Liam Hebert

Liam Hebert, Lukasz Golab, Pascal Poupart et al.

A core issue in multi-agent federated reinforcement learning is defining how to aggregate insights from multiple agents. This is commonly done by taking the average of each participating agent's model weights into one common model (FedAvg). We instead propose FedFormer, a novel federation strategy that utilizes Transformer Attention to contextually aggregate embeddings from models originating from different learner agents. In so doing, we attentively weigh the contributions of other agents with respect to the current agent's environment and learned relationships, thus providing a more effective and efficient federation. We evaluate our methods on the Meta-World environment and find that our approach yields significant improvements over FedAvg and non-federated Soft Actor-Critic single-agent methods. Our results compared to Soft Actor-Critic show that FedFormer achieves higher episodic return while still abiding by the privacy constraints of federated learning. Finally, we also demonstrate improvements in effectiveness with increased agent pools across all methods in certain tasks. This is contrasted by FedAvg, which fails to make noticeable improvements when scaled.

Liam Hebert, Lukasz Golab, Robin Cohen

We propose a system to predict harmful discussions on social media platforms. Our solution uses contextual deep language models and proposes the novel idea of integrating state-of-the-art Graph Transformer Networks to analyze all conversations that follow an initial post. This framework also supports adapting to future comments as the conversation unfolds. In addition, we study whether a community-specific analysis of hate speech leads to more effective detection of hateful discussions. We evaluate our approach on 333,487 Reddit discussions from various communities. We find that community-specific modeling improves performance two-fold and that models which capture wider-discussion context improve accuracy by 28\% (35\% for the most hateful content) compared to limited context models.

Liam Hebert, Hong Yi Chen, Robin Cohen et al.

Our work advances an approach for predicting hate speech in social media, drawing out the critical need to consider the discussions that follow a post to successfully detect when hateful discourse may arise. Using graph transformer networks, coupled with modelling attention and BERT-level natural language processing, our approach can capture context and anticipate upcoming anti-social behaviour. In this paper, we offer a detailed qualitative analysis of this solution for hate speech detection in social networks, leading to insights into where the method has the most impressive outcomes in comparison with competitors and identifying scenarios where there are challenges to achieving ideal performance. Included is an exploration of the kinds of posts that permeate social media today, including the use of hateful images. This suggests avenues for extending our model to be more comprehensive. A key insight is that the focus on reasoning about the concept of context positions us well to be able to support multi-modal analysis of online posts. We conclude with a reflection on how the problem we are addressing relates especially well to the theme of dynamic change, a critical concern for all AI solutions for social impact. We also comment briefly on how mental health well-being can be advanced with our work, through curated content attuned to the extent of hate in posts.

Liam Hebert, Gaurav Sahu, Yuxuan Guo et al.

We present the Multi-Modal Discussion Transformer (mDT), a novel methodfor detecting hate speech in online social networks such as Reddit discussions. In contrast to traditional comment-only methods, our approach to labelling a comment as hate speech involves a holistic analysis of text and images grounded in the discussion context. This is done by leveraging graph transformers to capture the contextual relationships in the discussion surrounding a comment and grounding the interwoven fusion layers that combine text and image embeddings instead of processing modalities separately. To evaluate our work, we present a new dataset, HatefulDiscussions, comprising complete multi-modal discussions from multiple online communities on Reddit. We compare the performance of our model to baselines that only process individual comments and conduct extensive ablation studies.

Liam Hebert, Raheleh Makki, Shubhanshu Mishra et al.

Entity Linking (EL) is the gateway into Knowledge Bases. Recent advances in EL utilize dense retrieval approaches for Candidate Generation, which addresses some of the shortcomings of the Lookup based approach of matching NER mentions against pre-computed dictionaries. In this work, we show that in the domain of Tweets, such methods suffer as users often include informal spelling, limited context, and lack of specificity, among other issues. We investigate these challenges on a large and recent Tweets benchmark for EL, empirically evaluate lookup and dense retrieval approaches, and demonstrate a hybrid solution using long contextual representation from Wikipedia is necessary to achieve considerable gains over previous work, achieving 0.93 recall.

Aditya Makkar, Divya Makkar, Aarav Patel et al.

The lack of fluency in sign language remains a barrier to seamless communication for hearing and speech-impaired communities. In this work, we propose a low-cost, real-time ASL-to-speech translation glove and an exhaustive training dataset of sign language patterns. We then benchmarked this dataset with supervised learning models, such as LSTMs, GRUs and Transformers, where our best model achieved 92% accuracy. The SignSpeak dataset has 7200 samples encompassing 36 classes (A-Z, 1-10) and aims to capture realistic signing patterns by using five low-cost flex sensors to measure finger positions at each time step at 36 Hz. Our open-source dataset, models and glove designs, provide an accurate and efficient ASL translator while maintaining cost-effectiveness, establishing a framework for future work to build on.

Pengcheng Jiang, Judith Yue Li, Moonkyung Ryu et al.

Many modern retrieval problems are set-valued: given a broad intent, the system must return a collection of results that optimizes higher-order properties (e.g., diversity, coverage, complementarity, coherence) while remaining grounded with respect to a fixed database. Set-valued objectives are typically non-decomposable and are not captured by existing supervised (query, content) datasets which only prioritize top-1 retrieval. Consequently, fan-out retrieval is often employed to generate diverse subqueries to retrieve item sets. While reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize set-level objectives via interaction, deploying an RL-tuned LLM for fan-out retrieval is prohibitively expensive at inference time. Conversely, diffusion-based generative retrieval enables efficient single-pass fan-out in embedding space, but requires objective-aligned training targets. To address these issues, we propose R4T (Retrieve-for-Train), which uses RL once as an objective transducer in a three-step process: (i) train a fan-out LLM with composite set-level rewards, (ii) synthesize objective-consistent training pairs, and (iii) train a lightweight diffusion retriever to model the conditional distribution of set-valued outputs. Across large-scale fashion and music benchmarks consisting of curated item sets, we show that R4T improves retrieval quality relative to strong baselines while reducing query-time fan-out latency by an order of magnitude.