Qiongkai Xu


2023

pdf bib
Rethinking Round-Trip Translation for Machine Translation Evaluation
Terry Yue Zhuo | Qiongkai Xu | Xuanli He | Trevor Cohn
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Automatic evaluation methods for translation often require model training, and thus the availability of parallel corpora limits their applicability to low-resource settings. Round-trip translation is a potential workaround, which can reframe bilingual evaluation into a much simpler monolingual task. Early results from the era of statistical machine translation (SMT) raised fundamental concerns about the utility of this approach, based on poor correlation with human translation quality judgments. In this paper, we revisit this technique with modern neural translation (NMT) and show that round-trip translation does allow for accurate automatic evaluation without the need for reference translations. These opposite findings can be explained through the copy mechanism in SMT that is absent in NMT. We demonstrate that round-trip translation benefits multiple machine translation evaluation tasks: i) predicting forward translation scores; ii) improving the performance of a quality estimation model; and iii) identifying adversarial competitors in shared tasks via cross-system verification.

pdf bib
Boot and Switch: Alternating Distillation for Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval
Fan Jiang | Qiongkai Xu | Tom Drummond | Trevor Cohn
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Neural ‘dense’ retrieval models are state of the art for many datasets, however these models often exhibit limited domain transfer ability. Existing approaches to adaptation are unwieldy, such as requiring explicit supervision, complex model architectures, or massive external models. We present ABEL, a simple but effective unsupervised method to enhance passage retrieval in zero-shot settings. Our technique follows a straightforward loop: a dense retriever learns from supervision signals provided by a reranker, and subsequently, the reranker is updated based on feedback from the improved retriever. By iterating this loop, the two components mutually enhance one another’s performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our unsupervised ABEL model outperforms both leading supervised and unsupervised retrievers on the BEIR benchmark. Meanwhile, it exhibits strong adaptation abilities to tasks and domains that were unseen during training. By either fine-tuning ABEL on labelled data or integrating it with existing supervised dense retrievers, we achieve state-of-the-art results.

pdf bib
Mitigating Backdoor Poisoning Attacks through the Lens of Spurious Correlation
Xuanli He | Qiongkai Xu | Jun Wang | Benjamin Rubinstein | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Modern NLP models are often trained over large untrusted datasets, raising the potential for a malicious adversary to compromise model behaviour. For instance, backdoors can be implanted through crafting training instances with a specific textual trigger and a target label. This paper posits that backdoor poisoning attacks exhibit a spurious correlation between simple text features and classification labels, and accordingly, proposes methods for mitigating spurious correlation as means of defence. Our empirical study reveals that the malicious triggers are highly correlated to their target labels; therefore such correlations are extremely distinguishable compared to those scores of benign features, and can be used to filter out potentially problematic instances. Compared with several existing defences, our defence method significantly reduces attack success rates across backdoor attacks, and in the case of insertion-based attacks, our method provides a near-perfect defence.

pdf bib
Security Challenges in Natural Language Processing Models
Qiongkai Xu | Xuanli He
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

Large-scale natural language processing models have been developed and integrated into numerous applications, given the advantage of their remarkable performance. Nonetheless, the security concerns associated with these models prevent the widespread adoption of these black-box machine learning models. In this tutorial, we will dive into three emerging security issues in NLP research, i.e., backdoor attacks, private data leakage, and imitation attacks. These threats will be introduced in accordance with their threatening usage scenarios, attack methodologies, and defense technologies.

pdf bib
Overview of the 2023 ALTA Shared Task: Discriminate between Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text
Diego Molla | Haolan Zhan | Xuanli He | Qiongkai Xu
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

The ALTA shared tasks have been running annually since 2010. In 2023, the purpose of the task is to build automatic detection systems that can discriminate between human-written and synthetic text generated by Large Language Models (LLM). In this paper we present the task, the evaluation criteria, and the results of the systems participating in the shared task.

2022

pdf bib
Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs
Qiongkai Xu | Xuanli He | Lingjuan Lyu | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) has attracted millions of users to their splendid large-scale models. Although published as black-box APIs, the valuable models behind these services are still vulnerable to imitation attacks. Recently, a series of works have demonstrated that attackers manage to steal or extract the victim models. Nonetheless, none of the previous stolen models can outperform the original black-box APIs. In this work, we conduct unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-victim ensemble to showing that attackers could potentially surpass victims, which is beyond previous understanding of model extraction. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets and real-world APIs validate that the imitators can succeed in outperforming the original black-box models on transferred domains. We consider our work as a milestone in the research of imitation attack, especially on NLP APIs, as the superior performance could influence the defense or even publishing strategy of API providers.

pdf bib
Extracted BERT Model Leaks More Information than You Think!
Xuanli He | Lingjuan Lyu | Chen Chen | Qiongkai Xu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The collection and availability of big data, combined with advances in pre-trained models (e.g. BERT), have revolutionized the predictive performance of natural language processing tasks. This allows corporations to provide machine learning as a service (MLaaS) by encapsulating fine-tuned BERT-based models as APIs. Due to significant commercial interest, there has been a surge of attempts to steal remote services via model extraction. Although previous works have made progress in defending against model extraction attacks, there has been little discussion on their performance in preventing privacy leakage. This work bridges this gap by launching an attribute inference attack against the extracted BERT model. Our extensive experiments reveal that model extraction can cause severe privacy leakage even when victim models are facilitated with state-of-the-art defensive strategies.

pdf bib
Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Qiongkai Xu | Tongtong Wu | Tianyang Zhan | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors, VAE-Dprior, for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-specific labeled examples. In order to tackle compositional generalization across tasks, our model performs disentangled representation learning by introducing a conditional prior for the latent content space and another conditional prior for the latent label space. Both types of priors satisfy a novel property called 𝜖-disentangled. We show both empirically and theoretically that the novel priors can disentangle representations even without specific regularizations as in the prior work. The content prior enables directly sampling diverse content representations from the content space learned from the seen tasks, and fuse them with the representations of novel tasks for generating semantically diverse texts in the low-resource settings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model over competitive baselines in terms of i) data augmentation in continuous zero/few-shot learning, and ii) text style transfer in the few-shot setting.

2021

pdf bib
Model Extraction and Adversarial Transferability, Your BERT is Vulnerable!
Xuanli He | Lingjuan Lyu | Lichao Sun | Qiongkai Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks, ranging from text classification to text generation, have been revolutionised by the pretrained language models, such as BERT. This allows corporations to easily build powerful APIs by encapsulating fine-tuned BERT models for downstream tasks. However, when a fine-tuned BERT model is deployed as a service, it may suffer from different attacks launched by the malicious users. In this work, we first present how an adversary can steal a BERT-based API service (the victim/target model) on multiple benchmark datasets with limited prior knowledge and queries. We further show that the extracted model can lead to highly transferable adversarial attacks against the victim model. Our studies indicate that the potential vulnerabilities of BERT-based API services still hold, even when there is an architectural mismatch between the victim model and the attack model. Finally, we investigate two defence strategies to protect the victim model, and find that unless the performance of the victim model is sacrificed, both model extraction and adversarial transferability can effectively compromise the target models.

2020

pdf bib
Personal Information Leakage Detection in Conversations
Qiongkai Xu | Lizhen Qu | Zeyu Gao | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The global market size of conversational assistants (chatbots) is expected to grow to USD 9.4 billion by 2024, according to MarketsandMarkets. Despite the wide use of chatbots, leakage of personal information through chatbots poses serious privacy concerns for their users. In this work, we propose to protect personal information by warning users of detected suspicious sentences generated by conversational assistants. The detection task is formulated as an alignment optimization problem and a new dataset PERSONA-LEAKAGE is collected for evaluation. In this paper, we propose two novel constrained alignment models, which consistently outperform baseline methods on Moreover, we conduct analysis on the behavior of recently proposed personalized chit-chat dialogue systems. The empirical results show that those systems suffer more from personal information disclosure than the widely used Seq2Seq model and the language model. In those cases, a significant number of information leaking utterances can be detected by our models with high precision.

2019

pdf bib
ALTER: Auxiliary Text Rewriting Tool for Natural Language Generation
Qiongkai Xu | Chenchen Xu | Lizhen Qu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

In this paper, we describe ALTER, an auxiliary text rewriting tool that facilitates the rewriting process for natural language generation tasks, such as paraphrasing, text simplification, fairness-aware text rewriting, and text style transfer. Our tool is characterized by two features, i) recording of word-level revision histories and ii) flexible auxiliary edit support and feedback to annotators. The text rewriting assist and traceable rewriting history are potentially beneficial to the future research of natural language generation.

pdf bib
Privacy-Aware Text Rewriting
Qiongkai Xu | Lizhen Qu | Chenchen Xu | Ran Cui
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Biased decisions made by automatic systems have led to growing concerns in research communities. Recent work from the NLP community focuses on building systems that make fair decisions based on text. Instead of relying on unknown decision systems or human decision-makers, we argue that a better way to protect data providers is to remove the trails of sensitive information before publishing the data. In light of this, we propose a new privacy-aware text rewriting task and explore two privacy-aware back-translation methods for the task, based on adversarial training and approximate fairness risk. Our extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with varying demographical attributes show that our methods are effective in obfuscating sensitive attributes. We have also observed that the fairness risk method retains better semantics and fluency, while the adversarial training method tends to leak less sensitive information.

2018

pdf bib
EPUTION at SemEval-2018 Task 2: Emoji Prediction with User Adaption
Liyuan Zhou | Qiongkai Xu | Hanna Suominen | Tom Gedeon
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes our approach, called EPUTION, for the open trial of the SemEval- 2018 Task 2, Multilingual Emoji Prediction. The task relates to using social media — more precisely, Twitter — with its aim to predict the most likely associated emoji of a tweet. Our solution for this text classification problem explores the idea of transfer learning for adapting the classifier based on users’ tweeting history. Our experiments show that our user-adaption method improves classification results by more than 6 per cent on the macro-averaged F1. Thus, our paper provides evidence for the rationality of enriching the original corpus longitudinally with user behaviors and transferring the lessons learned from corresponding users to specific instances.

2017

pdf bib
Demographic Inference on Twitter using Recursive Neural Networks
Sunghwan Mac Kim | Qiongkai Xu | Lizhen Qu | Stephen Wan | Cécile Paris
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In social media, demographic inference is a critical task in order to gain a better understanding of a cohort and to facilitate interacting with one’s audience. Most previous work has made independence assumptions over topological, textual and label information on social networks. In this work, we employ recursive neural networks to break down these independence assumptions to obtain inference about demographic characteristics on Twitter. We show that our model performs better than existing models including the state-of-the-art.

2016

pdf bib
Unsupervised Pre-training With Seq2Seq Reconstruction Loss for Deep Relation Extraction Models
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Qiongkai Xu | Mark Johnson
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2016

2015

pdf bib
Detecting English-French Cognates Using Orthographic Edit Distance
Qiongkai Xu | Albert Chen | Chang Li
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2015

2012

pdf bib
Using Deep Linguistic Features for Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam
Qiongkai Xu | Hai Zhao
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters