The sequential semantics of many concurrent data structures, such as stacks and queues, inevitably lead to memory contention in parallel environments, thus limiting scalability. Semantic relaxation has the potential to address this issue, increasing the parallelism at the expense of weakened semantics. Although prior research has shown that improved performance can be attained by relaxing concurrent data structure semantics, there is no one-size-fits-all relaxation that adequately addresses the varying needs of dynamic executions. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of elastic relaxation and consequently present the Lateral structure, which is an algorithmic component capable of supporting the design of elastically relaxed concurrent data structures. Using the Lateral , we design novel elastically relaxed, lock-free queues and stacks capable of reconfiguring relaxation during run time. We establish linearizability and define upper bounds for relaxation errors in our designs. Experimental evaluations show that our elastic designs hold up against state-of-the-art statically relaxed designs, while also swiftly managing trade-offs between relaxation and operational latency. We also outline how to use the Lateral to design elastically relaxed lock-free counters and deques.
Incremental processing allows interactive systems to respond based on partial inputs, which is a desirable property e.g. in dialogue agents. The currently popular Transformer architecture inherently processes sequences as a whole, abstracting away the notion of time. Recent work attempts to apply Transformers incrementally via restart-incrementality by repeatedly feeding, to an unchanged model, increasingly longer input prefixes to produce partial outputs. However, this approach is computationally costly and does not scale efficiently for long sequences. In parallel, we witness efforts to make Transformers more efficient, e.g. the Linear Transformer (LT) with a recurrence mechanism. In this work, we examine the feasibility of LT for incremental NLU in English. Our results show that the recurrent LT model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to the standard Transformer and LT with restart-incrementality, at the cost of part of the non-incremental (full sequence) quality. We show that the performance drop can be mitigated by training the model to wait for right context before committing to an output and that training with input prefixes is beneficial for delivering correct partial outputs.
For long document summarization, discourse structure is important to discern the key content of the text and the differences in importance level between sentences. Unfortunately, the integration of rhetorical structure theory (RST) into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for long document summarization remains unexplored. Therefore, this paper introduces RST-LoRA and proposes four RST-aware variants to explicitly incorporate RST into the LoRA model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the type and uncertainty of rhetorical relations can complementarily enhance the performance of LoRA in summarization tasks. Furthermore, the best-performing variant we introduced outperforms the vanilla LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning models, as confirmed by multiple automatic and human evaluations, and even surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods.
Neurosymbolic background knowledge and the expressivity required of its logic can break Machine Learning assumptions about data Independence and Identical Distribution. In this position paper we propose to analyze IID relaxation in a hierarchy of logics that fit different use case requirements. We discuss the benefits of exploiting known data dependencies and distribution constraints for Neurosymbolic use cases and argue that the expressivity required for this knowledge has implications for the design of underlying ML routines. This opens a new research agenda with general questions about Neurosymbolic background knowledge and the expressivity required of its logic.
Neural language models, particularly large-scale ones, have been consistently proven to be most effective in predicting brain neural activity across a range of studies. However, previous research overlooked the comparison of these models with psychologically plausible ones. Moreover, evaluations were reliant on limited, single-modality, and English cognitive datasets. To address these questions, we conducted an analysis comparing encoding performance of various neural language models and psychologically plausible models. Our study utilized extensive multi-modal cognitive datasets, examining bilingual word and discourse levels. Surprisingly, our findings revealed that psychologically plausible models outperformed neural language models across diverse contexts, encompassing different modalities such as fMRI and eye-tracking, and spanning languages from English to Chinese. Among psychologically plausible models, the one incorporating embodied information emerged as particularly exceptional. This model demonstrated superior performance at both word and discourse levels, exhibiting robust prediction of brain activation across numerous regions in both English and Chinese.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Graph neural networks generalize conventional neural networks to graph-structured data and have received widespread attention due to their impressive representation ability. In spite of the remarkable achievements, the performance of Euclidean models in graph-related learning is still bounded and limited by the representation ability of Euclidean geometry, especially for datasets with highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy. Recently, hyperbolic space has gained increasing popularity in processing graph data with tree-like structure and power-law distribution, owing to its exponential growth property. In this survey, we comprehensively revisit the technical details of the current hyperbolic graph neural networks, unifying them into a general framework and summarizing the variants of each component. More importantly, we present various HGNN-related applications. Last, we also identify several challenges, which potentially serve as guidelines for further flourishing the achievements of graph learning in hyperbolic spaces.
For deploying a deep learning model into production, it needs to be both accurate and compact to meet the latency and memory constraints. This usually results in a network that is deep (to ensure performance) and yet thin (to improve computational efficiency). In this paper, we propose an efficient method to train a deep thin network with a theoretic guarantee. Our method is motivated by model compression. It consists of three stages. In the first stage, we sufficiently widen the deep thin network and train it until convergence. In the second stage, we use this well-trained deep wide network to warm up (or initialize) the original deep thin network. This is achieved by letting the thin network imitate the immediate outputs of the wide network from layer to layer. In the last stage, we further fine tune this well initialized deep thin network. The theoretical guarantee is established by using mean field analysis, which shows the advantage of layerwise imitation over traditional training deep thin networks from scratch by backpropagation. We also conduct large-scale empirical experiments to validate our approach. By training with our method, ResNet50 can outperform ResNet101, and BERT_BASE can be comparable with BERT_LARGE, where both the latter models are trained via the standard training procedures as in the literature.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.