In recent years, the introduction of self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL) has demonstrated remarkable improvements in representation learning across various domains, including natural language processing and computer vision. By leveraging the inherent benefits of self-supervision, SSCL enables the pre-training of representation models using vast amounts of unlabeled data. Despite these advances, there remains a significant gap in understanding the impact of different SSCL strategies on time series forecasting performance, as well as the specific benefits that SSCL can bring. This paper aims to address these gaps by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of various training variables, including different SSCL algorithms, learning strategies, model architectures, and their interplay. Additionally, to gain deeper insights into the improvements brought about by SSCL in the context of time-series forecasting, a qualitative analysis of the empirical receptive field is performed. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the end-to-end training of a Transformer model using the Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss and SSCL emerges as the most effective approach in time series forecasting. Notably, the incorporation of the contrastive objective enables the model to prioritize more pertinent information for forecasting, such as scale and periodic relationships. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the benefits of SSCL in time series forecasting and provide valuable insights for future research in this area.
As large language models, such as GPT, continue to advance the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP), the question arises: does the problem of correction still persist? This paper investigates the role of correction in the context of large language models by conducting two experiments. The first experiment focuses on correction as a standalone task, employing few-shot learning techniques with GPT-like models for error correction. The second experiment explores the notion of correction as a preparatory task for other NLP tasks, examining whether large language models can tolerate and perform adequately on texts containing certain levels of noise or errors. By addressing these experiments, we aim to shed light on the significance of correction in the era of large language models and its implications for various NLP applications.
Self-supervised learning in computer vision aims to leverage the inherent structure and relationships within data to learn meaningful representations without explicit human annotation, enabling a holistic understanding of visual scenes. Robustness in vision machine learning ensures reliable and consistent performance, enhancing generalization, adaptability, and resistance to noise, variations, and adversarial attacks. Self-supervised paradigms, namely contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, mutual information maximization, and clustering, have been considered to have shown advances in invariant learning representations. This work investigates the robustness of learned representations of self-supervised learning approaches focusing on distribution shifts and image corruptions in computer vision. Detailed experiments have been conducted to study the robustness of self-supervised learning methods on distribution shifts and image corruptions. The empirical analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between the performance of learned representations within self-supervised paradigms and the severity of distribution shifts and corruptions. Notably, higher levels of shifts and corruptions are found to significantly diminish the robustness of the learned representations. These findings highlight the critical impact of distribution shifts and image corruptions on the performance and resilience of self-supervised learning methods, emphasizing the need for effective strategies to mitigate their adverse effects. The study strongly advocates for future research in the field of self-supervised representation learning to prioritize the key aspects of safety and robustness in order to ensure practical applicability. The source code and results are available on GitHub.
Large Language Models (LLMs) could enhance access to the legal system. However, empirical research on their effectiveness in conducting legal tasks is scant. We study securities cases involving cryptocurrencies as one of numerous contexts where AI could support the legal process, studying LLMs' legal reasoning and drafting capabilities. We examine whether a) an LLM can accurately determine which laws are potentially being violated from a fact pattern, and b) whether there is a difference in juror decision-making based on complaints written by a lawyer compared to an LLM. We feed fact patterns from real-life cases to GPT-3.5 and evaluate its ability to determine correct potential violations from the scenario and exclude spurious violations. Second, we had mock jurors assess complaints written by the LLM and lawyers. GPT-3.5's legal reasoning skills proved weak, though we expect improvement in future models, particularly given the violations it suggested tended to be correct (it merely missed additional, correct violations). GPT-3.5 performed better at legal drafting, and jurors' decisions were not statistically significantly associated with the author of the document upon which they based their decisions. Because LLMs cannot satisfactorily conduct legal reasoning tasks, they would be unable to replace lawyers at this stage. However, their drafting skills (though, perhaps, still inferior to lawyers), could provide access to justice for more individuals by reducing the cost of legal services. Our research is the first to systematically study LLMs' legal drafting and reasoning capabilities in litigation, as well as in securities law and cryptocurrency-related misconduct.
Feature attribution methods are popular in interpretable machine learning. These methods compute the attribution of each input feature to represent its importance, but there is no consensus on the definition of "attribution", leading to many competing methods with little systematic evaluation, complicated in particular by the lack of ground truth attribution. To address this, we propose a dataset modification procedure to induce such ground truth. Using this procedure, we evaluate three common methods: saliency maps, rationales, and attentions. We identify several deficiencies and add new perspectives to the growing body of evidence questioning the correctness and reliability of these methods applied on datasets in the wild. We further discuss possible avenues for remedy and recommend new attribution methods to be tested against ground truth before deployment. The code is available at \url{//github.com/YilunZhou/feature-attribution-evaluation}.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
Deep learning methods are achieving ever-increasing performance on many artificial intelligence tasks. A major limitation of deep models is that they are not amenable to interpretability. This limitation can be circumvented by developing post hoc techniques to explain the predictions, giving rise to the area of explainability. Recently, explainability of deep models on images and texts has achieved significant progress. In the area of graph data, graph neural networks (GNNs) and their explainability are experiencing rapid developments. However, there is neither a unified treatment of GNN explainability methods, nor a standard benchmark and testbed for evaluations. In this survey, we provide a unified and taxonomic view of current GNN explainability methods. Our unified and taxonomic treatments of this subject shed lights on the commonalities and differences of existing methods and set the stage for further methodological developments. To facilitate evaluations, we generate a set of benchmark graph datasets specifically for GNN explainability. We summarize current datasets and metrics for evaluating GNN explainability. Altogether, this work provides a unified methodological treatment of GNN explainability and a standardized testbed for evaluations.
Catastrophic forgetting refers to the tendency that a neural network "forgets" the previous learned knowledge upon learning new tasks. Prior methods have been focused on overcoming this problem on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), where the input samples like images lie in a grid domain, but have largely overlooked graph neural networks (GNNs) that handle non-grid data. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme dedicated to overcoming catastrophic forgetting problem and hence strengthen continual learning in GNNs. At the heart of our approach is a generic module, termed as topology-aware weight preserving~(TWP), applicable to arbitrary form of GNNs in a plug-and-play fashion. Unlike the main stream of CNN-based continual learning methods that rely on solely slowing down the updates of parameters important to the downstream task, TWP explicitly explores the local structures of the input graph, and attempts to stabilize the parameters playing pivotal roles in the topological aggregation. We evaluate TWP on different GNN backbones over several datasets, and demonstrate that it yields performances superior to the state of the art. Code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/hhliu79/TWP}.
The LSTM network was proposed to overcome the difficulty in learning long-term dependence, and has made significant advancements in applications. With its success and drawbacks in mind, this paper raises the question - do RNN and LSTM have long memory? We answer it partially by proving that RNN and LSTM do not have long memory from a statistical perspective. A new definition for long memory networks is further introduced, and it requires the model weights to decay at a polynomial rate. To verify our theory, we convert RNN and LSTM into long memory networks by making a minimal modification, and their superiority is illustrated in modeling long-term dependence of various datasets.
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. As a state-of-the-art language model pre-training model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved amazing results in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to investigate different fine-tuning methods of BERT on text classification task and provide a general solution for BERT fine-tuning. Finally, the proposed solution obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.