Kate Saenko
2025
Scaling Up Temporal Domain Generalization via Temporal Experts Averaging
Aoming Liu | Kevin Miller | Venkatesh Saligrama | Kate Saenko | Boqing Gong | Ser-Nam Lim | Bryan A. Plummer
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Aoming Liu | Kevin Miller | Venkatesh Saligrama | Kate Saenko | Boqing Gong | Ser-Nam Lim | Bryan A. Plummer
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) aims to generalize across temporal distribution shifts, e.g., lexical change over time. Prior work often addresses this by predicting future model weights. However, full model prediction is prohibitively expensive for even reasonably sized models. Thus, recent methods only predict the classifier layer, limiting generalization by failing to adjust other model components. To address this, we propose Temporal Expert Averaging (TEA), a novel and scalable TDG framework that updates the entire model using weight averaging to maximize generalization potential while minimizing computational costs. Our theoretical analysis guides us to two steps that enhance generalization to future domains. First, we create expert models with functional diversity yet parameter similarity by fine-tuning a domain-agnostic base model on individual temporal domains while constraining weight changes. Second, we optimize the bias-variance tradeoff through adaptive averaging coefficients derived from modeling temporal weight trajectories in a principal component subspace. Expert’s contributions are based on their projected proximity to future domains. Extensive experiments across 7 TDG benchmarks, 5 models, and 2 TDG settings shows TEA outperforms prior TDG methods by up to 69% while being up to 60x more efficient.
2024
Tell Me What’s Next: Textual Foresight for Generic UI Representations
Andrea Burns | Kate Saenko | Bryan Plummer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Andrea Burns | Kate Saenko | Bryan Plummer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Mobile app user interfaces (UIs) are rich with action, text, structure, and image content that can be utilized to learn generic UI representations for tasks like automating user commands, summarizing content, and evaluating the accessibility of user interfaces. Prior work has learned strong visual representations with local or global captioning losses, but fails to retain both granularities.To combat this, we propose Textual Foresight, a novel pretraining objective for learning UI screen representations. Textual Foresight generates global text descriptions of future UI states given a current UI and local action taken. Our approach requires joint reasoning over elements and entire screens, resulting in improved UI features: on generation tasks, UI agents trained with Textual Foresight outperform state-of-the-art by 2% with 28x fewer images. We train with our newly constructed mobile app dataset, OpenApp, which results in the first public dataset for app UI representation learning. OpenApp enables new baselines, and we find Textual Foresight improves average task performance over them by 5.7% while having access to 2x less data.
2023
A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage Understanding
Andrea Burns | Krishna Srinivasan | Joshua Ainslie | Geoff Brown | Bryan Plummer | Kate Saenko | Jianmo Ni | Mandy Guo
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Andrea Burns | Krishna Srinivasan | Joshua Ainslie | Geoff Brown | Bryan Plummer | Kate Saenko | Jianmo Ni | Mandy Guo
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Webpages have been a rich, scalable resource for vision-language and language only tasks. Yet only pieces of webpages are kept in existing datasets: image-caption pairs, long text articles, or raw HTML, never all in one place. Webpage tasks have resultingly received little attention and structured image-text data left underused. To study multimodal webpage understanding, we introduce the Wikipedia Webpage suite (WikiWeb2M) containing 2M pages with all of the associated image, text, and structure data. We verify its utility on three generative tasks: page description generation, section summarization, and contextual image captioning. We design a novel attention mechanism Prefix Global, which selects the most relevant image and text content as global tokens to attend to the rest of the webpage for context. By using page structure to separate such tokens, it performs better than full attention with lower computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that the new data in WikiWeb2M improves task performance compared to prior work.
2020
Detecting Cross-Modal Inconsistency to Defend Against Neural Fake News
Reuben Tan | Bryan Plummer | Kate Saenko
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Reuben Tan | Bryan Plummer | Kate Saenko
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Large-scale dissemination of disinformation online intended to mislead or deceive the general population is a major societal problem. Rapid progression in image, video, and natural language generative models has only exacerbated this situation and intensified our need for an effective defense mechanism. While existing approaches have been proposed to defend against neural fake news, they are generally constrained to the very limited setting where articles only have text and metadata such as the title and authors. In this paper, we introduce the more realistic and challenging task of defending against machine-generated news that also includes images and captions. To identify the possible weaknesses that adversaries can exploit, we create a NeuralNews dataset which is comprised of 4 different types of generated articles as well as conduct a series of human user study experiments based on this dataset. Coupled with providing a relatively effective approach based on detecting visual-semantic inconsistencies, the valuable insights gleaned from our user study experiments and, consequently, this paper will serve as an effective first line of defense and a valuable reference for future work in defending against machine-generated disinformation.
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Co-authors
- Raymond Mooney 4
- Bryan Plummer 3
- Subhashini Venugopalan 3
- Andrea Burns 2
- Trevor Darrell 2
- Sergio Guadarrama 2
- Lisa Anne Hendricks 2
- Anna Rohrbach 2
- Joshua Ainslie 1
- William Boag 1
- Geoff Brown 1
- Kaylee Burns 1
- Renan Campos 1
- Jeff Donahue 1
- Daniel Fried 1
- Boqing Gong 1
- Mandy Guo 1
- Ronghang Hu 1
- Dan Klein 1
- Niveda Krishnamoorthy 1
- Ser-Nam Lim 1
- Aoming Liu 1
- Girish Malkarnenkar 1
- Kevin Miller 1
- Jianmo Ni 1
- Bryan A. Plummer 1
- Marcus Rohrbach 1
- Anna Rumshisky 1
- Venkatesh Saligrama 1
- Krishna Srinivasan 1
- Reuben Tan 1
- Jesse Thomason 1
- Huijuan Xu 1