Adverse Event (ADE) extraction is one of the core tasks in digital pharmacovigilance, especially when applied to informal texts. This task has been addressed by the Natural Language Processing community using large pre-trained language models, such as BERT. Despite the great number of Transformer-based architectures used in the literature, it is unclear which of them has better performances and why. Therefore, in this paper we perform an extensive evaluation and analysis of 19 Transformer-based models for ADE extraction on informal texts. We compare the performance of all the considered models on two datasets with increasing levels of informality (forums posts and tweets). We also combine the purely Transformer-based models with two commonly-used additional processing layers (CRF and LSTM), and analyze their effect on the models performance. Furthermore, we use a well-established feature importance technique (SHAP) to correlate the performance of the models with a set of features that describe them: model category (AutoEncoding, AutoRegressive, Text-to-Text), pretraining domain, training from scratch, and model size in number of parameters. At the end of our analyses, we identify a list of take-home messages that can be derived from the experimental data.
Neural ranking models (NRMs) have undergone significant development and have become integral components of information retrieval (IR) systems. Unfortunately, recent research has unveiled the vulnerability of NRMs to adversarial document manipulations, potentially exploited by malicious search engine optimization practitioners. While progress in adversarial attack strategies aids in identifying the potential weaknesses of NRMs before their deployment, the defensive measures against such attacks, like the detection of adversarial documents, remain inadequately explored. To mitigate this gap, this paper establishes a benchmark dataset to facilitate the investigation of adversarial ranking defense and introduces two types of detection tasks for adversarial documents. A comprehensive investigation of the performance of several detection baselines is conducted, which involve examining the spamicity, perplexity, and linguistic acceptability, and utilizing supervised classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that a supervised classifier can effectively mitigate known attacks, but it performs poorly against unseen attacks. Furthermore, such classifier should avoid using query text to prevent learning the classification on relevance, as it might lead to the inadvertent discarding of relevant documents.
Intent Detection is one of the tasks of the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) unit in task-oriented dialogue systems. Out of Scope (OOS) and Out of Domain (OOD) inputs may run these systems into a problem. On the other side, a labeled dataset is needed to train a model for Intent Detection in task-oriented dialogue systems. The creation of a labeled dataset is time-consuming and needs human resources. The purpose of this article is to address mentioned problems. The task of identifying OOD/OOS inputs is named OOD/OOS Intent Detection. Also, discovering new intents and pseudo-labeling of OOD inputs is well known by Intent Discovery. In OOD intent detection part, we make use of a Variational Autoencoder to distinguish between known and unknown intents independent of input data distribution. After that, an unsupervised clustering method is used to discover different unknown intents underlying OOD/OOS inputs. We also apply a non-linear dimensionality reduction on OOD/OOS representations to make distances between representations more meaning full for clustering. Our results show that the proposed model for both OOD/OOS Intent Detection and Intent Discovery achieves great results and passes baselines in English and Persian languages.
Defining test oracles is crucial and central to test development, but manual construction of oracles is expensive. While recent neural-based automated test oracle generation techniques have shown promise, their real-world effectiveness remains a compelling question requiring further exploration and understanding. This paper investigates the effectiveness of TOGA, a recently developed neural-based method for automatic test oracle generation by Dinella et al. TOGA utilizes EvoSuite-generated test inputs and generates both exception and assertion oracles. In a Defects4j study, TOGA outperformed specification, search, and neural-based techniques, detecting 57 bugs, including 30 unique bugs not detected by other methods. To gain a deeper understanding of its applicability in real-world settings, we conducted a series of external, extended, and conceptual replication studies of TOGA. In a large-scale study involving 25 real-world Java systems, 223.5K test cases, and 51K injected faults, we evaluate TOGA's ability to improve fault-detection effectiveness relative to the state-of-the-practice and the state-of-the-art. We find that TOGA misclassifies the type of oracle needed 24% of the time and that when it classifies correctly around 62% of the time it is not confident enough to generate any assertion oracle. When it does generate an assertion oracle, more than 47% of them are false positives, and the true positive assertions only increase fault detection by 0.3% relative to prior work. These findings expose limitations of the state-of-the-art neural-based oracle generation technique, provide valuable insights for improvement, and offer lessons for evaluating future automated oracle generation methods.
Existing approaches for semi-supervised object detection assume a fixed set of classes present in training and unlabeled datasets, i.e., in-distribution (ID) data. The performance of these techniques significantly degrades when these techniques are deployed in the open-world, due to the fact that the unlabeled and test data may contain objects that were not seen during training, i.e., out-of-distribution (OOD) data. The two key questions that we explore in this paper are: can we detect these OOD samples and if so, can we learn from them? With these considerations in mind, we propose the Open World Semi-supervised Detection framework (OWSSD) that effectively detects OOD data along with a semi-supervised learning pipeline that learns from both ID and OOD data. We introduce an ensemble based OOD detector consisting of lightweight auto-encoder networks trained only on ID data. Through extensive evalulation, we demonstrate that our method performs competitively against state-of-the-art OOD detection algorithms and also significantly boosts the semi-supervised learning performance in open-world scenarios.
Fibre orientation distribution (FOD) reconstruction using deep learning has the potential to produce accurate FODs from a reduced number of diffusion-weighted images (DWIs), decreasing total imaging time. Diffusion acquisition invariant representations of the DWI signals are typically used as input to these methods to ensure that they can be applied flexibly to data with different b-vectors and b-values; however, this means the network cannot condition its output directly on the DWI signal. In this work, we propose a spherical deconvolution network, a model-driven deep learning FOD reconstruction architecture, that ensures intermediate and output FODs produced by the network are consistent with the input DWI signals. Furthermore, we implement a fixel classification penalty within our loss function, encouraging the network to produce FODs that can subsequently be segmented into the correct number of fixels and improve downstream fixel-based analysis. Our results show that the model-based deep learning architecture achieves competitive performance compared to a state-of-the-art FOD super-resolution network, FOD-Net. Moreover, we show that the fixel classification penalty can be tuned to offer improved performance with respect to metrics that rely on accurately segmented of FODs. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/Jbartlett6/SDNet .
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Contextual word representations derived from pre-trained bidirectional language models (biLMs) have recently been shown to provide significant improvements to the state of the art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, many questions remain as to how and why these models are so effective. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study of how the choice of neural architecture (e.g. LSTM, CNN, or self attention) influences both end task accuracy and qualitative properties of the representations that are learned. We show there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, but all architectures learn high quality contextual representations that outperform word embeddings for four challenging NLP tasks. Additionally, all architectures learn representations that vary with network depth, from exclusively morphological based at the word embedding layer through local syntax based in the lower contextual layers to longer range semantics such coreference at the upper layers. Together, these results suggest that unsupervised biLMs, independent of architecture, are learning much more about the structure of language than previously appreciated.