Alejandro Martín

Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martin, David Camacho

Online Social Networks serve as fertile ground for harmful behavior, ranging from hate speech to the dissemination of disinformation. Malicious actors now have unprecedented freedom to misbehave, leading to severe societal unrest and dire consequences, as exemplified by events such as the Capitol assault during the US presidential election and the Antivaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding online language has become more pressing than ever. While existing works predominantly focus on content analysis, we aim to shift the focus towards understanding harmful behaviors by relating content to their respective authors. Numerous novel approaches attempt to learn the stylistic features of authors in texts, but many of these approaches are constrained by small datasets or sub-optimal training losses. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Style Transformer for Authorship Representations (STAR), trained on a large corpus derived from public sources of 4.5 x 10^6 authored texts involving 70k heterogeneous authors. Our model leverages Supervised Contrastive Loss to teach the model to minimize the distance between texts authored by the same individual. This author pretext pre-training task yields competitive performance at zero-shot with PAN challenges on attribution and clustering. Additionally, we attain promising results on PAN verification challenges using a single dense layer, with our model serving as an embedding encoder. Finally, we present results from our test partition on Reddit. Using a support base of 8 documents of 512 tokens, we can discern authors from sets of up to 1616 authors with at least 80\% accuracy. We share our pre-trained model at huggingface (https://huggingface.co/AIDA-UPM/star) and our code is available at (https://github.com/jahuerta92/star)

Álvaro Huertas-García, Alejandro Martín, Javier Huertas-Tato et al.

Both in scientific literature and in industry,, Semantic and context-aware Natural Language Processing-based solutions have been gaining importance in recent years. The possibilities and performance shown by these models when dealing with complex Language Understanding tasks is unquestionable, from conversational agents to the fight against disinformation in social networks. In addition, considerable attention is also being paid to developing multilingual models to tackle the language bottleneck. The growing need to provide more complex models implementing all these features has been accompanied by an increase in their size, without being conservative in the number of dimensions required. This paper aims to give a comprehensive account of the impact of a wide variety of dimensional reduction techniques on the performance of different state-of-the-art multilingual Siamese Transformers, including unsupervised dimensional reduction techniques such as linear and nonlinear feature extraction, feature selection, and manifold techniques. In order to evaluate the effects of these techniques, we considered the multilingual extended version of Semantic Textual Similarity Benchmark (mSTSb) and two different baseline approaches, one using the pre-trained version of several models and another using their fine-tuned STS version. The results evidence that it is possible to achieve an average reduction in the number of dimensions of $91.58\% \pm 2.59\%$ and $54.65\% \pm 32.20\%$, respectively. This work has also considered the consequences of dimensionality reduction for visualization purposes. The results of this study will significantly contribute to the understanding of how different tuning approaches affect performance on semantic-aware tasks and how dimensional reduction techniques deal with the high-dimensional embeddings computed for the STS task and their potential for highly demanding NLP tasks

Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martin, David Camacho

The appearance of complex attention-based language models such as BERT, Roberta or GPT-3 has allowed to address highly complex tasks in a plethora of scenarios. However, when applied to specific domains, these models encounter considerable difficulties. This is the case of Social Networks such as Twitter, an ever-changing stream of information written with informal and complex language, where each message requires careful evaluation to be understood even by humans given the important role that context plays. Addressing tasks in this domain through Natural Language Processing involves severe challenges. When powerful state-of-the-art multilingual language models are applied to this scenario, language specific nuances use to get lost in translation. To face these challenges we present \textbf{BERTuit}, the larger transformer proposed so far for Spanish language, pre-trained on a massive dataset of 230M Spanish tweets using RoBERTa optimization. Our motivation is to provide a powerful resource to better understand Spanish Twitter and to be used on applications focused on this social network, with special emphasis on solutions devoted to tackle the spreading of misinformation in this platform. BERTuit is evaluated on several tasks and compared against M-BERT, XLM-RoBERTa and XLM-T, very competitive multilingual transformers. The utility of our approach is shown with applications, in this case: a zero-shot methodology to visualize groups of hoaxes and profiling authors spreading disinformation. Misinformation spreads wildly on platforms such as Twitter in languages other than English, meaning performance of transformers may suffer when transferred outside English speaking communities.

Guillermo Villar-Rodríguez, Álvaro Huertas-García, Alejandro Martín et al.

Introduction: This article introduces DisTrack, a methodology and a tool developed for tracking and analyzing misinformation within Online Social Networks (OSNs). DisTrack is designed to combat the spread of misinformation through a combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP) Social Network Analysis (SNA) and graph visualization. The primary goal is to detect misinformation, track its propagation, identify its sources, and assess the influence of various actors within the network. Methods: DisTrack's architecture incorporates a variety of methodologies including keyword search, semantic similarity assessments, and graph generation techniques. These methods collectively facilitate the monitoring of misinformation, the categorization of content based on alignment with known false claims, and the visualization of dissemination cascades through detailed graphs. The tool is tailored to capture and analyze the dynamic nature of misinformation spread in digital environments. Results: The effectiveness of DisTrack is demonstrated through three case studies focused on different themes: discredit/hate speech, anti-vaccine misinformation, and false narratives about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. These studies show DisTrack's capabilities in distinguishing posts that propagate falsehoods from those that counteract them, and tracing the evolution of misinformation from its inception. Conclusions: The research confirms that DisTrack is a valuable tool in the field of misinformation analysis. It effectively distinguishes between different types of misinformation and traces their development over time. By providing a comprehensive approach to understanding and combating misinformation in digital spaces, DisTrack proves to be an essential asset for researchers and practitioners working to mitigate the impact of false information in online social environments.

Moutaz Alazab, Ruba Abu Khurma, Pedro A. Castillo et al.

This paper proposes an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) employing the Harris Hawks Optimization algorithm (HHO) to optimize Multilayer Perceptron learning by optimizing bias and weight parameters. HHO-MLP aims to select optimal parameters in its learning process to minimize intrusion detection errors in networks. HHO-MLP has been implemented using EvoloPy NN framework, an open-source Python tool specialized for training MLPs using evolutionary algorithms. For purposes of comparing the HHO model against other evolutionary methodologies currently available, specificity and sensitivity measures, accuracy measures, and mse and rmse measures have been calculated using KDD datasets. Experiments have demonstrated the HHO MLP method is effective at identifying malicious patterns. HHO-MLP has been tested against evolutionary algorithms like Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BOA), Grasshopper Optimization Algorithms (GOA), and Black Widow Optimizations (BOW), with validation by Random Forest (RF), XG-Boost. HHO-MLP showed superior performance by attaining top scores with accuracy rate of 93.17%, sensitivity level of 89.25%, and specificity percentage of 95.41%.

Álvaro Huertas-García, Alejandro Martín, Javier Huertas-Tato et al.

Adversarial attacks represent a substantial challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This study undertakes a systematic exploration of this challenge in two distinct phases: vulnerability evaluation and resilience enhancement of Transformer-based models under adversarial attacks. In the evaluation phase, we assess the susceptibility of three Transformer configurations, encoder-decoder, encoder-only, and decoder-only setups, to adversarial attacks of escalating complexity across datasets containing offensive language and misinformation. Encoder-only models manifest a 14% and 21% performance drop in offensive language detection and misinformation detection tasks, respectively. Decoder-only models register a 16% decrease in both tasks, while encoder-decoder models exhibit a maximum performance drop of 14% and 26% in the respective tasks. The resilience-enhancement phase employs adversarial training, integrating pre-camouflaged and dynamically altered data. This approach effectively reduces the performance drop in encoder-only models to an average of 5% in offensive language detection and 2% in misinformation detection tasks. Decoder-only models, occasionally exceeding original performance, limit the performance drop to 7% and 2% in the respective tasks. Although not surpassing the original performance, Encoder-decoder models can reduce the drop to an average of 6% and 2% respectively. Results suggest a trade-off between performance and robustness, with some models maintaining similar performance while gaining robustness. Our study and adversarial training techniques have been incorporated into an open-source tool for generating camouflaged datasets. However, methodology effectiveness depends on the specific camouflage technique and data encountered, emphasizing the need for continued exploration.

Pablo Miralles-González, Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martín et al.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a central task in natural language understanding with applications in fact-checking, question answering, and information retrieval. Despite its importance, current NLI systems heavily rely on supervised learning with datasets that often contain annotation artifacts and biases, limiting generalization and real-world applicability. In this work, we apply a reinforcement learning-based approach using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) learning in NLI, eliminating the need for labeled rationales and enabling this type of training on more challenging datasets such as ANLI. We fine-tune 7B, 14B, and 32B language models using parameter-efficient techniques (LoRA and QLoRA), demonstrating strong performance across standard and adversarial NLI benchmarks. Our 32B AWQ-quantized model surpasses state-of-the-art results on 7 out of 11 adversarial sets$\unicode{x2013}$or on all of them considering our replication$\unicode{x2013}$within a 22GB memory footprint, showing that robust reasoning can be retained under aggressive quantization. This work provides a scalable and practical framework for building robust NLI systems without sacrificing inference quality.

Pablo Miralles-González, Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martín et al.

Computational stylometry analyzes writing style through quantitative patterns in text, supporting applications from forensic tasks such as identity linking and plagiarism detection to literary attribution in the humanities. Supervised and contrastive approaches rely on data with spurious correlations and often confuse style with topic. Despite their natural use in AI-generated text detection, the CLM pre-training of modern LLMs has been scarcely leveraged for general authorship problems. We propose a novel unsupervised approach based on this extensive pre-training and the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, employing the log-probabilities of an LLM to measure style transferability from one text to another. Our method significantly outperforms LLM prompting approaches of comparable scale and achieves higher accuracy than contrastively trained baselines when controlling for topical correlations. Moreover, performance scales fairly consistently with the size of the base model and, in the case of authorship verification, with an additional mechanism that increases test-time computation; enabling flexible trade-offs between computational cost and accuracy.

Javier Huertas-Tato, Adrián Girón-Jiménez, Alejandro Martín et al.

Authorship has entangled style and content inside. Authors frequently write about the same topics in the same style, so when different authors write about the exact same topic the easiest way out to distinguish them is by understanding the nuances of their style. Modern neural models for authorship can pick up these features using contrastive learning, however, some amount of content leakage is always present. Our aim is to reduce the inevitable impact and correlation between content and authorship. We present a technique to use contrastive learning (InfoNCE) with additional hard negatives synthetically created using a semantic similarity model. This disentanglement technique aims to distance the content embedding space from the style embedding space, leading to embeddings more informed by style. We demonstrate the performance with ablations on two different datasets and compare them on out-of-domain challenges. Improvements are clearly shown on challenging evaluations on prolific authors with up to a 10% increase in accuracy when the settings are particularly hard. Trials on challenges also demonstrate the preservation of zero-shot capabilities of this method as fine tuning.

Alejandro Martín, Javier Huertas-Tato, Álvaro Huertas-García et al.

Our society produces and shares overwhelming amounts of information through Online Social Networks (OSNs). Within this environment, misinformation and disinformation have proliferated, becoming a public safety concern in most countries. Allowing the public and professionals to efficiently find reliable evidences about the factual veracity of a claim is a crucial step to mitigate this harmful spread. To this end, we propose FacTeR-Check, a multilingual architecture for semi-automated fact-checking that can be used for either applications designed for the general public and by fact-checking organisations. FacTeR-Check enables retrieving fact-checked information, unchecked claims verification and tracking dangerous information over social media. This architectures involves several modules developed to evaluate semantic similarity, to calculate natural language inference and to retrieve information from Online Social Networks. The union of all these components builds a semi-automated fact-checking tool able of verifying new claims, to extract related evidence, and to track the evolution of a hoax on a OSN. While individual modules are validated on related benchmarks (mainly MSTS and SICK), the complete architecture is validated using a new dataset called NLI19-SP that is publicly released with COVID-19 related hoaxes and tweets from Spanish social media. Our results show state-of-the-art performance on the individual benchmarks, as well as producing a useful analysis of the evolution over time of 61 different hoaxes.

Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martín, Julián Fierrez et al.

Convolutional Networks have dominated the field of computer vision for the last ten years, exhibiting extremely powerful feature extraction capabilities and outstanding classification performance. The main strategy to prolong this trend relies on further upscaling networks in size. However, costs increase rapidly while performance improvements may be marginal. We hypothesise that adding heterogeneous sources of information may be more cost-effective to a CNN than building a bigger network. In this paper, an ensemble method is proposed for accurate image classification, fusing automatically detected features through Convolutional Neural Network architectures with a set of manually defined statistical indicators. Through a combination of the predictions of a CNN and a secondary classifier trained on statistical features, better classification performance can be cheaply achieved. We test multiple learning algorithms and CNN architectures on a diverse number of datasets to validate our proposal, making public all our code and data via GitHub. According to our results, the inclusion of additional indicators and an ensemble classification approach helps to increase the performance in 8 of 9 datasets, with a remarkable increase of more than 10% precision in two of them.