Seismic data often undergoes severe noise due to environmental factors, which seriously affects subsequent applications. Traditional hand-crafted denoisers such as filters and regularizations utilize interpretable domain knowledge to design generalizable denoising techniques, while their representation capacities may be inferior to deep learning denoisers, which can learn complex and representative denoising mappings from abundant training pairs. However, due to the scarcity of high-quality training pairs, deep learning denoisers may sustain some generalization issues over various scenarios. In this work, we propose a self-supervised method that combines the capacities of deep denoiser and the generalization abilities of hand-crafted regularization for seismic data random noise attenuation. Specifically, we leverage the Self2Self (S2S) learning framework with a trace-wise masking strategy for seismic data denoising by solely using the observed noisy data. Parallelly, we suggest the weighted total variation (WTV) to further capture the horizontal local smooth structure of seismic data. Our method, dubbed as S2S-WTV, enjoys both high representation abilities brought from the self-supervised deep network and good generalization abilities of the hand-crafted WTV regularizer and the self-supervised nature. Therefore, our method can more effectively and stably remove the random noise and preserve the details and edges of the clean signal. To tackle the S2S-WTV optimization model, we introduce an alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM)-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on synthetic and field noisy seismic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as compared with state-of-the-art traditional and deep learning-based seismic data denoising methods.

With the development of natural language processing techniques(NLP), automatic diagnosis of eye diseases using ophthalmology electronic medical records (OEMR) has become possible. It aims to evaluate the condition of both eyes of a patient respectively, and we formulate it as a particular multi-label classification task in this paper. Although there are a few related studies in other diseases, automatic diagnosis of eye diseases exhibits unique characteristics. First, descriptions of both eyes are mixed up in OEMR documents, with both free text and templated asymptomatic descriptions, resulting in sparsity and clutter of information. Second, OEMR documents contain multiple parts of descriptions and have long document lengths. Third, it is critical to provide explainability to the disease diagnosis model. To overcome those challenges, we present an effective automatic eye disease diagnosis framework, NEEDED. In this framework, a preprocessing module is integrated to improve the density and quality of information. Then, we design a hierarchical transformer structure for learning the contextualized representations of each sentence in the OEMR document. For the diagnosis part, we propose an attention-based predictor that enables traceable diagnosis by obtaining disease-specific information. Experiments on the real dataset and comparison with several baseline models show the advantage and explainability of our framework.

Graphic layout designs play an essential role in visual communication. Yet handcrafting layout designs are skill-demanding, time-consuming, and non-scalable to batch production. Although generative models emerge to make design automation no longer utopian, it remains non-trivial to customize designs that comply with designers' multimodal desires, i.e., constrained by background images and driven by foreground contents. In this study, we propose \textit{LayoutDETR} that inherits the high quality and realism from generative modeling, in the meanwhile reformulating content-aware requirements as a detection problem: we learn to detect in a background image the reasonable locations, scales, and spatial relations for multimodal elements in a layout. Experiments validate that our solution yields new state-of-the-art performance for layout generation on public benchmarks and on our newly-curated ads banner dataset. For practical usage, we build our solution into a graphical system that facilitates user studies. We demonstrate that our designs attract more subjective preference than baselines by significant margins. Our code, models, dataset, graphical system, and demos are available at https://github.com/salesforce/LayoutDETR.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

The goal of multimodal abstractive summarization (MAS) is to produce a concise summary given the multimodal data (text and vision). Existing studies on MAS mainly focus on how to effectively use the extracted visual features, having achieved impressive success on the high-resource English dataset. However, less attention has been paid to the quality of the visual features to the summary, which may limit the model performance especially in the low- and zero-resource scenarios. In this paper, we propose to improve the summary quality through summary-oriented visual features. To this end, we devise two auxiliary tasks including \emph{vision to summary task} and \emph{masked image modeling task}. Together with the main summarization task, we optimize the MAS model via the training objectives of all these tasks. By these means, the MAS model can be enhanced by capturing the summary-oriented visual features, thereby yielding more accurate summaries. Experiments on 44 languages, covering mid-high-, low-, and zero-resource scenarios, verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach, which achieves state-of-the-art performance under all scenarios.

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at generating a concise summary in a different target language. Unlike monolingual summarization (MS), naturally occurring source-language documents paired with target-language summaries are rare. To collect large-scale CLS samples, existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation. However, the translated text is distinguished from the text originally written in that language, i.e., translationese. Though many efforts have been devoted to CLS, none of them notice the phenomenon of translationese. In this paper, we first confirm that the different approaches to constructing CLS datasets will lead to different degrees of translationese. Then we design systematic experiments to investigate how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. In detail, we find that (1) the translationese in documents or summaries of test sets might lead to the discrepancy between human judgment and automatic evaluation; (2) the translationese in training sets would harm model performance in the real scene; (3) though machine-translated documents involve translationese, they are very useful for building CLS systems on low-resource languages under specific training strategies. Furthermore, we give suggestions for future CLS research including dataset and model developments. We hope that our work could let researchers notice the phenomenon of translationese in CLS and take it into account in the future.

Harvesting question-answer (QA) pairs from customer service chatlog in the wild is an efficient way to enrich the knowledge base for customer service chatbots in the cold start or continuous integration scenarios. Prior work attempts to obtain 1-to-1 QA pairs from growing customer service chatlog, which fails to integrate the incomplete utterances from the dialog context for composite QA retrieval. In this paper, we propose N-to-N QA extraction task in which the derived questions and corresponding answers might be separated across different utterances. We introduce a suite of generative/discriminative tagging based methods with end-to-end and two-stage variants that perform well on 5 customer service datasets and for the first time setup a benchmark for N-to-N DialogQAE with utterance and session level evaluation metrics. With a deep dive into extracted QA pairs, we find that the relations between and inside the QA pairs can be indicators to analyze the dialogue structure, e.g. information seeking, clarification, barge-in and elaboration. We also show that the proposed models can adapt to different domains and languages, and reduce the labor cost of knowledge accumulation in the real-world product dialogue platform.

We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method to retrofit Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) into Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data. PMR is capable of resolving the discrepancy between model pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of existing PLMs, and provides a unified solver for tackling various extraction tasks. To achieve this, we construct a large volume of general-purpose and high-quality MRC-style training data with the help of Wikipedia hyperlinks and design a Wiki Anchor Extraction task to guide the MRC-style pre-training process. Although conceptually simple, PMR is particularly effective in solving extraction tasks including Extractive Question Answering and Named Entity Recognition, where it shows tremendous improvements over previous approaches especially under low-resource settings. Moreover, viewing sequence classification task as a special case of extraction task in our MRC formulation, PMR is even capable to extract high-quality rationales to explain the classification process, providing more explainability of the predictions.

Medical images play an important role in clinical applications. Multimodal medical images could provide rich information about patients for physicians to diagnose. The image fusion technique is able to synthesize complementary information from multimodal images into a single image. This technique will prevent radiologists switch back and forth between different images and save lots of time in the diagnostic process. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dilated Residual Attention Network for the medical image fusion task. Our network is capable to extract multi-scale deep semantic features. Furthermore, we propose a novel fixed fusion strategy termed Softmax-based weighted strategy based on the Softmax weights and matrix nuclear norm. Extensive experiments show our proposed network and fusion strategy exceed the state-of-the-art performance compared with reference image fusion methods on four commonly used fusion metrics.

Minimum Bayesian Risk Decoding (MBR) emerges as a promising decoding algorithm in Neural Machine Translation. However, MBR performs poorly with label smoothing, which is surprising as label smoothing provides decent improvement with beam search and improves generality in various tasks. In this work, we show that the issue arises from the un-consistency of label smoothing on the token-level and sequence-level distributions. We demonstrate that even though label smoothing only causes a slight change in the token-level, the sequence-level distribution is highly skewed. We coin the issue \emph{distributional over-smoothness}. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective method, Distributional Cooling MBR (DC-MBR), which manipulates the entropy of output distributions by tuning down the Softmax temperature. We theoretically prove the equivalence between pre-tuning label smoothing factor and distributional cooling. Experiments on NMT benchmarks validate that distributional cooling improves MBR's efficiency and effectiveness in various settings.