Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which maps entities and relations in a knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces, has achieved great success in predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. However, knowledge graphs often contain incomplete triples that are difficult to inductively infer by KGEs. To address this challenge, we resort to analogical inference and propose a novel and general self-supervised framework AnKGE to enhance KGE models with analogical inference capability. We propose an analogical object retriever that retrieves appropriate analogical objects from entity-level, relation-level, and triple-level. And in AnKGE, we train an analogy function for each level of analogical inference with the original element embedding from a well-trained KGE model as input, which outputs the analogical object embedding. In order to combine inductive inference capability from the original KGE model and analogical inference capability enhanced by AnKGE, we interpolate the analogy score with the base model score and introduce the adaptive weights in the score function for prediction. Through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that AnKGE achieves competitive results on link prediction task and well performs analogical inference.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.

Theoretical properties of bilevel problems are well studied when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. In this work, we focus on bilevel optimization problems without the strong-convexity assumption. In these cases, we first show that the common local optimality measures such as KKT condition or regularization can lead to undesired consequences. Then, we aim to identify the mildest conditions that make bilevel problems tractable. We identify two classes of growth conditions on the lower-level objective that leads to continuity. Under these assumptions, we show that the local optimality of the bilevel problem can be defined via the Goldstein stationarity condition of the hyper-objective. We then propose the Inexact Gradient-Free Method (IGFM) to solve the bilevel problem, using an approximate zeroth order oracle that is of independent interest. Our non-asymptotic analysis demonstrates that the proposed method can find a $(\delta, \varepsilon)$ Goldstein stationary point for bilevel problems with a zeroth order oracle complexity that is polynomial in $d, 1/\delta$ and $1/\varepsilon$.

In recent years, the Transformer architecture has shown its superiority in the video-based person re-identification task. Inspired by video representation learning, these methods mainly focus on designing modules to extract informative spatial and temporal features. However, they are still limited in extracting local attributes and global identity information, which are critical for the person re-identification task. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Stage Spatial-Temporal Aggregation Transformer (MSTAT) with two novel designed proxy embedding modules to address the above issue. Specifically, MSTAT consists of three stages to encode the attribute-associated, the identity-associated, and the attribute-identity-associated information from the video clips, respectively, achieving the holistic perception of the input person. We combine the outputs of all the stages for the final identification. In practice, to save the computational cost, the Spatial-Temporal Aggregation (STA) modules are first adopted in each stage to conduct the self-attention operations along the spatial and temporal dimensions separately. We further introduce the Attribute-Aware and Identity-Aware Proxy embedding modules (AAP and IAP) to extract the informative and discriminative feature representations at different stages. All of them are realized by employing newly designed self-attention operations with specific meanings. Moreover, temporal patch shuffling is also introduced to further improve the robustness of the model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules in extracting the informative and discriminative information from the videos, and illustrate the MSTAT can achieve state-of-the-art accuracies on various standard benchmarks.

In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image transmission is developed. In the investigated framework, a set of servers cooperatively transmit images to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques. To evaluate the performance of studied semantic communication system, a multimodal metric is proposed to measure the correlation between the extracted semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, each server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem aiming to minimize each server's transmission latency while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, a value decomposition based entropy-maximized multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed, which enables servers to coordinate for training and execute RB allocation in a distributed manner to approach to a globally optimal performance with less training iterations. Compared to traditional multi-agent RL, the proposed RL improves the valuable action exploration of servers and the probability of finding a globally optimal RB allocation policy based on local observation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the transmission delay by up to 16.1% compared to traditional multi-agent RL.

With the fast development of big data, it has been easier than before to learn the optimal decision rule by updating the decision rule recursively and making online decisions. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual bandit framework of sequential decision-making. We propose a general framework for online and adaptive data collection environment that can update decision rules via weighted stochastic gradient descent. We allow different weighting schemes of the stochastic gradient and establish the asymptotic normality of the parameter estimator. Our proposed estimator significantly improves the asymptotic efficiency over the previous averaged SGD approach via inverse probability weights. We also conduct an optimality analysis on the weights in a linear regression setting. We provide a Bahadur representation of the proposed estimator and show that the remainder term in the Bahadur representation entails a slower convergence rate compared to classical SGD due to the adaptive data collection.

Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work focuses on the former. Previous methods build the network with several modules like CNN, LSTM and Attention. Recent methods combine the Transformer with these modules for better performance. However, it requires tedious optimization skills to train a network composed of mixed modules, making these methods inconvenient to be used in practice. In this paper, we propose to design \emph{pure Transformer-based networks} for deep RL, aiming at providing off-the-shelf backbones for both the online and offline settings. Specifically, the Transformer in Transformer (TIT) backbone is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the inner one is used to process a single observation, while the outer one is responsible for processing the observation history; combining both is expected to extract spatial-temporal representations for good decision-making. Experiments show that TIT can achieve satisfactory performance in different settings, consistently.