Canada

The prompt-based method has been proven effective in improving the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on sentence-level few-shot tasks. However, when applying prompting to token-level tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), specific templates need to be designed, and all possible segments of the input text need to be enumerated. These methods have high computational complexity in both training and inference processes, making them difficult to apply in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we redefine the NER task as a Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task and incorporate prompting into the MRC framework. Specifically, we sequentially insert boundary markers for various entity types into the templates and use these markers as anchors during the inference process to differentiate entity types. In contrast to the traditional multi-turn question-answering extraction in the MRC framework, our method can extract all spans of entity types in one round. Furthermore, we propose word-based template and example-based template that enhance the MRC framework&#39;s perception of entity start and end positions while significantly reducing the manual effort required for template design. It is worth noting that in cross-domain scenarios, PMRC does not require redesigning the model architecture and can continue training by simply replacing the templates to recognize entity types in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in low-resource settings, achieving an average performance improvement of +5.2% in settings where access to source domain data is limited. Particularly, on the ATIS dataset with a large number of entity types and 10-shot setting, PMRC achieves a performance improvement of +15.7%. Moreover, our method achieves a decoding speed 40.56 times faster than the template-based cloze-style approach.

AAAI 2024

PMRC: Prompt-Based Machine Reading Comprehension for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

question answering

language models

information extraction

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The prompt-based method has been proven effective in improving the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on sentence-level few-shot tasks. However, when applying prompting to token-level tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), specific templates need to be designed, and all possible segments of the input text need to be enumerated. These methods have high computational complexity in both training and inference processes, making them difficult to apply in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we redefine the NER task as a Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task and incorporate prompting into the MRC framework. Specifically, we sequentially insert boundary markers for various entity types into the templates and use these markers as anchors during the inference process to differentiate entity types. In contrast to the traditional multi-turn question-answering extraction in the MRC framework, our method can extract all spans of entity types in one round. Furthermore, we propose word-based template and example-based template that enhance the MRC framework's perception of entity start and end positions while significantly reducing the manual effort required for template design. It is worth noting that in cross-domain scenarios, PMRC does not require redesigning the model architecture and can continue training by simply replacing the templates to recognize entity types in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in low-resource settings, achieving an average performance improvement of +5.2% in settings where access to source domain data is limited. Particularly, on the ATIS dataset with a large number of entity types and 10-shot setting, PMRC achieves a performance improvement of +15.7%. Moreover, our method achieves a decoding speed 40.56 times faster than the template-based cloze-style approach.

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. 

In Autonomous Driving (AD), real-time perception is a critical component responsible for detecting surrounding objects to ensure safe driving. While researchers have extensively explored the integrity of AD perception due to its safety and security implications, the aspect of availability (real-time performance) or latency has received limited attention. Existing works on latency-based attack have focused mainly on object detection, i.e., a component in camera-based AD perception, overlooking the entire camera-based AD perception, which hinders them to achieve effective system-level effects, such as vehicle crashes. In this paper, we present SlowTrack, a novel framework for generating adversarial attacks to increase the execution time of camera-based AD perception. We propose a novel two-stage attack strategy along with the three new loss function designs. Our evaluation is conducted on four popular camera-based AD perception pipelines, and the results demonstrate that SlowTrack significantly outperforms existing latency-based attacks while maintaining comparable imperceptibility levels. Furthermore, we perform the evaluation on Baidu Apollo, an industry-grade full-stack AD system, and LGSVL, a production-grade AD simulator, with two scenarios to compare the system-level effects of SlowTrack and existing attacks. Our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the vehicle crash rate of SlowTrack is around 95% on average while existing works only have around 30%. To enhance physical-world realizability, we propose a method to generate adversarial patches that achieve similar attack effects.

SlowTrack: Increasing the Latency of Camera-Based Perception in Autonomous Driving Using Adversarial Examples

The core of pointly-supervised panoptic segmentation is estimating accurate dense pseudo labels from sparse point labels to train the panoptic head. Previous works generate pseudo labels mainly based on hand-crafted rules, such as connecting multiple points into polygon masks, or assigning the label information of labeled pixels to unlabeled pixels based on the artificially defined traversing distance. The accuracy of pseudo labels is limited by the quality of the hand-crafted rules (polygon masks are rough at object contour regions, and the traversing distance error will result in wrong pseudo labels). To overcome the limitation of hand-crafted rules, we estimate pseudo labels with a fully data-driven pseudo label branch, which is optimized by point labels end-to-end and predicts more accurate pseudo labels than previous methods. We also train an auxiliary semantic branch with point labels, it assists the training of the pseudo label branch by transferring semantic segmentation knowledge through shared parameters. Experiments on Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our approach is effective and shows state-of-the-art performance compared with related works. Codes are available at  https://github.com/BraveGroup/FDD.

Fully Data-Driven Pseudo Label Estimation for Pointly-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation | VIDEO

GraIL and its variants have shown their promising capacities for inductive relation reasoning on knowledge graphs. However, the uni-directional message-passing mechanism hinders such models from exploiting hidden mutual relations between entities in directed graphs. Besides, the enclosing subgraph extraction in most GraIL-based models restricts the model from extracting enough discriminative information for reasoning. Consequently, the expressive ability of these models is limited. To address the problems, we propose a novel GraIL-based framework, termed MINES, by introducing a Message Intercommunication mechanism on the Neighbor-Enhanced Subgraph. Concretely, the message intercommunication mechanism is designed to capture the omitted hidden mutual information. It introduces bi-directed information interactions between connected entities by inserting an undirected/bi-directed GCN layer between uni-directed RGCN layers. Moreover, inspired by the success of involving more neighbors in other graph-based tasks, we extend the neighborhood area beyond the enclosing subgraph to enhance the information collection for inductive relation reasoning. Extensive experiments prove the promising capacity of the proposed MINES from various aspects, especially for the superiority, effectiveness, and transfer ability.

MINES: Message Intercommunication for Inductive Relation Reasoning over Neighbor-Enhanced Subgraphs

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is the key technology in many applications for providing insights into human behavior and anticipating human future motions. Most existing empirical models are explicitly formulated by observed human behaviors using explicable mathematical terms with deterministic nature, while recent work has focused on developing hybrid models combined with learning-based techniques for powerful expressiveness while maintaining explainability. However, the deterministic nature of the learned steering behaviors from the empirical models limits the models' practical performance. To address this issue, this work proposes the social conditional variational autoencoder (SocialCVAE) for predicting pedestrian trajectories, which employs a CVAE to explore behavioral uncertainty in human motion decisions. SocialCVAE learns socially reasonable motion randomness by utilizing a socially explainable interaction energy map as the CVAE's condition, which illustrates the future occupancy of each pedestrian's local neighborhood area. The energy map is generated using an energy-based interaction model, which anticipates the energy cost (i.e., repulsion intensity) of pedestrians' interactions with neighbors. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including 25 scenes demonstrate that SocialCVAE significantly improves prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods, with up to 16.85% improvement in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 69.18% improvement in Final Displacement Error (FDE).

SocialCVAE: Predicting Pedestrian Trajectory via Interaction Conditioned Latents

Modeling complementary relationships greatly helps recommender systems to accurately and promptly recommend the subsequent items when one item is purchased. Unlike traditional similar relationships, items with complementary relationships may be purchased successively (such as iPhone and Airpods Pro), and they not only share relevance but also exhibit dissimilarity. Since the two attributes are opposites, modeling complementary relationships is challenging. Previous attempts to exploit these relationships have either ignored or oversimplified the dissimilarity attribute, resulting in ineffective modeling and an inability to balance the two attributes. Since Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can capture the relevance and dissimilarity between nodes in the spectral domain, we can leverage spectral-based GNNs to effectively understand and model complementary relationships. 
In this study, we present a novel approach called Spectral-based Complementary Graph Neural Networks (SComGNN) that utilizes the spectral properties of complementary item graphs. We make the first observation that complementary relationships consist of low-frequency and mid-frequency components, corresponding to the relevance and dissimilarity attributes, respectively. Based on this spectral observation, we design spectral graph convolutional networks with low-pass and mid-pass filters to capture the low-frequency and mid-frequency components. Additionally, we propose a two-stage attention mechanism to adaptively integrate and balance the two attributes. Experimental results on four e-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, with SComGNN significantly outperforming existing baseline models.

Spectral-Based Graph Neutral Networks for Complementary Item Recommendation

As Federated Learning (FL) gains prominence in distributed machine learning applications, achieving fairness without compromising predictive performance becomes paramount. The data being gathered from distributed clients in an FL environment often leads to class imbalance. In such scenarios, balanced accuracy rather than accuracy is the true representation of model performance. However, most state-of-the-art fair FL methods report accuracy as the measure of performance,  which can lead to misguided interpretations of the model's effectiveness to mitigate discrimination. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first attempt towards achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between balanced accuracy and fairness in a federated environment (FairTrade). By utilizing multi-objective optimization, the framework negotiates the intricate balance between model's balanced accuracy and fairness. The framework's agnostic design adeptly accommodates both statistical and causal fairness notions, ensuring its adaptability across diverse FL contexts. We provide empirical evidence of our framework's efficacy through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets and comparisons with six baselines. The empirical results underscore the potential of our framework in improving the trade-off between fairness and balanced accuracy in FL applications.

FairTrade: Achieving Pareto-Optimal Trade-Offs between Balanced Accuracy and Fairness in Federated Learning

In few-shot image generation, directly training GAN models on just a handful of images faces the risk of overfitting. A popular solution is to transfer the models pretrained on large source domains to small target ones. In this work, we introduce WeditGAN, which realizes model transfer by editing the intermediate latent codes w in StyleGANs with learned constant offsets (delta w), discovering and constructing target latent spaces via simply relocating the distribution of source latent spaces. The established one-to-one mapping between latent spaces can naturally prevents mode collapse and overfitting. Besides, we also propose variants of WeditGAN to further enhance the relocation process by regularizing the direction or finetuning the intensity of delta w. Experiments on a collection of widely used source/target datasets manifest the capability of WeditGAN in generating realistic and diverse images, which is simple yet highly effective in the research area of few-shot image generation.

WeditGAN: Few-Shot Image Generation via Latent Space Relocation | VIDEO

Current 3D object detection methods for indoor scenes mainly follow the voting-and-grouping strategy to generate proposals. 
However, most methods utilize instance-agnostic groupings, such as ball query, leading to inconsistent semantic information and inaccurate regression of the proposals. 
To this end, we propose a novel superpoint grouping network for indoor anchor-free one-stage 3D object detection. 
Specifically, we first adopt an unsupervised manner to partition raw point clouds into superpoints, areas with semantic consistency and spatial similarity.
Then, we design a geometry-aware voting module that adapts to the centerness in anchor-free detection by constraining the spatial relationship between superpoints and object centers.
Next, we present a superpoint-based grouping module to explore the consistent representation within proposals. 
This module includes a superpoint attention layer to learn feature interaction between neighboring superpoints, and a superpoint-voxel fusion layer to propagate the superpoint-level information to the voxel level.
Finally, we employ effective multiple matching to capitalize on the dynamic receptive fields of proposals based on superpoints during the training.  
Experimental results demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet V2, SUN RGB-D, and S3DIS datasets in the indoor one-stage 3D object detection. 
Source code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/SPGroup3D.

SPGroup3D: Superpoint Grouping Network for Indoor 3D Object Detection | VIDEO

3D scene stylization refers to transform the appearance of a 3D scene to match a given style image, ensuring that images rendered from different viewpoints exhibit the same style as the given style image, while maintaining the 3D consistency of the stylized scene. Several existing methods have obtained impressive results in stylizing 3D scenes. However, the mod- els proposed by these methods need to be re-trained when applied to a new scene. In other words, their models are cou- pled with a specific scene and cannot adapt to arbitrary other scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel 3D scene stylization framework to transfer an arbitrary style to an ar- bitrary scene, without any style-related or scene-related re- training. Concretely, we first map the appearance of the 3D scene into a 2D style pattern space, which realizes complete disentanglement of the geometry and appearance of the 3D scene and makes our model be generalized to arbitrary 3D scenes. Then we stylize the appearance of the 3D scene in the 2D style pattern space via a prompt-based 2D stylization al- gorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework is superior to SOTA methods in both visual qual- ity and generalization.

PNeSM: Arbitrary 3D Scene Stylization via Prompt-Based Neural Style Mapping

Variational Inference (VI) has gained popularity as a flexible approximate inference scheme for computing posterior distributions in Bayesian models. Original VI methods use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to construct variational objectives. However, KL divergence has zero-forcing behavior and is completely agnostic to the metric of the underlying data distribution, resulting in bad approximations. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new variational objective by using Optimal Transport (OT) distance, which is a metric-aware divergence, to measure the difference between approximate posteriors and priors. The superior performance of OT distance enables us to learn more accurate approximations. We further enhance the objective by gradually including the OT term using a hyperparameter $\lambda$ for over-parameterized models. We develop a Variational inference method with OT (VOT) which presents a gradient-based black-box framework for solving Bayesian models, even when the density function of approximate distribution is not available. We provide the consistency analysis of approximate posteriors and demonstrate the practical effectiveness on Bayesian neural networks and variational autoencoders.

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