Citation field learning is to segment a citation string into fields of interest such as author, title, and venue. Extracting such fields from citations is crucial for citation indexing, researcher profile analysis, etc. User-generated resources like academic homepages and Curriculum Vitae, provide rich citation field information. However, extracting fields from these resources is challenging due to inconsistent citation styles, incomplete sentence syntax, and insufficient training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm, CIFAL (citation field learning by anchor learning), to boost the citation field learning performance. CIFAL leverages the anchor learning, which is model-agnostic for any Pre-trained Language Model, to help capture citation patterns from the data of different citation styles. The experiments demonstrate that CIFAL outperforms state-of-the-art methods in citation field learning, achieving a 2.83% improvement in field-level F1-scores. Extensive analysis of the results further confirms the effectiveness of CIFAL quantitatively and qualitatively.
Graph-based deep learning methods have become popular tools to process collections of correlated time series. Differently from traditional multivariate forecasting methods, neural graph-based predictors take advantage of pairwise relationships by conditioning forecasts on a (possibly dynamic) graph spanning the time series collection. The conditioning can take the form of an architectural inductive bias on the neural forecasting architecture, resulting in a family of deep learning models called spatiotemporal graph neural networks. Such relational inductive biases enable the training of global forecasting models on large time-series collections, while at the same time localizing predictions w.r.t. each element in the set (i.e., graph nodes) by accounting for local correlations among them (i.e., graph edges). Indeed, recent theoretical and practical advances in graph neural networks and deep learning for time series forecasting make the adoption of such processing frameworks appealing and timely. However, most of the studies in the literature focus on proposing variations of existing neural architectures by taking advantage of modern deep learning practices, while foundational and methodological aspects have not been subject to systematic investigation. To fill the gap, this paper aims to introduce a comprehensive methodological framework that formalizes the forecasting problem and provides design principles for graph-based predictive models and methods to assess their performance. At the same time, together with an overview of the field, we provide design guidelines, recommendations, and best practices, as well as an in-depth discussion of open challenges and future research directions.
Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) were a great step towards extending deep learning to unstructured data such as graphs. But GCNs still need a constructed graph to work with. To solve this problem, classical graphs such as $k$-nearest neighbor are usually used to initialize the GCN. Although it is computationally efficient to construct $k$-nn graphs, the constructed graph might not be very useful for learning. In a $k$-nn graph, points are restricted to have a fixed number of edges, and all edges in the graph have equal weights. We present a new way to construct the graph and initialize the GCN. It is based on random projection forest (rpForest). rpForest enables us to assign varying weights on edges indicating varying importance, which enhanced the learning. The number of trees is a hyperparameter in rpForest. We performed spectral analysis to help us setting this parameter in the right range. In the experiments, initializing the GCN using rpForest provides better results compared to $k$-nn initialization.
As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense tasks. This work studies the impact of the reward signal that is provided to the agents when training for this task. Due to the nature of cybersecurity tasks, the reward signal is typically 1) in the form of penalties (e.g., when a compromise occurs), and 2) distributed sparsely across each defense episode. Such reward characteristics are atypical of classic reinforcement learning tasks where the agent is regularly rewarded for progress (cf. to getting occasionally penalized for failures). We investigate reward shaping techniques that could bridge this gap so as to enable agents to train more sample-efficiently and potentially converge to a better performance. We first show that deep reinforcement learning algorithms are sensitive to the magnitude of the penalties and their relative size. Then, we combine penalties with positive external rewards and study their effect compared to penalty-only training. Finally, we evaluate intrinsic curiosity as an internal positive reward mechanism and discuss why it might not be as advantageous for high-level network monitoring tasks.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) is an emerging field for learning on non-Euclidean data. Recently, there has been increased interest in designing GNN that scales to large graphs. Most existing methods use "graph sampling" or "layer-wise sampling" techniques to reduce training time. However, these methods still suffer from degrading performance and scalability problems when applying to graphs with billions of edges. This paper presents GBP, a scalable GNN that utilizes a localized bidirectional propagation process from both the feature vectors and the training/testing nodes. Theoretical analysis shows that GBP is the first method that achieves sub-linear time complexity for both the precomputation and the training phases. An extensive empirical study demonstrates that GBP achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly less training/testing time. Most notably, GBP can deliver superior performance on a graph with over 60 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges in less than half an hour on a single machine.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.
Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 87.6% to 93.2% and from 88.0% to 93.8% on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.