This work presents StrAE: a Structured Autoencoder framework that through strict adherence to explicit structure, and use of a novel contrastive objective over tree-structured representations, enables effective learning of multi-level representations. Through comparison over different forms of structure, we verify that our results are directly attributable to the informativeness of the structure provided as input, and show that this is not the case for existing tree models. We then further extend StrAE to allow the model to define its own compositions using a simple localised-merge algorithm. This variant, called Self-StrAE, outperforms baselines that don't involve explicit hierarchical compositions, and is comparable to models given informative structure (e.g. constituency parses). Our experiments are conducted in a data-constrained (circa 10M tokens) setting to help tease apart the contribution of the inductive bias to effective learning. However, we find that this framework can be robust to scale, and when extended to a much larger dataset (circa 100M tokens), our 430 parameter model performs comparably to a 6-layer RoBERTa many orders of magnitude larger in size. Our findings support the utility of incorporating explicit composition as an inductive bias for effective representation learning.
The aim of dataset distillation is to encode the rich features of an original dataset into a tiny dataset. It is a promising approach to accelerate neural network training and related studies. Different approaches have been proposed to improve the informativeness and generalization performance of distilled images. However, no work has comprehensively analyzed this technique from a security perspective and there is a lack of systematic understanding of potential risks. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current state-of-the-art dataset distillation methods. We successfully use membership inference attacks to show that privacy risks still remain. Our work also demonstrates that dataset distillation can cause varying degrees of impact on model robustness and amplify model unfairness across classes when making predictions. This work offers a large-scale benchmarking framework for dataset distillation evaluation.
Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.
Natural languages are powerful tools wielded by human beings to communicate information. Among their desirable properties, compositionality has been the main focus in the context of referential games and variants, as it promises to enable greater systematicity to the agents which would wield it. The concept of disentanglement has been shown to be of paramount importance to learned representations that generalise well in deep learning, and is thought to be a necessary condition to enable systematicity. Thus, this paper investigates how do compositionality at the level of the emerging languages, disentanglement at the level of the learned representations, and systematicity relate to each other in the context of visual referential games. Firstly, we find that visual referential games that are based on the Obverter architecture outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised learning approach in terms of many major disentanglement metrics. Secondly, we expand the previously proposed Positional Disentanglement (PosDis) metric for compositionality to (re-)incorporate some concerns pertaining to informativeness and completeness features found in the Mutual Information Gap (MIG) disentanglement metric it stems from. This extension allows for further discrimination between the different kind of compositional languages that emerge in the context of Obverter-based referential games, in a way that neither the referential game accuracy nor previous metrics were able to capture. Finally we investigate whether the resulting (emergent) systematicity, as measured by zero-shot compositional learning tests, correlates with any of the disentanglement and compositionality metrics proposed so far. Throughout the training process, statically significant correlation coefficients can be found both positive and negative depending on the moment of the measure.
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decisionmaking process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements. In this paper, we propose a neat and effective Explainable Collaborative Filtering (ECF) model that leverages interpretable cluster learning to achieve the two most demanding objectives: (1) Precise - the model should not compromise accuracy in the pursuit of explainability; and (2) Self-explainable - the model's explanations should truly reflect its decision-making process, not generated from post-hoc methods. The core of ECF is mining taste clusters from user-item interactions and item profiles.We map each user and item to a sparse set of taste clusters, and taste clusters are distinguished by a few representative tags. The user-item preference, users/items' cluster affiliations, and the generation of taste clusters are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a forest mechanism to ensure the model's accuracy, explainability, and diversity. To comprehensively evaluate the explainability quality of taste clusters, we design several quantitative metrics, including in-cluster item coverage, tag utilization, silhouette, and informativeness. Our model's effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets.
Text-to-SQL is a task that converts a natural language question into a structured query language (SQL) to retrieve information from a database. Large language models (LLMs) work well in natural language generation tasks, but they are not specifically pre-trained to understand the syntax and semantics of SQL commands. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based framework for Text-to-SQL which retrieves helpful demonstration examples to prompt LLMs. However, questions with different database schemes can vary widely, even if the intentions behind them are similar and the corresponding SQL queries exhibit similarities. Consequently, it becomes crucial to identify the appropriate SQL demonstrations that align with our requirements. We design a de-semanticization mechanism that extracts question skeletons, allowing us to retrieve similar examples based on their structural similarity. We also model the relationships between question tokens and database schema items (i.e., tables and columns) to filter out scheme-related information. Our framework adapts the range of the database schema in prompts to balance length and valuable information. A fallback mechanism allows for a more detailed schema to be provided if the generated SQL query fails. Ours outperforms state-of-the-art models and demonstrates strong generalization ability on three cross-domain Text-to-SQL benchmarks.
Noise has always been nonnegligible trouble in object detection by creating confusion in model reasoning, thereby reducing the informativeness of the data. It can lead to inaccurate recognition due to the shift in the observed pattern, that requires a robust generalization of the models. To implement a general vision model, we need to develop deep learning models that can adaptively select valid information from multi-modal data. This is mainly based on two reasons. Multi-modal learning can break through the inherent defects of single-modal data, and adaptive information selection can reduce chaos in multi-modal data. To tackle this problem, we propose a universal uncertainty-aware multi-modal fusion model. It adopts a multi-pipeline loosely coupled architecture to combine the features and results from point clouds and images. To quantify the correlation in multi-modal information, we model the uncertainty, as the inverse of data information, in different modalities and embed it in the bounding box generation. In this way, our model reduces the randomness in fusion and generates reliable output. Moreover, we conducted a completed investigation on the KITTI 2D object detection dataset and its derived dirty data. Our fusion model is proven to resist severe noise interference like Gaussian, motion blur, and frost, with only slight degradation. The experiment results demonstrate the benefits of our adaptive fusion. Our analysis on the robustness of multi-modal fusion will provide further insights for future research.
Multi-step reasoning ability is fundamental to many natural language tasks, yet it is unclear what constitutes a good reasoning chain and how to evaluate them. Most existing methods focus solely on whether the reasoning chain leads to the correct conclusion, but this answer-oriented view may confound reasoning quality with other spurious shortcuts to predict the answer. To bridge this gap, we evaluate reasoning chains by viewing them as informal proofs that derive the final answer. Specifically, we propose ReCEval (Reasoning Chain Evaluation), a framework that evaluates reasoning chains via two key properties: (1) correctness, i.e., each step makes a valid inference based on information contained within the step, preceding steps, and input context, and (2) informativeness, i.e., each step provides new information that is helpful towards deriving the generated answer. We evaluate these properties by developing metrics using natural language inference models and V-Information. On multiple datasets, we show that ReCEval effectively identifies various error types and yields notable improvements compared to prior methods. We analyze the impact of step boundaries, and previous steps on evaluating correctness and demonstrate that our informativeness metric captures the expected flow of information in high-quality reasoning chains. Finally, we show that scoring reasoning chains based on ReCEval improves downstream task performance. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/archiki/ReCEval
EvalRS aims to bring together practitioners from industry and academia to foster a debate on rounded evaluation of recommender systems, with a focus on real-world impact across a multitude of deployment scenarios. Recommender systems are often evaluated only through accuracy metrics, which fall short of fully characterizing their generalization capabilities and miss important aspects, such as fairness, bias, usefulness, informativeness. This workshop builds on the success of last year's workshop at CIKM, but with a broader scope and an interactive format.
Dialogue Acts (DAs) can be used to explain what expert tutors do and what students know during the tutoring process. Most empirical studies adopt the random sampling method to obtain sentence samples for manual annotation of DAs, which are then used to train DA classifiers. However, these studies have paid little attention to sample informativeness, which can reflect the information quantity of the selected samples and inform the extent to which a classifier can learn patterns. Notably, the informativeness level may vary among the samples and the classifier might only need a small amount of low informative samples to learn the patterns. Random sampling may overlook sample informativeness, which consumes human labelling costs and contributes less to training the classifiers. As an alternative, researchers suggest employing statistical sampling methods of Active Learning (AL) to identify the informative samples for training the classifiers. However, the use of AL methods in educational DA classification tasks is under-explored. In this paper, we examine the informativeness of annotated sentence samples. Then, the study investigates how the AL methods can select informative samples to support DA classifiers in the AL sampling process. The results reveal that most annotated sentences present low informativeness in the training dataset and the patterns of these sentences can be easily captured by the DA classifier. We also demonstrate how AL methods can reduce the cost of manual annotation in the AL sampling process.
Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure.Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.
Text summarization has a wide range of applications in many scenarios. The evaluation of the quality of the generated text is a complex problem. A big challenge to language evaluation is that there is a clear divergence between existing metrics and human evaluation. A document summary's quality can be assessed by human annotators on various criteria, both objective ones like grammar and correctness, and subjective ones like informativeness, succinctness, and appeal. Most of the automatic evaluation methods like BLUE/ROUGE may be not able to adequately capture the above dimensions. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation framework based on LLMs, which provides a comprehensive evaluation framework by comparing generated text and reference text from both objective and subjective aspects. First, we propose to model objective and subjective dimensions of generated text based on roleplayers prompting mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a context-based prompting mechanism that is able to generate dynamic roleplayer profiles based on input context. Finally, we design a multi-roleplayer prompting technology based on batch prompting and integrate multiple outputs into the final evaluation results. Experimental results on three real datasets for summarization show that our model is highly competitive and has a very high consistency with human annotators.
Object detection is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of computer vision tasks, which has been broadly utilized in pose estimation, object tracking and instance segmentation models. To obtain training data for object detection model efficiently, many datasets opt to obtain their unannotated data in video format and the annotator needs to draw a bounding box around each object in the images. Annotating every frame from a video is costly and inefficient since many frames contain very similar information for the model to learn from. How to select the most informative frames from a video to annotate has become a highly practical task to solve but attracted little attention in research. In this paper, we proposed a novel active learning algorithm for object detection models to tackle this problem. In the proposed active learning algorithm, both classification and localization informativeness of unlabelled data are measured and aggregated. Utilizing the temporal information from video frames, two novel localization informativeness measurements are proposed. Furthermore, a weight curve is proposed to avoid querying adjacent frames. Proposed active learning algorithm with multiple configurations was evaluated on the MuPoTS dataset and FootballPD dataset.
Optimizing accuracy and performance while eliminating hallucinations of open-domain conversational large language models (LLMs) is an open research challenge. A particularly promising direction is to augment and ground LLMs with information from structured sources. This paper introduces Conversational Tables (cTBLS), a three-step architecture to retrieve and generate dialogue responses grounded on retrieved tabular information. cTBLS uses Transformer encoder embeddings for Dense Table Retrieval and obtains up to 125% relative improvement over the retriever in the previous state-of-the-art system on the HyrbiDialogue dataset. cTBLS then uses a shared process between encoder and decoder models to perform a coarse+fine tabular knowledge (e.g., cell) ranking combined with a GPT-3.5 LLM response generator to yield a 2x relative improvement in ROUGE scores. Finally, human evaluators prefer cTBLs +80% of the time (coherency, fluency) and judge informativeness to be 4x better than the previous state-of-the-art.
State abstraction is an effective technique for planning in robotics environments with continuous states and actions, long task horizons, and sparse feedback. In object-oriented environments, predicates are a particularly useful form of state abstraction because of their compatibility with symbolic planners and their capacity for relational generalization. However, to plan with predicates, the agent must be able to interpret them in continuous environment states (i.e., ground the symbols). Manually programming predicate interpretations can be difficult, so we would instead like to learn them from data. We propose an embodied active learning paradigm where the agent learns predicate interpretations through online interaction with an expert. For example, after taking actions in a block stacking environment, the agent may ask the expert: "Is On(block1, block2) true?" From this experience, the agent learns to plan: it learns neural predicate interpretations, symbolic planning operators, and neural samplers that can be used for bilevel planning. During exploration, the agent plans to learn: it uses its current models to select actions towards generating informative expert queries. We learn predicate interpretations as ensembles of neural networks and use their entropy to measure the informativeness of potential queries. We evaluate this approach in three robotic environments and find that it consistently outperforms six baselines while exhibiting sample efficiency in two key metrics: number of environment interactions, and number of queries to the expert. Code: https://tinyurl.com/active-predicates
In this paper, we conduct the first study on spurious correlations for open-domain response generation models based on a corpus CGDIALOG curated in our work. The cur rent models indeed suffer from spurious correlations and have a tendency of generating irrelevant and generic responses. Inspired by causal discovery algorithms, we propose a novel model-agnostic method for training and inference of response generation model using a conditional independence classifier. The classifier is trained by a constrained self-training method, coined CONSTRAIN, to overcome data scarcity. The experimental results based on both human and automatic evaluation show that our method significantly outperforms the competitive baselines in terms of relevance, informativeness, and fluency.
Uncertainty estimation is a key factor that makes deep learning reliable in practical applications. Recently proposed evidential neural networks explicitly account for different uncertainties by treating the network's outputs as evidence to parameterize the Dirichlet distribution, and achieve impressive performance in uncertainty estimation. However, for high data uncertainty samples but annotated with the one-hot label, the evidence-learning process for those mislabeled classes is over-penalized and remains hindered. To address this problem, we propose a novel method, Fisher Information-based Evidential Deep Learning ($\mathcal{I}$-EDL). In particular, we introduce Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to measure the informativeness of evidence carried by each sample, according to which we can dynamically reweight the objective loss terms to make the network more focused on the representation learning of uncertain classes. The generalization ability of our network is further improved by optimizing the PAC-Bayesian bound. As demonstrated empirically, our proposed method consistently outperforms traditional EDL-related algorithms in multiple uncertainty estimation tasks, especially in the more challenging few-shot classification settings.
Explainable recommendation has attracted much attention from the industry and academic communities. It has shown great potential for improving the recommendation persuasiveness, informativeness and user satisfaction. Despite a lot of promising explainable recommender models have been proposed in the past few years, the evaluation strategies of these models suffer from several limitations. For example, the explanation ground truths are not labeled by real users, the explanations are mostly evaluated based on only one aspect and the evaluation strategies can be hard to unify. To alleviate the above problems, we propose to build an explainable recommendation dataset with multi-aspect real user labeled ground truths. In specific, we firstly develop a video recommendation platform, where a series of questions around the recommendation explainability are carefully designed. Then, we recruit about 3000 users with different backgrounds to use the system, and collect their behaviors and feedback to our questions. In this paper, we detail the construction process of our dataset and also provide extensive analysis on its characteristics. In addition, we develop a library, where ten well-known explainable recommender models are implemented in a unified framework. Based on this library, we build several benchmarks for different explainable recommendation tasks. At last, we present many new opportunities brought by our dataset, which are expected to shed some new lights to the explainable recommendation field. Our dataset, library and the related documents have been released at https://reasoner2023.github.io/.
Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary in a different target language. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, ChatGPT and GPT-4, has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. However, it is not yet known the performance of LLMs on CLS. In this report, we empirically use various prompts to guide LLMs to perform zero-shot CLS from different paradigms (i.e., end-to-end and pipeline), and provide a preliminary evaluation on the generated summaries. We find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 originally prefer to produce lengthy summaries with detailed information. These two LLMs can further balance informativeness and conciseness with the help of an interactive prompt, significantly improving their CLS performance. Experimental results on three widely-used CLS datasets show that GPT-4 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot CLS performance, and performs competitively compared with the fine-tuned mBART-50. Moreover, we also find some multi-lingual and bilingual LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, ChatGLM-6B, Vicuna-13B and ChatYuan) have limited zero-shot CLS ability. Due to the composite nature of CLS, which requires models to perform summarization and translation simultaneously, accomplishing this task in a zero-shot manner is even a challenge for LLMs. Therefore, we sincerely hope and recommend future LLM research could use CLS as a testbed.
Additionally, the strong dependency among in-context examples makes it an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and enumerating all permutations is infeasible. Hence we propose LENS, a fiLter-thEN-Search method to tackle this challenge in two stages: First we filter the dataset to obtain informative in-context examples individually. Specifically, we propose a novel metric, InfoScore, to evaluate the example's in-context informativeness based on the language model's feedback, and further propose a progressive filtering process to filter out uninformative examples. Then we propose diversity-guided example search which iteratively refines and evaluates the selected example permutations, to find examples that fully depict the task. The experimental results show that LENS significantly outperforms a wide range of baselines.