Cho-Jui Hsieh


2023

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Enhancing Unsupervised Semantic Parsing with Distributed Contextual Representations
Zixuan Ling | Xiaoqing Zheng | Jianhan Xu | Jinshu Lin | Kai-Wei Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We extend a non-parametric Bayesian model of (Titov and Klementiev, 2011) to deal with homonymy and polysemy by leveraging distributed contextual word and phrase representations pre-trained on a large collection of unlabelled texts. Then, unsupervised semantic parsing is performed by decomposing sentences into fragments, clustering the fragments to abstract away syntactic variations of the same meaning, and predicting predicate-argument relations between the fragments. To better model the statistical dependencies between predicates and their arguments, we further conduct a hierarchical Pitman-Yor process. An improved Metropolis-Hastings merge-split sampler is proposed to speed up the mixing and convergence of Markov chains by leveraging pre-trained distributed representations. The experimental results show that the models achieve better accuracy on both question-answering and relation extraction tasks.

2022

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Towards Adversarially Robust Text Classifiers by Learning to Reweight Clean Examples
Jianhan Xu | Cenyuan Zhang | Xiaoqing Zheng | Linyang Li | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Most of the existing defense methods improve the adversarial robustness by making the models adapt to the training set augmented with some adversarial examples. However, the augmented adversarial examples may not be natural, which might distort the training distribution, resulting in inferior performance both in clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. In this study, we explore the feasibility of introducing a reweighting mechanism to calibrate the training distribution to obtain robust models. We propose to train text classifiers by a sample reweighting method in which the example weights are learned to minimize the loss of a validation set mixed with the clean examples and their adversarial ones in an online learning manner. Through extensive experiments, we show that there exists a reweighting mechanism to make the models more robust against adversarial attacks without the need to craft the adversarial examples for the entire training set.

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Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck
Cenyuan Zhang | Xiang Zhou | Yixin Wan | Xiaoqing Zheng | Kai-Wei Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Existing studies have demonstrated that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features, which are highly predictive, but can be easily manipulated by adversaries to fool NLP models. In this study, we explore the feasibility of capturing task-specific robust features, while eliminating the non-robust ones by using the information bottleneck theory. Through extensive experiments, we show that the models trained with our information bottleneck-based method are able to achieve a significant improvement in robust accuracy, exceeding performances of all the previously reported defense methods while suffering almost no performance drop in clean accuracy on SST-2, AGNEWS and IMDB datasets.

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Weight Perturbation as Defense against Adversarial Word Substitutions
Jianhan Xu | Linyang Li | Jiping Zhang | Xiaoqing Zheng | Kai-Wei Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

The existence and pervasiveness of textual adversarial examples have raised serious concerns to security-critical applications. Many methods have been developed to defend against adversarial attacks for neural natural language processing (NLP) models. Adversarial training is one of the most successful defense methods by adding some random or intentional perturbations to the original input texts and making the models robust to the perturbed examples. In this study, we explore the feasibility of improving the adversarial robustness of NLP models by performing perturbations in the parameter space rather than the input feature space. The weight perturbation helps to find a better solution (i.e., the values of weights) that minimizes the adversarial loss among other feasible solutions. We found that the weight perturbation can significantly improve the robustness of NLP models when it is combined with the perturbation in the input embedding space, yielding the highest accuracy on both clean and adversarial examples across different datasets.

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On the Sensitivity and Stability of Model Interpretations in NLP
Fan Yin | Zhouxing Shi | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a variety of post-hoc interpretations that aim to uncover how natural language processing (NLP) models make predictions. Despite the surge of new interpretation methods, it remains an open problem how to define and quantitatively measure the faithfulness of interpretations, i.e., to what extent interpretations reflect the reasoning process by a model. We propose two new criteria, sensitivity and stability, that provide complementary notions of faithfulness to the existed removal-based criteria. Our results show that the conclusion for how faithful interpretations are could vary substantially based on different notions. Motivated by the desiderata of sensitivity and stability, we introduce a new class of interpretation methods that adopt techniques from adversarial robustness. Empirical results show that our proposed methods are effective under the new criteria and overcome limitations of gradient-based methods on removal-based criteria. Besides text classification, we also apply interpretation methods and metrics to dependency parsing. Our results shed light on understanding the diverse set of interpretations.

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Extreme Zero-Shot Learning for Extreme Text Classification
Yuanhao Xiong | Wei-Cheng Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Hsiang-Fu Yu | Inderjit Dhillon
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The eXtreme Multi-label text Classification (XMC) problem concerns finding most relevant labels for an input text instance from a large label set. However, the XMC setup faces two challenges: (1) it is not generalizable to predict unseen labels in dynamic environments, and (2) it requires a large amount of supervised (instance, label) pairs, which can be difficult to obtain for emerging domains. In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario called Extreme Zero-Shot XMC (EZ-XMC), in which no supervision is needed and merely raw text of instances and labels are accessible. Few-Shot XMC (FS-XMC), an extension to EZ-XMC with limited supervision is also investigated. To learn the semantic embeddings of instances and labels with raw text, we propose to pre-train Transformer-based encoders with self-supervised contrastive losses. Specifically, we develop a pre-training method MACLR, which thoroughly leverages the raw text with techniques including Multi-scale Adaptive Clustering, Label Regularization, and self-training with pseudo positive pairs. Experimental results on four public EZ-XMC datasets demonstrate that MACLR achieves superior performance compared to all other leading baseline methods, in particular with approximately 5-10% improvement in precision and recall on average. Moreover, we show that our pre-trained encoder can be further improved on FS-XMC when there are a limited number of ground-truth positive pairs in training. Our code is available at https://github.com/amzn/pecos/tree/mainline/examples/MACLR.

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ADDMU: Detection of Far-Boundary Adversarial Examples with Data and Model Uncertainty Estimation
Fan Yin | Yao Li | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Adversarial Examples Detection (AED) is a crucial defense technique against adversarial attacks and has drawn increasing attention from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. Despite the surge of new AED methods, our studies show that existing methods heavily rely on a shortcut to achieve good performance. In other words, current search-based adversarial attacks in NLP stop once model predictions change, and thus most adversarial examples generated by those attacks are located near model decision boundaries. To surpass this shortcut and fairly evaluate AED methods, we propose to test AED methods with Far Boundary (FB) adversarial examples. Existing methods show worse than random guess performance under this scenario. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new technique, ADDMU, adversary detection with data and model uncertainty, which combines two types of uncertainty estimation for both regular and FB adversarial example detection. Our new method outperforms previous methods by 3.6 and 6.0 AUC points under each scenario. Finally, our analysis shows that the two types of uncertainty provided by ADDMU can be leveraged to characterize adversarialexamples and identify the ones that contribute most to model’s robustness in adversarial training.

2021

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On the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks against Neural Text Classifier
Liping Yuan | Xiaoqing Zheng | Yi Zhou | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

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Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution
Zongyi Li | Jianhan Xu | Jiehang Zeng | Linyang Li | Xiaoqing Zheng | Qi Zhang | Kai-Wei Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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 of systematic studies through comprehensive researches on understanding the behavior of neural text classifiers trained by various defense methods under 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 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.

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Double Perturbation: On the Robustness of Robustness and Counterfactual Bias Evaluation
Chong Zhang | Jieyu Zhao | Huan Zhang | Kai-Wei Chang | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Robustness and counterfactual bias are usually evaluated on a test dataset. However, are these evaluations robust? If the test dataset is perturbed slightly, will the evaluation results keep the same? In this paper, we propose a “double perturbation” framework to uncover model weaknesses beyond the test dataset. The framework first perturbs the test dataset to construct abundant natural sentences similar to the test data, and then diagnoses the prediction change regarding a single-word substitution. We apply this framework to study two perturbation-based approaches that are used to analyze models’ robustness and counterfactual bias in English. (1) For robustness, we focus on synonym substitutions and identify vulnerable examples where prediction can be altered. Our proposed attack attains high success rates (96.0%-99.8%) in finding vulnerable examples on both original and robustly trained CNNs and Transformers. (2) For counterfactual bias, we focus on substituting demographic tokens (e.g., gender, race) and measure the shift of the expected prediction among constructed sentences. Our method is able to reveal the hidden model biases not directly shown in the test dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/chong-z/nlp-second-order-attack.

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Defense against Synonym Substitution-based Adversarial Attacks via Dirichlet Neighborhood Ensemble
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)

Although deep neural networks have achieved prominent performance on many NLP tasks, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. We propose Dirichlet Neighborhood Ensemble (DNE), a randomized method for training a robust model to defense synonym substitution-based attacks. During training, DNE forms virtual sentences by sampling embedding vectors for each word in an input sentence from a convex hull spanned by the word and its synonyms, and it augments them with the training data. In such a way, the model is robust to adversarial attacks while maintaining the performance on the original clean data. DNE is agnostic to the network architectures and scales to large models (e.g., BERT) for NLP applications. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms recently proposed defense methods by a significant margin across different network architectures and multiple data sets.

2020

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What Does BERT with Vision Look At?
Liunian Harold Li | Mark Yatskar | Da Yin | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Pre-trained visually grounded language models such as ViLBERT, LXMERT, and UNITER have achieved significant performance improvement on vision-and-language tasks but what they learn during pre-training remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate that certain attention heads of a visually grounded language model actively ground elements of language to image regions. Specifically, some heads can map entities to image regions, performing the task known as entity grounding. Some heads can even detect the syntactic relations between non-entity words and image regions, tracking, for example, associations between verbs and regions corresponding to their arguments. We denote this ability as syntactic grounding. We verify grounding both quantitatively and qualitatively, using Flickr30K Entities as a testbed.

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Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Neural Network-based Dependency Parsing Models with Adversarial Examples
Xiaoqing Zheng | Jiehang Zeng | Yi Zhou | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Minhao Cheng | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

2019

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On the Robustness of Self-Attentive Models
Yu-Lun Hsieh | Minhao Cheng | Da-Cheng Juan | Wei Wei | Wen-Lian Hsu | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This work examines the robustness of self-attentive neural networks against adversarial input perturbations. Specifically, we investigate the attention and feature extraction mechanisms of state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and self-attentive architectures for sentiment analysis, entailment and machine translation under adversarial attacks. We also propose a novel attack algorithm for generating more natural adversarial examples that could mislead neural models but not humans. Experimental results show that, compared to recurrent neural models, self-attentive models are more robust against adversarial perturbation. In addition, we provide theoretical explanations for their superior robustness to support our claims.

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Efficient Contextual Representation Learning With Continuous Outputs
Liunian Harold Li | Patrick H. Chen | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

Contextual representation models have achieved great success in improving various downstream natural language processing tasks. However, these language-model-based encoders are difficult to train due to their large parameter size and high computational complexity. By carefully examining the training procedure, we observe that the softmax layer, which predicts a distribution of the target word, often induces significant overhead, especially when the vocabulary size is large. Therefore, we revisit the design of the output layer and consider directly predicting the pre-trained embedding of the target word for a given context. When applied to ELMo, the proposed approach achieves a 4-fold speedup and eliminates 80% trainable parameters while achieving competitive performance on downstream tasks. Further analysis shows that the approach maintains the speed advantage under various settings, even when the sentence encoder is scaled up.

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Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Dialogue Systems: A Case Study on a Negotiation Agent
Minhao Cheng | Wei Wei | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Recent research has demonstrated that goal-oriented dialogue agents trained on large datasets can achieve striking performance when interacting with human users. In real world applications, however, it is important to ensure that the agent performs smoothly interacting with not only regular users but also those malicious ones who would attack the system through interactions in order to achieve goals for their own advantage. In this paper, we develop algorithms to evaluate the robustness of a dialogue agent by carefully designed attacks using adversarial agents. Those attacks are performed in both black-box and white-box settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that adversarial training using our attacks can significantly improve the robustness of a goal-oriented dialogue system. On a case-study of the negotiation agent developed by (Lewis et al., 2017), our attacks reduced the average advantage of rewards between the attacker and the trained RL-based agent from 2.68 to -5.76 on a scale from -10 to 10 for randomized goals. Moreover, we show that with the adversarial training, we are able to improve the robustness of negotiation agents by 1.5 points on average against all our attacks.

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MulCode: A Multiplicative Multi-way Model for Compressing Neural Language Model
Yukun Ma | Patrick H. Chen | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

It is challenging to deploy deep neural nets on memory-constrained devices due to the explosion of numbers of parameters. Especially, the input embedding layer and Softmax layer usually dominate the memory usage in an RNN-based language model. For example, input embedding and Softmax matrices in IWSLT-2014 German-to-English data set account for more than 80% of the total model parameters. To compress these embedding layers, we propose MulCode, a novel multi-way multiplicative neural compressor. MulCode learns an adaptively created matrix and its multiplicative compositions. Together with a prior weighted loss, Multicode is more effective than the state-of-the-art compression methods. On the IWSLT-2014 machine translation data set, MulCode achieved 17 times compression rate for the embedding and Softmax matrices, and when combined with quantization technique, our method can achieve 41.38 times compression rate with very little loss in performance.

2018

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Learning Word Embeddings for Low-Resource Languages by PU Learning
Chao Jiang | Hsiang-Fu Yu | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Word embedding is a key component in many downstream applications in processing natural languages. Existing approaches often assume the existence of a large collection of text for learning effective word embedding. However, such a corpus may not be available for some low-resource languages. In this paper, we study how to effectively learn a word embedding model on a corpus with only a few million tokens. In such a situation, the co-occurrence matrix is sparse as the co-occurrences of many word pairs are unobserved. In contrast to existing approaches often only sample a few unobserved word pairs as negative samples, we argue that the zero entries in the co-occurrence matrix also provide valuable information. We then design a Positive-Unlabeled Learning (PU-Learning) approach to factorize the co-occurrence matrix and validate the proposed approaches in four different languages.

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Attacking Visual Language Grounding with Adversarial Examples: A Case Study on Neural Image Captioning
Hongge Chen | Huan Zhang | Pin-Yu Chen | Jinfeng Yi | Cho-Jui Hsieh
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Visual language grounding is widely studied in modern neural image captioning systems, which typically adopts an encoder-decoder framework consisting of two principal components: a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image feature extraction and a recurrent neural network (RNN) for language caption generation. To study the robustness of language grounding to adversarial perturbations in machine vision and perception, we propose Show-and-Fool, a novel algorithm for crafting adversarial examples in neural image captioning. The proposed algorithm provides two evaluation approaches, which check if we can mislead neural image captioning systems to output some randomly chosen captions or keywords. Our extensive experiments show that our algorithm can successfully craft visually-similar adversarial examples with randomly targeted captions or keywords, and the adversarial examples can be made highly transferable to other image captioning systems. Consequently, our approach leads to new robustness implications of neural image captioning and novel insights in visual language grounding.

2009

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Iterative Scaling and Coordinate Descent Methods for Maximum Entropy
Fang-Lan Huang | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang | Chih-Jen Lin
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers