Collaborative Filtering (CF) models, despite their great success, suffer from severe performance drops due to popularity distribution shifts, where these changes are ubiquitous and inevitable in real-world scenarios. Unfortunately, most leading popularity debiasing strategies, rather than tackling the vulnerability of CF models to varying popularity distributions, require prior knowledge of the test distribution to identify the degree of bias and further learn the popularity-entangled representations to mitigate the bias. Consequently, these models result in significant performance benefits in the target test set, while dramatically deviating the recommendation from users' true interests without knowing the popularity distribution in advance. In this work, we propose a novel learning framework, Invariant Collaborative Filtering (InvCF), to discover disentangled representations that faithfully reveal the latent preference and popularity semantics without making any assumption about the popularity distribution. At its core is the distillation of unbiased preference representations (i.e., user preference on item property), which are invariant to the change of popularity semantics, while filtering out the popularity feature that is unstable or outdated. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets and four evaluation settings (i.e., synthetic long-tail, unbiased, temporal split, and out-of-distribution evaluations) demonstrate that InvCF outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of popularity generalization ability on real recommendations. Visualization studies shed light on the advantages of InvCF for disentangled representation learning. Our codes are available at //github.com/anzhang314/InvCF.
Online Social Network (OSN) has become a hotbed of fake news due to the low cost of information dissemination. Although the existing methods have made many attempts in news content and propagation structure, the detection of fake news is still facing two challenges: one is how to mine the unique key features and evolution patterns, and the other is how to tackle the problem of small samples to build the high-performance model. Different from popular methods which take full advantage of the propagation topology structure, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for fake news detection from perspectives of semantic, emotion and data enhancement, which excavates the emotional evolution patterns of news participants during the propagation process, and a dual deep interaction channel network of semantic and emotion is designed to obtain a more comprehensive and fine-grained news representation with the consideration of comments. Meanwhile, the framework introduces a data enhancement module to obtain more labeled data with high quality based on confidence which further improves the performance of the classification model. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Conventional de-noising methods rely on the assumption that all samples are independent and identically distributed, so the resultant classifier, though disturbed by noise, can still easily identify the noises as the outliers of training distribution. However, the assumption is unrealistic in large-scale data that is inevitably long-tailed. Such imbalanced training data makes a classifier less discriminative for the tail classes, whose previously "easy" noises are now turned into "hard" ones -- they are almost as outliers as the clean tail samples. We introduce this new challenge as Noisy Long-Tailed Classification (NLT). Not surprisingly, we find that most de-noising methods fail to identify the hard noises, resulting in significant performance drop on the three proposed NLT benchmarks: ImageNet-NLT, Animal10-NLT, and Food101-NLT. To this end, we design an iterative noisy learning framework called Hard-to-Easy (H2E). Our bootstrapping philosophy is to first learn a classifier as noise identifier invariant to the class and context distributional changes, reducing "hard" noises to "easy" ones, whose removal further improves the invariance. Experimental results show that our H2E outperforms state-of-the-art de-noising methods and their ablations on long-tailed settings while maintaining a stable performance on the conventional balanced settings. Datasets and codes are available at //github.com/yxymessi/H2E-Framework
Out-Of-Distribution generalization (OOD) is all about learning invariance against environmental changes. If the context in every class is evenly distributed, OOD would be trivial because the context can be easily removed due to an underlying principle: class is invariant to context. However, collecting such a balanced dataset is impractical. Learning on imbalanced data makes the model bias to context and thus hurts OOD. Therefore, the key to OOD is context balance. We argue that the widely adopted assumption in prior work, the context bias can be directly annotated or estimated from biased class prediction, renders the context incomplete or even incorrect. In contrast, we point out the everoverlooked other side of the above principle: context is also invariant to class, which motivates us to consider the classes (which are already labeled) as the varying environments to resolve context bias (without context labels). We implement this idea by minimizing the contrastive loss of intra-class sample similarity while assuring this similarity to be invariant across all classes. On benchmarks with various context biases and domain gaps, we show that a simple re-weighting based classifier equipped with our context estimation achieves state-of-the-art performance. We provide the theoretical justifications in Appendix and codes on //github.com/simpleshinobu/IRMCon.
Recently published graph neural networks (GNNs) show promising performance at social event detection tasks. However, most studies are oriented toward monolingual data in languages with abundant training samples. This has left the more common multilingual settings and lesser-spoken languages relatively unexplored. Thus, we present a GNN that incorporates cross-lingual word embeddings for detecting events in multilingual data streams. The first exploit is to make the GNN work with multilingual data. For this, we outline a construction strategy that aligns messages in different languages at both the node and semantic levels. Relationships between messages are established by merging entities that are the same but are referred to in different languages. Non-English message representations are converted into English semantic space via the cross-lingual word embeddings. The resulting message graph is then uniformly encoded by a GNN model. In special cases where a lesser-spoken language needs to be detected, a novel cross-lingual knowledge distillation framework, called CLKD, exploits prior knowledge learned from similar threads in English to make up for the paucity of annotated data. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show the framework to be highly effective at detection in both multilingual data and in languages where training samples are scarce.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
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.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
The aim of this work is to develop a fully-distributed algorithmic framework for training graph convolutional networks (GCNs). The proposed method is able to exploit the meaningful relational structure of the input data, which are collected by a set of agents that communicate over a sparse network topology. After formulating the centralized GCN training problem, we first show how to make inference in a distributed scenario where the underlying data graph is split among different agents. Then, we propose a distributed gradient descent procedure to solve the GCN training problem. The resulting model distributes computation along three lines: during inference, during back-propagation, and during optimization. Convergence to stationary solutions of the GCN training problem is also established under mild conditions. Finally, we propose an optimization criterion to design the communication topology between agents in order to match with the graph describing data relationships. A wide set of numerical results validate our proposal. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work combining graph convolutional neural networks with distributed optimization.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Multi-view networks are ubiquitous in real-world applications. In order to extract knowledge or business value, it is of interest to transform such networks into representations that are easily machine-actionable. Meanwhile, network embedding has emerged as an effective approach to generate distributed network representations. Therefore, we are motivated to study the problem of multi-view network embedding, with a focus on the characteristics that are specific and important in embedding this type of networks. In our practice of embedding real-world multi-view networks, we identify two such characteristics, which we refer to as preservation and collaboration. We then explore the feasibility of achieving better embedding quality by simultaneously modeling preservation and collaboration, and propose the mvn2vec algorithms. With experiments on a series of synthetic datasets, an internal Snapchat dataset, and two public datasets, we further confirm the presence and importance of preservation and collaboration. These experiments also demonstrate that better embedding can be obtained by simultaneously modeling the two characteristics, while not over-complicating the model or requiring additional supervision.