Deep learning has been widely used recently for sound event detection and classification. Its success is linked to the availability of sufficiently large datasets, possibly with corresponding annotations when supervised learning is considered. In bioacoustic applications, most tasks come with few labelled training data, because annotating long recordings is time consuming and costly. Therefore supervised learning is not the best suited approach to solve bioacoustic tasks. The bioacoustic community recasted the problem of sound event detection within the framework of few-shot learning, i.e. training a system with only few labeled examples. The few-shot bioacoustic sound event detection task in the DCASE challenge focuses on detecting events in long audio recordings given only five annotated examples for each class of interest. In this paper, we show that learning a rich feature extractor from scratch can be achieved by leveraging data augmentation using a supervised contrastive learning framework. We highlight the ability of this framework to transfer well for five-shot event detection on previously unseen classes in the training data. We obtain an F-score of 63.46\% on the validation set and 42.7\% on the test set, ranking second in the DCASE challenge. We provide an ablation study for the critical choices of data augmentation techniques as well as for the learning strategy applied on the training set.
Prompt-based learning has shown its effectiveness in few-shot text classification. One important factor in its success is a verbalizer, which translates output from a language model into a predicted class. Notably, the simplest and widely acknowledged verbalizer employs manual labels to represent the classes. However, manual selection does not guarantee the optimality of the selected words when conditioned on the chosen language model. Therefore, we propose Label-Aware Automatic Verbalizer (LAAV), effectively augmenting the manual labels to achieve better few-shot classification results. Specifically, we use the manual labels along with the conjunction "and" to induce the model to generate more effective words for the verbalizer. The experimental results on five datasets across five languages demonstrate that LAAV significantly outperforms existing verbalizers. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that LAAV suggests more relevant words compared to similar approaches, especially in mid-to-low resource languages.
Entity linking aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. One of the key challenges comes from insufficient labeled data for specific domains. Although dense retrievers have achieved excellent performance on several benchmarks, their performance decreases significantly when only a limited amount of in-domain labeled data is available. In such few-shot setting, we revisit the sparse retrieval method, and propose an ELECTRA-based keyword extractor to denoise the mention context and construct a better query expression. For training the extractor, we propose a distant supervision method to automatically generate training data based on overlapping tokens between mention contexts and entity descriptions. Experimental results on the ZESHEL dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin across all test domains, showing the effectiveness of keyword-enhanced sparse retrieval.
To imitate the ability of keeping learning of human, continual learning which can learn from a never-ending data stream has attracted more interests recently. In all settings, the online class incremental learning (OCIL), where incoming samples from data stream can be used only once, is more challenging and can be encountered more frequently in real world. Actually, all continual learning models face a stability-plasticity dilemma, where the stability means the ability to preserve old knowledge while the plasticity denotes the ability to incorporate new knowledge. Although replay-based methods have shown exceptional promise, most of them concentrate on the strategy for updating and retrieving memory to keep stability at the expense of plasticity. To strike a preferable trade-off between stability and plasticity, we propose an Adaptive Focus Shifting algorithm (AFS), which dynamically adjusts focus to ambiguous samples and non-target logits in model learning. Through a deep analysis of the task-recency bias caused by class imbalance, we propose a revised focal loss to mainly keep stability. \Rt{By utilizing a new weight function, the revised focal loss will pay more attention to current ambiguous samples, which are the potentially valuable samples to make model progress quickly.} To promote plasticity, we introduce a virtual knowledge distillation. By designing a virtual teacher, it assigns more attention to non-target classes, which can surmount overconfidence and encourage model to focus on inter-class information. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets for OCIL have shown the effectiveness of AFS. The code will be available at \url{//github.com/czjghost/AFS}.
State-space models are used to describe and analyse dynamical systems. They are ubiquitously used in many scientific fields such as signal processing, finance and ecology to name a few. Particle filters are popular inferential methods used for state-space methods. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA), an approximate Bayesian inference method, can also be used for this kind of models in case the transition distribution is Gaussian. We present a way to use this framework in order to approximate the particle filter's proposal distribution that incorporates information about the observations, parameters and the previous latent variables. Further, we demonstrate the performance of this proposal on data simulated from a Poisson state-space model used for count data. We also show how INLA can be used to estimate the parameters of certain state-space models (a task that is often challenging) that would be used for Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms.
Contrastive learning has been proven to be effective in learning better sentence representations. However, to train a contrastive learning model, large numbers of labeled sentences are required to construct positive and negative pairs explicitly, such as those in natural language inference (NLI) datasets. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficient high-quality labeled data can be both time-consuming and resource-intensive, leading researchers to focus on developing methods for learning unsupervised sentence representations. As there is no clear relationship between these unstructured randomly-sampled sentences, building positive and negative pairs over them is tricky and problematic. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose SemCSR, a semantic-aware contrastive sentence representation framework. By leveraging the generation and evaluation capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we can automatically construct a high-quality NLI-style corpus without any human annotation, and further incorporate the generated sentence pairs into learning a contrastive sentence representation model. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework for learning a better sentence representation with LLMs.
Deep learning has been the mainstream technique in natural language processing (NLP) area. However, the techniques require many labeled data and are less generalizable across domains. Meta-learning is an arising field in machine learning studying approaches to learn better learning algorithms. Approaches aim at improving algorithms in various aspects, including data efficiency and generalizability. Efficacy of approaches has been shown in many NLP tasks, but there is no systematic survey of these approaches in NLP, which hinders more researchers from joining the field. Our goal with this survey paper is to offer researchers pointers to relevant meta-learning works in NLP and attract more attention from the NLP community to drive future innovation. This paper first introduces the general concepts of meta-learning and the common approaches. Then we summarize task construction settings and application of meta-learning for various NLP problems and review the development of meta-learning in NLP community.
Spatio-temporal representation learning is critical for video self-supervised representation. Recent approaches mainly use contrastive learning and pretext tasks. However, these approaches learn representation by discriminating sampled instances via feature similarity in the latent space while ignoring the intermediate state of the learned representations, which limits the overall performance. In this work, taking into account the degree of similarity of sampled instances as the intermediate state, we propose a novel pretext task - spatio-temporal overlap rate (STOR) prediction. It stems from the observation that humans are capable of discriminating the overlap rates of videos in space and time. This task encourages the model to discriminate the STOR of two generated samples to learn the representations. Moreover, we employ a joint optimization combining pretext tasks with contrastive learning to further enhance the spatio-temporal representation learning. We also study the mutual influence of each component in the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed STOR task can favor both contrastive learning and pretext tasks. The joint optimization scheme can significantly improve the spatio-temporal representation in video understanding. The code is available at //github.com/Katou2/CSTP.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.