Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), as parametric-based eager learners, have become the de-facto choice for current paradigms of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In contrast, k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) classifiers, as the lazy learning paradigm, tend to mitigate over-fitting and isolated noise. In this paper, we revisit kNN classifiers for augmenting the PLMs-based classifiers. From the methodological level, we propose to adopt kNN with textual representations of PLMs in two steps: (1) Utilize kNN as prior knowledge to calibrate the training process. (2) Linearly interpolate the probability distribution predicted by kNN with that of the PLMs' classifier. At the heart of our approach is the implementation of kNN-calibrated training, which treats predicted results as indicators for easy versus hard examples during the training process. From the perspective of the diversity of application scenarios, we conduct extensive experiments on fine-tuning, prompt-tuning paradigms and zero-shot, few-shot and fully-supervised settings, respectively, across eight diverse end-tasks. We hope our exploration will encourage the community to revisit the power of classical methods for efficient NLP. Code and datasets are available in //github.com/zjunlp/Revisit-KNN.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have succeeded in various computer science applications, yet deep GNNs underperform their shallow counterparts despite deep learning's success in other domains. Over-smoothing and over-squashing are key challenges when stacking graph convolutional layers, hindering deep representation learning and information propagation from distant nodes. Our work reveals that over-smoothing and over-squashing are intrinsically related to the spectral gap of the graph Laplacian, resulting in an inevitable trade-off between these two issues, as they cannot be alleviated simultaneously. To achieve a suitable compromise, we propose adding and removing edges as a viable approach. We introduce the Stochastic Jost and Liu Curvature Rewiring (SJLR) algorithm, which is computationally efficient and preserves fundamental properties compared to previous curvature-based methods. Unlike existing approaches, SJLR performs edge addition and removal during GNN training while maintaining the graph unchanged during testing. Comprehensive comparisons demonstrate SJLR's competitive performance in addressing over-smoothing and over-squashing.
We investigate time-optimal Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning (MCPP) for both unweighted and weighted terrains, which aims to minimize the coverage time, defined as the maximum travel time of all robots. Specifically, we focus on a reduction from MCPP to Min-Max Rooted Tree Cover (MMRTC). For the first time, we propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model to optimally solve MMRTC, resulting in an MCPP solution with a coverage time that is provably at most four times the optimal. Moreover, we propose two suboptimal yet effective heuristics that reduce the number of variables in the MIP model, thus improving its efficiency for large-scale MCPP instances. We show that both heuristics result in reduced-size MIP models that remain complete (i.e., guaranteed to find a solution if one exists) for all MMRTC instances. Additionally, we explore the use of model optimization warm-startup to further improve the efficiency of both the original MIP model and the reduced-size MIP models. We validate the effectiveness of our MIP-based MCPP planner through experiments that compare it with two state-of-the-art MCPP planners on various instances, demonstrating a reduction in the coverage time by an average of 27.65% and 23.24% over them, respectively.
Pseudo-labeling is significant for semi-supervised instance segmentation, which generates instance masks and classes from unannotated images for subsequent training. However, in existing pipelines, pseudo-labels that contain valuable information may be directly filtered out due to mismatches in class and mask quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, called pseudo-label aligning instance segmentation (PAIS), in this paper. In PAIS, we devise a dynamic aligning loss (DALoss) that adjusts the weights of semi-supervised loss terms with varying class and mask score pairs. Through extensive experiments conducted on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets, we demonstrate that PAIS is a promising framework for semi-supervised instance segmentation, particularly in cases where labeled data is severely limited. Notably, with just 1\% labeled data, PAIS achieves 21.2 mAP (based on Mask-RCNN) and 19.9 mAP (based on K-Net) on the COCO dataset, outperforming the current state-of-the-art model, \ie, NoisyBoundary with 7.7 mAP, by a margin of over 12 points. Code is available at: \url{//github.com/hujiecpp/PAIS}.
We propose a location-adaptive self-normalization (SN) based test for change points in time series. The SN technique has been extensively used in change-point detection for its capability to avoid direct estimation of nuisance parameters. However, we find that the power of the SN-based test is susceptible to the location of the break and may suffer from a severe power loss, especially when the change occurs at the early or late stage of the sequence. This phenomenon is essentially caused by the unbalance of the data used before and after the change point when one is building a test statistic based on the cumulative sum (CUSUM) process. Hence, we consider leaving out the samples far away from the potential locations of change points and propose an optimal data selection scheme. Based on this scheme, a new SN-based test statistic adaptive to the locations of breaks is established. The new test can significantly improve the power of the existing SN-based tests while maintaining a satisfactory size. It is a unified treatment that can be readily extended to tests for general quantities of interest, such as the median and the model parameters. The derived optimal subsample selection strategy is not specific to the SN-based tests but is applicable to any method that relies on the CUSUM process, which may provide new insights in the area for future research.
Traditional approaches in speech emotion recognition, such as LSTM, CNN, RNN, SVM, and MLP, have limitations such as difficulty capturing long-term dependencies in sequential data, capturing the temporal dynamics, and struggling to capture complex patterns and relationships in multimodal data. This research addresses these shortcomings by proposing an ensemble model that combines Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) for processing textual data and the HuBERT transformer for analyzing audio signals. We found that GCNs excel at capturing Long-term contextual dependencies and relationships within textual data by leveraging graph-based representations of text and thus detecting the contextual meaning and semantic relationships between words. On the other hand, HuBERT utilizes self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies, enabling the modeling of temporal dynamics present in speech and capturing subtle nuances and variations that contribute to emotion recognition. By combining GCN and HuBERT, our ensemble model can leverage the strengths of both approaches. This allows for the simultaneous analysis of multimodal data, and the fusion of these modalities enables the extraction of complementary information, enhancing the discriminative power of the emotion recognition system. The results indicate that the combined model can overcome the limitations of traditional methods, leading to enhanced accuracy in recognizing emotions from speech.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.
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.