Lili Wang

Weicheng Ma, Renze Lou, Kai Zhang et al.

A key problem in multi-task learning (MTL) research is how to select high-quality auxiliary tasks automatically. This paper presents GradTS, an automatic auxiliary task selection method based on gradient calculation in Transformer-based models. Compared to AUTOSEM, a strong baseline method, GradTS improves the performance of MT-DNN with a bert-base-cased backend model, from 0.33% to 17.93% on 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmarks. GradTS is also time-saving since (1) its gradient calculations are based on single-task experiments and (2) the gradients are re-used without additional experiments when the candidate task set changes. On the 8 GLUE classification tasks, for example, GradTS costs on average 21.32% less time than AUTOSEM with comparable GPU consumption. Further, we show the robustness of GradTS across various task settings and model selections, e.g. mixed objectives among candidate tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of GradTS in these case studies illustrate its general applicability in MTL research without requiring manual task filtering or costly parameter tuning.

Lili Wang, Chongyang Gao, Chenghan Huang et al.

Networks found in the real-world are numerous and varied. A common type of network is the heterogeneous network, where the nodes (and edges) can be of different types. Accordingly, there have been efforts at learning representations of these heterogeneous networks in low-dimensional space. However, most of the existing heterogeneous network embedding methods suffer from the following two drawbacks: (1) The target space is usually Euclidean. Conversely, many recent works have shown that complex networks may have hyperbolic latent anatomy, which is non-Euclidean. (2) These methods usually rely on meta-paths, which require domain-specific prior knowledge for meta-path selection. Additionally, different down-streaming tasks on the same network might require different meta-paths in order to generate task-specific embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel self-guided random walk method that does not require meta-path for embedding heterogeneous networks into hyperbolic space. We conduct thorough experiments for the tasks of network reconstruction and link prediction on two public datasets, showing that our model outperforms a variety of well-known baselines across all tasks.

Ruibo Liu, Chenyan Jia, Jason Wei et al.

Current large-scale language models can be politically biased as a result of the data they are trained on, potentially causing serious problems when they are deployed in real-world settings. In this paper, we describe metrics for measuring political bias in GPT-2 generation and propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for mitigating political biases in generated text. By using rewards from word embeddings or a classifier, our RL framework guides debiased generation without having access to the training data or requiring the model to be retrained. In empirical experiments on three attributes sensitive to political bias (gender, location, and topic), our methods reduced bias according to both our metrics and human evaluation, while maintaining readability and semantic coherence.

Weicheng Ma, Ruibo Liu, Lili Wang et al.

Authorship identification tasks, which rely heavily on linguistic styles, have always been an important part of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) research. While other tasks based on linguistic style understanding benefit from deep learning methods, these methods have not behaved as well as traditional machine learning methods in many authorship-based tasks. With these tasks becoming more and more challenging, however, traditional machine learning methods based on handcrafted feature sets are already approaching their performance limits. Thus, in order to inspire future applications of deep learning methods in authorship-based tasks in ways that benefit the extraction of stylistic features, we survey authorship-based tasks and other tasks related to writing style understanding. We first describe our survey results on the current state of research in both sets of tasks and summarize existing achievements and problems in authorship-related tasks. We then describe outstanding methods in style-related tasks in general and analyze how they are used in combination in the top-performing models. We are optimistic about the applicability of these models to authorship-based tasks and hope our survey will help advance research in this field.

Philip Lam, Lili Wang, Henry Y. T. Ngan et al.

It is meaningful to detect outliers in traffic data for traffic management. However, this is a massive task for people from large-scale database to distinguish outliers. In this paper, we present two methods: Kernel Smoothing Naïve Bayes (NB) method and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) method to automatically detect any hardware errors as well as abnormal traffic events in traffic data collected at a four-arm junction in Hong Kong. Traffic data was recorded in a video format, and converted to spatial-temporal (ST) traffic signals by statistics. The ST signals are then projected to a two-dimensional (2D) (x,y)-coordinate plane by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimension reduction. We assume that inlier data are normal distributed. As such, the NB and GMM methods are successfully applied in outlier detection (OD) for traffic data. The kernel smooth NB method assumes the existence of kernel distributions in traffic data and uses Bayes' Theorem to perform OD. In contrast, the GMM method believes the traffic data is formed by the mixture of Gaussian distributions and exploits confidence region for OD. This paper would address the modeling of each method and evaluate their respective performances. Experimental results show that the NB algorithm with Triangle kernel and GMM method achieve up to 93.78% and 94.50% accuracies, respectively.

Li-Li Wang, Henry Y. T. Ngan, Nelson H. C. Yung

Modern cities experience heavy traffic flows and congestions regularly across space and time. Monitoring traffic situations becomes an important challenge for the Traffic Control and Surveillance Systems (TCSS). In advanced TCSS, it is helpful to automatically detect and classify different traffic incidents such as severity of congestion, abnormal driving pattern, abrupt or illegal stop on road, etc. Although most TCSS are equipped with basic incident detection algorithms, they are however crude to be really useful as an automated tool for further classification. In literature, there is a lack of research for Automated Incident Classification (AIC). Therefore, a novel AIC method is proposed in this paper to tackle such challenges. In the proposed method, traffic signals are firstly extracted from captured videos and converted as spatial-temporal (ST) signals. Based on the characteristics of the ST signals, a set of realistic simulation data are generated to construct an extended big traffic database to cover a variety of traffic situations. Next, a Mean-Shift filter is introduced to suppress the effect of noise and extract significant features from the ST signals. The extracted features are then associated with various types of traffic data: one normal type (inliers) and multiple abnormal types (outliers). For the classification, an adaptive boosting classifier is trained to detect outliers in traffic data automatically. Further, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based method is adopted to train the model for identifying the categories of outliers. In short, this hybrid approach is called an Adaptive Boosting Support Vector Machines (AB-SVM) method. Experimental results show that the proposed AB-SVM method achieves a satisfied result with more than 92% classification accuracy on average.