Correlated noise mechanisms such as DP Matrix Factorization (DP-MF) have proven to be effective alternatives to DP-SGD in large-epsilon few-epoch training regimes. Significant work has been done to find the best correlated noise strategies, and the current state-of-the-art approach is DP-BandMF, which optimally balances the benefits of privacy amplification and noise correlation. Despite it's utility advantages, severe scalability limitations prevent this mechanism from handling large-scale training scenarios where the number of training iterations may exceed $10^4$ and the number of model parameters may exceed $10^7$. In this work, we present techniques to scale up DP-BandMF along these two dimensions, significantly extending it's reach and enabling it to handle settings with virtually any number of model parameters and training iterations, with negligible utility degradation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have recently gained significant attention in the domain of Recommendation Systems (RS). These models, trained on massive amounts of data using self-supervised learning, have demonstrated remarkable success in learning universal representations and have the potential to enhance various aspects of recommendation systems by some effective transfer techniques such as fine-tuning and prompt tuning, and so on. The crucial aspect of harnessing the power of language models in enhancing recommendation quality is the utilization of their high-quality representations of textual features and their extensive coverage of external knowledge to establish correlations between items and users. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the existing LLM-based recommendation systems, this survey presents a taxonomy that categorizes these models into two major paradigms, respectively Discriminative LLM for Recommendation (DLLM4Rec) and Generative LLM for Recommendation (GLLM4Rec), with the latter being systematically sorted out for the first time. Furthermore, we systematically review and analyze existing LLM-based recommendation systems within each paradigm, providing insights into their methodologies, techniques, and performance. Additionally, we identify key challenges and several valuable findings to provide researchers and practitioners with inspiration.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Deep Learning algorithms have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for Image Classification and have been used even in security-critical applications, such as biometric recognition systems and self-driving cars. However, recent works have shown those algorithms, which can even surpass the human capabilities, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In Computer Vision, adversarial examples are images containing subtle perturbations generated by malicious optimization algorithms in order to fool classifiers. As an attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities, numerous countermeasures have been constantly proposed in literature. Nevertheless, devising an efficient defense mechanism has proven to be a difficult task, since many approaches have already shown to be ineffective to adaptive attackers. Thus, this self-containing paper aims to provide all readerships with a review of the latest research progress on Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification, however with a defender's perspective. Here, novel taxonomies for categorizing adversarial attacks and defenses are introduced and discussions about the existence of adversarial examples are provided. Further, in contrast to exisiting surveys, it is also given relevant guidance that should be taken into consideration by researchers when devising and evaluating defenses. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, it is discussed some promising paths for future research.
A sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit of human languages. Sememe knowledge bases (KBs), which contain words annotated with sememes, have been successfully applied to many NLP tasks. However, existing sememe KBs are built on only a few languages, which hinders their widespread utilization. To address the issue, we propose to build a unified sememe KB for multiple languages based on BabelNet, a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. We first build a dataset serving as the seed of the multilingual sememe KB. It manually annotates sememes for over $15$ thousand synsets (the entries of BabelNet). Then, we present a novel task of automatic sememe prediction for synsets, aiming to expand the seed dataset into a usable KB. We also propose two simple and effective models, which exploit different information of synsets. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore important factors and difficulties in the task. All the source code and data of this work can be obtained on //github.com/thunlp/BabelNet-Sememe-Prediction.
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs) can add value, in addition to the textual content, by providing background knowledge that may be critical for a task. However, the proposed models do not fully exploit the information in the usually large and noisy KGs, and it is not clear how it can be effectively encoded to be useful for entailment. We present an approach that complements text-based entailment models with information from KGs by (1) using Personalized PageR- ank to generate contextual subgraphs with reduced noise and (2) encoding these subgraphs using graph convolutional networks to capture KG structure. Our technique extends the capability of text models exploiting structural and semantic information found in KGs. We evaluate our approach on multiple textual entailment datasets and show that the use of external knowledge helps improve prediction accuracy. This is particularly evident in the challenging BreakingNLI dataset, where we see an absolute improvement of 5-20% over multiple text-based entailment models.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.