Entity matching in Customer 360 is the task of determining if multiple records represent the same real world entity. Entities are typically people, organizations, locations, and events represented as attributed nodes in a graph, though they can also be represented as records in relational data. While probabilistic matching engines and artificial neural network models exist for this task, explaining entity matching has received less attention. In this demo, we present our Explainable Entity Matching (xEM) system and discuss the different AI/ML considerations that went into its implementation.

Multi-Exit models (MEMs) use an early-exit strategy to improve the accuracy and efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) by allowing samples to exit the network before the last layer. However, the effectiveness of MEMs in the presence of distribution shifts remains largely unexplored. Our work examines how distribution shifts generated by common image corruptions affect the accuracy/efficiency of MEMs. We find that under common corruptions, early-exiting at the first correct exit reduces the inference cost and provides a significant boost in accuracy ( 10%) over exiting at the last layer. However, with realistic early-exit strategies, which do not assume knowledge about the correct exits, MEMs still reduce inference cost but provide a marginal improvement in accuracy (1%) compared to exiting at the last layer. Moreover, the presence of distribution shift widens the gap between an MEM's maximum classification accuracy and realistic early-exit strategies by 5% on average compared with the gap on in-distribution data. Our empirical analysis shows that the lack of calibration due to a distribution shift increases the susceptibility of such early-exit strategies to exit early and increases misclassification rates. Furthermore, the lack of calibration increases the inconsistency in the predictions of the model across exits, leading to both inefficient inference and more misclassifications compared with evaluation on in-distribution data. Finally, we propose two metrics, underthinking and overthinking, that quantify the different behavior of practical early-exit strategy under distribution shifts, and provide insights into improving the practical utility of MEMs.

Continuous pseudo-labeling (PL) algorithms such as slimIPL have recently emerged as a powerful strategy for semi-supervised learning in speech recognition. In contrast with earlier strategies that alternated between training a model and generating pseudo-labels (PLs) with it, here PLs are generated in end-to-end manner as training proceeds, improving training speed and the accuracy of the final model. PL shares a common theme with teacher-student models such as distillation in that a teacher model generates targets that need to be mimicked by the student model being trained. However, interestingly, PL strategies in general use hard-labels, whereas distillation uses the distribution over labels as the target to mimic. Inspired by distillation we expect that specifying the whole distribution (aka soft-labels) over sequences as the target for unlabeled data, instead of a single best pass pseudo-labeled transcript (hard-labels) should improve PL performance and convergence. Surprisingly and unexpectedly, we find that soft-labels targets can lead to training divergence, with the model collapsing to a degenerate token distribution per frame. We hypothesize that the reason this does not happen with hard-labels is that training loss on hard-labels imposes sequence-level consistency that keeps the model from collapsing to the degenerate solution. In this paper, we show several experiments that support this hypothesis, and experiment with several regularization approaches that can ameliorate the degenerate collapse when using soft-labels. These approaches can bring the accuracy of soft-labels closer to that of hard-labels, and while they are unable to outperform them yet, they serve as a useful framework for further improvements.

由于具有强大的代表性，变形金刚在包括自然语言处理（NLP），计算机视觉和语音识别在内的广泛应用中越来越受欢迎。但是，利用这种代表性的能力有效地需要大量的数据，强大的正则化或两者兼而有之以减轻过度拟合。最近，基于掩盖的自动编码器的自我监督预处理策略已解锁了变压器的功能，这些策略依赖于直接或从未掩盖的内容对比的掩蔽输入进行重建。这种预训练的策略已在NLP中的BERT模型，Speak2VEC模型中使用，最近在Vision中的MAE模型中，该模型迫使该模型使用自动编码相关的目标来了解输入不同部分中的内容之间的关系。在本文中，我们提出了一种小说但令人惊讶的简单替代内容，以预测内容的位置，而无需为其提供位置信息。这样做需要变压器仅凭内容就可以理解输入不同部分之间的位置关系。这相当于有效的实现，其中借口任务是每个输入令牌所有可能位置之间的分类问题。我们在视觉和语音基准上进行了实验，我们的方法对强有力的监督训练基准进行了改进，并且与现代的无监督/自我监督预审方法相媲美。我们的方法还可以使经过训练的变压器在没有位置嵌入的情况下胜过训练有完整位置信息的训练的变压器。

自我发挥作用机制通过在所有输入令牌之间使用成对的注意来对远程环境进行建模。在这样做时，他们假设由个体令牌（例如文本字符或图像像素）定义的固定注意粒度，这对于在较高级别上建模复杂依赖性可能不是最佳的。在本文中，我们提出了ContextPool，通过调整每个令牌的注意力粒度来解决此问题。受到与合并以捕获远程依赖关系的Convnets成功的启发，我们学会了为每个令牌汇总相邻功能，然后在给定的注意力层中计算注意力。合并的权重和支撑大小是自适应确定的，允许汇总功能以不同的规模编码有意义的上下文。我们表明，ContextPool使注意力模型更具表现力，经常以更少的层次实现强大的性能，从而大大降低了成本。实验验证我们的上下文池模块插入变压器模型时，使用几种语言和图像基准的计算较少计算，匹配或超越了最先进的性能，胜过最新的作品，这些作品具有学习的上下文大小或稀疏注意的模式，并且也适用为了进行有效的功能学习。

This paper describes Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize time-domain waveforms from those spectrograms. Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech. To validate our design choices, we present ablation studies of key components of our system and evaluate the impact of using mel spectrograms as the conditioning input to WaveNet instead of linguistic, duration, and F0 features. We further show that using this compact acoustic intermediate representation allows for a significant reduction in the size of the WaveNet architecture.

We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that are discrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence. Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence [1] and Neural Turing Machines [2], because the number of target classes in each step of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable. Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorial optimization problems belong to this class. Our model solves the problem of variable size output dictionaries using a recently proposed mechanism of neural attention. It differs from the previous attention attempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of an encoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention as a pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net). We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to three challenging geometric problems -finding planar convex hulls, computing Delaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem -using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve over sequence-to-sequence with input attention, but also allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries. We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengths they were trained on. We hope our results on these tasks will encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discrete problems.

Recurrent Neural Networks can be trained to produce sequences of tokens given some input, as exemplified by recent results in machine translation and image captioning. The current approach to training them consists of maximizing the likelihood of each token in the sequence given the current (recurrent) state and the previous token. At inference, the unknown previous token is then replaced by a token generated by the model itself. This discrepancy between training and inference can yield errors that can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to gently change the training process from a fully guided scheme using the true previous token, towards a less guided scheme which mostly uses the generated token instead. Experiments on several sequence prediction tasks show that this approach yields significant improvements. Moreover, it was used successfully in our winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning challenge, 2015.