Jie Yu

Hongyu Zang, Xin Li, Jie Yu et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) struggles in environments with rich and noisy inputs, where the agent only has access to a fixed dataset without environment interactions. Past works have proposed common workarounds based on the pre-training of state representations, followed by policy training. In this work, we introduce a simple, yet effective approach for learning state representations. Our method, Behavior Prior Representation (BPR), learns state representations with an easy-to-integrate objective based on behavior cloning of the dataset: we first learn a state representation by mimicking actions from the dataset, and then train a policy on top of the fixed representation, using any off-the-shelf Offline RL algorithm. Theoretically, we prove that BPR carries out performance guarantees when integrated into algorithms that have either policy improvement guarantees (conservative algorithms) or produce lower bounds of the policy values (pessimistic algorithms). Empirically, we show that BPR combined with existing state-of-the-art Offline RL algorithms leads to significant improvements across several offline control benchmarks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/bit1029public/offline_bpr}.

Xingxing Wei, Ying Guo, Jie Yu et al.

Adversarial patch is an important form of real-world adversarial attack that brings serious risks to the robustness of deep neural networks. Previous methods generate adversarial patches by either optimizing their perturbation values while fixing the pasting position or manipulating the position while fixing the patch's content. This reveals that the positions and perturbations are both important to the adversarial attack. For that, in this paper, we propose a novel method to simultaneously optimize the position and perturbation for an adversarial patch, and thus obtain a high attack success rate in the black-box setting. Technically, we regard the patch's position, the pre-designed hyper-parameters to determine the patch's perturbations as the variables, and utilize the reinforcement learning framework to simultaneously solve for the optimal solution based on the rewards obtained from the target model with a small number of queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Face Recognition (FR) task, and results on four representative FR models show that our method can significantly improve the attack success rate and query efficiency. Besides, experiments on the commercial FR service and physical environments confirm its practical application value. We also extend our method to the traffic sign recognition task to verify its generalization ability.

Wei Xingxing, Yu Jie, Huang Yao

Owing to the extensive application of infrared object detectors in the safety-critical tasks, it is necessary to evaluate their robustness against adversarial examples in the real world. However, current few physical infrared attacks are complicated to implement in practical application because of their complex transformation from digital world to physical world. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a physically feasible infrared attack method called "adversarial infrared patches". Considering the imaging mechanism of infrared cameras by capturing objects' thermal radiation, adversarial infrared patches conduct attacks by attaching a patch of thermal insulation materials on the target object to manipulate its thermal distribution. To enhance adversarial attacks, we present a novel aggregation regularization to guide the simultaneous learning for the patch' shape and location on the target object. Thus, a simple gradient-based optimization can be adapted to solve for them. We verify adversarial infrared patches in different object detection tasks with various object detectors. Experimental results show that our method achieves more than 90\% Attack Success Rate (ASR) versus the pedestrian detector and vehicle detector in the physical environment, where the objects are captured in different angles, distances, postures, and scenes. More importantly, adversarial infrared patch is easy to implement, and it only needs 0.5 hours to be constructed in the physical world, which verifies its effectiveness and efficiency.

Bin Ji, Shasha Li, Shaoduo Gan et al.

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) enables us to build a NER system for a new domain using very few labeled examples. However, existing prototypical networks for this task suffer from roughly estimated label dependency and closely distributed prototypes, thus often causing misclassifications. To address the above issues, we propose EP-Net, an Entity-level Prototypical Network enhanced by dispersedly distributed prototypes. EP-Net builds entity-level prototypes and considers text spans to be candidate entities, so it no longer requires the label dependency. In addition, EP-Net trains the prototypes from scratch to distribute them dispersedly and aligns spans to prototypes in the embedding space using a space projection. Experimental results on two evaluation tasks and the Few-NERD settings demonstrate that EP-Net consistently outperforms the previous strong models in terms of overall performance. Extensive analyses further validate the effectiveness of EP-Net.

Bin Ji, Shasha Li, Hao Xu et al.

Span-based joint extraction simultaneously conducts named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) in text span form. However, since previous span-based models rely on span-level classifications, they cannot benefit from token-level label information, which has been proven advantageous for the task. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Tagging augmented Span-based Network (STSN), a span-based joint model that can make use of token-level label information. In STSN, we construct a core neural architecture by deep stacking multiple attention layers, each of which consists of three basic attention units. On the one hand, the core architecture enables our model to learn token-level label information via the sequence tagging mechanism and then uses the information in the span-based joint extraction; on the other hand, it establishes a bi-directional information interaction between NER and RE. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that STSN consistently outperforms the strongest baselines in terms of F1, creating new state-of-the-art results.

Wuhang Lin, Shasha Li, Chen Zhang et al.

Text summarization models are often trained to produce summaries that meet human quality requirements. However, the existing evaluation metrics for summary text are only rough proxies for summary quality, suffering from low correlation with human scoring and inhibition of summary diversity. To solve these problems, we propose SummScore, a comprehensive metric for summary quality evaluation based on CrossEncoder. Firstly, by adopting the original-summary measurement mode and comparing the semantics of the original text, SummScore gets rid of the inhibition of summary diversity. With the help of the text-matching pre-training Cross-Encoder, SummScore can effectively capture the subtle differences between the semantics of summaries. Secondly, to improve the comprehensiveness and interpretability, SummScore consists of four fine-grained submodels, which measure Coherence, Consistency, Fluency, and Relevance separately. We use semi-supervised multi-rounds of training to improve the performance of our model on extremely limited annotated data. Extensive experiments show that SummScore significantly outperforms existing evaluation metrics in the above four dimensions in correlation with human scoring. We also provide the quality evaluation results of SummScore on 16 mainstream summarization models for later research.

Siyuan Jiang, Yan Ding, Yuling Wang et al.

Ultrasound is a vital diagnostic technique in health screening, with the advantages of non-invasive, cost-effective, and radiation free, and therefore is widely applied in the diagnosis of nodules. However, it relies heavily on the expertise and clinical experience of the sonographer. In ultrasound images, a single nodule might present heterogeneous appearances in different cross-sectional views which makes it hard to perform per-nodule examination. Sonographers usually discriminate different nodules by examining the nodule features and the surrounding structures like gland and duct, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. To address this problem, we collected hundreds of breast ultrasound videos and built a nodule reidentification system that consists of two parts: an extractor based on the deep learning model that can extract feature vectors from the input video clips and a real-time clustering algorithm that automatically groups feature vectors by nodules. The system obtains satisfactory results and exhibits the capability to differentiate ultrasound videos. As far as we know, it's the first attempt to apply re-identification technique in the ultrasonic field.

Jing Yang, Bin Ji, Shasha Li et al.

Recently, many studies incorporate external knowledge into character-level feature based models to improve the performance of Chinese relation extraction. However, these methods tend to ignore the internal information of the Chinese character and cannot filter out the noisy information of external knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a mixture-of-view-experts framework (MoVE) to dynamically learn multi-view features for Chinese relation extraction. With both the internal and external knowledge of Chinese characters, our framework can better capture the semantic information of Chinese characters. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets in distinct domains. Experimental results show consistent and significant superiority and robustness of our proposed framework. Our code and dataset will be released at: https://gitee.com/tmg-nudt/multi-view-of-expert-for-chineserelation-extraction

Bin Ji, Hao Xu, Jie Yu et al.

An exhaustive study has been conducted to investigate span-based models for the joint entity and relation extraction task. However, these models sample a large number of negative entities and negative relations during the model training, which are essential but result in grossly imbalanced data distributions and in turn cause suboptimal model performance. In order to address the above issues, we propose a two-phase paradigm for the span-based joint entity and relation extraction, which involves classifying the entities and relations in the first phase, and predicting the types of these entities and relations in the second phase. The two-phase paradigm enables our model to significantly reduce the data distribution gap, including the gap between negative entities and other entities, as well as the gap between negative relations and other relations. In addition, we make the first attempt at combining entity type and entity distance as global features, which has proven effective, especially for the relation extraction. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that the spanbased joint extraction model augmented with the two-phase paradigm and the global features consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art span-based models for the joint extraction task, establishing a new standard benchmark. Qualitative and quantitative analyses further validate the effectiveness the proposed paradigm and the global features.

Mengxue Du, Shasha Li, Jie Yu et al.

Document retrieval enables users to find their required documents accurately and quickly. To satisfy the requirement of retrieval efficiency, prevalent deep neural methods adopt a representation-based matching paradigm, which saves online matching time by pre-storing document representations offline. However, the above paradigm consumes vast local storage space, especially when storing the document as word-grained representations. To tackle this, we present TGTR, a Topic-Grained Text Representation-based Model for document retrieval. Following the representation-based matching paradigm, TGTR stores the document representations offline to ensure retrieval efficiency, whereas it significantly reduces the storage requirements by using novel topicgrained representations rather than traditional word-grained. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to word-grained baselines, TGTR is consistently competitive with them on TREC CAR and MS MARCO in terms of retrieval accuracy, but it requires less than 1/10 of the storage space required by them. Moreover, TGTR overwhelmingly surpasses global-grained baselines in terms of retrieval accuracy.

Bin Ji, Shasha Li, Jie Yu et al.

For Named Entity Recognition (NER), sequence labeling-based and span-based paradigms are quite different. Previous research has demonstrated that the two paradigms have clear complementary advantages, but few models have attempted to leverage these advantages in a single NER model as far as we know. In our previous work, we proposed a paradigm known as Bundling Learning (BL) to address the above problem. The BL paradigm bundles the two NER paradigms, enabling NER models to jointly tune their parameters by weighted summing each paradigm's training loss. However, three critical issues remain unresolved: When does BL work? Why does BL work? Can BL enhance the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) NER models? To address the first two issues, we implement three NER models, involving a sequence labeling-based model--SeqNER, a span-based NER model--SpanNER, and BL-NER that bundles SeqNER and SpanNER together. We draw two conclusions regarding the two issues based on the experimental results on eleven NER datasets from five domains. We then apply BL to five existing SOTA NER models to investigate the third issue, consisting of three sequence labeling-based models and two span-based models. Experimental results indicate that BL consistently enhances their performance, suggesting that it is possible to construct a new SOTA NER system by incorporating BL into the current SOTA system. Moreover, we find that BL reduces both entity boundary and type prediction errors. In addition, we compare two commonly used labeling tagging methods as well as three types of span semantic representations.

Xiaopeng Li, Shasha Li, Shezheng Song et al.

The general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) make them the infrastructure for various AI applications, but updating their inner knowledge requires significant resources. Recent model editing is a promising technique for efficiently updating a small amount of knowledge of LLMs and has attracted much attention. In particular, local editing methods, which directly update model parameters, are proven suitable for updating small amounts of knowledge. Local editing methods update weights by computing least squares closed-form solutions and identify edited knowledge by vector-level matching in inference, which achieve promising results. However, these methods still require a lot of time and resources to complete the computation. Moreover, vector-level matching lacks reliability, and such updates disrupt the original organization of the model's parameters. To address these issues, we propose a detachable and expandable Subject Word Embedding Altering (SWEA) framework, which finds the editing embeddings through token-level matching and adds them to the subject word embeddings in Transformer input. To get these editing embeddings, we propose optimizing then suppressing fusion method, which first optimizes learnable embedding vectors for the editing target and then suppresses the Knowledge Embedding Dimensions (KEDs) to obtain final editing embeddings. We thus propose SWEA$\oplus$OS method for editing factual knowledge in LLMs. We demonstrate the overall state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of SWEA$\oplus$OS on the CounterFact and zsRE datasets. To further validate the reasoning ability of SWEA$\oplus$OS in editing knowledge, we evaluate it on the more complex RippleEdits benchmark. The results demonstrate that SWEA$\oplus$OS possesses SOTA reasoning ability.

Xingxing Wei, Ying Guo, Jie Yu

To assess the vulnerability of deep learning in the physical world, recent works introduce adversarial patches and apply them on different tasks. In this paper, we propose another kind of adversarial patch: the Meaningful Adversarial Sticker, a physically feasible and stealthy attack method by using real stickers existing in our life. Unlike the previous adversarial patches by designing perturbations, our method manipulates the sticker's pasting position and rotation angle on the objects to perform physical attacks. Because the position and rotation angle are less affected by the printing loss and color distortion, adversarial stickers can keep good attacking performance in the physical world. Besides, to make adversarial stickers more practical in real scenes, we conduct attacks in the black-box setting with the limited information rather than the white-box setting with all the details of threat models. To effectively solve for the sticker's parameters, we design the Region based Heuristic Differential Evolution Algorithm, which utilizes the new-found regional aggregation of effective solutions and the adaptive adjustment strategy of the evaluation criteria. Our method is comprehensively verified in the face recognition and then extended to the image retrieval and traffic sign recognition. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is effective and efficient in complex physical conditions and has a good generalization for different tasks.