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Yuexian Hou

Publications and source records attributed to Yuexian Hou.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Mining Effective Features Using Quantum Entropy for Humor Recognition

Humor recognition has been extensively studied with different methods in the past years. However, existing studies on humor recognition do not understand the mechanisms that generate humor. In this paper, inspired by the incongruity theory, any joke can be divided into two components (the setup and the punchline). Both components have multiple possible semantics, and there is an incongruous relationship between them. We use density matrices to represent the semantic uncertainty of the setup and the punchline, respectively, and design QE-Uncertainty and QE-Incongruity with the help of quantum entropy as features for humor recognition. The experimental results on the SemEval2021 Task 7 dataset show that the proposed features are more effective than the baselines for recognizing humorous and non-humorous texts.

cs.CL↗

Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation

Human conversations of recommendation naturally involve the shift of interests which can align the recommendation actions and conversation process to make accurate recommendations with rich explanations. However, existing conversational recommendation systems (CRS) ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, which leads to an ineffective loose coupling structure of CRS. To address this issue, by modeling the recommendation actions as recommendation paths in a knowledge graph (KG), we propose DICR (Dual Imitation for Conversational Recommendation), which designs a dual imitation to explicitly align the recommendation paths and user interest shift paths in a recommendation module and a conversation module, respectively. By exchanging alignment signals, DICR achieves bidirectional promotion between recommendation and conversation modules and generates high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations. Experiments demonstrate that DICR outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics.

cs.CL↗

Label-Based Diversity Measure Among Hidden Units of Deep Neural Networks: A Regularization Method

Although the deep structure guarantees the powerful expressivity of deep networks (DNNs), it also triggers serious overfitting problem. To improve the generalization capacity of DNNs, many strategies were developed to improve the diversity among hidden units. However, most of these strategies are empirical and heuristic in absence of either a theoretical derivation of the diversity measure or a clear connection from the diversity to the generalization capacity. In this paper, from an information theoretic perspective, we introduce a new definition of redundancy to describe the diversity of hidden units under supervised learning settings by formalizing the effect of hidden layers on the generalization capacity as the mutual information. We prove an opposite relationship existing between the defined redundancy and the generalization capacity, i.e., the decrease of redundancy generally improving the generalization capacity. The experiments show that the DNNs using the redundancy as the regularizer can effectively reduce the overfitting and decrease the generalization error, which well supports above points.

cs.LG↗

Quantum observation scheme universally identifying causalities from correlations

It has long been recognized as a difficult problem to determine whether the observed statistical correlation between two classical variables arise from causality or from common causes. Recent research has shown that in quantum theoretical framework, the mechanisms of entanglement and quantum coherence provide an advantage in tackling this problem. In some particular cases, quantum common causes and quantum causality can be effectively distinguished using observations only. However, these solutions do not apply to all cases. There still exist enormous cases in which quantum common causes and quantum causality can not be distinguished. In this paper, along the line of considering unitary transformation as causality in the quantum world, we formally show quantum common causes and quantum causality are universally separable. Based on the analysis, we further provide a general method to discriminate the two.

quant-ph↗

A Tensorized Transformer for Language Modeling

Latest development of neural models has connected the encoder and decoder through a self-attention mechanism. In particular, Transformer, which is solely based on self-attention, has led to breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the multi-head attention mechanism, as a key component of Transformer, limits the effective deployment of the model to a resource-limited setting. In this paper, based on the ideas of tensor decomposition and parameters sharing, we propose a novel self-attention model (namely Multi-linear attention) with Block-Term Tensor Decomposition (BTD). We test and verify the proposed attention method on three language modeling tasks (i.e., PTB, WikiText-103 and One-billion) and a neural machine translation task (i.e., WMT-2016 English-German). Multi-linear attention can not only largely compress the model parameters but also obtain performance improvements, compared with a number of language modeling approaches, such as Transformer, Transformer-XL, and Transformer with tensor train decomposition.

cs.CL↗

Discrimination Between Quantum Common Causes and Quantum Causality

In classic cases, Reichenbach's principle implies that discriminating between common causes and causality is unprincipled since the discriminative results essentially depend on the selection of possible conditional variables. For some typical quantum cases, K.Reid $et$ $al$. \href{https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3266}{[Nat. Phys. 11, 414 (2015)]} presented the statistic $C$ which can effectively discriminate quantum common causes and quantum causality over two quantum random variables (i.e., qubits) and which only uses measurement information about these two variables. In this paper, we formalize general quantum common causes and general quantum causality. Based on the formal representation, we further investigate their decidability via the statistic $C$ in general quantum cases. We demonstrate that (i) $C \in \left[ { - 1,\frac{1}{27}} \right]$ if two qubits are influenced by quantum common causes; (ii) $C \in \left[ { - \frac{1}{27},1} \right]$ if the relation between two qubits is quantum causality; (iii) a geometric picture can illuminate the geometric interpretation of the probabilistic mixture of quantum common causes and quantum causality. This geometric picture also provides a basic heuristic to develop more complete methods for discriminating the cases corresponding to $C \in \left[ { - \frac{1}{27},\frac{1}{27}} \right]$. Our results demonstrate that quantum common causes and quantum causality can be discriminated in a considerable scope.

quant-ph↗

Further Theoretical Study of Distribution Separation Method for Information Retrieval

Recently, a Distribution Separation Method (DSM) is proposed for relevant feedback in information retrieval, which aims to approximate the true relevance distribution by separating a seed irrelevance distribution from the mixture one. While DSM achieved a promising empirical performance, theoretical analysis of DSM is still need further study and comparison with other relative retrieval model. In this article, we first generalize DSM's theoretical property, by proving that its minimum correlation assumption is equivalent to the maximum (original and symmetrized) KL-Divergence assumption. Second, we also analytically show that the EM algorithm in a well-known Mixture Model is essentially a distribution separation process and can be simplified using the linear separation algorithm in DSM. Some empirical results are also presented to support our theoretical analysis.

cs.IR↗

A Confident Information First Principle for Parametric Reduction and Model Selection of Boltzmann Machines

Typical dimensionality reduction (DR) methods are often data-oriented, focusing on directly reducing the number of random variables (features) while retaining the maximal variations in the high-dimensional data. In unsupervised situations, one of the main limitations of these methods lies in their dependency on the scale of data features. This paper aims to address the problem from a new perspective and considers model-oriented dimensionality reduction in parameter spaces of binary multivariate distributions. Specifically, we propose a general parameter reduction criterion, called Confident-Information-First (CIF) principle, to maximally preserve confident parameters and rule out less confident parameters. Formally, the confidence of each parameter can be assessed by its contribution to the expected Fisher information distance within the geometric manifold over the neighbourhood of the underlying real distribution. We then revisit Boltzmann machines (BM) from a model selection perspective and theoretically show that both the fully visible BM (VBM) and the BM with hidden units can be derived from the general binary multivariate distribution using the CIF principle. This can help us uncover and formalize the essential parts of the target density that BM aims to capture and the non-essential parts that BM should discard. Guided by the theoretical analysis, we develop a sample-specific CIF for model selection of BM that is adaptive to the observed samples. The method is studied in a series of density estimation experiments and has been shown effective in terms of the estimate accuracy.

cs.LG↗

Understanding Boltzmann Machine and Deep Learning via A Confident Information First Principle

Typical dimensionality reduction methods focus on directly reducing the number of random variables while retaining maximal variations in the data. In this paper, we consider the dimensionality reduction in parameter spaces of binary multivariate distributions. We propose a general Confident-Information-First (CIF) principle to maximally preserve parameters with confident estimates and rule out unreliable or noisy parameters. Formally, the confidence of a parameter can be assessed by its Fisher information, which establishes a connection with the inverse variance of any unbiased estimate for the parameter via the Cramér-Rao bound. We then revisit Boltzmann machines (BM) and theoretically show that both single-layer BM without hidden units (SBM) and restricted BM (RBM) can be solidly derived using the CIF principle. This can not only help us uncover and formalize the essential parts of the target density that SBM and RBM capture, but also suggest that the deep neural network consisting of several layers of RBM can be seen as the layer-wise application of CIF. Guided by the theoretical analysis, we develop a sample-specific CIF-based contrastive divergence (CD-CIF) algorithm for SBM and a CIF-based iterative projection procedure (IP) for RBM. Both CD-CIF and IP are studied in a series of density estimation experiments.

cs.NE↗

On Tsallis Entropy Bias and Generalized Maximum Entropy Models

In density estimation task, maximum entropy model (Maxent) can effectively use reliable prior information via certain constraints, i.e., linear constraints without empirical parameters. However, reliable prior information is often insufficient, and the selection of uncertain constraints becomes necessary but poses considerable implementation complexity. Improper setting of uncertain constraints can result in overfitting or underfitting. To solve this problem, a generalization of Maxent, under Tsallis entropy framework, is proposed. The proposed method introduces a convex quadratic constraint for the correction of (expected) Tsallis entropy bias (TEB). Specifically, we demonstrate that the expected Tsallis entropy of sampling distributions is smaller than the Tsallis entropy of the underlying real distribution. This expected entropy reduction is exactly the (expected) TEB, which can be expressed by a closed-form formula and act as a consistent and unbiased correction. TEB indicates that the entropy of a specific sampling distribution should be increased accordingly. This entails a quantitative re-interpretation of the Maxent principle. By compensating TEB and meanwhile forcing the resulting distribution to be close to the sampling distribution, our generalized TEBC Maxent can be expected to alleviate the overfitting and underfitting. We also present a connection between TEB and Lidstone estimator. As a result, TEB-Lidstone estimator is developed by analytically identifying the rate of probability correction in Lidstone. Extensive empirical evaluation shows promising performance of both TEBC Maxent and TEB-Lidstone in comparison with various state-of-the-art density estimation methods.

cs.LG↗