Reza Farahbakhsh


2024

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Improving Cross-lingual Transfer with Contrastive Negative Learning and Self-training
Guanlin Li | Xuechen Zhao | Amir Jafari | Wenhao Shao | Reza Farahbakhsh | Noel Crespi
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Recent studies improve the cross-lingual transfer learning by better aligning the internal representations within the multilingual model or exploring the information of the target language using self-training. However, the alignment-based methods exhibit intrinsic limitations such as non-transferable linguistic elements, while most of the self-training based methods ignore the useful information hidden in the low-confidence samples. To address this issue, we propose CoNLST (Contrastive Negative Learning and Self-Training) to leverage the information of low-confidence samples. Specifically, we extend the negative learning to the metric space by selecting negative pairs based on the complementary labels and then employ self-training to iteratively train the model to converge on the obtained clean pseudo-labels. We evaluate our approach on the widely-adopted cross-lingual benchmark XNLI. The experiment results show that our method improves upon the baseline models and can serve as a beneficial complement to the alignment-based methods.

2023

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No offence, Bert - I insult only humans! Multilingual sentence-level attack on toxicity detection networks
Sergey Berezin | Reza Farahbakhsh | Noel Crespi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

We introduce a simple yet efficient sentence-level attack on black-box toxicity detector models. By adding several positive words or sentences to the end of a hateful message, we are able to change the prediction of a neural network and pass the toxicity detection system check. This approach is shown to be working on seven languages from three different language families. We also describe the defence mechanism against the aforementioned attack and discuss its limitations.