Deep learning has been widely adopted to tackle various code-based tasks by building deep code models based on a large amount of code snippets. While these deep code models have achieved great success, even state-of-the-art models suffer from noise present in inputs leading to erroneous predictions. While it is possible to enhance models through retraining/fine-tuning, this is not a once-and-for-all approach and incurs significant overhead. In particular, these techniques cannot on-the-fly improve performance of (deployed) models. There are currently some techniques for input denoising in other domains (such as image processing), but since code input is discrete and must strictly abide by complex syntactic and semantic constraints, input denoising techniques in other fields are almost not applicable. In this work, we propose the first input denoising technique (i.e., CodeDenoise) for deep code models. Its key idea is to localize noisy identifiers in (likely) mispredicted inputs, and denoise such inputs by cleansing the located identifiers. It does not need to retrain or reconstruct the model, but only needs to cleanse inputs on-the-fly to improve performance. Our experiments on 18 deep code models (i.e., three pre-trained models with six code-based datasets) demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CodeDenoise. For example, on average, CodeDenoise successfully denoises 21.91% of mispredicted inputs and improves the original models by 2.04% in terms of the model accuracy across all the subjects in an average of 0.48 second spent on each input, substantially outperforming the widely-used fine-tuning strategy.
Multimodal learning seeks to utilize data from multiple sources to improve the overall performance of downstream tasks. It is desirable for redundancies in the data to make multimodal systems robust to missing or corrupted observations in some correlated modalities. However, we observe that the performance of several existing multimodal networks significantly deteriorates if one or multiple modalities are absent at test time. To enable robustness to missing modalities, we propose simple and parameter-efficient adaptation procedures for pretrained multimodal networks. In particular, we exploit low-rank adaptation and modulation of intermediate features to compensate for the missing modalities. We demonstrate that such adaptation can partially bridge performance drop due to missing modalities and outperform independent, dedicated networks trained for the available modality combinations in some cases. The proposed adaptation requires extremely small number of parameters (e.g., fewer than 0.7% of the total parameters in most experiments). We conduct a series of experiments to highlight the robustness of our proposed method using diverse datasets for RGB-thermal and RGB-Depth semantic segmentation, multimodal material segmentation, and multimodal sentiment analysis tasks. Our proposed method demonstrates versatility across various tasks and datasets, and outperforms existing methods for robust multimodal learning with missing modalities.
Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performances in various domains, while they are vulnerable to the inputs with well-crafted but small perturbations, which are named after adversarial examples (AEs). Among many strategies to improve the model robustness against AEs, Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) based adversarial training is one of the most effective methods. Unfortunately, the prohibitive computational overhead of generating strong enough AEs, due to the maximization of the loss function, sometimes makes the regular PGD adversarial training impractical when using larger and more complicated models. In this paper, we propose that the adversarial loss can be approximated by the partial sum of Taylor series. Furthermore, we approximate the gradient of adversarial loss and propose a new and efficient adversarial training method, adversarial training with gradient approximation (GAAT), to reduce the cost of building up robust models. Additionally, extensive experiments demonstrate that this efficiency improvement can be achieved without any or with very little loss in accuracy on natural and adversarial examples, which show that our proposed method saves up to 60\% of the training time with comparable model test accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{//github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
Federated learning is a new distributed machine learning framework, where a bunch of heterogeneous clients collaboratively train a model without sharing training data. In this work, we consider a practical and ubiquitous issue in federated learning: intermittent client availability, where the set of eligible clients may change during the training process. Such an intermittent client availability model would significantly deteriorate the performance of the classical Federated Averaging algorithm (FedAvg for short). We propose a simple distributed non-convex optimization algorithm, called Federated Latest Averaging (FedLaAvg for short), which leverages the latest gradients of all clients, even when the clients are not available, to jointly update the global model in each iteration. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedLaAvg attains the convergence rate of $O(1/(N^{1/4} T^{1/2}))$, achieving a sublinear speedup with respect to the total number of clients. We implement and evaluate FedLaAvg with the CIFAR-10 dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedLaAvg indeed reaches a sublinear speedup and achieves 4.23% higher test accuracy than FedAvg.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Deep learning has emerged as a powerful machine learning technique that learns multiple layers of representations or features of the data and produces state-of-the-art prediction results. Along with the success of deep learning in many other application domains, deep learning is also popularly used in sentiment analysis in recent years. This paper first gives an overview of deep learning and then provides a comprehensive survey of its current applications in sentiment analysis.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.