Bo Li

Bo Li, Di Liang, Zixin Zhang

The Transformer-based model have made significant strides in semantic matching tasks by capturing connections between phrase pairs. However, to assess the relevance of sentence pairs, it is insufficient to just examine the general similarity between the sentences. It is crucial to also consider the tiny subtleties that differentiate them from each other. Regrettably, attention softmax operations in transformers tend to miss these subtle differences. To this end, in this work, we propose a novel semantic sentence matching model named Combined Attention Network based on Transformer model (Comateformer). In Comateformer model, we design a novel transformer-based quasi-attention mechanism with compositional properties. Unlike traditional attention mechanisms that merely adjust the weights of input tokens, our proposed method learns how to combine, subtract, or resize specific vectors when building a representation. Moreover, our proposed approach builds on the intuition of similarity and dissimilarity (negative affinity) when calculating dual affinity scores. This allows for a more meaningful representation of relationships between sentences. To evaluate the performance of our proposed model, we conducted extensive experiments on ten public real-world datasets and robustness testing. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent improvements.

Renzhe Xu, Peng Cui, Kun Kuang et al.

Nowadays fairness issues have raised great concerns in decision-making systems. Various fairness notions have been proposed to measure the degree to which an algorithm is unfair. In practice, there frequently exist a certain set of variables we term as fair variables, which are pre-decision covariates such as users' choices. The effects of fair variables are irrelevant in assessing the fairness of the decision support algorithm. We thus define conditional fairness as a more sound fairness metric by conditioning on the fairness variables. Given different prior knowledge of fair variables, we demonstrate that traditional fairness notations, such as demographic parity and equalized odds, are special cases of our conditional fairness notations. Moreover, we propose a Derivable Conditional Fairness Regularizer (DCFR), which can be integrated into any decision-making model, to track the trade-off between precision and fairness of algorithmic decision making. Specifically, an adversarial representation based conditional independence loss is proposed in our DCFR to measure the degree of unfairness. With extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate the advantages of our conditional fairness notation and DCFR.

Kun Kuang, Ruoxuan Xiong, Peng Cui et al.

For many machine learning algorithms, two main assumptions are required to guarantee performance. One is that the test data are drawn from the same distribution as the training data, and the other is that the model is correctly specified. In real applications, however, we often have little prior knowledge on the test data and on the underlying true model. Under model misspecification, agnostic distribution shift between training and test data leads to inaccuracy of parameter estimation and instability of prediction across unknown test data. To address these problems, we propose a novel Decorrelated Weighting Regression (DWR) algorithm which jointly optimizes a variable decorrelation regularizer and a weighted regression model. The variable decorrelation regularizer estimates a weight for each sample such that variables are decorrelated on the weighted training data. Then, these weights are used in the weighted regression to improve the accuracy of estimation on the effect of each variable, thus help to improve the stability of prediction across unknown test data. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate that our DWR algorithm can significantly improve the accuracy of parameter estimation and stability of prediction with model misspecification and agnostic distribution shift.