curves. Benefiting from the modulation, kernels also gain smooth gradients on geometric dimensions (e.g., location dimension and orientation dimension). It allows us to generate group convolution kernels from sparse weights with learnable geometric parameters, which can achieve both competitive performances and parameter efficiencies. Furthermore, we quantitatively prove that discrete group convolutions with proper tuning curves (bigger than 1$\times$ sampling step) can achieve continuous equivariance. Experimental results show that 1) our approach achieves very competitive performances on MNIST-rot with at least 75\% fewer parameters compared with previous SOTA methods, which is efficient in parameter; 2) Especially with small sample sizes, our approach exhibits more pronounced performance improvements (up to 24\%); 3) It also has excellent rotation generalization ability on various datasets such as MNIST, CIFAR, and ImageNet with both plain and ResNet architectures.

Continuous Rotation Group Equivariant Network Inspired by Neural Population Coding

Gaze estimation methods often experience significant performance degradation when evaluated across different domains, due to the domain gap between the testing and training data. Existing methods try to address this issue using various domain generalization approaches, but with little success because of the limited diversity of gaze datasets, such as appearance, wearable, and image quality. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called CLIP-Gaze that utilizes a pre-trained vision-language model to leverage its transferable knowledge. Our framework is the first to leverage the vision-and-language cross-modality approach for gaze estimation task. Specifically, we extract gaze-relevant feature by pushing it away from gaze-irrelevant features which can be flexibly constructed via language descriptions. To learn more suitable prompts, we propose a personalized context optimization method for text prompt tuning. Furthermore, we utilize the relationship among gaze samples to refine the distribution of gaze-relevant features, thereby improving the generalization capability of the gaze estimation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of CLIP-Gaze over existing methods on four cross-domain evaluations.

CLIP-Gaze: Towards General Gaze Estimation via Visual-Linguistic Model

The emergence of various medical large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain has highlighted the need for unified evaluation standards, as manual evaluation of LLMs proves to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we introduce MedBench, a comprehensive benchmark for the Chinese medical domain, comprising 40,041 questions sourced from authentic examination exercises and medical reports of diverse branches of medicine. In particular, this benchmark is composed of four key components: the Chinese Medical Licensing Examination, the Resident Standardization Training Examination, the Doctor In-Charge Qualification Examination, and real-world clinic cases encompassing examinations, diagnoses, and treatments. MedBench replicates the educational progression and clinical practice experiences of doctors in Mainland China, thereby establish- ing itself as a credible benchmark for assessing the mastery of knowledge and reasoning abilities in medical language learning models. We perform extensive experiments and conduct an in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives, which culminate in the following findings: (1) Chinese medical LLMs underperform on this benchmark, highlighting the need for significant advances in clinical knowledge and diagnostic precision. (2) Several general-domain LLMs surprisingly possess considerable medical knowledge. These findings elucidate both the capabilities and limitations of LLMs within the context of MedBench, with the ultimate goal of aiding the medical research community.

MedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful tool to address the challenge of insufficient annotated data in medical segmentation problems. However, existing semi-supervised methods mainly rely on internal knowledge for pseudo labeling, which is biased due to the distribution mismatch between the highly imbalanced labeled and unlabeled data. Segmenting left atrial appendage (LAA) from transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE) images is a typical medical image segmentation task featured by scarcity of professional annotations and diverse data distributions, for which existing SSL models cannot achieve satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to mitigate the inherent challenge of distribution mismatch in SSL by, for the first time, incorporating a large foundation model (i.e. SAM in our implementation) into an SSL model to improve the quality of pseudo labels. We further propose a new self-reconstruction mechanism to generate both noise-resilient prompts to demonically improve SAM’s generalization capability over TEE images and self-perturbations to stabilize the training process and reduce the impact of noisy labels. We conduct extensive experiments on an in-house TEE dataset; experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than state-of-the-art SSL models.

Semi-supervised TEE Segmentation via Interacting with SAM Equipped with Noise-Resilient Prompting

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a crucial real-world task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories from an unlabeled dataset by leveraging another labeled dataset with only known categories. Despite the improved performance on known categories, current methods perform poorly on novel categories. We attribute the poor performance to two reasons: biased knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled data and noisy representation learning on the unlabeled data. The former leads to unreliable estimation of learning targets for novel categories and the latter hinders models from learning discriminative features. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a Transfer and Alignment Network (TAN), which incorporates two knowledge transfer mechanisms to calibrate the biased knowledge and two feature alignment mechanisms to learn discriminative features.
Specifically, we model different categories with prototypes and transfer the prototypes in labeled data to correct model bias towards known categories. On the one hand, we pull instances with known categories in unlabeled data closer to these prototypes to form more compact clusters and avoid boundary overlap between known and novel categories. On the other hand, we use these prototypes to calibrate noisy prototypes estimated from unlabeled data based on category similarities, which allows for more accurate estimation of prototypes for novel categories that can be used as reliable learning targets later. After knowledge transfer, we further propose two feature alignment mechanisms to acquire both instance- and category-level knowledge from unlabeled data by aligning instance features with both augmented features and the calibrated prototypes, which can boost model performance on both known and novel categories with less noise. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms SOTA methods, especially on novel categories. Theoretical analysis is provided for an in-depth understanding of our model in general.
Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/TAN.

Transfer and Alignment Network for Generalized Category Discovery | VIDEO

Instrumental variables (IVs), widely applied in economics and healthcare, enable consistent counterfactual prediction in the presence of hidden confounding factors, effectively addressing endogeneity issues. The prevailing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods typically rely on the availability of valid IVs (satisfying \textbf{Relevance}, \textbf{Exclusivity}, and \textbf{Exogeneity}), a requirement which often proves elusive in real-world scenarios. Various data-driven techniques are being developed to create valid IVs (or representations of IVs) from a pool of IV candidates. However, most of these techniques still necessitate the inclusion of valid IVs within the set of candidates. This paper proposes a distribution-conditioned adversarial variational autoencoder to tackle this challenge. Specifically: 1) for \textbf{Relevance} and \textbf{Exclusivity}, we deduce the corresponding evidence lower bound following the Bayesian network structure and build the variational autoencoder accordingly; 2) for \textbf{Exogeneity}, we design an adversarial game to encourage latent factors originating from the marginal distribution, compelling the independence between IVs and other outcome-related factors. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness, stability and generality of our proposed model in generating valid IV factors in the absence of valid IV candidates.

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What to Remember: Self-Adaptive Continual Learning for Audio Deepfake Detection

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Dealing with Semantic Underspecification in Multimodal NLP