Proprietary and closed APIs are becoming increasingly common to process natural language, and are impacting the practical applications of natural language processing, including few-shot classification. Few-shot classification involves training a model to perform a new classification task with a handful of labeled data. This paper presents three contributions. First, we introduce a scenario where the embedding of a pre-trained model is served through a gated API with compute-cost and data-privacy constraints. Second, we propose a transductive inference, a learning paradigm that has been overlooked by the NLP community. Transductive inference, unlike traditional inductive learning, leverages the statistics of unlabelled data. We also introduce a new parameter-free transductive regularizer based on the Fisher-Rao loss, which can be used on top of the gated API embeddings. This method fully utilizes unlabelled data, does not share any label with the third-party API provider and could serve as a baseline for future research. Third, we propose an improved experimental setting and compile a benchmark of eight datasets involving multiclass classification in four different languages, with up to 151 classes. We evaluate our methods using eight backbone models, along with an episodic evaluation over 1,000 episodes, which demonstrate the superiority of transductive inference over the standard inductive setting.

Implementing effective control mechanisms to ensure the proper functioning and security of deployed NLP models, from translation to chatbots, is essential. A key ingredient to ensure safe system behaviour is Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection, which aims to detect whether an input sample is statistically far from the training distribution. Although OOD detection is a widely covered topic in classification tasks, most methods rely on hidden features output by the encoder. In this work, we focus on leveraging soft-probabilities in a black-box framework, i.e. we can access the soft-predictions but not the internal states of the model. Our contributions include: (i) RAINPROOF a Relative informAItioN Projection OOD detection framework; and (ii) a more operational evaluation setting for OOD detection. Surprisingly, we find that OOD detection is not necessarily aligned with task-specific measures. The OOD detector may filter out samples well processed by the model and keep samples that are not, leading to weaker performance. Our results show that RAINPROOF provides OOD detection methods more aligned with task-specific performance metrics than traditional OOD detectors.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the de-facto standard in real-world machine translation applications. However, NMT models can unpredictably produce severely pathological translations, known as hallucinations, that seriously undermine user trust. It becomes thus crucial to implement effective preventive strategies to guarantee their proper functioning. In this paper, we address the problem of hallucination detection in NMT by following a simple intuition: as hallucinations are detached from the source content, they exhibit encoder-decoder attention patterns that are statistically different from those of good quality translations. We frame this problem with an optimal transport formulation and propose a fully unsupervised, plug-in detector that can be used with any attention-based NMT model. Experimental results show that our detector not only outperforms all previous model-based detectors, but is also competitive with detectors that employ external models trained on millions of samples for related tasks such as quality estimation and cross-lingual sentence similarity.

The landscape of available textual adversarial attacks keeps growing, posing severe threats and raising concerns regarding deep NLP systems integrity. However, the crucial problem of defending against malicious attacks has only drawn few attention in the NLP community. The latter is nonetheless instrumental to develop robust and trustworthy systems. This paper makes two important contributions in this line of search: (i) we introduce LAROUSSE, a new framework to detect textual adversarial attacks and (ii) we introduce STAKEOUT, an extended benchmark composed of nine popular attack methods, three datasets and two pre-trained models. LAROUSSE is ready-to-use in production as it is unsupervised, hyperparameter free and non-differentiable, protecting it against gradient-based methods. Our new benchmark STAKEOUT allows for a robust evaluation framework: we conduct extensive numerical experiments which demonstrate that LAROUSSE outperforms previous methods, and which allows to identify interesting factor of detection rate variations.

When working with textual data, a natural application of disentangled representations is the fair classification where the goal is to make predictions without being biased (or influenced) by sensible attributes that may be present in the data (e.g., age, gender or race). Dominant approaches to disentangle a sensitive attribute from textual representations rely on learning simultaneously a penalization term that involves either an adversary loss (e.g., a discriminator) or an information measure (e.g., mutual information). However, these methods require the training of a deep neural network with several parameter updates for each update of the representation model. As a matter of fact, the resulting nested optimization loop is both times consuming, adding complexity to the optimization dynamic, and requires a fine hyperparameter selection (e.g., learning rates, architecture). In this work, we introduce a family of regularizers for learning disentangled representations that do not require training. These regularizers are based on statistical measures of similarity between the conditional probability distributions with respect to the sensible attributes. Our novel regularizers do not require additional training, are faster and do not involve additional tuning while achieving better results both when combined with pretrained and randomly initialized text encoders.

Learning disentangled representations of textual data is essential for many natural language tasks such as fair classification, style transfer and sentence generation, among others. The existent dominant approaches in the context of text data either rely on training an adversary (discriminator) that aims at making attribute values difficult to be inferred from the latent code or rely on minimising variational bounds of the mutual information between latent code and the value attribute. However, the available methods suffer of the impossibility to provide a fine-grained control of the degree (or force) of disentanglement. In contrast to adversarial methods, which are remarkably simple, although the adversary seems to be performing perfectly well during the training phase, after it is completed a fair amount of information about the undesired attribute still remains. This paper introduces a novel variational upper bound to the mutual information between an attribute and the latent code of an encoder. Our bound aims at controlling the approximation error via the Renyi’s divergence, leading to both better disentangled representations and in particular, a precise control of the desirable degree of disentanglement than state-of-the-art methods proposed for textual data. Furthermore, it does not suffer from the degeneracy of other losses in multi-class scenarios. We show the superiority of this method on fair classification and on textual style transfer tasks. Additionally, we provide new insights illustrating various trade-offs in style transfer when attempting to learn disentangled representations and quality of the generated sentence.

A new metric BaryScore to evaluate text generation based on deep contextualized embeddings (e.g., BERT, Roberta, ELMo) is introduced. This metric is motivated by a new framework relying on optimal transport tools, i.e., Wasserstein distance and barycenter. By modelling the layer output of deep contextualized embeddings as a probability distribution rather than by a vector embedding; this framework provides a natural way to aggregate the different outputs through the Wasserstein space topology. In addition, it provides theoretical grounds to our metric and offers an alternative to available solutions (e.g., MoverScore and BertScore). Numerical evaluation is performed on four different tasks: machine translation, summarization, data2text generation and image captioning. Our results show that BaryScore outperforms other BERT based metrics and exhibits more consistent behaviour in particular for text summarization.