Jingzhou Liu

Nan Wang, Qifan Wang, Yi-Chia Wang et al.

As language models become increasingly integrated into our digital lives, Personalized Text Generation (PTG) has emerged as a pivotal component with a wide range of applications. However, the bias inherent in user written text, often used for PTG model training, can inadvertently associate different levels of linguistic quality with users' protected attributes. The model can inherit the bias and perpetuate inequality in generating text w.r.t. users' protected attributes, leading to unfair treatment when serving users. In this work, we investigate fairness of PTG in the context of personalized explanation generation for recommendations. We first discuss the biases in generated explanations and their fairness implications. To promote fairness, we introduce a general framework to achieve measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Shutong Zhang, Yi-Ling Qiao, Guanglei Zhu et al. · cmu

Various heuristic objectives for modeling hand-object interaction have been proposed in past work. However, due to the lack of a cohesive framework, these objectives often possess a narrow scope of applicability and are limited by their efficiency or accuracy. In this paper, we propose HandyPriors, a unified and general pipeline for pose estimation in human-object interaction scenes by leveraging recent advances in differentiable physics and rendering. Our approach employs rendering priors to align with input images and segmentation masks along with physics priors to mitigate penetration and relative-sliding across frames. Furthermore, we present two alternatives for hand and object pose estimation. The optimization-based pose estimation achieves higher accuracy, while the filtering-based tracking, which utilizes the differentiable priors as dynamics and observation models, executes faster. We demonstrate that HandyPriors attains comparable or superior results in the pose estimation task, and that the differentiable physics module can predict contact information for pose refinement. We also show that our approach generalizes to perception tasks, including robotic hand manipulation and human-object pose estimation in the wild.

Xiaotian Han, Hanqing Zeng, Yu Chen et al.

This paper investigates the relationship between graph convolution and Mixup techniques. Graph convolution in a graph neural network involves aggregating features from neighboring samples to learn representative features for a specific node or sample. On the other hand, Mixup is a data augmentation technique that generates new examples by averaging features and one-hot labels from multiple samples. One commonality between these techniques is their utilization of information from multiple samples to derive feature representation. This study aims to explore whether a connection exists between these two approaches. Our investigation reveals that, under two mild conditions, graph convolution can be viewed as a specialized form of Mixup that is applied during both the training and testing phases. The two conditions are: 1) \textit{Homophily Relabel} - assigning the target node's label to all its neighbors, and 2) \textit{Test-Time Mixup} - Mixup the feature during the test time. We establish this equivalence mathematically by demonstrating that graph convolution networks (GCN) and simplified graph convolution (SGC) can be expressed as a form of Mixup. We also empirically verify the equivalence by training an MLP using the two conditions to achieve comparable performance.

Yen-Chun Chen, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng et al.

Large-scale pre-trained language model such as BERT has achieved great success in language understanding tasks. However, it remains an open question how to utilize BERT for language generation. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Conditional Masked Language Modeling (C-MLM), to enable the finetuning of BERT on target generation tasks. The finetuned BERT (teacher) is exploited as extra supervision to improve conventional Seq2Seq models (student) for better text generation performance. By leveraging BERT's idiosyncratic bidirectional nature, distilling knowledge learned in BERT can encourage auto-regressive Seq2Seq models to plan ahead, imposing global sequence-level supervision for coherent text generation. Experiments show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms strong Transformer baselines on multiple language generation tasks such as machine translation and text summarization. Our proposed model also achieves new state of the art on IWSLT German-English and English-Vietnamese MT datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenRocks/Distill-BERT-Textgen.

Ethan L. Childerhose, Jingzhou Liu

The following paper presents a heuristic method by which sum-of-product Boolean expressions can be simplified with a specific focus on the removal of redundant and selective prime implicants. Existing methods, such as the Karnaugh map and the Quine-McCluskey method [1, 2], fail to scale since they increase exponentially in complexity as the quantity of literals increases, doing as such to ensure the solution is algorithmically obtained. By employing a heuristic model, nearly all expressions can be simplified at an overall reduction in computational complexity. This new method was derived from the fundamental Boolean laws, Karnaugh mapping, as well as truth tables.

Jingzhou Liu, Wenhu Chen, Yu Cheng et al.

We introduce a new task, Video-and-Language Inference, for joint multimodal understanding of video and text. Given a video clip with aligned subtitles as premise, paired with a natural language hypothesis based on the video content, a model needs to infer whether the hypothesis is entailed or contradicted by the given video clip. A new large-scale dataset, named Violin (VIdeO-and-Language INference), is introduced for this task, which consists of 95,322 video-hypothesis pairs from 15,887 video clips, spanning over 582 hours of video. These video clips contain rich content with diverse temporal dynamics, event shifts, and people interactions, collected from two sources: (i) popular TV shows, and (ii) movie clips from YouTube channels. In order to address our new multimodal inference task, a model is required to possess sophisticated reasoning skills, from surface-level grounding (e.g., identifying objects and characters in the video) to in-depth commonsense reasoning (e.g., inferring causal relations of events in the video). We present a detailed analysis of the dataset and an extensive evaluation over many strong baselines, providing valuable insights on the challenges of this new task.

Xuezhe Ma, Zecong Hu, Jingzhou Liu et al.

We introduce a novel architecture for dependency parsing: \emph{stack-pointer networks} (\textbf{\textsc{StackPtr}}). Combining pointer networks~\citep{vinyals2015pointer} with an internal stack, the proposed model first reads and encodes the whole sentence, then builds the dependency tree top-down (from root-to-leaf) in a depth-first fashion. The stack tracks the status of the depth-first search and the pointer networks select one child for the word at the top of the stack at each step. The \textsc{StackPtr} parser benefits from the information of the whole sentence and all previously derived subtree structures, and removes the left-to-right restriction in classical transition-based parsers. Yet, the number of steps for building any (including non-projective) parse tree is linear in the length of the sentence just as other transition-based parsers, yielding an efficient decoding algorithm with $O(n^2)$ time complexity. We evaluate our model on 29 treebanks spanning 20 languages and different dependency annotation schemas, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on 21 of them.