12 research outputs found
Use of a controlled experiment and computational models to measure the impact of sequential peer exposures on decision making
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors.
This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker
receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold
when the pattern by which it receives these signals vary and when peer
influence is directed towards choices which are not optimal. To investigate
that, we manipulate social signal exposure in an online controlled experiment
using a game with human participants. Each participant in the game makes a
decision among choices with differing utilities. We observe the following: (1)
even in the presence of monetary risks and previously acquired knowledge of the
choices, decision-makers tend to deviate from the obvious optimal decision when
their peers make similar decision which we call the influence decision, (2)
when the quantity of social signals vary over time, the forwarding probability
of the influence decision and therefore being responsive to social influence
does not necessarily correlate proportionally to the absolute quantity of
signals. To better understand how these rules of peer influence could be used
in modeling applications of real world diffusion and in networked environments,
we use our behavioral findings to simulate spreading dynamics in real world
case studies. We specifically try to see how cumulative influence plays out in
the presence of user uncertainty and measure its outcome on rumor diffusion,
which we model as an example of sub-optimal choice diffusion. Together, our
simulation results indicate that sequential peer effects from the influence
decision overcomes individual uncertainty to guide faster rumor diffusion over
time. However, when the rate of diffusion is slow in the beginning, user
uncertainty can have a substantial role compared to peer influence in deciding
the adoption trajectory of a piece of questionable information
Parameter and Data Efficient Continual Pre-training for Robustness to Dialectal Variance in Arabic
The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource
languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic
has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance.
While prior research studies have tried to adapt these multilingual models for
dialectal variants of Arabic, it still remains a challenging problem owing to
the lack of sufficient monolingual dialectal data and parallel translation data
of such dialectal variants. It remains an open problem on whether the limited
dialectical data can be used to improve the models trained in Arabic on its
dialectal variants. First, we show that multilingual-BERT (mBERT) incrementally
pretrained on Arabic monolingual data takes less training time and yields
comparable accuracy when compared to our custom monolingual Arabic model and
beat existing models (by an avg metric of +). We then explore two
continual pre-training methods -- (1) using small amounts of dialectical data
for continual finetuning and (2) parallel Arabic to English data and a
Translation Language Modeling loss function. We show that both approaches help
improve performance on dialectal classification tasks ( avg. gain) when
used on monolingual models
HYTREL: Hypergraph-enhanced Tabular Data Representation Learning
Language models pretrained on large collections of tabular data have
demonstrated their effectiveness in several downstream tasks. However, many of
these models do not take into account the row/column permutation invariances,
hierarchical structure, etc. that exist in tabular data. To alleviate these
limitations, we propose HYTREL, a tabular language model, that captures the
permutation invariances and three more structural properties of tabular data by
using hypergraphs - where the table cells make up the nodes and the cells
occurring jointly together in each row, column, and the entire table are used
to form three different types of hyperedges. We show that HYTREL is maximally
invariant under certain conditions for tabular data, i.e., two tables obtain
the same representations via HYTREL iff the two tables are identical up to
permutations. Our empirical results demonstrate that HYTREL consistently
outperforms other competitive baselines on four downstream tasks with minimal
pretraining, illustrating the advantages of incorporating the inductive biases
associated with tabular data into the representations. Finally, our qualitative
analyses showcase that HYTREL can assimilate the table structures to generate
robust representations for the cells, rows, columns, and the entire table.Comment: NeurIPS 2023 (spotlight