Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we empirically show that different timesteps of DDIM inversion reveal varying subtle distinctions between synthetic and real images that are extractable for detection, taking the forms of such as Fourier power spectrum high-frequency discrepancies and inter-pixel variance distributions. Based on these observations, we propose a novel detection method named ESIDE that directly utilizes features of intermediately noised images by training an ensemble on multiple noised timesteps, circumventing the overtime of conventional reconstruction-based strategies. To enhance human comprehension, we introduce a metric-grounded explanation refinement module to identify and explain AI-generated flaws. Additionally, we present the benchmarks GenHard and GenExplain, offering detection samples of greater difficulty and high-quality rationales for fake images. Extensive experiments show that ESIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance with 98.91% and 95.89% detection accuracy on regular and challenging samples respectively, and demonstrates generalizability and robustness.

Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhenghua Wang, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Synthetic high-quality multi-step reasoning data can significantly enhance the performance of large language models on various tasks. However, most existing methods rely on rejection sampling, which generates trajectories independently and suffers from inefficiency and imbalanced sampling across problems of varying difficulty. In this work, we introduce FastMCTS, an innovative data synthesis strategy inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search. FastMCTS provides a more efficient sampling method for multi-step reasoning data, offering step-level evaluation signals and promoting balanced sampling across problems of different difficulty levels. Experiments on both English and Chinese reasoning datasets demonstrate that FastMCTS generates over 30% more correct reasoning paths compared to rejection sampling as the number of generated tokens scales up. Furthermore, under comparable synthetic data budgets, models trained on FastMCTS-generated data outperform those trained on rejection sampling data by 3.9% across multiple benchmarks. As a lightweight sampling strategy, FastMCTS offers a practical and efficient alternative for synthesizing high-quality reasoning data.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) enhance recommendation quality by engaging users in multi-turn dialogues, capturing nuanced preferences through natural language interactions. However, these systems often face the false negative issue, where items that a user might like are incorrectly labeled as negative during training, leading to suboptimal recommendations. Expanding the label set through data augmentation presents an intuitive solution but faces the challenge of balancing two key aspects: ensuring semantic relevance and preserving the collaborative information inherent in CRS datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel data augmentation framework that first leverages an LLM-based semantic retriever to identify diverse and semantically relevant items, which are then filtered by a relevance scorer to remove noisy candidates. Building on this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy balancing semantic relevance and collaborative information. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and user simulators demonstrate significant and consistent performance improvements across various recommenders, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in advancing CRS performance.

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has been limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks. In this study, we suggest that the self-safeguarding capability of LLMs is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. Although these patterns have little impact on the semantic content of the generated text, they play a crucial role in shaping LLM behavior under jailbreaking attacks. Our findings demonstrate that these patterns can be detected with just a few pairs of contrastive queries. Extensive experimentation shows that the robustness of LLMs against jailbreaking can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. Further visual analysis provides additional evidence for our conclusions, providing new insights into the jailbreaking phenomenon. These findings highlight the importance of addressing the potential misuse of open-source LLMs within the community.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, yet their effectiveness frequently depends on costly commercial APIs or cloud services.Model selection thus entails a critical trade-off between performance and cost: high-performing LLMs typically incur substantial expenses, whereas budget-friendly small language models (SLMs) are constrained by limited capabilities.Current research primarily proposes two routing strategies: pre-generation routing and cascade routing.Both approaches have distinct characteristics, with cascade routing typically offering superior cost-effectiveness and accuracy despite its higher latency.To further address the limitations of both approaches, we introduce SATER, a dual-mode compatible approach that finetunes models through shortest-response preference optimization and a confidence-aware rejection mechanism.SATER significantly reduces redundant outputs and response times, while improving both the performance of pregeneration routing and the efficiency of cascade routing.Experiments across three SLMs and six datasets, varying in type and complexity, demonstrate that SATER achieves comparable performance while consistently reducing computational costs by over 50% and cascade latency by over 80%.

Backpropagation is the foundational algorithm for training neural networks and a key driver of deep learning’s success. However, its biological plausibility has been challenged due to three primary limitations: weight symmetry, reliance on global error signals, and the dual-phase nature of training, as highlighted by the existing literature. Although various alternative learning approaches have been proposed to address these issues, most either fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously or yield suboptimal results. Inspired by the dynamics and plasticity of pyramidal neurons, we propose Dendritic Localized Learning (DLL), a novel learning algorithm designed to overcome these challenges. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that DLL satisfies all three criteria of biological plausibility while achieving state-of-the-art performance among algorithms that meet these requirements. Furthermore, DLL exhibits strong generalization across a range of architectures, including MLPs, CNNs, and RNNs. These results, benchmarked against existing biologically plausible learning algorithms, offer valuable empirical insights for future research. We hope this study can inspire the development of new biologically plausible algorithms for training multilayer networks and advancing progress in both neuroscience and machine learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lvchangze/Dendritic-Localized-Learning.

Most edge-cloud collaboration frameworks rely on the substantial computational and storage capabilities of cloud-based artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, this reliance results in significant communication overhead between edge devices and the cloud, as well as high computational energy consumption, especially when applied to resource-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose ECC-SNN, a novel edge-cloud collaboration framework that incorporates energy-efficient spiking neural networks (SNNs) to offload more computational workload from the cloud to the edge, thereby improving cost-effectiveness and reducing reliance on the cloud. ECC-SNN employs a joint training approach that integrates ANN and SNN models, enabling edge devices to leverage knowledge from cloud models for enhanced performance while reducing energy consumption and processing latency. Furthermore, ECC-SNN features an on-device incremental learning algorithm that enables edge models to continuously adapt to dynamic environments, reducing the communication overhead and resource consumption associated with frequent cloud update requests. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that ECC-SNN improves accuracy by 4.15%, reduces average energy consumption by 79.4%, and lowers average processing latency by 39.1%.

On-device sequential recommendation (SR) systems are designed to make local inferences using real-time features, thereby alleviating the communication burden on server-based recommenders when handling concurrent requests from millions of users. However, the resource constraints of edge devices, including limited memory and computational capacity, pose significant challenges to deploying efficient SR models. Inspired by the energy-efficient and sparse computing properties of deep Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), we propose a cost-effective on-device SR model named SSR, which encodes dense embedding representations into sparse spike-wise representations and integrates novel spiking filter modules to extract temporal patterns and critical features from item sequences, optimizing computational and memory efficiency without sacrificing recommendation accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SSR. Compared to other SR baselines, SSR achieves comparable recommendation performance while reducing energy consumption by an average of 59.43%. In addition, SSR significantly lowers memory usage, making it particularly well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that mimic how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (spiking Transformers) have recently shown great advancements in various tasks, and inspired by traditional Transformers, several studies have demonstrated that spiking absolute positional encoding can help capture sequential relationships for input data, enhancing the capabilities of spiking Transformers for tasks such as sequential modeling and image classification. However, how to incorporate relative positional information into SNNs remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce several strategies to approximate relative positional encoding (RPE) in spiking Transformers while preserving the binary nature of spikes. Firstly, we formally prove that encoding relative distances with Gray Code ensures that the binary representations of positional indices maintain a constant Hamming distance whenever their decimal values differ by a power of two, and we propose **Gray-PE** based on this property. In addition, we propose another RPE method called **Log-PE**, which combines the logarithmic form of the relative distance matrix directly into the spiking attention map. Furthermore, we extend our RPE methods to a two-dimensional form, making them suitable for processing image patches. We evaluate our RPE methods on various tasks, including time series forecasting, text classification, and patch-based image classification, and the experimental results demonstrate a satisfying performance gain by incorporating our RPE methods across many architectures. Our results provide fresh perspectives on designing spiking Transformers to advance their sequential modeling capability, thereby expanding their applicability across various domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SeqSNN.

In this paper, we propose a novel learning paradigm, termed *Chain-of-Model* (CoM), which incorporates the causal relationship into the hidden states of each layer as a chain style. thereby introducing great scaling efficiency in model training and inference flexibility in deployment.We introduce the concept of *Chain-of-Representation* (CoR), which formulates the hidden states at each layer as a combination of multiple sub-representations (i.e., chains). In each layer, each chain from the output representations can only view all of its preceding chains in the input representations. Consequently, the model built upon CoM framework can progressively scale up the model size by increasing the chains based on the previous models (i.e., chains), and offer multiple sub-models at varying sizes for elastic inference by using different chain numbers. Based on this principle, we devise *Chain-of-Language-Model* (CoLM), which incorporates the idea of CoM into each layer of Transformer architecture. Based on CoLM, we further introduce CoLM-Air by introducing a *KV sharing* mechanism, that computes all keys and values within the first chain and then shares across all chains. This design demonstrates additional extensibility, such as enabling seamless LM switching, prefilling acceleration and so on. Experimental results demonstrate our CoLM family can achieve comparable performance to the standard Transformer, while simultaneously enabling greater flexiblity, such as progressive scaling to improve training efficiency and offer multiple varying model sizes for elastic inference, paving a a new way toward building language models.

Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Double descent presents a counter-intuitive aspect within the machine learning domain, and researchers have observed its manifestation in various models and tasks. While some theoretical explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon in specific contexts, an accepted theory for its occurring mechanism in deep learning remains yet to be established. In this study, we revisit the phenomenon of double descent and demonstrate that the presence of noisy data strongly influences its occurrence. By comprehensively analysing the feature space of learned representations, we unveil that double descent arises in imperfect models trained with noisy data. We argue that while small and intermediate models before the interpolation threshold follow the traditional bias-variance trade-off, over-parameterized models interpolate noisy samples among robust data thus acquiring the capability to separate the information from the noise. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Yufei-Gu-451/double_descent_inference.git}.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking behavior of biological neurons, provide a unique pathway for capturing the intricacies of temporal data. However, applying SNNs to time-series forecasting is challenging due to difficulties in effective temporal alignment, complexities in encoding processes, and the absence of standardized guidelines for model selection. In this paper, we propose a framework for SNNs in time-series forecasting tasks, leveraging the efficiency of spiking neurons in processing temporal information. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based approaches achieve comparable or superior results to traditional time-series forecasting methods on diverse benchmarks with much less energy consumption. Furthermore, we conduct detailed analysis experiments to assess the SNN’s capacity to capture temporal dependencies within time-series data, offering valuable insights into its nuanced strengths and effectiveness in modeling the intricate dynamics of temporal data. Our study contributes to the expanding field of SNNs and offers a promising alternative for time-series forecasting tasks, presenting a pathway for the development of more biologically inspired and temporally aware forecasting models. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SeqSNN.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a promising approach to developing artificial neural networks that are both energy-efficient and biologically plausible. However, applying SNNs to sequential tasks, such as text classification and time-series forecasting, has been hindered by the challenge of creating an effective and hardware-friendly spike-form positional encoding (PE) strategy. Drawing inspiration from the central pattern generators (CPGs) in the human brain, which produce rhythmic patterned outputs without requiring rhythmic inputs, we propose a novel PE technique for SNNs, termed CPG-PE. We demonstrate that the commonly used sinusoidal PE is mathematically a specific solution to the membrane potential dynamics of a particular CPG. Moreover, extensive experiments across various domains, including time-series forecasting, natural language processing, and image classification, show that SNNs with CPG-PE outperform their conventional counterparts. Additionally, we perform analysis experiments to elucidate the mechanism through which SNNs encode positional information and to explore the function of CPGs in the human brain. This investigation may offer valuable insights into the fundamental principles of neural computation.

Crowd counting has received extensive attention in the field of computer vision, and methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made great progress in this task. However, challenges such as scale variation, nonuniform distribution, complex background, and occlusion in crowded scenes hinder the performance of these networks in crowd counting. In order to overcome these challenges, this article proposes a multiscale spatial guidance perception aggregation network (MGANet) to achieve efficient and accurate crowd counting. MGANet consists of three parts: multiscale feature extraction network (MFEN), spatial guidance network (SGN), and attention fusion network (AFN). Specifically, to alleviate the scale variation problem in crowded scenes, MFEN is introduced to enhance the scale adaptability and effectively capture multiscale features in scenes with drastic scale variation. To address the challenges of nonuniform distribution and complex background in population, an SGN is proposed. The SGN includes two parts: the spatial context network (SCN) and the guidance perception network (GPN). SCN is used to capture the detailed semantic information between the multiscale feature positions extracted by MFEN, and improve the ability of deep structured information exploration. At the same time, the dependence relationship between the spatial remote context is established to enhance the receptive field. GPN is used to enhance the information exchange between channels and guide the network to select appropriate multiscale features and spatial context semantic features. AFN is used to adaptively measure the importance of the above different features, and obtain accurate and effective feature representations from them. In addition, this article proposes a novel region-adaptive loss function, which optimizes the regions with large recognition errors in the image, and alleviates the inconsistency between the training target and the evaluation metric. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, extensive experiments were carried out on challenging benchmarks including ShanghaiTech Part A and Part B, UCF-CC-50, UCF-QNRF, and JHU-CROWD++. Experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance on all four datasets. Especially on ShanghaiTech Part A and Part B, CUCF-QNRF, and JHU-CROWD++ datasets, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method achieves superior recognition performance and better robustness.

Tables are widely used in research and business, and are suitable for human consumption, but not easily machine-processable, particularly when tables are present in images.One of the main challenges to extracting data from images of tables is to accurately recognize table structures, especially for complex tables with cross rows and columns.In this study, we propose a novel multi-modal pre-training model for table structure recognition, named TableVLM.With a two-stream multi-modal transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture, TableVLM learns to capture rich table structure-related features by multiple carefullydesigned unsupervised objectives inspired by the notion of masked visual-language modeling.To pre-train this model, we also created a dataset, called ComplexTable, which consists of 1, 000K samples to be released publicly.Experiment results show that the model built on pre-trained TableVLM can improve the performance up to 1.97% in tree-editing-distancescore on ComplexTable.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in the field of natural language generation.However, the propensity of LLMs to generate inaccurate or non-factual content, termed "hallucinations", remains a significant challenge.Current hallucination detection methods often necessitate the retrieval of great numbers of relevant evidence, thereby increasing response times.We introduce a unique framework that leverages statistical decision theory and Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process.This approach does not require a predetermined number of observations.Instead, the analysis proceeds in a sequential manner, enabling an expeditious decision towards "belief" or "disbelief" through a stop-or-continue strategy.Extensive experiments reveal that this novel framework surpasses existing methods in both efficiency and precision of hallucination detection.Furthermore, it requires fewer retrieval steps on average, thus decreasing response times 1 .

Abstract Very recently, few certified defense methods have been developed to provably guarantee the robustness of a text classifier to adversarial synonym substitutions. However, all the existing certified defense methods assume that the defenders have been informed of how the adversaries generate synonyms, which is not a realistic scenario. In this study, we propose a certifiably robust defense method by randomly masking a certain proportion of the words in an input text, in which the above unrealistic assumption is no longer necessary. The proposed method can defend against not only word substitution-based attacks, but also character-level perturbations. We can certify the classifications of over 50% of texts to be robust to any perturbation of five words on AGNEWS, and two words on SST2 dataset. The experimental results show that our randomized smoothing method significantly outperforms recently proposed defense methods across multiple datasets under different attack algorithms.

We propose an unsupervised word segmentation model, in which for each unlabelled sentence sample, the learning objective is to maximize the generation probability of the sentence given its all possible segmentations. Such a generation probability can be factorized into the likelihood of each possible segment given the context in a recursive way. To capture both the long- and short-term dependencies, we propose to use a bi-directional neural language model to better extract the features of the segment’s context. Two decoding algorithms were also developed to combine the context features from both directions to generate the final segmentation at the inference time, which helps to reconcile word-boundary ambiguities. Experimental results show that our context-sensitive unsupervised segmentation model achieved state-of-the-art at different evaluation settings on various datasets for Chinese, and the comparable result for Thai.

We describe DiaProlog, a dialogue logic programming language that extends the vanilla Prolog with the features to facilitate the integration of reasoning capabilities into task-oriented dialogue systems. The extended language combines the expressive power of Horn rule and description logic with uncertainty and allows us to describe the specifications for both problem solving and dialogue management in a declarative programming manner. The systems incorporated with DiaProlog are capable of asking appropriate questions when necessary and collecting the answers to direct the line of reasoning and guide the conversation toward the correct solution. Besides, an explanation facility is provided to explain the reasoning behind its conclusion. We also describe a dialogue management framework built upon DiaProlog, which has been validated in multiple implementations providing legal consulting, financial advising, and medical guidance services where many questions require complex inferences about knowledge.

Predicting energetically favorable 3-dimensional conformations of organic molecules frommolecular graph plays a fundamental role in computer-aided drug discovery research.However, effectively exploring the high-dimensional conformation space to identify (meta) stable conformers is anything but trivial.In this work, we introduce RMCF, a novel framework to generate a diverse set of low-energy molecular conformations through samplingfrom a regularized molecular conformation field.We develop a data-driven molecular segmentation algorithm to automatically partition each molecule into several structural building blocks to reduce the modeling degrees of freedom.Then, we employ a Markov Random Field to learn the joint probability distribution of fragment configurations and inter-fragment dihedral angles, which enables us to sample from different low-energy regions of a conformation space.Our model constantly outperforms state-of-the-art models for the conformation generation task on the GEOM-Drugs dataset.We attribute the success of RMCF to modeling in a regularized feature space and learning a global fragment configuration distribution for effective sampling.The proposed method could be generalized to deal with larger biomolecular systems.

Conditional random fields (CRFs) have been widely used for sequence labeling tasks in the field of natural language processing. However, how to model both local and global dependencies among labels is not well solved yet. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage label decoding method to better model the short- and long-term label dependencies, while being much more computationally efficient with the use of graphics processing units (GPUs). A base model is first used to propose draft labels, and then a novel two-stream self-attention model makes refinements on these draft predictions based on long-range label dependencies. Besides, in order to mitigate the side effects of incorrect draft labels, Bayesian neural networks are used to indicate the labels with high probabilities of being wrong, which helps to mitigate the error propagation. Not only can our method model sentence-level label dependencies, but it is also easily extended to document-level sequence labeling by querying and storing a key-value memory matrix with label co-occurrence relationships. The experimental results on both sentence-level and document-level sequence labeling benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms existing label decoding methods while taking advantage of parallel computations on GPUs.

Yi Zhou, Xiaoqing Zheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Kai-Wei Chang, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Recent studies have shown that deep neural network-based models are vulnerable to intentionally crafted adversarial examples, and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks for neural NLP models.However, there is a lack of systematic study on comparing different defense approaches under the same attacking setting.In this paper, we seek to fill the gap through comprehensive studies on the behavior of neural text classifiers trained with various defense methods against representative adversarial attacks.In addition, we propose an effective method to further improve the robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks, and achieved the highest accuracy on both clean and adversarial examples on AGNEWS and IMDB datasets, outperforming existing methods by a significant margin.We hope this study could provide useful clues for future research on text adversarial defense.Codes are available at https:// github.com/RockyLzy/TextDefender.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where a small perturbation to an input alters the model prediction.In many cases, malicious inputs intentionally crafted for one model can fool another model.In this paper, we present the first study to systematically investigate the transferability of adversarial examples for text classification models and explore how various factors, including network architecture, tokenization scheme, word embedding, and model capacity, affect the transferability of adversarial examples.Based on these studies, we propose a genetic algorithm to find an ensemble of models that can be used to induce adversarial examples to fool almost all existing models.Such adversarial examples reflect the defects of the learning process and the data bias in the training set.Finally, we derive word replacement rules that can be used for model diagnostics from these adversarial examples. A.2 Transferability among Different Neural ModelsWe show in Figure 4 the transferability rate among all neural models in the model pool.The column and row headers indicate the IDs of source and target models respectively.The mapping of IDs and the corresponding models is shown in Figure 8.We generate adversarial examples by attacking a source model, and report the transferability rates on a target (or victim) model. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 1 .71.50.68.66.21.30.50.39.48.48.22.27.51.49.57.50.21.29 .44 .38 2 .55.63.58.59.21.33 .46.47.46.48.20 .31.49.59.52 .50.18.30.45.47 3 .68.53.70.70.22.28.49.41.50.48.21.26.52 .50.58.55.20 .27.44 .41 4 .

Recently, many efforts have been devoted to generating responses expressing a specific emotion or relating to a given topic in a controlled manner. However, limited attention has been given to generating responses with a specified syntactic pattern, which makes it possible to imitate someone's way of speaking in dialogue. To fulfill this goal, we propose two models to generate syntax-aware responses: a gross-constraint and a specific-constraint model. The former controls the syntactic patterns of generated responses at sentence-level, while the latter works at smaller language units, such as words or phrases, being capable of manipulating the syntactic structures of responses in a more subtle manner. The extensive experimental results on two different datasets show that both the two models not only can generate meaningful responses with a specific and coherent structure but also improve on the diversity of generated responses, with similar gains in readability, relevance, and diversity as measured by human judges.

Despite achieving prominent performance on many important tasks, it has been reported that neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples.Previously studies along this line mainly focused on semantic tasks such as sentiment analysis, question answering and reading comprehension.In this study, we show that adversarial examples also exist in dependency parsing: we propose two approaches to study where and how parsers make mistakes by searching over perturbations to existing texts at sentence and phrase levels, and design algorithms to construct such examples in both of the black-box and white-box settings.Our experiments with one of state-of-the-art parsers on the English Penn Treebank (PTB) show that up to 77% of input examples admit adversarial perturbations, and we also show that the robustness of parsing models can be improved by crafting high-quality adversaries and including them in the training stage, while suffering little to no performance drop on the clean input data.

A sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning with neural networks empirically shows to be an effective framework for grammatical error correction (GEC), which takes a sentence with errors as input and outputs the corrected one.However, the performance of GEC models with the seq2seq framework heavily relies on the size and quality of the corpus on hand.We propose a method inspired by adversarial training to generate more meaningful and valuable training examples by continually identifying the weak spots of a model, and to enhance the model by gradually adding the generated adversarial examples to the training set.Extensive experimental results show that such adversarial training can improve both the generalization and robustness of GEC models.

It is desirable for dialog systems to have capability to express specific emotions during a conversation, which has a direct, quantifiable impact on improvement of their usability and user satisfaction.After a careful investigation of real-life conversation data, we found that there are at least two ways to express emotions with language.One is to describe emotional states by explicitly using strong emotional words; another is to increase the intensity of the emotional experiences by implicitly combining neutral words in distinct ways.We propose an emotional dialogue system (EmoDS) that can generate the meaningful responses with a coherent structure for a post, and meanwhile express the desired emotion explicitly or implicitly within a unified framework.Experimental results showed EmoDS performed better than the baselines in BLEU, diversity and the quality of emotional expression.

Pre-trained distributed word representations have been proven to be useful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the geometric basis of word representations and their relations to the representations of word's contexts has not been carefully studied yet. In this study, we first investigate such geometric relationship under a general framework, which is abstracted from some typical word representation learning approaches, and find out that only the directions of word representations are well associated to their context vector representations while the magnitudes are not. In order to make better use of the information contained in the magnitudes of word representations, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian model combined with maximum a posteriori estimation to learn word representations, and extend it to represent polysemous words. Our word representations have been evaluated on multiple NLP tasks, and the experimental results show that the proposed model achieved promising results, comparing to several popular word representations.

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) combined with attention mechanism has proved to be useful for various NLP tasks including machine translation, sequence labeling and syntactic parsing. The attention mechanism is usually applied by estimating the weights (or importance) of inputs and taking the weighted sum of inputs as derived features. Although such features have demonstrated their effectiveness, they may fail to capture the sequence information due to the simple weighted sum being used to produce them. The order of the words does matter to the meaning or the structure of the sentences, especially for syntactic parsing, which aims to recover the structure from a sequence of words. In this study, we propose an RNN-based attention to capture the relevant and sequence-preserved features from a sentence, and use the derived features to perform the dependency parsing. We evaluated the graph-based and transition-based parsing models enhanced with the RNN-based sequence-preserved attention on the both English PTB and Chinese CTB datasets. The experimental results show that the enhanced systems were improved with significant increase in parsing accuracy.

Unsupervised word representations have demonstrated improvements in predictive generalization on various NLP tasks. Most of the existing models are in fact good at capturing the relatedness among words rather than their ''genuine'' similarity because the context representations are often represented by a sum (or an average) of the neighbor's embeddings, which simplifies the computation but ignores an important fact that the meaning of a word is determined by its context, reflecting not only the surrounding words but also the rules used to combine them (i.e. compositionality). On the other hand, much effort has been devoted to learning a single-prototype representation per word, which is problematic because many words are polysemous, and a single-prototype model is incapable of capturing phenomena of homonymy and polysemy. We present a neural network architecture to jointly learn word embeddings and context representations from large data sets. The explicitly produced context representations are further used to learn context-specific and multi-prototype word embeddings. Our embeddings were evaluated on several NLP tasks, and the experimental results demonstrated the proposed model outperformed other competitors and is applicable to intrinsically "character-based" languages.

Very recently, some studies on neural dependency parsers have shown advantage over the traditional ones on a wide variety of languages.However, for graphbased neural dependency parsing systems, they either count on the long-term memory and attention mechanism to implicitly capture the high-order features or give up the global exhaustive inference algorithms in order to harness the features over a rich history of parsing decisions.The former might miss out the important features for specific headword predictions without the help of the explicit structural information, and the latter may suffer from the error propagation as false early structural constraints are used to create features when making future predictions.We explore the feasibility of explicitly taking high-order features into account while remaining the main advantage of global inference and learning for graph-based parsing.The proposed parser first forms an initial parse tree by head-modifier predictions based on the first-order factorization.High-order features (such as grandparent, sibling, and uncle) then can be defined over the initial tree, and used to refine the parse tree in an iterative fashion.Experimental results showed that our model (called INDP) archived competitive performance to existing benchmark parsers on both English and Chinese datasets.

The beer recipe optimization is a effective way for reducing the brewing enterprises. Because the recipe optimization belongs to NP-hard problem, It is difficult to obtain the global optimal solution for the traditional optimization algorithm. Though ant colony optimization (ACO) is suitable for solving the combinatorial optimization problems, it still has weakness in solving continuous optimization problems. Therefore, a new ant colony optimization was presented in this paper, and the whole solution space was adjusted properly by using dynamic mining in iterative process. After that, the optimization of beer recipe based on the improved ACO was studied, to reduce the cost of raw materials under the condition of the production constraints. And Simulation results had been showed that comparing with other algorithms, the improved algorithm has better global optimization ability and robustness.

We propose a convolutional neural network architecture with k-max pooling layer for semantic modeling of music. The aim of a music model is to analyze and represent the semantic content of music for purposes of classification, discovery, or clustering. The k-max pooling layer is used in the network to make it possible to pool the k most active features, capturing the semantic-rich and time-varying information about music. Our network takes an input music as a sequence of audio words, where each audio word is associated with a distributed feature vector that can be fine-tuned by backpropagating errors during the training. The architecture allows us to take advantage of the better trained audio word embeddings and the deep structures to produce more robust music representations. Experiment results with two different music collections show that our neural networks achieved the best accuracy in music genre classification comparing with three state-of-art systems.

This study explores the feasibility of performing Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and POS tagging by deep learning.We try to avoid task-specific feature engineering, and use deep layers of neural networks to discover relevant features to the tasks.We leverage large-scale unlabeled data to improve internal representation of Chinese characters, and use these improved representations to enhance supervised word segmentation and POS tagging models.Our networks achieved close to state-of-theart performance with minimal computational cost.We also describe a perceptron-style algorithm for training the neural networks, as an alternative to maximum-likelihood method, to speed up the training process and make the learning algorithm easier to be implemented.

BACKGROUND: Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science. RESULTS: We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research. CONCLUSION: Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline.

Trust plays a central role for efficient and secure interactions on the semantic Web. Nowadays, more and more research has focused on this topic. In this paper, we introduce RCSW, a reputation-chain trust model for the semantic Web. We illustrate the basic definitions and mechanisms of RCSW and present the algorithm to calculate trust ratings through the chain of the trust network. RCSW incorporates pairwise trust values and reliable factors of acquaintances and constructs an edge-weighted graph to calculate trust ratings. We also define classes of trust functions to allow users to individualize their trust calculation. Our proposed model can deal with trust management effectively and can quickly adapt to the changing environment.