In recent years, the development of large pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT, significantly improved information extraction systems on various tasks, including relation classification. State-of-the-art systems are highly accurate on scientific benchmarks. A lack of explainability is currently a complicating factor in many real-world applications. Comprehensible systems are necessary to prevent biased, counterintuitive, or harmful decisions. We introduce semantic extents, a concept to analyze decision patterns for the relation classification task. Semantic extents are the most influential parts of texts concerning classification decisions. Our definition allows similar procedures to determine semantic extents for humans and models. We provide an annotation tool and a software framework to determine semantic extents for humans and models conveniently and reproducibly. Comparing both reveals that models tend to learn shortcut patterns from data. These patterns are hard to detect with current interpretability methods, such as input reductions. Our approach can help detect and eliminate spurious decision patterns during model development. Semantic extents can increase the reliability and security of natural language processing systems. Semantic extents are an essential step in enabling applications in critical areas like healthcare or finance. Moreover, our work opens new research directions for developing methods to explain deep learning models.
The era of huge data necessitates highly efficient machine learning algorithms. Many common machine learning algorithms, however, rely on computationally intensive subroutines that are prohibitively expensive on large datasets. Oftentimes, existing techniques subsample the data or use other methods to improve computational efficiency, at the expense of incurring some approximation error. This thesis demonstrates that it is often sufficient, instead, to substitute computationally intensive subroutines with a special kind of randomized counterparts that results in almost no degradation in quality.
We present a novel method for initializing layers of tensorized neural networks in a way that avoids the explosion of the parameters of the matrix it emulates. The method is intended for layers with a high number of nodes in which there is a connection to the input or output of all or most of the nodes. The core of this method is the use of the Frobenius norm of this layer in an iterative partial form, so that it has to be finite and within a certain range. This norm is efficient to compute, fully or partially for most cases of interest. We apply the method to different layers and check its performance. We create a Python function to run it on an arbitrary layer, available in a Jupyter Notebook in the i3BQuantum repository: //github.com/i3BQuantumTeam/Q4Real/blob/e07c827651ef16bcf74590ab965ea3985143f891/Quantum-Inspired%20Variational%20Methods/Normalization_process.ipynb
Modern recommender systems perform large-scale retrieval by first embedding queries and item candidates in the same unified space, followed by approximate nearest neighbor search to select top candidates given a query embedding. In this paper, we propose a novel generative retrieval approach, where the retrieval model autoregressively decodes the identifiers of the target candidates. To that end, we create semantically meaningful tuple of codewords to serve as a Semantic ID for each item. Given Semantic IDs for items in a user session, a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model is trained to predict the Semantic ID of the next item that the user will interact with. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Semantic ID-based generative model for recommendation tasks. We show that recommender systems trained with the proposed paradigm significantly outperform the current SOTA models on various datasets. In addition, we show that incorporating Semantic IDs into the sequence-to-sequence model enhances its ability to generalize, as evidenced by the improved retrieval performance observed for items with no prior interaction history.
Quantum based systems are a relatively new research area for that different modelling languages including process calculi are currently under development. Encodings are often used to compare process calculi. Quality criteria are used then to rule out trivial or meaningless encodings. In this new context of quantum based systems, it is necessary to analyse the applicability of these quality criteria and to potentially extend or adapt them. As a first step, we test the suitability of classical criteria for encodings between quantum based languages and discuss new criteria. Concretely, we present an encoding, from a language inspired by CQP into a language inspired by qCCS. We show that this encoding satisfies compositionality, name invariance (for channel and qubit names), operational correspondence, divergence reflection, success sensitiveness, and that it preserves the size of quantum registers. Then we show that there is no encoding from qCCS into CQP that is compositional, operationally corresponding, and success sensitive.
The diversity and Zipfian frequency distribution of natural language predicates in corpora leads to sparsity in Entailment Graphs (EGs) built by Open Relation Extraction (ORE). EGs are computationally efficient and explainable models of natural language inference, but as symbolic models, they fail if a novel premise or hypothesis vertex is missing at test-time. We present theory and methodology for overcoming such sparsity in symbolic models. First, we introduce a theory of optimal smoothing of EGs by constructing transitive chains. We then demonstrate an efficient, open-domain, and unsupervised smoothing method using an off-the-shelf Language Model to find approximations of missing premise predicates. This improves recall by 25.1 and 16.3 percentage points on two difficult directional entailment datasets, while raising average precision and maintaining model explainability. Further, in a QA task we show that EG smoothing is most useful for answering questions with lesser supporting text, where missing premise predicates are more costly. Finally, controlled experiments with WordNet confirm our theory and show that hypothesis smoothing is difficult, but possible in principle.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in question-answering tasks, their performance is limited when the questions require knowledge that is not included in the model's training data and can only be acquired through direct observation or interaction with the real world. Existing methods decompose reasoning tasks through the use of modules invoked sequentially, limiting their ability to answer deep reasoning tasks. We introduce a method, Recursion based extensible LLM (REBEL), which handles open-world, deep reasoning tasks by employing automated reasoning techniques like dynamic planning and forward-chaining strategies. REBEL allows LLMs to reason via recursive problem decomposition and utilization of external tools. The tools that REBEL uses are specified only by natural language description. We further demonstrate REBEL capabilities on a set of problems that require a deeply nested use of external tools in a compositional and conversational setting.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) with their impressive language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their performance may be suboptimal for long-tail or domain-specific tasks due to limited exposure to domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, the lack of transparency of most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, which can only be accessed via APIs, impedes further fine-tuning with custom data. Moreover, data privacy is a significant concern. To address these challenges, we propose the novel Parametric Knowledge Guiding (PKG) framework, which equips LLMs with a knowledge-guiding module to access relevant knowledge at runtime without altering the LLMs' parameters. Our PKG is based on open-source "white-box" small language models, allowing offline storage of any knowledge that LLMs require. We demonstrate that our PKG framework can enhance the performance of "black-box" LLMs on a range of long-tail and domain-specific downstream tasks requiring factual, tabular, medical, and multimodal knowledge.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.