25.7SDAug 24, 2023
WavMark: Watermarking for Audio GenerationGuangyu Chen, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al. · microsoft-research
Recent breakthroughs in zero-shot voice synthesis have enabled imitating a speaker's voice using just a few seconds of recording while maintaining a high level of realism. Alongside its potential benefits, this powerful technology introduces notable risks, including voice fraud and speaker impersonation. Unlike the conventional approach of solely relying on passive methods for detecting synthetic data, watermarking presents a proactive and robust defence mechanism against these looming risks. This paper introduces an innovative audio watermarking framework that encodes up to 32 bits of watermark within a mere 1-second audio snippet. The watermark is imperceptible to human senses and exhibits strong resilience against various attacks. It can serve as an effective identifier for synthesized voices and holds potential for broader applications in audio copyright protection. Moreover, this framework boasts high flexibility, allowing for the combination of multiple watermark segments to achieve heightened robustness and expanded capacity. Utilizing 10 to 20-second audio as the host, our approach demonstrates an average Bit Error Rate (BER) of 0.48\% across ten common attacks, a remarkable reduction of over 2800\% in BER compared to the state-of-the-art watermarking tool. See https://aka.ms/wavmark for demos of our work.
PASTA: Table-Operations Aware Fact Verification via Sentence-Table Cloze Pre-trainingZihui Gu, Ju Fan, Nan Tang et al. · berkeley
Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, in this paper we introduce PASTA, a novel state-of-the-art framework for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence-table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence-table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence-table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pretrains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two table-based fact verification benchmarks: TabFact and SEM-TAB-FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms the previous state of the art by 4.7 points (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small TabFact test set is narrowed to just 1.5 points (90.6% vs. 92.1%).
REAL: A Representative Error-Driven Approach for Active LearningCheng Chen, Yong Wang, Lizi Liao et al.
Given a limited labeling budget, active learning (AL) aims to sample the most informative instances from an unlabeled pool to acquire labels for subsequent model training. To achieve this, AL typically measures the informativeness of unlabeled instances based on uncertainty and diversity. However, it does not consider erroneous instances with their neighborhood error density, which have great potential to improve the model performance. To address this limitation, we propose $REAL$, a novel approach to select data instances with $\underline{R}$epresentative $\underline{E}$rrors for $\underline{A}$ctive $\underline{L}$earning. It identifies minority predictions as \emph{pseudo errors} within a cluster and allocates an adaptive sampling budget for the cluster based on estimated error density. Extensive experiments on five text classification datasets demonstrate that $REAL$ consistently outperforms all best-performing baselines regarding accuracy and F1-macro scores across a wide range of hyperparameter settings. Our analysis also shows that $REAL$ selects the most representative pseudo errors that match the distribution of ground-truth errors along the decision boundary. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/withchencheng/ECML_PKDD_23_Real.
Interleaving Pre-Trained Language Models and Large Language Models for Zero-Shot NL2SQL GenerationZihui Gu, Ju Fan, Nan Tang et al.
Zero-shot NL2SQL is crucial in achieving natural language to SQL that is adaptive to new environments (e.g., new databases, new linguistic phenomena or SQL structures) with zero annotated NL2SQL samples from such environments. Existing approaches either fine-tune pre-trained language models (PLMs) based on annotated data or use prompts to guide fixed large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. PLMs can perform well in schema alignment but struggle to achieve complex reasoning, while LLMs is superior in complex reasoning tasks but cannot achieve precise schema alignment. In this paper, we propose a ZeroNL2SQL framework that combines the complementary advantages of PLMs and LLMs for supporting zero-shot NL2SQL. ZeroNL2SQL first uses PLMs to generate an SQL sketch via schema alignment, then uses LLMs to fill the missing information via complex reasoning. Moreover, in order to better align the generated SQL queries with values in the given database instances, we design a predicate calibration method to guide the LLM in completing the SQL sketches based on the database instances and select the optimal SQL query via an execution-based strategy. Comprehensive experiments show that ZeroNL2SQL can achieve the best zero-shot NL2SQL performance on real-world benchmarks. Specifically, ZeroNL2SQL outperforms the state-of-the-art PLM-based methods by 3.2% to 13% and exceeds LLM-based methods by 10% to 20% on execution accuracy.
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different ModalitiesZhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou et al.
Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.
Create and Find Flatness: Building Flat Training Spaces in Advance for Continual LearningWenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Zhe Zhao et al.
Catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge in the field of continual learning, where neural networks struggle to retain prior knowledge while assimilating new information. Most existing studies emphasize mitigating this issue only when encountering new tasks, overlooking the significance of the pre-task phase. Therefore, we shift the attention to the current task learning stage, presenting a novel framework, C&F (Create and Find Flatness), which builds a flat training space for each task in advance. Specifically, during the learning of the current task, our framework adaptively creates a flat region around the minimum in the loss landscape. Subsequently, it finds the parameters' importance to the current task based on their flatness degrees. When adapting the model to a new task, constraints are applied according to the flatness and a flat space is simultaneously prepared for the impending task. We theoretically demonstrate the consistency between the created and found flatness. In this manner, our framework not only accommodates ample parameter space for learning new tasks but also preserves the preceding knowledge of earlier tasks. Experimental results exhibit C&F's state-of-the-art performance as a standalone continual learning approach and its efficacy as a framework incorporating other methods. Our work is available at https://github.com/Eric8932/Create-and-Find-Flatness.
10.0AIMay 28
Double-Edged Sword or Sharp Tool? Designing and Evaluating Triadic LLM-Teacher Collaboration for K-12 Writing at ScaleCanran Wang, Yuwen Yang, Zhen Wang et al.
The double-edged sword of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an effective triadic collaboration mechanism among LLMs, teachers and students, especially for K-12 education. By developing a triadic collaboration system to support K-12 writing learning, a multidimensional evaluation framework grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics and the suggestion trajectory tracing pipeline, this paper contributes a large-scale empirical dataset involving $57,954$ essays from $10,195$ students across $120$ schools over two years. Our findings confirm the efficacy of this system in improving writing quality through a strategic labor division: the LLM serves as a generative engine to mitigate teacher burnout, and the teacher acts as a pedagogical gatekeeper and bridge to guarantee feedback quality. While both LLM and teacher are critical for skill improvement, we uncover a ceiling effect where excessive linguistic expansion yields diminishing marginal utility. These suggest a dynamically adaptive LLM-teacher collaboration as student proficiency increases.
3.3DBApr 7, 2023
ChatPipe: Orchestrating Data Preparation Program by Optimizing Human-ChatGPT InteractionsSibei Chen, Hanbing Liu, Weiting Jin et al.
Orchestrating a high-quality data preparation program is essential for successful machine learning (ML), but it is known to be time and effort consuming. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models like ChatGPT in generating programs by interacting with users through natural language prompts, there are still limitations. Specifically, a user must provide specific prompts to iteratively guide ChatGPT in improving data preparation programs, which requires a certain level of expertise in programming, the dataset used and the ML task. Moreover, once a program has been generated, it is non-trivial to revisit a previous version or make changes to the program without starting the process over again. In this paper, we present ChatPipe, a novel system designed to facilitate seamless interaction between users and ChatGPT. ChatPipe provides users with effective recommendation on next data preparation operations, and guides ChatGPT to generate program for the operations. Also, ChatPipe enables users to easily roll back to previous versions of the program, which facilitates more efficient experimentation and testing. We have developed a web application for ChatPipe and prepared several real-world ML tasks from Kaggle. These tasks can showcase the capabilities of ChatPipe and enable VLDB attendees to easily experiment with our novel features to rapidly orchestrate a high-quality data preparation program.
2.6CVSep 17, 2022
Human Pose Driven Object Effects RecommendationZhaoxin Fan, Fengxin Li, Hongyan Liu et al.
In this paper, we research the new topic of object effects recommendation in micro-video platforms, which is a challenging but important task for many practical applications such as advertisement insertion. To avoid the problem of introducing background bias caused by directly learning video content from image frames, we propose to utilize the meaningful body language hidden in 3D human pose for recommendation. To this end, in this work, a novel human pose driven object effects recommendation network termed PoseRec is introduced. PoseRec leverages the advantages of 3D human pose detection and learns information from multi-frame 3D human pose for video-item registration, resulting in high quality object effects recommendation performance. Moreover, to solve the inherent ambiguity and sparsity issues that exist in object effects recommendation, we further propose a novel item-aware implicit prototype learning module and a novel pose-aware transductive hard-negative mining module to better learn pose-item relationships. What's more, to benchmark methods for the new research topic, we build a new dataset for object effects recommendation named Pose-OBE. Extensive experiments on Pose-OBE demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance than strong baselines.
26.2AIOct 19, 2025Code
DeepAnalyze: Agentic Large Language Models for Autonomous Data ScienceShaolei Zhang, Ju Fan, Meihao Fan et al.
Autonomous data science, from raw data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports, has been a long-standing challenge, and is now becoming feasible with the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). Recent workflow-based data agents have shown promising results on specific data tasks but remain fundamentally limited in achieving fully autonomous data science due to their reliance on predefined workflows. In this paper, we introduce DeepAnalyze-8B, the first agentic LLM designed for autonomous data science, capable of automatically completing the end-toend pipeline from data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports. To tackle high-complexity data science tasks, we propose a curriculum-based agentic training paradigm that emulates the learning trajectory of human data scientists, enabling LLMs to progressively acquire and integrate multiple capabilities in real-world environments. We also introduce a data-grounded trajectory synthesis framework that constructs high-quality training data. Through agentic training, DeepAnalyze learns to perform a broad spectrum of data tasks, ranging from data question answering and specialized analytical tasks to open-ended data research. Experiments demonstrate that, with only 8B parameters, DeepAnalyze outperforms previous workflow-based agents built on most advanced proprietary LLMs. The model, code, and training data of DeepAnalyze are open-sourced, paving the way toward autonomous data science.
Joint Knowledge Editing for Information Enrichment and Probability PromotionWenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Shuqing Bian et al.
Knowledge stored in large language models requires timely updates to reflect the dynamic nature of real-world information. To update the knowledge, most knowledge editing methods focus on the low layers, since recent probes into the knowledge recall process reveal that the answer information is enriched in low layers. However, these probes only and could only reveal critical recall stages for the original answers, while the goal of editing is to rectify model's prediction for the target answers. This inconsistency indicates that both the probe approaches and the associated editing methods are deficient. To mitigate the inconsistency and identify critical editing regions, we propose a contrast-based probe approach, and locate two crucial stages where the model behavior diverges between the original and target answers: Information Enrichment in low layers and Probability Promotion in high layers. Building upon the insights, we develop the Joint knowledge Editing for information Enrichment and probability Promotion (JEEP) method, which jointly edits both the low and high layers to modify the two critical recall stages. Considering the mutual interference and growing forgetting due to dual modifications, JEEP is designed to ensure that updates to distinct regions share the same objectives and are complementary. We rigorously evaluate JEEP by editing up to thousands of facts on various models, i.e., GPT-J (6B) and LLaMA (7B), and addressing diverse editing objectives, i.e., adding factual and counterfactual knowledge. In all tested scenarios, JEEP achieves best performances, validating the effectiveness of the revealings of our probe approach and the designs of our editing method. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Eric8932/JEEP.
A Two-Phase Recall-and-Select Framework for Fast Model SelectionJianwei Cui, Wenhang Shi, Honglin Tao et al.
As the ubiquity of deep learning in various machine learning applications has amplified, a proliferation of neural network models has been trained and shared on public model repositories. In the context of a targeted machine learning assignment, utilizing an apt source model as a starting point typically outperforms the strategy of training from scratch, particularly with limited training data. Despite the investigation and development of numerous model selection strategies in prior work, the process remains time-consuming, especially given the ever-increasing scale of model repositories. In this paper, we propose a two-phase (coarse-recall and fine-selection) model selection framework, aiming to enhance the efficiency of selecting a robust model by leveraging the models' training performances on benchmark datasets. Specifically, the coarse-recall phase clusters models showcasing similar training performances on benchmark datasets in an offline manner. A light-weight proxy score is subsequently computed between this model cluster and the target dataset, which serves to recall a significantly smaller subset of potential candidate models in a swift manner. In the following fine-selection phase, the final model is chosen by fine-tuning the recalled models on the target dataset with successive halving. To accelerate the process, the final fine-tuning performance of each potential model is predicted by mining the model's convergence trend on the benchmark datasets, which aids in filtering lower performance models more earlier during fine-tuning. Through extensive experimentation on tasks covering natural language processing and computer vision, it has been demonstrated that the proposed methodology facilitates the selection of a high-performing model at a rate about 3x times faster than conventional baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/plasware/two-phase-selection.
Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Bidirectional PropagationMing Chen, Zhewei Wei, Bolin Ding et al.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) is an emerging field for learning on non-Euclidean data. Recently, there has been increased interest in designing GNN that scales to large graphs. Most existing methods use "graph sampling" or "layer-wise sampling" techniques to reduce training time. However, these methods still suffer from degrading performance and scalability problems when applying to graphs with billions of edges. This paper presents GBP, a scalable GNN that utilizes a localized bidirectional propagation process from both the feature vectors and the training/testing nodes. Theoretical analysis shows that GBP is the first method that achieves sub-linear time complexity for both the precomputation and the training phases. An extensive empirical study demonstrates that GBP achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly less training/testing time. Most notably, GBP can deliver superior performance on a graph with over 60 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges in less than half an hour on a single machine. The codes of GBP can be found at https://github.com/chennnM/GBP .
29.8AIFeb 4, 2024
Large Language Model for Table Processing: A SurveyWeizheng Lu, Jing Zhang, Ju Fan et al.
Tables, typically two-dimensional and structured to store large amounts of data, are essential in daily activities like database queries, spreadsheet manipulations, web table question answering, and image table information extraction. Automating these table-centric tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs) or Visual Language Models (VLMs) offers significant public benefits, garnering interest from academia and industry. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of table-related tasks, examining both user scenarios and technical aspects. It covers traditional tasks like table question answering as well as emerging fields such as spreadsheet manipulation and table data analysis. We summarize the training techniques for LLMs and VLMs tailored for table processing. Additionally, we discuss prompt engineering, particularly the use of LLM-powered agents, for various table-related tasks. Finally, we highlight several challenges, including diverse user input when serving and slow thinking using chain-of-thought.
Cost-Effective In-Context Learning for Entity Resolution: A Design Space ExplorationMeihao Fan, Xiaoyue Han, Ju Fan et al.
Entity resolution (ER) is an important data integration task with a wide spectrum of applications. The state-of-the-art solutions on ER rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs), which require fine-tuning on a lot of labeled matching/non-matching entity pairs. Recently, large languages models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown the ability to perform many tasks without tuning model parameters, which is known as in-context learning (ICL) that facilitates effective learning from a few labeled input context demonstrations. However, existing ICL approaches to ER typically necessitate providing a task description and a set of demonstrations for each entity pair and thus have limitations on the monetary cost of interfacing LLMs. To address the problem, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive study to investigate how to develop a cost-effective batch prompting approach to ER. We introduce a framework BATCHER consisting of demonstration selection and question batching and explore different design choices that support batch prompting for ER. We also devise a covering-based demonstration selection strategy that achieves an effective balance between matching accuracy and monetary cost. We conduct a thorough evaluation to explore the design space and evaluate our proposed strategies. Through extensive experiments, we find that batch prompting is very cost-effective for ER, compared with not only PLM-based methods fine-tuned with extensive labeled data but also LLM-based methods with manually designed prompting. We also provide guidance for selecting appropriate design choices for batch prompting.
3.7CVAug 29, 2021
RPR-Net: A Point Cloud-based Rotation-aware Large Scale Place Recognition NetworkZhaoxin Fan, Zhenbo Song, Wenping Zhang et al.
Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is an important but challenging task for many applications such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Taking the task as a point cloud retrieval problem, previous methods have made delightful achievements. However, how to deal with catastrophic collapse caused by rotation problems is still under-explored. In this paper, to tackle the issue, we propose a novel Point Cloud-based Rotation-aware Large Scale Place Recognition Network (RPR-Net). In particular, to solve the problem, we propose to learn rotation-invariant features in three steps. First, we design three kinds of novel Rotation-Invariant Features (RIFs), which are low-level features that can hold the rotation-invariant property. Second, using these RIFs, we design an attentive module to learn rotation-invariant kernels. Third, we apply these kernels to previous point cloud features to generate new features, which is the well-known SO(3) mapping process. By doing so, high-level scene-specific rotation-invariant features can be learned. We call the above process an Attentive Rotation-Invariant Convolution (ARIConv). To achieve the place recognition goal, we build RPR-Net, which takes ARIConv as a basic unit to construct a dense network architecture. Then, powerful global descriptors used for retrieval-based place recognition can be sufficiently extracted from RPR-Net. Experimental results on prevalent datasets show that our method achieves comparable results to existing state-of-the-art place recognition models and significantly outperforms other rotation-invariant baseline models when solving rotation problems.
16.6CVMay 1, 2021
SVT-Net: Super Light-Weight Sparse Voxel Transformer for Large Scale Place RecognitionZhaoxin Fan, Zhenbo Song, Hongyan Liu et al.
Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is fundamental for many applications like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Although many models have been proposed and have achieved good performance by learning short-range local features, long-range contextual properties have often been neglected. Moreover, the model size has also become a bottleneck for their wide applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a super light-weight network model termed SVT-Net for large scale place recognition. Specifically, on top of the highly efficient 3D Sparse Convolution (SP-Conv), an Atom-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (ASVT) and a Cluster-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (CSVT) are proposed to learn both short-range local features and long-range contextual features in this model. Consisting of ASVT and CSVT, SVT-Net can achieve state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets in terms of both accuracy and speed with a super-light model size (0.9M). Meanwhile, two simplified versions of SVT-Net are introduced, which also achieve state-of-the-art and further reduce the model size to 0.8M and 0.4M respectively.
15.9LGDec 4, 2020
RPT: Relational Pre-trained Transformer Is Almost All You Need towards Democratizing Data PreparationNan Tang, Ju Fan, Fangyi Li et al.
Can AI help automate human-easy but computer-hard data preparation tasks that burden data scientists, practitioners, and crowd workers? We answer this question by presenting RPT, a denoising auto-encoder for tuple-to-X models (X could be tuple, token, label, JSON, and so on). RPT is pre-trained for a tuple-to-tuple model by corrupting the input tuple and then learning a model to reconstruct the original tuple. It adopts a Transformer-based neural translation architecture that consists of a bidirectional encoder (similar to BERT) and a left-to-right autoregressive decoder (similar to GPT), leading to a generalization of both BERT and GPT. The pre-trained RPT can already support several common data preparation tasks such as data cleaning, auto-completion and schema matching. Better still, RPT can be fine-tuned on a wide range of data preparation tasks, such as value normalization, data transformation, data annotation, etc. To complement RPT, we also discuss several appealing techniques such as collaborative training and few-shot learning for entity resolution, and few-shot learning and NLP question-answering for information extraction. In addition, we identify a series of research opportunities to advance the field of data preparation.
Relational Data Synthesis using Generative Adversarial Networks: A Design Space ExplorationJu Fan, Tongyu Liu, Guoliang Li et al.
The proliferation of big data has brought an urgent demand for privacy-preserving data publishing. Traditional solutions to this demand have limitations on effectively balancing the tradeoff between privacy and utility of the released data. Thus, the database community and machine learning community have recently studied a new problem of relational data synthesis using generative adversarial networks (GAN) and proposed various algorithms. However, these algorithms are not compared under the same framework and thus it is hard for practitioners to understand GAN's benefits and limitations. To bridge the gaps, we conduct so far the most comprehensive experimental study that investigates applying GAN to relational data synthesis. We introduce a unified GAN-based framework and define a space of design solutions for each component in the framework, including neural network architectures and training strategies. We conduct extensive experiments to explore the design space and compare with traditional data synthesis approaches. Through extensive experiments, we find that GAN is very promising for relational data synthesis, and provide guidance for selecting appropriate design solutions. We also point out limitations of GAN and identify future research directions.
Deep Manifold Embedding for Hyperspectral Image ClassificationZhiqiang Gong, Weidong Hu, Xiaoyong Du et al.
Deep learning methods have played a more and more important role in hyperspectral image classification. However, the general deep learning methods mainly take advantage of the information of sample itself or the pairwise information between samples while ignore the intrinsic data structure within the whole data. To tackle this problem, this work develops a novel deep manifold embedding method(DMEM) for hyperspectral image classification. First, each class in the image is modelled as a specific nonlinear manifold and the geodesic distance is used to measure the correlation between the samples. Then, based on the hierarchical clustering, the manifold structure of the data can be captured and each nonlinear data manifold can be divided into several sub-classes. Finally, considering the distribution of each sub-class and the correlation between different subclasses, the DMEM is constructed to preserve the estimated geodesic distances on the data manifold between the learned low dimensional features of different samples. Experiments over three real-world hyperspectral image datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
2.6CVNov 21, 2019
Voice-Face Cross-modal Matching and Retrieval: A BenchmarkChuyuan Xiong, Deyuan Zhang, Tao Liu et al.
Cross-modal associations between voice and face from a person can be learnt algorithmically, which can benefit a lot of applications. The problem can be defined as voice-face matching and retrieval tasks. Much research attention has been paid on these tasks recently. However, this research is still in the early stage. Test schemes based on random tuple mining tend to have low test confidence. Generalization ability of models can not be evaluated by small scale datasets. Performance metrics on various tasks are scarce. A benchmark for this problem needs to be established. In this paper, first, a framework based on comprehensive studies is proposed for voice-face matching and retrieval. It achieves state-of-the-art performance with various performance metrics on different tasks and with high test confidence on large scale datasets, which can be taken as a baseline for the follow-up research. In this framework, a voice anchored L2-Norm constrained metric space is proposed, and cross-modal embeddings are learned with CNN-based networks and triplet loss in the metric space. The embedding learning process can be more effective and efficient with this strategy. Different network structures of the framework and the cross language transfer abilities of the model are also analyzed. Second, a voice-face dataset (with 1.15M face data and 0.29M audio data) from Chinese speakers is constructed, and a convenient and quality controllable dataset collection tool is developed. The dataset and source code of the paper will be published together with this paper.
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training ModelsZhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang et al.
Existing works, including ELMO and BERT, have revealed the importance of pre-training for NLP tasks. While there does not exist a single pre-training model that works best in all cases, it is of necessity to develop a framework that is able to deploy various pre-training models efficiently. For this purpose, we propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit, namely Universal Encoder Representations (UER). UER is loosely coupled, and encapsulated with rich modules. By assembling modules on demand, users can either reproduce a state-of-the-art pre-training model or develop a pre-training model that remains unexplored. With UER, we have built a model zoo, which contains pre-trained models based on different corpora, encoders, and targets (objectives). With proper pre-trained models, we could achieve new state-of-the-art results on a range of downstream datasets.
Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic RelationsShen Li, Zhe Zhao, Renfen Hu et al.
Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. This paper proposes an analogical reasoning task on Chinese. After delving into Chinese lexical knowledge, we sketch 68 implicit morphological relations and 28 explicit semantic relations. A big and balanced dataset CA8 is then built for this task, including 17813 questions. Furthermore, we systematically explore the influences of vector representations, context features, and corpora on analogical reasoning. With the experiments, CA8 is proved to be a reliable benchmark for evaluating Chinese word embeddings.
Learning Document Embeddings by Predicting N-grams for Sentiment Classification of Long Movie ReviewsBofang Li, Tao Liu, Xiaoyong Du et al.
Despite the loss of semantic information, bag-of-ngram based methods still achieve state-of-the-art results for tasks such as sentiment classification of long movie reviews. Many document embeddings methods have been proposed to capture semantics, but they still can't outperform bag-of-ngram based methods on this task. In this paper, we modify the architecture of the recently proposed Paragraph Vector, allowing it to learn document vectors by predicting not only words, but n-gram features as well. Our model is able to capture both semantics and word order in documents while keeping the expressive power of learned vectors. Experimental results on IMDB movie review dataset shows that our model outperforms previous deep learning models and bag-of-ngram based models due to the above advantages. More robust results are also obtained when our model is combined with other models. The source code of our model will be also published together with this paper.