United States

Image instance segmentation is a  fundamental research topic in autonomous driving, which is crucial for scene understanding and road safety. Advanced learning-based approaches often rely on the costly 2D mask annotations for training. In this paper, we present a more artful framework, LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (LWSIS), which leverages the off-the-shelf 3D data, Point Cloud, together with the 3D boxes, as natural weak supervisions for training the 2D image instance segmentation models. Our LWSIS not only exploits the complementary information in multi-modal data during training but also significantly reduces the annotation cost of the dense 2D masks. In detail, LWSIS consists of two crucial modules, Point Label Assignment (PLA) and Graph-based Consistency Regularization (GCR). The former module aims to automatically assign the 3D point cloud as 2D point-wise labels, while the latter further refines the predictions by enforcing the geometry and appearance consistency of the multi-modal data. Moreover, we conduct a secondary instance segmentation annotation on the nuScenes, named nuInsSeg, to facilitate the researchers on multi-modal perception tasks. Extensive experiments on the nuInsSeg, as well as the large-scale Waymo, show that \ourmodel~can substantially improve existing weakly supervised segmentation models by only involving 3D data during training.  Additionally, LWSIS can also be incorporated into 3D object detectors like PointPainting to boost the 3D detection performance for free.

AAAI 2023

LWSIS: LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policy from the passively collected offline dataset. Applying existing RL methods on the static dataset straightforwardly will raise distribution shift, causing these unconstrained RL methods to fail. To cope with the distribution shift problem, a common practice in offline RL is to constrain the policy explicitly or implicitly close to behavioral policy. However, the available dataset usually contains sub-optimal or inferior actions, constraining the policy near all these actions will make the policy inevitably learn inferior behaviors, limiting the performance of the algorithm. Based on this observation, we propose a weighted policy constraints (wPC) method that only constrains the learned policy to desirable behaviors, making room for policy improvement on other parts. Our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms on the D4RL offline gym datasets. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is simple to implement with few hyper-parameters, making the proposed wPC algorithm a robust offline RL method with low computational complexity.

Weighted Policy Constraints for Offline Reinforcement Learning

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) suffers from a significant loss of information when trained on a non-stationary data distribution. This loss in VAE models, which is called catastrophic forgetting, has not been studied theoretically before. We analyse the forgetting behaviour of a VAE in continual generative modelling by developing a new lower bound on the data likelihood, which interprets the forgetting process as an increase in the probability distance between the generator distribution and the evolved data distribution. The proposed bound shows that a VAE-based dynamic expansion model can achieve better performance if its capacity increases appropriately considering the shift in the data distribution. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel expansion criterion that aims to preserve the information diversity among VAE components, while ensuring that it acquires more knowledge with fewer parameters. Specifically, we implement this expansion criterion from the perspective of a multi-player game and propose the Online Adversarial Expansion Strategy (OAES), which considers all previously learned components as well as the currently updated component as multiple players while an adversary model evaluates their performance. The proposed OAES can dynamically estimate the discrepancy between each player and the adversary without accessing task information. This leads to the gradual addition of new components while ensuring the knowledge diversity among all of them. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed extension strategy can enable a VAE model to achieve the best performance given an appropriate model size.

Lifelong Variational Autoencoder via Online Adversarial Expansion Strategy

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to learn effective multi-agent policies from pre-collected datasets, which is an important step toward the deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world applications. However, in practice, each individual behavior policy that generates multi-agent joint trajectories usually has a different level of how well it performs. e.g., an agent is a random policy while other agents are medium policies. In the cooperative game with global reward, one agent learned by existing offline MARL often inherits this random policy, jeopardizing the utility of the entire team. In this paper, we investigate offline MARL with explicit consideration on the diversity of agent-wise trajectories and propose a novel framework called Shared Individual Trajectories (SIT) to address this problem. Specifically, an attention-based reward decomposition network assigns the credit to each agent through a differentiable key-value memory mechanism in an offline manner. These decomposed credits are then used to reconstruct the joint offline datasets into prioritized experience replay with individual trajectories, thereafter agents can share their good trajectories and conservatively train their policies with a graph attention network (GAT) based critic. We evaluate our method in both discrete control (i.e., StarCraft II and multi-agent particle environment) and continuous control (i.e., multi-agent mujoco). The results indicate that our method achieves significantly better results in complex and mixed offline multi-agent datasets, especially when the difference of data quality between individual trajectories is large.

Learning From Good Trajectories in Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

As a sub-task of visual grounding, linking people across text and images aims to localize target people in images with corresponding sentences. Existing approaches tend to capture superficial features of people (e.g., dress and location) that suffer from the incompleteness information across text and images. We observe that humans are adept at exploring social relations to assist identifying people. Therefore, we propose a Social Relation Reasoning (SRR) approach to address
the aforementioned issues. Firstly, we design a Social Relation Extraction (SRE) module to extract social relations between people in the input sentences. Specially, SRE module is based on zero-shot learning that is able to extract social relations even though they are not defined in the existing datasets. Reasoning based Cross-modal Matching (RCM) module is further used to generate matching matrices by reasoning on the social relations and visual features. Experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed SRR approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the challenging datasets Who’s Waldo and FL: MSRE, by more than 5% and 7%, respectively. Our code will be available.

Linking People Across Text and Images Based on Social Relation Reasoning

Vector Quantization (VQ) is a method for discretizing latent representations and has become a major part of the deep learning toolkit. It has been theoretically and empirically shown that discretization of representations leads to improved generalization, including in reinforcement learning where discretization can be used to bottleneck multi-agent communication to promote agent specialization and robustness. The discretization tightness of most VQ-based methods is defined by the number of discrete codes in the representation vector and the codebook size, which are fixed as hyperparameters. In this work, we propose learning to dynamically select discretization tightness conditioned on inputs, based on the hypothesis that data naturally contains variations in complexity that call for different levels of representational coarseness which is observed in many heterogeneous data sets. We show that dynamically varying tightness in communication bottlenecks can improve model performance on visual reasoning and reinforcement learning tasks with heterogeneity in representations.

Adaptive Discrete Communication Bottlenecks with Dynamic Vector Quantization for Heterogeneous Representational Coarseness

MapReduce (MR) algorithms for maximizing monotone, submodular functions subject to a cardinality constraint (SMCC) are currently restricted to the use of the linear-adaptive (non-parallelizable) algorithm GREEDY. Low-adaptive algorithms do not satisfy the requirements of these distributed MR frameworks, thereby limiting their performance. We study the SMCC problem in a distributed setting and propose the first MR algorithms with sublinear adaptive complexity. Our algorithms, R-DASH, T-DASH and G-DASH provide $0.316-\varepsilon$, $3/8 -\varepsilon$, and $1 - 1/e -\varepsilon$   approximation ratios, respectively, with nearly optimal adaptive complexity and nearly linear time complexity. Additionally, we provide a framework to increase, under some mild assumptions, the maximum permissible cardinality constraint from  $O( n / \ell^2)$ of prior MR algorithms to $O( n / \ell )$, where n is the data size and $\ell$ is the number of machines; under a stronger condition on the objective function, we increase the maximum constraint value to n. Finally, we provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that our sublinear-adaptive, distributed algorithms provide orders of magnitude faster runtime compared to current state-of-the-art distributed algorithms.

DASH: A Distributed and Parallelizable Algorithm for Size-Constrained Submodular Maximization

Collaborative Communication platforms (e.g., Slack) support multi-party conversations which contain a large number of messages on shared channels. Multiple conversations intermingle within these messages. The task of conversation disentanglement is to cluster these intermingled messages into conversations. Existing approaches are trained using loss functions that optimize only local decisions, i.e. predicting reply-to links for each message and thereby creating clusters of conversations. 
In this work, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) approach that directly optimizes a global metric. We observe that using existing global metrics such as variation of information and adjusted rand index as a reward for the RL agent deteriorates its performance. This behaviour is because these metrics completely ignore the reply-to links between messages (local decisions) during reward computation. Therefore, we propose a novel thread-level reward function that captures the global metric without ignoring the local decisions.
Through experiments on the Ubuntu IRC dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed RL model improves the performance on both link-level and conversation-level metrics. We have attached the code as supplementary material.

End-to-End Deep Reinforcement learning for Conversation Disentanglement

Pre-trained programming language (PL) models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, etc.,) have the potential to automate software engineering tasks involving code understanding and code generation. However, these models operate in the natural channel of code, i.e., primarily concerned with the human understanding of code. They are not robust to changes in the input and thus, are potentially susceptible to adversarial attacks in the natural channel. We propose, Code Attack, a simple yet effective black-box attack model that uses code structure to generate effective, efficient, and imperceptible adversarial code samples and demonstrates the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art PL models to code-specific adversarial attacks. We evaluate the transferability of CodeAttack on several code-code (translation and repair) and code-NL (summarization) tasks across different programming languages. Code Attack outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial NLP attack models to achieve the best overall drop in performance while being more efficient, imperceptible, consistent, and fluent.

Code Attack: Code-based Adversarial Attacks for Pre-Trained Programming Language Models

Meeting today’s major societal challenges requires understanding dynamics of cooperation and conflict in complex adaptive systems. Artificial Intelligence is intimately connected with these challenges, both as an application domain and as a source of new computational techniques: On the one hand, AI suggests new algorithmic recommendations and interaction paradigms, offering novel possibilities to engineer cooperation and alleviate conflict in (hybrid) populations; on the other hand, new learning algorithms provide improved techniques to simulate agents and multiagent systems. My research lies at the interface between complex systems and AI: I develop computational methods to understand cooperation and conflict among learning agents. I focus on mapping interaction rules and incentives onto emerging macroscopic patterns and long-term dynamics. Examples of this research agenda, that I will survey in this talk, include modelling 1) the connection between reputation systems and cooperation dynamics; 2) the impact of link recommendation algorithms on potential sources of conflict (e.g., radicalization and polarization); 3) the strategic adaptation process of populations to classification algorithms, through a combination of utility maximization and behavioral imitation of peers.

Dynamics of Cooperation and Conflict in Multiagent Systems

Despite their great success in many artificial intelligence tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) still suffer from a few limitations, such as poor generalization behavior for out-of-distribution (OOD) data and the "black-box" nature. Information theory offers fresh insights to solve these challenges.

In this talk, we first present a novel matrix-based Renyi's entropy functional estimator, which measures information-theoretic quantities (e.g., mutual information) in terms of the eigenspectrum of the Hermitian matrix of the projected data in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), without explicit evaluation of the underlying data distributions. Second, we give two recent applications of this estimator. In particular, we show how to analyze and understand the inner mechanism (e.g., the flow of information, the Information Bottleneck hypothesis) of DNNs and how to improve the generalization performance of a DNN from an information-theoretic perspective. We finally present the applications of information-theoretic learning principles (e.g., the Information Bottleneck and the Principle of Relevant Information) to develop interpretable and generalizable graph neural networks for brain network-based psychiatric diagnosis.

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LWSIS: LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

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