Yang Zhang

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu et al.

Table question answering is a popular task that assesses a model's ability to understand and interact with structured data. However, the given table often does not contain sufficient information for answering the question, necessitating the integration of external knowledge. Existing methods either convert both the table and external knowledge into text, which neglects the structured nature of the table; or they embed queries for external sources in the interaction with the table, which complicates the process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information in a given table. Our method first constructs an augmenting table containing the missing information and then generates a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Augment_tableQA.

Shengnan Hu, Yang Zhang, Sumit Laha et al.

Deep neural network based object detection hasbecome the cornerstone of many real-world applications. Alongwith this success comes concerns about its vulnerability tomalicious attacks. To gain more insight into this issue, we proposea contextual camouflage attack (CCA for short) algorithm to in-fluence the performance of object detectors. In this paper, we usean evolutionary search strategy and adversarial machine learningin interactions with a photo-realistic simulated environment tofind camouflage patterns that are effective over a huge varietyof object locations, camera poses, and lighting conditions. Theproposed camouflages are validated effective to most of the state-of-the-art object detectors.

Weili Nie, Yang Zhang, Ankit Patel

Backpropagation-based visualizations have been proposed to interpret convolutional neural networks (CNNs), however a theory is missing to justify their behaviors: Guided backpropagation (GBP) and deconvolutional network (DeconvNet) generate more human-interpretable but less class-sensitive visualizations than saliency map. Motivated by this, we develop a theoretical explanation revealing that GBP and DeconvNet are essentially doing (partial) image recovery which is unrelated to the network decisions. Specifically, our analysis shows that the backward ReLU introduced by GBP and DeconvNet, and the local connections in CNNs are the two main causes of compelling visualizations. Extensive experiments are provided that support the theoretical analysis.

Prajit Ramachandran, Tom Le Paine, Pooya Khorrami et al.

Convolutional autoregressive models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a number of generation tasks. While fast, parallel training methods have been crucial for their success, generation is typically implemented in a naïve fashion where redundant computations are unnecessarily repeated. This results in slow generation, making such models infeasible for production environments. In this work, we describe a method to speed up generation in convolutional autoregressive models. The key idea is to cache hidden states to avoid redundant computation. We apply our fast generation method to the Wavenet and PixelCNN++ models and achieve up to $21\times$ and $183\times$ speedups respectively.