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1. META: Metadata-Empowered Weak Supervision for Text Classification

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.670  

   Mekala, Dheeraj; Zhang, Xinyang; Shang, Jingbo (January 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP))

   null (Ed.)

   Recent advances in weakly supervised learn- ing enable training high-quality text classifiers by only providing a few user-provided seed words. Existing methods mainly use text data alone to generate pseudo-labels despite the fact that metadata information (e.g., author and timestamp) is widely available across various domains. Strong label indicators exist in the metadata and it has been long overlooked mainly due to the following challenges: (1) metadata is multi-typed, requiring systematic modeling of different types and their combinations, (2) metadata is noisy, some metadata entities (e.g., authors, venues) are more compelling label indicators than others. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, META, which goes beyond the existing paradigm and leverages metadata as an additional source of weak supervision. Specifically, we organize the text data and metadata together into a text-rich network and adopt network motifs to capture appropriate combinations of metadata. Based on seed words, we rank and filter motif instances to distill highly label-indicative ones as “seed motifs”, which provide additional weak supervision. Following a boot-strapping manner, we train the classifier and expand the seed words and seed motifs iteratively. Extensive experiments and case studies on real-world datasets demonstrate superior performance and significant advantages of leveraging metadata as weak supervision. 

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2. X-Class: Text Classification with Extremely Weak Supervision

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.242  

   Wang, Zihan; Mekala, Dheeraj; Shang, Jingbo (January 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies)

   null (Ed.)

   In this paper, we explore text classification with extremely weak supervision, i.e., only relying on the surface text of class names. This is a more challenging setting than the seed-driven weak supervision, which allows a few seed words per class. We opt to attack this problem from a representation learning perspective—ideal document representations should lead to nearly the same results between clustering and the desired classification. In particular, one can classify the same corpus differently (e.g., based on topics and locations), so document representations should be adaptive to the given class names. We propose a novel framework X-Class to realize the adaptive representations. Specifically, we first estimate class representations by incrementally adding the most similar word to each class until inconsistency arises. Following a tailored mixture of class attention mechanisms, we obtain the document representation via a weighted average of contextualized word representations. With the prior of each document assigned to its nearest class, we then cluster and align the documents to classes. Finally, we pick the most confident documents from each cluster to train a text classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Class can rival and even outperform seed-driven weakly supervised methods on 7 benchmark datasets. 

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3. Mind Control through Causal Inference: Predicting Clean Images from Poisoned Data

   Hu, Mengxuan; Guan, Zihan; Zeng, Yi; Guo, Junfeng; Zhou, Zhongliang; Zhang, Jielu; Jia, Ruoxi; Vullikanti, Anil Kumar; Li, Sheng (January 2025, International Conference on Learning Representations)

   Anti-backdoor learning, aiming to train clean models directly from poisoned datasets, serves as an important defense method for backdoor attack. However, existing methods usually fail to recover backdoored samples to their original, correct labels and suffer from poor generalization to large pre-trained models due to its non end-to end training, making them unsuitable for protecting the increasingly prevalent large pre-trained models. To bridge the gap, we first revisit the anti-backdoor learning problem from a causal perspective. Our theoretical causal analysis reveals that incorporating both images and the associated attack indicators preserves the model's integrity. Building on the theoretical analysis, we introduce an end-to-end method, Mind Control through Causal Inference (MCCI), to train clean models directly from poisoned datasets. This approach leverages both the image and the attack indicator to train the model. Based on this training paradigm, the model’s perception of whether an input is clean or backdoored can be controlled. Typically, by introducing fake non-attack indicators, the model perceives all inputs as clean and makes correct predictions, even for poisoned samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, efficiently recovering the original correct predictions for poisoned samples and enhancing accuracy on clean samples. 

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4. LOPS: Learning Order Inspired Pseudo-Label Selection for Weakly Supervised Text Classification

   Mekala, Dheeraj; Dong, Chengyu; Shang, Jingbo (January 2022, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022)

   Weakly supervised text classification methods typically train a deep neural classifier based on pseudo-labels. The quality of pseudo-labels is crucial to final performance but they are inevitably noisy due to their heuristic nature, so selecting the correct ones has a huge potential for performance boost. One straightforward solution is to select samples based on the softmax probability scores in the neural classifier corresponding to their pseudo-labels. However, we show through our experiments that such solutions are ineffective and unstable due to the erroneously high-confidence predictions from poorly calibrated models. Recent studies on the memorization effects of deep neural models suggest that these models first memorize training samples with clean labels and then those with noisy labels. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel pseudo-label selection method LOPS that takes learning order of samples into consideration. We hypothesize that the learning order reflects the probability of wrong annotation in terms of ranking, and therefore, propose to select the samples that are learnt earlier. LOPS can be viewed as a strong performance-boost plug-in to most existing weakly-supervised text classification methods, as confirmed in extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. 

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5. Hidden-Trigger Backdoor Attacks

   Saha, Aniruddha; Subramanya, Akshayvarun; Pirsiavash, Hamed (April 2020, 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020)

   With the success of deep learning algorithms in various domains, studying adversarial attacks to secure deep models in real world applications has become an important research topic. Backdoor attacks are a form of adversarial attacks on deep networks where the attacker provides poisoned data to the victim to train the model with, and then activates the attack by showing a specific small trigger pattern at the test time. Most state-of-the-art backdoor attacks either provide mislabeled poisoning data that is possible to identify by visual inspection, reveal the trigger in the poisoned data, or use noise to hide the trigger. We propose a novel form of backdoor attack where poisoned data look natural with correct labels and also more importantly, the attacker hides the trigger in the poisoned data and keeps the trigger secret until the test time. We perform an extensive study on various image classification settings and show that our attack can fool the model by pasting the trigger at random locations on unseen images although the model performs well on clean data. We also show that our proposed attack cannot be easily defended using a state-of-the-art defense algorithm for backdoor attacks. 

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