This study explores the influence of FOMC sentiment on market expectations, focusing on cognitive differences between experts and non-experts. Using sentiment analysis of FOMC minutes, we integrate these insights into a bounded rationality model to examine the impact on inflation expectations. Results show that experts form more conservative expectations, anticipating FOMC stabilization actions, while non-experts react more directly to inflation concerns. A lead-lag analysis indicates that institutions adjust faster, though the gap with individual investors narrows in the short term. These findings highlight the need for tailored communication strategies to better align public expectations with policy goals.
As the use of complex machine learning models continues to grow, so does the need for reliable explainability methods. One of the most popular methods for model explainability is based on Shapley values. There are two most commonly used approaches to calculating Shapley values which produce different results when features are correlated, conditional and marginal. In our previous work, it was demonstrated that the conditional approach is fundamentally flawed due to implicit assumptions of causality. However, it is a well-known fact that marginal approach to calculating Shapley values leads to model extrapolation where it might not be well defined. In this paper we explore the impacts of model extrapolation on Shapley values in the case of a simple linear spline model. Furthermore, we propose an approach which while using marginal averaging avoids model extrapolation and with addition of causal information replicates causal Shapley values. Finally, we demonstrate our method on the real data example.
Uncertainty in gaze estimation manifests in two aspects: 1) low-quality images caused by occlusion, blurriness, inconsistent eye movements, or even non-face images; 2) incorrect labels resulting from the misalignment between the labeled and actual gaze points during the annotation process. Allowing these uncertainties to participate in training hinders the improvement of gaze estimation. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose an effective solution, named Suppressing Uncertainty in Gaze Estimation (SUGE), which introduces a novel triplet-label consistency measurement to estimate and reduce the uncertainties. Specifically, for each training sample, we propose to estimate a novel ``neighboring label'' calculated by a linearly weighted projection from the neighbors to capture the similarity relationship between image features and their corresponding labels, which can be incorporated with the predicted pseudo label and ground-truth label for uncertainty estimation. By modeling such triplet-label consistency, we can measure the qualities of both images and labels, and further largely reduce the negative effects of unqualified images and wrong labels through our designed sample weighting and label correction strategies. Experimental results on the gaze estimation benchmarks indicate that our proposed SUGE achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Different from most conventional recommendation problems, sequential recommendation focuses on learning users' preferences by exploiting the internal order and dependency among the interacted items, which has received significant attention from both researchers and practitioners. In recent years, we have witnessed great progress and achievements in this field, necessitating a new survey. In this survey, we study the SR problem from a new perspective (i.e., the construction of an item's properties), and summarize the most recent techniques used in sequential recommendation such as pure ID-based SR, SR with side information, multi-modal SR, generative SR, LLM-powered SR, ultra-long SR and data-augmented SR. Moreover, we introduce some frontier research topics in sequential recommendation, e.g., open-domain SR, data-centric SR, could-edge collaborative SR, continuous SR, SR for good, and explainable SR. We believe that our survey could be served as a valuable roadmap for readers in this field.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
In the era of deep learning, modeling for most NLP tasks has converged to several mainstream paradigms. For example, we usually adopt the sequence labeling paradigm to solve a bundle of tasks such as POS-tagging, NER, Chunking, and adopt the classification paradigm to solve tasks like sentiment analysis. With the rapid progress of pre-trained language models, recent years have observed a rising trend of Paradigm Shift, which is solving one NLP task by reformulating it as another one. Paradigm shift has achieved great success on many tasks, becoming a promising way to improve model performance. Moreover, some of these paradigms have shown great potential to unify a large number of NLP tasks, making it possible to build a single model to handle diverse tasks. In this paper, we review such phenomenon of paradigm shifts in recent years, highlighting several paradigms that have the potential to solve different NLP tasks.
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.
This paper serves as a survey of recent advances in large margin training and its theoretical foundations, mostly for (nonlinear) deep neural networks (DNNs) that are probably the most prominent machine learning models for large-scale data in the community over the past decade. We generalize the formulation of classification margins from classical research to latest DNNs, summarize theoretical connections between the margin, network generalization, and robustness, and introduce recent efforts in enlarging the margins for DNNs comprehensively. Since the viewpoint of different methods is discrepant, we categorize them into groups for ease of comparison and discussion in the paper. Hopefully, our discussions and overview inspire new research work in the community that aim to improve the performance of DNNs, and we also point to directions where the large margin principle can be verified to provide theoretical evidence why certain regularizations for DNNs function well in practice. We managed to shorten the paper such that the crucial spirit of large margin learning and related methods are better emphasized.
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}.
Graphical causal inference as pioneered by Judea Pearl arose from research on artificial intelligence (AI), and for a long time had little connection to the field of machine learning. This article discusses where links have been and should be established, introducing key concepts along the way. It argues that the hard open problems of machine learning and AI are intrinsically related to causality, and explains how the field is beginning to understand them.