科学研究的基本目标是了解因果关系。然而，尽管因果关系在生活和社会科学中的重要作用，但在自然语言处理（NLP）中并不具有相同的重要性，而自然语言处理（NLP）传统上更加重视预测任务。这种区别开始逐渐消失，随着因果推理和语言处理的融合，跨学科研究的新兴领域。尽管如此，关于NLP因果关系的研究仍然散布在没有统一的定义，基准数据集的情况下，并清楚地表达了将因果推论应用于文本领域的挑战和机遇，并具有其独特的属性。在这项调查中，我们巩固了整个学术领域的研究，并将其置于更广泛的NLP景观中。我们介绍了用文本估算因果效应的统计挑战，其中包含文本用作结果，治疗或解决混杂问题的设置。此外，我们探讨了因果推理的潜在用途，以提高NLP模型的鲁棒性，公平性和解释性。因此，我们提供了NLP社区因果推断的统一概述。

We propose a layered hierarchical architecture called UCLA (Universal Causality Layered Architecture), which combines multiple levels of categorical abstraction for causal inference. At the top-most level, causal interventions are modeled combinatorially using a simplicial category of ordinal numbers. At the second layer, causal models are defined by a graph-type category. The non-random ``surgical" operations on causal structures, such as edge deletion, are captured using degeneracy and face operators from the simplicial layer above. The third categorical abstraction layer corresponds to the data layer in causal inference. The fourth homotopy layer comprises of additional structure imposed on the instance layer above, such as a topological space, which enables evaluating causal models on datasets. Functors map between every pair of layers in UCLA. Each functor between layers is characterized by a universal arrow, which defines an isomorphism between every pair of categorical layers. These universal arrows define universal elements and representations through the Yoneda Lemma, and in turn lead to a new category of elements based on a construction introduced by Grothendieck. Causal inference between each pair of layers is defined as a lifting problem, a commutative diagram whose objects are categories, and whose morphisms are functors that are characterized as different types of fibrations. We illustrate the UCLA architecture using a range of examples, including integer-valued multisets that represent a non-graphical framework for conditional independence, and causal models based on graphs and string diagrams using symmetric monoidal categories. We define causal effect in terms of the homotopy colimit of the nerve of the category of elements.

Self-supervised pre-trained transformers have improved the state of the art on a variety of speech tasks. Due to the quadratic time and space complexity of self-attention, they usually operate at the level of relatively short (e.g., utterance) segments. In this paper, we study the use of context, i.e., surrounding segments, during fine-tuning and propose a new approach called context-aware fine-tuning. We attach a context module on top of the last layer of a pre-trained model to encode the whole segment into a context embedding vector which is then used as an additional feature for the final prediction. During the fine-tuning stage, we introduce an auxiliary loss that encourages this context embedding vector to be similar to context vectors of surrounding segments. This allows the model to make predictions without access to these surrounding segments at inference time and requires only a tiny overhead compared to standard fine-tuned models. We evaluate the proposed approach using the SLUE and Librilight benchmarks for several downstream tasks: Automatic speech recognition (ASR), named entity recognition (NER), and sentiment analysis (SA). The results show that context-aware fine-tuning not only outperforms a standard fine-tuning baseline but also rivals a strong context injection baseline that uses neighboring speech segments during inference.

Advancement in large pretrained language models has significantly improved their performance for conditional language generation tasks including summarization albeit with hallucinations. To reduce hallucinations, conventional methods proposed improving beam search or using a fact checker as a postprocessing step. In this paper, we investigate the use of the Natural Language Inference (NLI) entailment metric to detect and prevent hallucinations in summary generation. We propose an NLI-assisted beam re-ranking mechanism by computing entailment probability scores between the input context and summarization model-generated beams during saliency-enhanced greedy decoding. Moreover, a diversity metric is introduced to compare its effectiveness against vanilla beam search. Our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms vanilla beam decoding on XSum and CNN/DM datasets.

Coordinate-based implicit neural networks, or neural fields, have emerged as useful representations of shape and appearance in 3D computer vision. Despite advances however, it remains challenging to build neural fields for categories of objects without datasets like ShapeNet that provide canonicalized object instances that are consistently aligned for their 3D position and orientation (pose). We present Canonical Field Network (CaFi-Net), a self-supervised method to canonicalize the 3D pose of instances from an object category represented as neural fields, specifically neural radiance fields (NeRFs). CaFi-Net directly learns from continuous and noisy radiance fields using a Siamese network architecture that is designed to extract equivariant field features for category-level canonicalization. During inference, our method takes pre-trained neural radiance fields of novel object instances at arbitrary 3D pose, and estimates a canonical field with consistent 3D pose across the entire category. Extensive experiments on a new dataset of 1300 NeRF models across 13 object categories show that our method matches or exceeds the performance of 3D point cloud-based methods.

Cloud computing holds the promise of reduced costs through economies of scale. To realize this promise, cloud computing vendors typically solve sequential resource allocation problems, where customer workloads are packed on shared hardware. Virtual machines (VM) form the foundation of modern cloud computing as they help logically abstract user compute from shared physical infrastructure. Traditionally, VM packing problems are solved by predicting demand, followed by a Model Predictive Control (MPC) optimization over a future horizon. We introduce an approximate formulation of an industrial VM packing problem as an MILP with soft-constraints parameterized by the predictions. Recently, predict-and-optimize (PnO) was proposed for end-to-end training of prediction models by back-propagating the cost of decisions through the optimization problem. But, PnO is unable to scale to the large prediction horizons prevalent in cloud computing. To tackle this issue, we propose the Predict-and-Critic (PnC) framework that outperforms PnO with just a two-step horizon by leveraging reinforcement learning. PnC jointly trains a prediction model and a terminal Q function that approximates cost-to-go over a long horizon, by back-propagating the cost of decisions through the optimization problem \emph{and from the future}. The terminal Q function allows us to solve a much smaller two-step horizon optimization problem than the multi-step horizon necessary in PnO. We evaluate PnO and the PnC framework on two datasets, three workloads, and with disturbances not modeled in the optimization problem. We find that PnC significantly improves decision quality over PnO, even when the optimization problem is not a perfect representation of reality. We also find that hardening the soft constraints of the MILP and back-propagating through the constraints improves decision quality for both PnO and PnC.

Deep neural networks have emerged as the workhorse for a large section of robotics and control applications, especially as models for dynamical systems. Such data-driven models are in turn used for designing and verifying autonomous systems. This is particularly useful in modeling medical systems where data can be leveraged to individualize treatment. In safety-critical applications, it is important that the data-driven model is conformant to established knowledge from the natural sciences. Such knowledge is often available or can often be distilled into a (possibly black-box) model $M$. For instance, the unicycle model for an F1 racing car. In this light, we consider the following problem - given a model $M$ and state transition dataset, we wish to best approximate the system model while being bounded distance away from $M$. We propose a method to guarantee this conformance. Our first step is to distill the dataset into few representative samples called memories, using the idea of a growing neural gas. Next, using these memories we partition the state space into disjoint subsets and compute bounds that should be respected by the neural network, when the input is drawn from a particular subset. This serves as a symbolic wrapper for guaranteed conformance. We argue theoretically that this only leads to bounded increase in approximation error; which can be controlled by increasing the number of memories. We experimentally show that on three case studies (Car Model, Drones, and Artificial Pancreas), our constrained neurosymbolic models conform to specified $M$ models (each encoding various constraints) with order-of-magnitude improvements compared to the augmented Lagrangian and vanilla training methods.

Industries must follow government rules and regulations around the world to classify products when assessing duties and taxes for international shipment. Harmonized System (HS) is the most standardized numerical method of classifying traded products among industry classification systems. A hierarchical ensemble model comprising of Bert- transformer, NER, distance-based approaches, and knowledge-graphs have been developed to address scalability, coverage, ability to capture nuances, automation and auditing requirements when classifying unknown text-descriptions as per HS method.

Consider two brands that want to jointly test alternate web experiences for their customers with an A/B test. Such collaborative tests are today enabled using \textit{third-party cookies}, where each brand has information on the identity of visitors to another website. With the imminent elimination of third-party cookies, such A/B tests will become untenable. We propose a two-stage experimental design, where the two brands only need to agree on high-level aggregate parameters of the experiment to test the alternate experiences. Our design respects the privacy of customers. We propose an estimater of the Average Treatment Effect (ATE), show that it is unbiased and theoretically compute its variance. Our demonstration describes how a marketer for a brand can design such an experiment and analyze the results. On real and simulated data, we show that the approach provides valid estimate of the ATE with low variance and is robust to the proportion of visitors overlapping across the brands.

Language is one of the primary means by which we describe the 3D world around us. While rapid progress has been made in text-to-2D-image synthesis, similar progress in text-to-3D-shape synthesis has been hindered by the lack of paired (text, shape) data. Moreover, extant methods for text-to-shape generation have limited shape diversity and fidelity. We introduce TextCraft, a method to address these limitations by producing high-fidelity and diverse 3D shapes without the need for (text, shape) pairs for training. TextCraft achieves this by using CLIP and using a multi-resolution approach by first generating in a low-dimensional latent space and then upscaling to a higher resolution, improving the fidelity of the generated shape. To improve shape diversity, we use a discrete latent space which is modelled using a bidirectional transformer conditioned on the interchangeable image-text embedding space induced by CLIP. Moreover, we present a novel variant of classifier-free guidance, which further improves the accuracy-diversity trade-off. Finally, we perform extensive experiments that demonstrate that TextCraft outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.