Scholar's Hub

Our researchers at Semantic Scholar and Allen Institute for AI have specific interests and expertise that we’d like to share with you. By curating these theme-based paper collections, we aim to promote equal access to science and start conversations within and beyond the scholar community.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact us.

Illustration: Trending Papers

AI Papers to Know in 2023

Deep Contextualized Word Representations

Matthew E. Peters, Mark Neumann, Mohit Iyyer, Matt Gardner, Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, Luke Zettlemoyer
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
February 15, 2018

We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.

A new type of deep contextualized word representation is introduced that models both complex characteristics of word use and how these uses vary across linguistic contexts, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.

On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks

Chuan Guo, Geoff Pleiss, Yu Sun, Kilian Q. Weinberger
International Conference on Machine Learning
June 14, 2017

Confidence calibration -- the problem of predicting probability estimates representative of the true correctness likelihood -- is important for classification models in many applications. We discover that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated. Through extensive experiments, we observe that depth, width, weight decay, and Batch Normalization are important factors influencing calibration. We evaluate the performance of various post-processing calibration methods on state-of-the-art architectures with image and document classification datasets. Our analysis and experiments not only offer insights into neural network learning, but also provide a simple and straightforward recipe for practical settings: on most datasets, temperature scaling -- a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling -- is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.

It is discovered that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated, and on most datasets, temperature scaling -- a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling -- is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.

Attention is All you Need

Ashish Vaswani, Noam M. Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
Published in NIPS
June 12, 2017

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

A new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely is proposed, which generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

Kaiming He, X. Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun
2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
December 10, 2015

Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers - 8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

This work presents a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously, and provides comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth.

Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

Volodymyr Mnih, K. Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, J. Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin A. Riedmiller, A. Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, Stig Petersen, Charlie Beattie, Amir Sadik, Ioannis Antonoglou, Helen King, D. Kumaran, Daan Wierstra, S. Legg, D. Hassabis
Nature
February 25, 2015

The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization

Diederik P. Kingma, Jimmy Ba
CoRR
December 22, 2014

We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

This work introduces Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments, and provides a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework.

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks

Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le
ArXiv
September 10, 2014

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT-14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous state of the art. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

This paper presents a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure, and finds that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate

Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, Yoshua Bengio
CoRR
September 1, 2014

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

It is conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and it is proposed to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly.

Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality

Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, G. Corrado, J. Dean
ArXiv
October 16, 2013

The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.

This paper presents a simple method for finding phrases in text, and shows that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible and describes a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling.

ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks

A. Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey E. Hinton
Communications of the ACM
December 3, 2012

We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0% which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.

A large, deep convolutional neural network was trained to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes and employed a recently developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective.

Award-Winning Papers by Semantic Scholar Research

Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI

Organizers Of Queer in AI, Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian, Ashwin Singh, Claas Voelcker, Danica J. Sutherland, Davide Locatelli, Eva Breznik, Filip Klubička, Hang Yuan, Hetvi J, Huan Zhang, Jaidev Shriram, Kruno Lehman, Luca Soldaini, Maarten Sap, Marc Peter Deisenroth, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Maria Ryskina, Martin Mundt, Melvin Selim Atay, Milind Agarwal, Nyx McLean, Pan Xu, A Pranav, Raj Korpan, Ruchira Ray, Sarah Mathew, Sarthak Arora, St John, Tanvi Anand, Vishakha Agrawal, William Agnew, Yanan Long, Zijie J. Wang, Zeerak Talat, Avijit Ghosh, Nathaniel Dennler, Michael Noseworthy, Sharvani Jha, Emi Baylor, Aditya Joshi, Natalia Y. Bilenko, Andrew McNamara, Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Alex Markham, Evyn Dǒng, Jackie Kay, Manu Saraswat, Nikhil Vytla, Luke Stark
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
March 29, 2023

Queerness and queer people face an uncertain future in the face of ever more widely deployed and invasive artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies have caused numerous harms to queer people, including privacy violations, censoring and downranking queer content, exposing queer people and spaces to harassment by making them hypervisible, deadnaming and outing queer people. More broadly, they have violated core tenets of queerness by classifying and controlling queer identities. In response to this, the queer community in AI has organized Queer in AI, a global, decentralized, volunteer-run grassroots organization that employs intersectional and community-led participatory design to build an inclusive and equitable AI future. In this paper, we present Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI. We examine how participatory design and intersectional tenets started and shaped this community’s programs over the years. We discuss different challenges that emerged in the process, look at ways this organization has fallen short of operationalizing participatory and intersectional principles, and then assess the organization’s impact. Queer in AI provides important lessons and insights for practitioners and theorists of participatory methods broadly through its rejection of hierarchy in favor of decentralization, success at building aid and programs by and for the queer community, and effort to change actors and institutions outside of the queer community. Finally, we theorize how communities like Queer in AI contribute to the participatory design in AI more broadly by fostering cultures of participation in AI, welcoming and empowering marginalized participants, critiquing poor or exploitative participatory practices, and bringing participation to institutions outside of individual research projects. Queer in AI’s work serves as a case study of grassroots activism and participatory methods within AI, demonstrating the potential of community-led participatory methods and intersectional praxis, while also providing challenges, case studies, and nuanced insights to researchers developing and using participatory methods.

CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context

Joseph Chee Chang, Amy X. Zhang, Jonathan Bragg, Andrew Head, Kyle Lo, Doug Downey, Daniel S. Weld
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
February 14, 2023

When reading a scholarly article, inline citations help researchers contextualize the current article and discover relevant prior work. However, it can be challenging to prioritize and make sense of the hundreds of citations encountered during literature reviews. This paper introduces CiteSee, a paper reading tool that leverages a user’s publishing, reading, and saving activities to provide personalized visual augmentations and context around citations. First, CiteSee connects the current paper to familiar contexts by surfacing known citations a user had cited or opened. Second, CiteSee helps users prioritize their exploration by highlighting relevant but unknown citations based on saving and reading history. We conducted a lab study that suggests CiteSee is significantly more effective for paper discovery than three baselines. A field deployment study shows CiteSee helps participants keep track of their explorations and leads to better situational awareness and increased paper discovery via inline citation when conducting real-world literature reviews.

CiteSee is a paper reading tool that leverages a user’s publishing, reading, and saving activities to provide personalized visual augmentations and context around citations to help users prioritize their exploration.

LongEval: Guidelines for Human Evaluation of Faithfulness in Long-form Summarization

Kalpesh Krishna, Erin Bransom, Bailey Kuehl, Mohit Iyyer, Pradeep Dasigi, Arman Cohan, Kyle Lo
ArXiv
January 30, 2023

While human evaluation remains best practice for accurately judging the faithfulness of automatically-generated summaries, few solutions exist to address the increased difficulty and workload when evaluating long-form summaries. Through a survey of 162 papers on long-form summarization, we first shed light on current human evaluation practices surrounding long-form summaries. We find that 73% of these papers do not perform any human evaluation on model-generated summaries, while other works face new difficulties that manifest when dealing with long documents (e.g., low inter-annotator agreement). Motivated by our survey, we present LongEval, a set of guidelines for human evaluation of faithfulness in long-form summaries that addresses the following challenges: (1) How can we achieve high inter-annotator agreement on faithfulness scores? (2) How can we minimize annotator workload while maintaining accurate faithfulness scores? and (3) Do humans benefit from automated alignment between summary and source snippets? We deploy LongEval in annotation studies on two long-form summarization datasets in different domains (SQuALITY and PubMed), and we find that switching to a finer granularity of judgment (e.g., clause-level) reduces inter-annotator variance in faithfulness scores (e.g., std-dev from 18.5 to 6.8). We also show that scores from a partial annotation of fine-grained units highly correlates with scores from a full annotation workload (0.89 Kendall’s tau using 50% judgements). We release our human judgments, annotation templates, and software as a Python library for future research.

LongEval is presented, a set of guidelines for human evaluation of faithfulness in long-form summaries that addresses the following challenges: How can high inter-annotator agreement on faithfulness scores be achieved?

SciA11y: Converting Scientific Papers to Accessible HTML

Lucy Lu Wang, Isabel Cachola, Jonathan Bragg, Evie (Yu-Yen) Cheng, Chelsea Hess Haupt, Matt Latzke, Bailey Kuehl, Madeleine van Zuylen, Linda M. Wagner, Daniel S. Weld
Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
October 17, 2021

We present SciA11y, a system that renders inaccessible scientific paper PDFs into HTML. SciA11y uses machine learning models to extract and understand the content of scientific PDFs, and reorganizes the resulting paper components into a form that better supports skimming and scanning for blind and low vision (BLV) readers. SciA11y adds navigation features such as tagged headings, a table of contents, and bidirectional links between inline citations and references, which allow readers to resolve citations without losing their context. A set of 1.5 million open access papers are processed and available at https://scia11y.org/. This system is a first step in addressing scientific PDF accessibility, and may significantly improve the experience of paper reading for BLV users.

SciA11y uses machine learning models to extract and understand the content of scientific PDFs, and reorganizes the resulting paper components into a form that better supports skimming and scanning for blind and low vision readers.

SciCo: Hierarchical Cross-Document Coreference for Scientific Concepts

Arie Cattan, Sophie Johnson, Daniel S. Weld, Ido Dagan, Iz Beltagy, Doug Downey, Tom Hope
ArXiv
April 18, 2021

Determining coreference of concept mentions across multiple documents is a fundamental task in natural language understanding. Previous work on cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) typically considers mentions of events in the news, which seldom involve abstract technical concepts that are prevalent in science and technology. These complex concepts take diverse or ambiguous forms and have many hierarchical levels of granularity (e.g., tasks and subtasks), posing challenges for CDCR. We present a new task of Hierarchical CDCR (H-CDCR) with the goal of jointly inferring coreference clusters and hierarchy between them. We create SciCo, an expert-annotated dataset for H-CDCR in scientific papers, 3X larger than the prominent ECB+ resource. We study strong baseline models that we customize for H-CDCR, and highlight challenges for future work.

SciCo, an expert-annotated dataset for H-CDCR in scientific papers, is created, 3X larger than the prominent ECB+ resource, and is studied to study strong baseline models that are customize for H -CDCR, and highlight challenges for future work.

Latest News & Updates

Case Study: Iterative Design for Skimming Support

Case Study: Iterative Design for Skimming Support

How might we help researchers quickly assess the relevance of scientific literature? Take a closer look at Skimming, Semantic Reader’s latest AI feature, and the collaborative design process behind it.

Cassidy Trier

Behind the Scenes of Semantic Scholar’s New Author Influence Design

Behind the Scenes of Semantic Scholar’s New Author Influence Design

We released a new version of Author Influence interface to help scholars better discover other scholars in their fields. Here's how we identified user insights and made those design choices.

Cassidy Trier, Evie Cheng, Ashley Lee

Artificial-intelligence search engines wrangle academic literature

Artificial-intelligence search engines wrangle academic literature

Nature had a chat with Dan Weld, Chief Scientist at Semantic Scholar, to discuss how search engines are helping scientists explore and innovate by making it easier to draw connections from a massive collection of scientific literature.

Amanda Heidt

Create Your Account