NeurIPS.2022 - Poster

Total: 2869

#1 M4Singer: A Multi-Style, Multi-Singer and Musical Score Provided Mandarin Singing Corpus [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi9]

Authors: Lichao Zhang ; Ruiqi Li ; Shoutong Wang ; Liqun Deng ; Jinglin Liu ; Yi Ren ; Jinzheng He ; Rongjie Huang ; Jieming Zhu ; Xiao Chen ; Zhou Zhao

The lack of publicly available high-quality and accurately labeled datasets has long been a major bottleneck for singing voice synthesis (SVS). To tackle this problem, we present M4Singer, a free-to-use Multi-style, Multi-singer Mandarin singing collection with elaborately annotated Musical scores as well as its benchmarks. Specifically, 1) we construct and release a large high-quality Chinese singing voice corpus, which is recorded by 20 professional singers, covering 700 Chinese pop songs as well as all the four SATB types (i.e., soprano, alto, tenor, and bass); 2) we take extensive efforts to manually compose the musical scores for each recorded song, which are necessary to the study of the prosody modeling for SVS. 3) To facilitate the use and demonstrate the quality of M4Singer, we conduct four different benchmark experiments: score-based SVS, controllable singing voice (CSV), singing voice conversion (SVC) and automatic music transcription (AMT).

#2 Benchmarking and Analyzing 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation Beyond Algorithms [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi2]

Authors: Hui En Pang ; Zhongang Cai ; Lei Yang ; Tianwei Zhang ; Ziwei Liu

3D human pose and shape estimation (a.k.a. ``human mesh recovery'') has achieved substantial progress. Researchers mainly focus on the development of novel algorithms, while less attention has been paid to other critical factors involved. This could lead to less optimal baselines, hindering the fair and faithful evaluations of newly designed methodologies. To address this problem, this work presents the \textit{first} comprehensive benchmarking study from three under-explored perspectives beyond algorithms. \emph{1) Datasets.} An analysis on 31 datasets reveals the distinct impacts of data samples: datasets featuring critical attributes (\emph{i.e.} diverse poses, shapes, camera characteristics, backbone features) are more effective. Strategical selection and combination of high-quality datasets can yield a significant boost to the model performance. \emph{2) Backbones.} Experiments with 10 backbones, ranging from CNNs to transformers, show the knowledge learnt from a proximity task is readily transferable to human mesh recovery. \emph{3) Training strategies.} Proper augmentation techniques and loss designs are crucial. With the above findings, we achieve a PA-MPJPE of 47.3 \(mm\) on the 3DPW test set with a relatively simple model. More importantly, we provide strong baselines for fair comparisons of algorithms, and recommendations for building effective training configurations in the future. Codebase is available at \url{https://github.com/smplbody/hmr-benchmarks}.

#3 A Greek Parliament Proceedings Dataset for Computational Linguistics and Political Analysis [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi2]

Authors: Konstantina Dritsa ; Aikaterini Thoma ; Ioannis Pavlopoulos ; Panos Louridas

Large, diachronic datasets of political discourse are hard to come across, especially for resource-lean languages such as Greek. In this paper, we introduce a curated dataset of the Greek Parliament Proceedings that extends chronologically from 1989 up to 2020. It consists of more than 1 million speeches with extensive meta-data, extracted from 5,355 parliamentary sitting record files. We explain how it was constructed and the challenges that had to be overcome. The dataset can be used for both computational linguistics and political analysis---ideally, combining the two. We present such an application, showing (i) how the dataset can be used to study the change of word usage through time, (ii) between significant historical events and political parties, (iii) by evaluating and employing algorithms for detecting semantic shifts.

#4 MSDS: A Large-Scale Chinese Signature and Token Digit String Dataset for Handwriting Verification [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Peirong Zhang ; Jiajia Jiang ; Yuliang Liu ; Lianwen Jin

Although online handwriting verification has made great progress recently, the verification performances are still far behind the real usage owing to the small scale of the datasets as well as the limited biometric mediums. Therefore, this paper proposes a new handwriting verification benchmark dataset named Multimodal Signature and Digit String (MSDS), which consists of two subsets: MSDS-ChS (Chinese Signatures) and MSDS-TDS (Token Digit Strings), contributed by 402 users, with 20 genuine samples and 20 skilled forgeries per user per subset. MSDS-ChS consists of handwritten Chinese signatures, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest publicly available Chinese signature dataset for handwriting verification, at least eight times larger than existing online datasets. Meanwhile, MSDS-TDS consists of handwritten Token Digit Strings, i.e, the actual phone numbers of users, which have not been explored yet. Extensive experiments with different baselines are respectively conducted for MSDS-ChS and MSDS-TDS. Surprisingly, verification performances of state-of-the-art methods on MSDS-TDS are generally better than those on MSDS-ChS, which indicates that the handwritten Token Digit String could be a more effective biometric than handwritten Chinese signature. This is a promising discovery that could inspire us to explore new biometric traits. The MSDS dataset is available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/MSDS.

#5 BackdoorBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Backdoor Learning [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Baoyuan Wu ; Hongrui Chen ; Mingda Zhang ; Zihao Zhu ; Shaokui Wei ; Danni Yuan ; Chao Shen

Backdoor learning is an emerging and vital topic for studying deep neural networks' vulnerability (DNNs). Many pioneering backdoor attack and defense methods are being proposed, successively or concurrently, in the status of a rapid arms race. However, we find that the evaluations of new methods are often unthorough to verify their claims and accurate performance, mainly due to the rapid development, diverse settings, and the difficulties of implementation and reproducibility. Without thorough evaluations and comparisons, it is not easy to track the current progress and design the future development roadmap of the literature. To alleviate this dilemma, we build a comprehensive benchmark of backdoor learning called BackdoorBench. It consists of an extensible modular-based codebase (currently including implementations of 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks and 9 SOTA defense algorithms) and a standardized protocol of complete backdoor learning. We also provide comprehensive evaluations of every pair of 8 attacks against 9 defenses, with 5 poisoning ratios, based on 5 models and 4 datasets, thus 8,000 pairs of evaluations in total. We present abundant analysis from different perspectives about these 8,000 evaluations, studying the effects of different factors in backdoor learning. All codes and evaluations of BackdoorBench are publicly available at https://backdoorbench.github.io.

#6 ELEVATER: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Language-Augmented Visual Models [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Chunyuan Li ; Haotian Liu ; Liunian Li ; Pengchuan Zhang ; Jyoti Aneja ; Jianwei Yang ; Ping Jin ; Houdong Hu ; Zicheng Liu ; Yong Jae Lee ; Jianfeng Gao

Learning visual representations from natural language supervision has recently shown great promise in a number of pioneering works. In general, these language-augmented visual models demonstrate strong transferability to a variety of datasets/tasks. However, it remains challenging to evaluate the transferablity of these foundation models due to the lack of easy-to-use toolkits for fair benchmarking. To tackle this, we build ELEVATER (Evaluation of Language-augmented Visual Task-level Transfer), the first benchmark to compare and evaluate pre-trained language-augmented visual models. Several highlights include: (i) Datasets. As downstream evaluation suites, it consists of 20 image classification datasets and 35 object detection datasets, each of which is augmented with external knowledge. (ii) Toolkit. An automatic hyper-parameter tuning toolkit is developed to ensure the fairness in model adaption. To leverage the full power of language-augmented visual models, novel language-aware initialization methods are proposed to significantly improve the adaption performance. (iii) Metrics. A variety of evaluation metrics are used, including sample-efficiency (zero-shot and few-shot) and parameter-efficiency (linear probing and full model fine-tuning). We will publicly release ELEVATER.

#7 TGEA 2.0: A Large-Scale Diagnostically Annotated Dataset with Benchmark Tasks for Text Generation of Pretrained Language Models [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Huibin Ge ; Xiaohu Zhao ; Chuang Liu ; Yulong Zeng ; Qun Liu ; Deyi Xiong

In order to diagnostically analyze and improve the capability of pretrained language models (PLMs) in text generation, we propose TGEA 2.0, to date the largest dataset built on machine-authored texts by PLMs with fine-grained semantic annotations on a wide variety of pathological generation errors. We collect 170K nominal, phrasal and sentential prompts from 6M natural sentences in 3 domains. These prompts are fed into 4 generative PLMs with their best decoding strategy to generate paragraphs. 195,629 sentences are extracted from these generated paragraphs for manual annotation, where 36K erroneous sentences are detected, 42K erroneous spans are located and categorized into an error type defined in a two-level error taxonomy. We define a \textbf{Mi}nimal \textbf{S}et of \textbf{E}rror-related \textbf{W}ords (MiSEW) for each erroneous span, which not only provides error-associated words but also rationalizes the reasoning behind the error. Quality control with a pre-annotation and feedback loop is performed before and during the entire annotation process. With the diagnostically annotated dataset, we propose 5 diagnosis benchmark tasks (i.e., erroneous text detection, MiSEW extraction, erroneous span location and correction together with error type classification) and 2 pathology mitigation benchmark tasks (pairwise comparison and word prediction). Experiment results on these benchmark tasks demonstrate that TGEA 2.0 is a challenging dataset that could facilitate further research on automatic diagnosis and pathology mitigation over machine texts. The dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/TGEA/.

#8 Adapting Self-Supervised Vision Transformers by Probing Attention-Conditioned Masking Consistency [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Viraj Prabhu ; Sriram Yenamandra ; Aaditya Singh ; Judy Hoffman

Visual domain adaptation (DA) seeks to transfer trained models to unseen, unlabeled domains across distribution shift, but approaches typically focus on adapting convolutional neural network architectures initialized with supervised ImageNet representations. In this work, we shift focus to adapting modern architectures for object recognition -- the increasingly popular Vision Transformer (ViT) -- initialized with modern pretraining based on self-supervised learning (SSL). Inspired by the design of recent SSL approaches based on learning from partial image inputs generated via masking or cropping -- either by learning to predict the missing pixels, or learning representational invariances to such augmentations -- we propose PACMAC, a two-stage adaptation algorithm for self-supervised ViTs. PACMAC first performs in-domain SSL on pooled source and target data to learn task-discriminative features, and then probes the model's predictive consistency across a set of partial target inputs generated via a novel attention-conditioned masking strategy, to identify reliable candidates for self-training. Our simple approach leads to consistent performance gains over competing methods that use ViTs and self-supervised initializations on standard object recognition benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/virajprabhu/PACMAC.

#9 APT-36K: A Large-scale Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: Yuxiang Yang ; Junjie Yang ; Yufei Xu ; Jing Zhang ; Long Lan ; Dacheng Tao

Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting the applications in real world, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. Specifically, APT-36K consists of 2,400 video clips collected and filtered from 30 animal species with 15 frames for each video, resulting in 36,000 frames in total. After manual annotation and careful double-check, high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations are provided for all the animal instances. Based on APT-36K, we benchmark several representative models on the following three tracks: (1) supervised animal pose estimation on a single frame under intra- and inter-domain transfer learning settings, (2) inter-species domain generalization test for unseen animals, and (3) animal pose estimation with animal tracking. Based on the experimental results, we gain some empirical insights and show that APT-36K provides a useful animal pose estimation and tracking benchmark, offering new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/pandorgan/APT-36K.

#10 Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Xian Liu ; Qianyi Wu ; Hang Zhou ; Yuanqi Du ; Wayne Wu ; Dahua Lin ; Ziwei Liu

Co-speech gesture is crucial for human-machine interaction and digital entertainment. While previous works mostly map speech audio to human skeletons (e.g., 2D keypoints), directly generating speakers' gestures in the image domain remains unsolved. In this work, we formally define and study this challenging problem of audio-driven co-speech gesture video generation, i.e., using a unified framework to generate speaker image sequence driven by speech audio. Our key insight is that the co-speech gestures can be decomposed into common motion patterns and subtle rhythmic dynamics. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Audio-driveN Gesture vIdeo gEneration (ANGIE), to effectively capture the reusable co-speech gesture patterns as well as fine-grained rhythmic movements. To achieve high-fidelity image sequence generation, we leverage an unsupervised motion representation instead of a structural human body prior (e.g., 2D skeletons). Specifically, 1) we propose a vector quantized motion extractor (VQ-Motion Extractor) to summarize common co-speech gesture patterns from implicit motion representation to codebooks. 2) Moreover, a co-speech gesture GPT with motion refinement (Co-Speech GPT) is devised to complement the subtle prosodic motion details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework renders realistic and vivid co-speech gesture video. Demo video and more resources can be found in: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/ANGIE

#11 Dense Interspecies Face Embedding [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Sejong Yang ; Subin Jeon ; Seonghyeon Nam ; Seon Joo Kim

Dense Interspecies Face Embedding (DIFE) is a new direction for understanding faces of various animals by extracting common features among animal faces including human face. There are three main obstacles for interspecies face understanding: (1) lack of animal data compared to human, (2) ambiguous connection between faces of various animals, and (3) extreme shape and style variance. To cope with the lack of data, we utilize multi-teacher knowledge distillation of CSE and StyleGAN2 requiring no additional data or label. Then we synthesize pseudo pair images through the latent space exploration of StyleGAN2 to find implicit associations between different animal faces. Finally, we introduce the semantic matching loss to overcome the problem of extreme shape differences between species. To quantitatively evaluate our method over possible previous methodologies like unsupervised keypoint detection, we perform interspecies facial keypoint transfer on MAFL and AP-10K. Furthermore, the results of other applications like interspecies face image manipulation and dense keypoint transfer are provided. The code is available at https://github.com/kingsj0405/dife.

#12 SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Meng-Hao Guo ; Cheng-Ze Lu ; Qibin Hou ; Zhengning Liu ; Ming-Ming Cheng ; Shi-min Hu

We present SegNeXt, a simple convolutional network architecture for semantic segmentation. Recent transformer-based models have dominated the field of se- mantic segmentation due to the efficiency of self-attention in encoding spatial information. In this paper, we show that convolutional attention is a more efficient and effective way to encode contextual information than the self-attention mech- anism in transformers. By re-examining the characteristics owned by successful segmentation models, we discover several key components leading to the perfor- mance improvement of segmentation models. This motivates us to design a novel convolutional attention network that uses cheap convolutional operations. Without bells and whistles, our SegNeXt significantly improves the performance of previous state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes, COCO-Stuff, Pascal VOC, Pascal Context, and iSAID. Notably, SegNeXt out- performs EfficientNet-L2 w/ NAS-FPN and achieves 90.6% mIoU on the Pascal VOC 2012 test leaderboard using only 1/10 parameters of it. On average, SegNeXt achieves about 2.0% mIoU improvements compared to the state-of-the-art methods on the ADE20K datasets with the same or fewer computations.

#13 Multilingual Abusive Comment Detection at Scale for Indic Languages [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Vikram Gupta ; Sumegh Roychowdhury ; Mithun Das ; Somnath Banerjee ; Punyajoy Saha ; Binny Mathew ; hastagiri prakash vanchinathan ; Animesh Mukherjee

Social media platforms were conceived to act as online `town squares' where people could get together, share information and communicate with each other peacefully. However, harmful content borne out of bad actors are constantly plaguing these platforms slowly converting them into `mosh pits' where the bad actors take the liberty to extensively abuse various marginalised groups. Accurate and timely detection of abusive content on social media platforms is therefore very important for facilitating safe interactions between users. However, due to the small scale and sparse linguistic coverage of Indic abusive speech datasets, development of such algorithms for Indic social media users (one-sixth of global population) is severely impeded.To facilitate and encourage research in this important direction, we contribute for the first time MACD - a large-scale (150K), human-annotated, multilingual (5 languages), balanced (49\% abusive content) and diverse (70K users) abuse detection dataset of user comments, sourced from a popular social media platform - ShareChat. We also release AbuseXLMR, an abusive content detection model pretrained on large number of social media comments in 15+ Indic languages which outperforms XLM-R and MuRIL on multiple Indic datasets. Along with the annotations, we also release the mapping between comment, post and user id's to facilitate modelling the relationship between them. We share competitive monolingual, cross-lingual and few-shot baselines so that MACD can be used as a dataset benchmark for future research.

#14 Evaluating Out-of-Distribution Performance on Document Image Classifiers [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Stefan Larson ; Yi Yang Gordon Lim ; Yutong Ai ; David Kuang ; Kevin Leach

The ability of a document classifier to handle inputs that are drawn from a distribution different from the training distribution is crucial for robust deployment and generalizability. The RVL-CDIP corpus is the de facto standard benchmark for document classification, yet to our knowledge all studies that use this corpus do not include evaluation on out-of-distribution documents. In this paper, we curate and release a new out-of-distribution benchmark for evaluating out-of-distribution performance for document classifiers. Our new out-of-distribution benchmark consists of two types of documents: those that are not part of any of the 16 in-domain RVL-CDIP categories (RVL-CDIP-O), and those that are one of the 16 in-domain categories yet are drawn from a distribution different from that of the original RVL-CDIP dataset (RVL-CDIP-N). While prior work on document classification for in-domain RVL-CDIP documents reports high accuracy scores, we find that these models exhibit accuracy drops of between roughly 15-30% on our new out-of-domain RVL-CDIP-N benchmark, and further struggle to distinguish between in-domain RVL-CDIP-N and out-of-domain RVL-CDIP-O inputs. Our new benchmark provides researchers with a valuable new resource for analyzing out-of-distribution performance on document classifiers.

#15 Towards Video Text Visual Question Answering: Benchmark and Baseline [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: Minyi Zhao ; Bingjia Li ; Jie Wang ; Wanqing Li ; Wenjing Zhou ; Lan Zhang ; Shijie Xuyang ; Zhihang Yu ; Xinkun Yu ; Guangze Li ; Aobotao Dai ; Shuigeng Zhou

There are already some text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) benchmarks for developing machine's ability to answer questions based on texts in images in recent years. However, models developed on these benchmarks cannot work effectively in many real-life scenarios (e.g. traffic monitoring, shopping ads and e-learning videos) where temporal reasoning ability is required. To this end, we propose a new task named Video Text Visual Question Answering (ViteVQA in short) that aims at answering questions by reasoning texts and visual information spatiotemporally in a given video. In particular, on the one hand, we build the first ViteVQA benchmark dataset named M4-ViteVQA --- the abbreviation of Multi-category Multi-frame Multi-resolution Multi-modal benchmark for ViteVQA, which contains 7,620 video clips of 9 categories (i.e., shopping, traveling, driving, vlog, sport, advertisement, movie, game and talking) and 3 kinds of resolutions (i.e., 720p, 1080p and 1176x664), and 25,123 question-answer pairs. On the other hand, we develop a baseline method named T5-ViteVQA for the ViteVQA task. T5-ViteVQA consists of five transformers. It first extracts optical character recognition (OCR) tokens, question features, and video representations via two OCR transformers, one language transformer and one video-language transformer, respectively. Then, a multimodal fusion transformer and an answer generation module are applied to fuse multimodal information and generate the final prediction. Extensive experiments on M4-ViteVQA demonstrate the superiority of T5-ViteVQA to the existing approaches of TextVQA and VQA tasks. The ViteVQA benchmark is available in https://github.com/bytedance/VTVQA.

#16 A Unified Evaluation of Textual Backdoor Learning: Frameworks and Benchmarks [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Ganqu Cui ; Lifan Yuan ; Bingxiang He ; Yangyi Chen ; Zhiyuan Liu ; Maosong Sun

Textual backdoor attacks are a kind of practical threat to NLP systems. By injecting a backdoor in the training phase, the adversary could control model predictions via predefined triggers. As various attack and defense models have been proposed, it is of great significance to perform rigorous evaluations. However, we highlight two issues in previous backdoor learning evaluations: (1) The differences between real-world scenarios (e.g. releasing poisoned datasets or models) are neglected, and we argue that each scenario has its own constraints and concerns, thus requires specific evaluation protocols; (2) The evaluation metrics only consider whether the attacks could flip the models' predictions on poisoned samples and retain performances on benign samples, but ignore that poisoned samples should also be stealthy and semantic-preserving. To address these issues, we categorize existing works into three practical scenarios in which attackers release datasets, pre-trained models, and fine-tuned models respectively, then discuss their unique evaluation methodologies. On metrics, to completely evaluate poisoned samples, we use grammar error increase and perplexity difference for stealthiness, along with text similarity for validity. After formalizing the frameworks, we develop an open-source toolkit OpenBackdoor to foster the implementations and evaluations of textual backdoor learning. With this toolkit, we perform extensive experiments to benchmark attack and defense models under the suggested paradigm. To facilitate the underexplored defenses against poisoned datasets, we further propose CUBE, a simple yet strong clustering-based defense baseline. We hope that our frameworks and benchmarks could serve as the cornerstones for future model development and evaluations.

#17 MVP-N: A Dataset and Benchmark for Real-World Multi-View Object Classification [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: REN WANG ; Jiayue Wang ; Tae Sung Kim ; JINSUNG KIM ; Hyuk-Jae Lee

Combining information from multiple views is essential for discriminating similar objects. However, existing datasets for multi-view object classification have several limitations, such as synthetic and coarse-grained objects, no validation split for hyperparameter tuning, and a lack of view-level information quantity annotations for analyzing multi-view-based methods. To address this issue, this study proposes a new dataset, MVP-N, which contains 44 retail products, 16k real captured views with human-perceived information quantity annotations, and 9k multi-view sets. The fine-grained categorization of objects naturally generates multi-view label noise owing to the inter-class view similarity, allowing the study of learning from noisy labels in the multi-view case. Moreover, this study benchmarks four multi-view-based feature aggregation methods and twelve soft label methods on MVP-N. Experimental results show that MVP-N will be a valuable resource for facilitating the development of real-world multi-view object classification methods. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/SMNUResearch/MVP-N.

#18 DGraph: A Large-Scale Financial Dataset for Graph Anomaly Detection [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: Xuanwen Huang ; Yang Yang ; Yang Wang ; Chunping Wang ; Zhisheng Zhang ; Jiarong Xu ; Lei Chen ; Michalis Vazirgiannis

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) has recently become a hot research spot due to its practicability and theoretical value. Since GAD emphasizes the application and the rarity of anomalous samples, enriching the varieties of its datasets is fundamental. Thus, this paper present DGraph, a real-world dynamic graph in the finance domain. DGraph overcomes many limitations of current GAD datasets. It contains about 3M nodes, 4M dynamic edges, and 1M ground-truth nodes. We provide a comprehensive observation of DGraph, revealing that anomalous nodes and normal nodes generally have different structures, neighbor distribution, and temporal dynamics. Moreover, it suggests that 2M background nodes are also essential for detecting fraudsters. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on DGraph. Observation and experiments demonstrate that DGraph is propulsive to advance GAD research and enable in-depth exploration of anomalous nodes.

#19 TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Shangbin Feng ; Zhaoxuan Tan ; Herun Wan ; Ningnan Wang ; Zilong Chen ; Binchi Zhang ; Qinghua Zheng ; Wenqian Zhang ; Zhenyu Lei ; Shujie Yang ; Xinshun Feng ; Qingyue Zhang ; Hongrui Wang ; Yuhan Liu ; Yuyang Bai ; Heng Wang ; Zijian Cai ; Yanbo Wang ; Lijing Zheng ; Zihan Ma ; Jundong Li ; Minnan Luo

Twitter bot detection has become an increasingly important task to combat misinformation, facilitate social media moderation, and preserve the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art bot detection methods generally leverage the graph structure of the Twitter network, and they exhibit promising performance when confronting novel Twitter bots that traditional methods fail to detect. However, very few of the existing Twitter bot detection datasets are graph-based, and even these few graph-based datasets suffer from limited dataset scale, incomplete graph structure, as well as low annotation quality. In fact, the lack of a large-scale graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that addresses these issues has seriously hindered the development and evaluation of novel graph-based bot detection approaches. In this paper, we propose TwiBot-22, a comprehensive graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that presents the largest dataset to date, provides diversified entities and relations on the Twitter network, and has considerably better annotation quality than existing datasets. In addition, we re-implement 35 representative Twitter bot detection baselines and evaluate them on 9 datasets, including TwiBot-22, to promote a fair comparison of model performance and a holistic understanding of research progress. To facilitate further research, we consolidate all implemented codes and datasets into the TwiBot-22 evaluation framework, where researchers could consistently evaluate new models and datasets. The TwiBot-22 Twitter bot detection benchmark and evaluation framework are publicly available at \url{https://twibot22.github.io/}.

#20 TaiSu: A 166M Large-scale High-Quality Dataset for Chinese Vision-Language Pre-training [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Yulong Liu ; Guibo Zhu ; Bin Zhu ; Qi Song ; Guojing Ge ; Haoran Chen ; GuanHui Qiao ; Ru Peng ; Lingxiang Wu ; Jinqiao Wang

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has been shown to be an efficient method to improve the performance of models on different vision-and-language downstream tasks. Substantial studies have shown that neural networks may be able to learn some general rules about language and visual concepts from a large-scale weakly labeled image-text dataset. However, most of the public cross-modal datasets that contain more than 100M image-text pairs are in English; there is a lack of available large-scale and high-quality Chinese VLP datasets. In this work, we propose a new framework for automatic dataset acquisition and cleaning with which we construct a new large-scale and high-quality cross-modal dataset named as TaiSu, containing 166 million images and 219 million Chinese captions. Compared with the recently released Wukong dataset, our dataset is achieved with much stricter restrictions on the semantic correlation of image-text pairs. We also propose to combine texts collected from the web with texts generated by a pre-trained image-captioning model. To the best of our knowledge, TaiSu is currently the largest publicly accessible Chinese cross-modal dataset. Furthermore, we test our dataset on several vision-language downstream tasks. TaiSu outperforms BriVL by a large margin on the zero-shot image-text retrieval task and zero-shot image classification task. TaiSu also shows better performance than Wukong on the image-retrieval task without using image augmentation for training. Results demonstrate that TaiSu can serve as a promising VLP dataset, both for understanding and generative tasks. More information can be referred to https://github.com/ksOAn6g5/TaiSu.

#21 pyKT: A Python Library to Benchmark Deep Learning based Knowledge Tracing Models [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Zitao Liu ; Qiongqiong Liu ; Jiahao Chen ; Shuyan Huang ; Jiliang Tang ; Weiqi Luo

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of using students' historical learning interaction data to model their knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future interaction performance. Recently, remarkable progress has been made of using various deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. However, the success behind deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) approaches is still left somewhat unknown and proper measurement and analysis of these DLKT approaches remain a challenge. First, data preprocessing procedures in existing works are often private and custom, which limits experimental standardization. Furthermore, existing DLKT studies often differ in terms of the evaluation protocol and are far away real-world educational contexts. To address these problems, we introduce a comprehensive python based benchmark platform, \textsc{pyKT}, to guarantee valid comparisons across DLKT methods via thorough evaluations. The \textsc{pyKT} library consists of a standardized set of integrated data preprocessing procedures on 7 popular datasets across different domains, and 10 frequently compared DLKT model implementations for transparent experiments. Results from our fine-grained and rigorous empirical KT studies yield a set of observations and suggestions for effective DLKT, e.g., wrong evaluation setting may cause label leakage that generally leads to performance inflation; and the improvement of many DLKT approaches is minimal compared to the very first DLKT model proposed by Piech et al. \cite{piech2015deep}. We have open sourced \textsc{pyKT} and our experimental results at \url{https://pykt.org/}. We welcome contributions from other research groups and practitioners.

#22 Tenrec: A Large-scale Multipurpose Benchmark Dataset for Recommender Systems [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Guanghu Yuan ; Fajie Yuan ; Yudong Li ; Beibei Kong ; Shujie Li ; Lei Chen ; Min Yang ; Chenyun YU ; Bo Hu ; Zang Li ; Yu Xu ; Xiaohu Qie

Existing benchmark datasets for recommender systems (RS) either are created at a small scale or involve very limited forms of user feedback. RS models evaluated on such datasets often lack practical values for large-scale real-world applications. In this paper, we describe Tenrec, a novel and publicly available data collection for RS that records various user feedback from four different recommendation scenarios. To be specific, Tenrec has the following five characteristics: (1) it is large-scale, containing around 5 million users and 140 million interactions; (2) it has not only positive user feedback, but also true negative feedback (vs. one-class recommendation); (3) it contains overlapped users and items across four different scenarios; (4) it contains various types of user positive feedback, in forms of clicking, liking, sharing, and following, etc; (5) it contains additional features beyond the user IDs and item IDs. We verify Tenrec on ten diverse recommendation tasks by running several classical baseline models per task. Tenrec has the potential to become a useful benchmark dataset for a majority of popular recommendation tasks. Our source codes and datasets will be included in supplementary materials.

#23 NAS-Bench-Graph: Benchmarking Graph Neural Architecture Search [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Yijian Qin ; Ziwei Zhang ; Xin Wang ; Zeyang Zhang ; Wenwu Zhu

Graph neural architecture search (GraphNAS) has recently aroused considerable attention in both academia and industry. However, two key challenges seriously hinder the further research of GraphNAS. First, since there is no consensus for the experimental setting, the empirical results in different research papers are often not comparable and even not reproducible, leading to unfair comparisons. Secondly, GraphNAS often needs extensive computations, which makes it highly inefficient and inaccessible to researchers without access to large-scale computation. To solve these challenges, we propose NAS-Bench-Graph, a tailored benchmark that supports unified, reproducible, and efficient evaluations for GraphNAS. Specifically, we construct a unified, expressive yet compact search space, covering 26,206 unique graph neural network (GNN) architectures and propose a principled evaluation protocol. To avoid unnecessary repetitive training, we have trained and evaluated all of these architectures on nine representative graph datasets, recording detailed metrics including train, validation, and test performance in each epoch, the latency, the number of parameters, etc. Based on our proposed benchmark, the performance of GNN architectures can be directly obtained by a look-up table without any further computation, which enables fair, fully reproducible, and efficient comparisons. To demonstrate its usage, we make in-depth analyses of our proposed NAS-Bench-Graph, revealing several interesting findings for GraphNAS. We also showcase how the benchmark can be easily compatible with GraphNAS open libraries such as AutoGL and NNI. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first benchmark for graph neural architecture search.

#24 DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: Arsene Fansi Tchango ; Rishab Goel ; Zhi Wen ; Julien Martel ; Joumana Ghosn

There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.

#25 Kantorovich Strikes Back! Wasserstein GANs are not Optimal Transport? [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Alexander Korotin ; Alexander Kolesov ; Evgeny Burnaev

Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) are the popular generative models built on the theory of Optimal Transport (OT) and the Kantorovich duality. Despite the success of WGANs, it is still unclear how well the underlying OT dual solvers approximate the OT cost (Wasserstein-1 distance, W1) and the OT gradient needed to update the generator. In this paper, we address these questions. We construct 1-Lipschitz functions and use them to build ray monotone transport plans. This strategy yields pairs of continuous benchmark distributions with the analytically known OT plan, OT cost and OT gradient in high-dimensional spaces such as spaces of images. We thoroughly evaluate popular WGAN dual form solvers (gradient penalty, spectral normalization, entropic regularization, etc.) using these benchmark pairs. Even though these solvers perform well in WGANs, none of them faithfully compute W1 in high dimensions. Nevertheless, many provide a meaningful approximation of the OT gradient. These observations suggest that these solvers should not be treated as good estimators of W1 but to some extent they indeed can be used in variational problems requiring the minimization of W1.