PARE: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Monolingual and Multilingual Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Attention mechanisms are often used in deep neural networks for distantly supervised relation extraction (DS-RE) to distinguish valid from noisy instances. However, traditional 1- D vector attention models are insufficient for the learning of different contexts in the selection of valid instances to predict the relationship for an entity pair. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel multi-level structured (2-D matrix) self-attention mechanism for DS-RE in a multi-instance learning (MIL) framework using bidirectional recurrent neural networks. In the proposed method, a structured word-level self-attention mechanism learns a 2-D matrix where each row vector represents a weight distribution for different aspects of an instance regarding two entities. Targeting the MIL issue, the structured sentence-level attention learns a 2-D matrix where each row vector represents a weight distribution on selection of different valid instances. Experiments conducted on two publicly available DS-RE datasets show that the proposed framework with a multi-level structured self-attention mechanism significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines in terms of PR curves, P@N and F1 measures.

In recent years, distantly-supervised relation extraction has achieved a certain success by using deep neural networks. Distant Supervision (DS) can automatically generate large-scale annotated data by aligning entity pairs from Knowledge Bases (KB) to sentences. However, these DS-generated datasets inevitably have wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing, which may mislead the researchers. To solve this problem, we build a new dataset NYTH, where we use the DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data. Compared with the previous datasets, NYT-H has a much larger test set and then we can perform more accurate and consistent evaluation. Finally, we present the experimental results of several widely used systems on NYT-H. The experimental results show that the ranking lists of the comparison systems on the DS-labelled test data and human-annotated test data are different. This indicates that our human-annotated data is necessary for evaluation of distantly-supervised relation extraction.

Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (DSRE) aims to automatically identify semantic relationships within large text corpora by aligning with external knowledge bases. Despite the success of current methods in automating data annotation, they introduce two main challenges: label noise and data long-tail distribution. Label noise results in inaccurate annotations, which can undermine the quality of relation extraction. The long-tail problem, on the other hand, leads to an imbalanced model that struggles to extract less frequent, long-tail relations. In this paper, we introduce a novel relation extraction framework based on multi-level hierarchical attention. This approach utilizes Graph Attention Networks (GATs) to model the hierarchical structure of the relations, capturing the semantic dependencies between relation types and generating relation embeddings that reflect the overall hierarchical framework. To improve the classification process, we incorporate a multi-level classification structure guided by hierarchical attention, which enhances the accuracy of both head and tail relation extraction. A local probability constraint is introduced to ensure coherence across the classification levels, fostering knowledge transfer from frequent to less frequent relations. Experimental evaluations on the New York Times (NYT) dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, particularly in the context of long-tail relation extraction, offering a comprehensive solution to the challenges of DSRE.

Distant supervised relation extraction has been widely used to find novel relational facts from text. However, distant supervision inevitably accompanies with the wrong labelling problem, and these noisy data will substantially hurt the performance of relation extraction. To alleviate this issue, we propose a sentence-level attention-based model for relation extraction. In this model, we employ convolutional neural networks to embed the semantics of sentences. Afterwards, we build sentence-level attention over multiple instances, which is expected to dynamically reduce the weights of those noisy instances. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that, our model can make full use of all informative sentences and effectively reduce the influence of wrong labelled instances. Our model achieves significant and consistent improvements on relation extraction as compared with baselines.

The Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is a universal relation extraction method that can predict relations of entity pairs by capturing sentences’ syntactic features. However, existing GCN methods often use dependency parsing to generate graph matrices and learn syntactic features. The quality of the dependency parsing will directly affect the accuracy of the graph matrix and change the whole GCN’s performance. Because of the influence of noisy words and sentence length in the distant supervised dataset, using dependency parsing on sentences causes errors and leads to unreliable information. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain credible graph matrices and relational features for some special sentences. In this article, we present a Multi-Graph Cooperative Learning model (MGCL), which focuses on extracting the reliable syntactic features of relations by different graphs and harnessing them to improve the representations of sentences. We conduct experiments on a widely used real-world dataset, and the experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance of relation extraction.

Semantic piecewise convolutional neural network with adaptive negative training for distantly supervised relation extraction

Distant supervision for relation extraction with hierarchical selective attention

Two problems arise when using distant supervision for relation extraction. First, in this method, an already existing knowledge base is heuristically aligned to texts, and the alignment results are treated as labeled data. However, the heuristic alignment can fail, resulting in wrong label problem. In addition, in previous approaches, statistical models have typically been applied to ad hoc features. The noise that originates from the feature extraction process can cause poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model dubbed the Piecewise Convolutional Neural Networks (PCNNs) with multi-instance learning to address these two problems. To solve the first problem, distant supervised relation extraction is treated as a multi-instance problem in which the uncertainty of instance labels is taken into account. To address the latter problem, we avoid feature engineering and instead adopt convolutional architecture with piecewise max pooling to automatically learn relevant features. Experiments show that our method is effective and outperforms several competitive baseline methods.

Distant supervision assumes that any sentence containing the same entity pairs reflects identical relationships. Previous works of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) task generally focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising techniques independently, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning Framework for Distantly Supervised relation extraction (HiCLRE) to reduce noisy sentences, which integrate the global structural information and local fine-grained interaction. Specifically, we propose a three-level hierarchical learning framework to interact with cross levels, generating the de-noising context-aware representations via adapting the existing multi-head self-attention, named Multi-Granularity Recontextualization. Meanwhile, pseudo positive samples are also provided in the specific level for contrastive learning via a dynamic gradient-based data augmentation strategy, named Dynamic Gradient Adversarial Perturbation. Experiments demonstrate that HiCLRE significantly outperforms strong baselines in various mainstream DSRE datasets.

Abstract3D multi-object tracking (MOT) has witnessed numerous novel benchmarks and approaches in recent years, especially those under the “tracking-by-detection” paradigm. Despite their progress and usefulness, an in-depth analysis of their strengths and weaknesses is not yet available. In this paper, we summarize current 3D MOT methods into a unified framework by decomposing them into four constituent parts: pre-processing of detection, association, motion model, and life cycle management. We then ascribe the failure cases of existing algorithms to each component and investigate them in detail. Based on the analyses, we propose corresponding improvements which lead to a strong yet simple baseline: SimpleTrack. Comprehensive experimental results on Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes demonstrate that our final method could achieve new state-of-the-art results with minor modifications. Furthermore, we take additional steps and rethink whether current benchmarks authentically reflect the ability of algorithms for real-world challenges. We delve into the details of existing benchmarks and find some intriguing facts. Finally, we analyze the distribution and causes of remaining failures in SimpleTrack and propose future directions for 3D MOT. Our code is at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SimpleTrack.Keywords3D multi-object trackingAutonomous driving

BasicTAD: An astounding RGB-Only baseline for temporal action detection

This study explores a simple but strong baseline for person re-identification (ReID). Person ReID with deep neural networks has progressed and achieved high performance in recent years. However, many state-of-the-art methods design complex network structures and concatenate multi-branch features. In the literature, some effective training tricks briefly appear in several papers or source codes. The present study collects and evaluates these effective training tricks in person ReID. By combining these tricks, the model achieves 94.5% rank-1 and 85.9% mean average precision on Market1501 with only using the global features of ResNet50. The performance surpasses all existing global- and part-based baselines in person ReID. We propose a novel neck structure named as batch normalization neck (BNNeck). BNNeck adds a batch normalization layer after global pooling layer to separate metric and classification losses into two different feature spaces because we observe they are inconsistent in one embedding space. Extended experiments show that BNNeck can boost the baseline, and our baseline can improve the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods. Our codes and models are available at: https://github.com/michuanhaohao/reid-strong-baseline.

We present a simple yet very strong baseline for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction that also works in the multilingual setting. We support our results with interesting insights and analyses.

Image-based visual-language (I-VL) pre-training has shown great success for learning joint visual-textual representations from large-scale web data, revealing remarkable ability for “zero-shot” generalisation. This paper presents a simple but strong baseline to efficiently adapt the pre-trained I-VL model for video understanding tasks, with minimal training. Specifically, we propose to optimise a few random vectors, termed as “continuous prompt vectors”, that convert video-related tasks into the same format as the pre-training objectives. In addition, to bridge the gap between static images and videos, temporal information is encoded with lightweight Transformers stacking on top of frame-wise visual features. Experimentally, we conduct extensive ablation studies to analyse the critical components. On ten public benchmarks of action recognition, action localisation, and text-video retrieval, across closed-set, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios, we achieve competitive or state-of-the-art performance to existing methods, despite optimising significantly fewer parameters. Due to space limitation, we refer the readers to the arXiv version at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04478.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods effectively leverage unlabeled data to improve model generalization. However, SSL models often underperform in open-set scenarios, where unlabeled data contain outliers from novel categories that do not appear in the labeled set. In this paper, we study the challenging and realistic open-set SSL setting, where the goal is to both correctly classify inliers and to detect outliers. Intuitively, the inlier classifier should be trained on inlier data only. However, we find that inlier classification performance can be largely improved by incorporating high-confidence pseudo-labeled data, regardless of whether they are inliers or outliers. Also, we propose to utilize non-linear transformations to separate the features used for inlier classification and outlier detection in the multi-task learning framework, preventing adverse effects between them. Additionally, we introduce pseudo-negative mining, which further boosts outlier detection performance. The three ingredients lead to what we call Simple but Strong Baseline (SSB) for open-set SSL. In experiments, SSB greatly improves both inlier classification and outlier detection performance, outperforming existing methods by a large margin. Our code will be released at https://github.com/YUE-FAN/SSB.