United States

Although AI systems archive a great success in various societal fields, there still exists a challengeable issue of outputting discriminatory results with respect to protected attributes (e.g., gender and age). The popular approach to solving the issue is to remove protected attribute information in the decision process. However, this approach has a limitation that beneficial information for target tasks may also be eliminated. To overcome the limitation, we propose Fairness-aware Disentangling Variational Auto-Encoder (FD-VAE) that disentangles data representation into three subspaces: 1) Target Attribute Latent (TAL), 2) Protected Attribute Latent (PAL), 3) Mutual Attribute Latent (MAL). On top of that, we propose a decorrelation loss that aligns the overall information into each subspace, instead of removing the protected attribute information. After learning the representation, we re-encode MAL to include only target information and combine it with TAL to perform downstream tasks. In our experiments on CelebA and UTK Face datasets, we show that the proposed method mitigates unfairness in facial attribute classification tasks with respect to gender and age. Ours outperforms previous methods by large margins on two standard fairness metrics, equal opportunity and equalized odds.

AAAI 2021

Learning Disentangled Representation for Fair Facial Attribute Classification via Fairness-Aware information Alignment

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Although artificial intelligence has revolutionized data analysis, significantly less work has focused on using AI to improve scientific data collection. Past work in AI for data collection has typically assumed the objective function is well-defined by humans before starting an experiment; however, this is a poor fit for scientific domains where new discoveries and insights are made as data is being collected. In this paper we present a new framework to allow AI systems to work together with humans (e.g. scientists) to collect data more effectively in simple scientific domains. We present a novel algorithm, TESA, which seeks to achieve good performance by learning from past human behavior how to direct data to places that are likely to become scientifically interesting in the future. We analyze the problem theoretically, defining a novel notion of regret in this setting and showing that TESA is zero regret. Next, we show that TESA outperforms other related algorithms in simulations using real data drawn from three diverse domains (economics, mental health, and cognitive psychology). Finally, we run experiments with human subjects across these scientific domains to compare our iterative human-in-the-loop process to a (more standard) workflow in which information is communicated to the AI a priori.

AI-Assisted Scientific Data Collection with Iterative Human Feedback

Lexical relations describe how concepts are semantically related, in the form of relation triples. The accurate prediction of lexical relations between concepts is challenging, due to the sparsity of patterns indicating the existence of such relations. We propose the Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning (KEML) framework to address lexical relation classification. In KEML, the LKB-BERT (Lexical Knowledge Base-BERT) model is first presented to learn concept representations from text corpora, with rich lexical knowledge injected by distant supervision. A probabilistic distribution of auxiliary tasks is defined to increase the model's ability to recognize different types of lexical relations. We further propose a neural classifier integrated with special relation recognition cells, in order to combine meta-learning over the auxiliary task distribution and supervised learning for LRC. Experiments over multiple datasets show KEML outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

KEML: A Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning Framework for Lexical Relation Classification

We study the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous 2nd price auctions (S2PA) under a new natural condition of no underbidding, meaning that agents never bid on items less than their marginal values.
We establish improved (mostly tight) bounds on the PoA of S2PA under no underbidding for different valuation classes (including unit demand, submodular, XOS, subadditive, and general monotone valuations), in both full information and incomplete information settings. 

To derive our results, we introduce a new parameterized property of auctions, termed (gamma,delta) revenue guaranteed, which implies a PoA of at least gamma/(1+delta). 
Via extension theorems, this guarantee extends to coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in full information settings, and to Bayesian PoA (BPoA) in settings with incomplete information and arbitrary (correlated) distributions.
We then show that S2PA are (1,1) revenue guaranteed with respect to bids satisfying no underbidding. 
This implies a PoA of at least 1/2 for general monotone valuation, which extends to BPOA with arbitrary correlated distributions.
Moreover, we show that (lambda,mu) smoothness combined with (gamma,delta) revenue guaranteed guarantees a PoA of at least (gamma+lambda)/(1+delta+mu).
This implies a host of results, such as a tight PoA of 2/3 for S2PA with submodular (or XOS) valuations, under no overbidding and no underbidding.
Beyond establishing improved bounds for S2PA, the no underbidding assumption sheds new light on the performance of S2PA relative to 
simultaneous 1st price auctions.

Simultaneous 2nd Price Item Auctions with No-Underbidding

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using image-level labels has recently attracted much attention for reducing annotation costs.
Existing WSSS methods utilize localization maps from the classification network to generate pseudo segmentation labels.
However, since localization maps obtained from the classifier focus only on sparse discriminative object regions, it is difficult to generate high-quality segmentation labels.
To address this issue, we introduce discriminative region suppression (DRS) module that is a simple yet effective method to expand object activation regions.
DRS suppresses the attention on discriminative regions and spreads it to adjacent non-discriminative regions, generating dense localization maps.
DRS requires few or no additional parameters and can be plugged into any network.
Furthermore, we introduce an additional learning strategy to give a self-enhancement of localization maps, named localization map refinement learning.
Benefiting from this refinement learning, localization maps are refined and enhanced by recovering some missing parts or removing noise itself.
Due to its simplicity and effectiveness, our approach achieves mIoU 71.4% on the PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark using only image-level labels.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Meta-learning has been sufficiently validated to be beneficial for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). However, we find that meta-trained NMT fails to improve the translation performance of the domain unseen at the meta-training stage. In this paper, we aim to alleviate this issue by proposing a novel meta-curriculum learning for domain adaptation in NMT. During meta-training, the NMT first learns the similar curricula from each domain to avoid falling into a bad local optimum early, and finally learns the curricula of individualities to improve the model robustness for learning domain-specific knowledge. Experimental results on 10 different low-resource domains show that meta-curriculum learning can improve the translation performance of both familiar and unfamiliar domains. All the codes and data are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/Meta-Curriculum.

Meta-Curriculum Learning for Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation

Ternary neural networks (TNNs) are potential for network acceleration by reducing the full-precision weights in network to ternary ones, e.g., {-1,0,1}.
However, existing TNNs are mostly calculated based on rule-of-thumb quantization methods by simply thresholding operations, which  causes a significant accuracy loss. In this paper, we introduce a stem-residual framework which provides new  insight into Ternary quantization, termed Residual Quantization (TRQ), to achieve more powerful TNNs. Rather than directly thresholding operations, TRQ recursively performs quantization on full-precision weights for a  refined reconstruction by combining the binarized stem and residual parts. With such a unique quantization process, TRQ  endows the quantizer with high flexibility and precision. Our TRQ is generic, which can be easily extended to multiple bits through recursively encoded residual for  a better recognition accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields great recognition accuracy while being accelerated.

TRQ: Ternary Neural Networks with Residual Quantization

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text generation have recently received many criticisms, as they perform worse than their MLE counterparts. We suspect previous text GANs' inferior performance is due to the lack of a reliable guiding signal in their discriminators. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial imitation learning framework for text generation that uses large pre-trained language models to provide more reliable reward guidance. As previous text GANs suffer from high variance of gradients, we apply contrastive discriminator, and proximal policy optimization (PPO) to stabilize and improve text generation performance. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on a diverse set of unconditional and conditional text generation tasks. Experimental results show that TextGAIL achieves better performance in terms of both quality and diversity than the MLE baseline. We also validate our intuition that TextGAIL's discriminator demonstrates the capability of providing reasonable rewards with an additional task.

TextGAIL: Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Text Generation

Low-shot (one/few-shot) segmentation has attracted increasing attention as it works well with limited annotation. State-of-the-art low-shot segmentation methods on natural images usually focus on implicit representation learning for each novel class, such as learning prototypes, deriving guidance features via masked average pooling, and segmenting using cosine similarity in feature space. We argue that low-shot segmentation on medical images should step further to explicitly learn dense correspondences between images to utilize the anatomical similarity. The core ideas are inspired by the classical practice of multi-atlas segmentation, where the indispensable parts of atlas-based segmentation, i.e., registration, label propagation, and label fusion are unified into a single framework in our work. Specifically, we propose two alternative baselines, i.e., the Siamese-Baseline and Individual-Difference-Aware Baseline, where the former is targeted at anatomically stable structures (such as brain tissues), and the latter possesses a strong generalization ability to organs suffering large morphological variations (such as abdominal organs). In summary, this work sets up a benchmark for low-shot 3D medical image segmentation and sheds light on further understanding of atlas-based few-shot segmentation.

Alternative Baselines for Low-Shot 3D Medical Image Segmentation---An Atlas Perspective

Generally, the existing graph-based multi-view clustering models consists of two steps: (1) graph construction; (2) eigen-decomposition on the graph Laplacian matrix to compute a continuous cluster assignment matrix, followed by a post-processing algorithm to get the discrete one. However, both the graph construction and eigen-decomposition are time-consuming, and the two-stage process may deviate from directly solving the primal problem. To this end, we propose Fast Multi-view Discrete Clustering (FMDC) with anchor graphs, focusing on directly solving the spectral clustering problem with a small time cost. We efficiently generate representative anchors and construct anchor graphs on different views. The discrete cluster assignment matrix is directly obtained by performing clustering on the automatically aggregated graph. FMDC has a linear computational complexity with respect to the data scale, which is a significant improvement compared to the quadratic one. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness.

Fast Multi-View Discrete Clustering with Anchor Graphs

Review generation, aiming to automatically generate review text according to the given information, is proposed to assist in the unappealing review writing. However, most of existing methods only consider the overall sentiments of reviews and cannot achieve aspect-level sentiment control. Even though some previous studies attempt to generate aspect-level sentiment-controllable reviews, they usually require large-scale human annotations which are unavailable in the real world. To address this issue, we propose a mutual learning framework to take advantage of unlabeled data to assist the aspect-level sentiment-controllable review generation. The framework consists of a generator and a classifier which utilize confidence mechanism and reconstruction reward to enhance each other. Experimental results show our model can achieve aspect-sentiment control accuracy up to 88% without losing generation quality.

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