United States

Layout generation plays a crucial role in graphic design intelligence. One important characteristic of the graphic layouts is that they usually follow certain design principles. For example, the principle of repetition emphasizes the reuse of similar visual elements throughout the design. To generate a layout, previous works mainly attempt at predicting the absolute value of bounding box for each element, where such target representation has hidden the information of higher-order design operations like repetition (e.g. copy the size of the previously generated element). In this paper, we introduce a novel action schema to encode these operations for better modeling the generation process. Instead of predicting the bounding box values, our approach autoregressively outputs the intermediate action sequence, which can then be deterministically converted to the final layout. We achieve state-of-the-art performances on three datasets. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our approach generates high-quality and diverse layouts. Furthermore, we revisit the commonly used evaluation metric FID adapted in this task, and observe that previous works use different settings to train the feature extractor for obtaining real/generated data distribution, which leads to inconsistent conclusions. We conduct an in-depth analysis on this metric and settle for a more robust and reliable evaluation setting.

AAAI 2023

Layout Generation as Intermediate Action Sequence Prediction

app: design

snlp: applications

snlp: generation

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

poster

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.

Deep regression is an important problem with numerous applications. These range from computer vision tasks such as age estimation from photographs, to medical tasks such as ejection fraction estimation from echocardiograms for disease tracking.
Semi-supervised approaches for deep regression are notably under-explored compared to classification and segmentation tasks, however. 
Unlike classification tasks, which rely on thresholding functions for generating class pseudo-labels, regression tasks use real number target predictions directly as pseudo-labels, making them more sensitive to prediction quality.
In this work, we propose a novel approach to semi-supervised regression, namely Uncertainty-Consistent Variational Model Ensembling (UCVME), which improves training by generating high-quality pseudo-labels and uncertainty estimates for heteroscedastic regression.
Given that aleatoric uncertainty is only dependent on input data by definition and should be equal for the same inputs, we present a novel uncertainty consistency loss for co-trained models.
Our consistency loss significantly improves uncertainty estimates and allows higher quality pseudo-labels to be assigned greater importance under heteroscedastic regression. 
Furthermore, we introduce a novel variational model ensembling approach to reduce prediction noise and generate more robust pseudo-labels. We analytically show our method generates higher quality targets for unlabeled data and further improves training. 
Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives on different tasks and can be competitive with supervised methods that use full labels. 

Semi-Supervised Deep Regression with Uncertainty Consistency and Variational Model Ensembling via Bayesian Neural Networks

Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to transfer a detector pre-trained on a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain without seeing source data. While most existing SFOD methods generate pseudo labels via a source-pretrained model to guide training, these pseudo labels usually contain high noises due to heavy domain discrepancy. In order to obtain better pseudo supervisions, we divide the target domain into source-similar and source-dissimilar parts and align them in the feature space by adversarial learning. Specifically, we design a detection variance-based criterion to divide the target domain. This criterion is motivated by a finding that larger detection variances denote higher recall and larger similarity to the source domain. Then we incorporate an adversarial module into a mean teacher framework to drive the feature spaces of these two subsets indistinguishable. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain object detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms the compared SFOD methods.  

Adversarial Alignment for Source Free Object Detection

Deep learning methods have demonstrated promising performance on the NP-hard Graph Matching (GM) problems. However, the state-of-the-art methods usually require the ground-truth labels, which may take extensive human efforts or be impractical to collect. In this paper, we present a robust self-supervised bidirectional learning method (IA-SSGM) to tackle GM in an unsupervised manner. It involves an affinity learning component and a classic GM solver. Specifically, we adopt the Hungarian solver to generate pseudo correspondence labels for the simple probabilistic relaxation of the affinity matrix. In addition, a bidirectional recycling consistency module is proposed to generate pseudo samples by recycling the pseudo correspondence back to permute the input. It imposes a consistency constraint between the pseudo affinity and the original one, which is theoretically supported to help reduce the matching error. Our method further develops a graph contrastive learning jointly with the affinity learning to enhance its robustness against the noise and outliers in real applications. Experiments deliver superior performance over the previous state-of-the-arts on five real-world benchmarks, especially under the more difficult outlier scenarios, demon- strating the effectiveness of our method.

Self-Supervised Bidirectional Learning for Graph Matching

The disjunctive skolem chase is a sound, complete, and potentially non-terminating procedure for solving boolean conjunctive query entailment over knowledge bases of disjunctive existential rules. We develop novel acyclicity and cyclicity notions for this procedure; that is, we develop sufficient conditions to determine chase termination and non-termination. Our empirical evaluation shows that our novel notions are significantly more general than existing criteria.

General Acyclicity and Cyclicity Notions for the Disjunctive Skolem Chase

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables the agent to effectively learn from logged data, which significantly extends the applicability of RL algorithms in real-world scenarios where exploration can be expensive or unsafe. Previous works have shown that extracting primitive skills from the recurring and temporally extended structures in the logged data yields better learning. However, these methods suffer greatly when the primitives have limited representation ability to recover the original policy space, especially in offline settings. In this paper, we highlight the importance of learning lossless primitives and propose to use \emph{flow}-based structure as the representation for low-level policies. This allows us to represent the behaviors in the dataset loyally while keeping the expression ability to recover the whole policy space. We show that, theoretically and empirically, such lossless primitives can drastically improve the performance of hierarchical policies. The experimental results on the standard D4RL benchmark show that our method achieves superior performance in most tasks. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the strong representation ability of the proposed method.

Flow to Control: Offline Reinforcement Learning with Lossless Primitive Discovery

Second-order quantified Boolean formulas (SOQBFs) generalize quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs) by admitting second-order quantifiers on function variables in addition to first-order quantifiers on atomic variables. Recent endeavors establish that the complexity of SOQBF satisfiability corresponds to the exponential-time hierarchy (EXPH), similar to that of QBF satisfiability corresponding to the polynomial-time hierarchy (PH). This fact reveals the succinct expression power of SOQBFs in encoding decision problems not efficiently doable by QBFs. In this paper, we investigate the second-order quantified Boolean logic with the following main results: First, we present a procedure of quantifier elimination converting SOQBFs to QBFs and a game interpretation of SOQBF semantics. Second, we devise a sound and complete refutation proof system for SOQBF. Third, we develop an algorithm of countermodel extraction from a refutation proof. Finally, we show potential applications of SOQBFs in system design and multi-agent planning. With these advances, we anticipate practical tools for development.

Second-Order Quantified Boolean Logic

Recent literature has shown that denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) can be used to synthesize high-fidelity samples with a competitive (or sometimes better) quality than previous state-of-the-art approaches. However, few attempts have been made to apply DDPM for the speech enhancement task. The reported performance of the existing works is relatively poor and significantly inferior to other generative methods. In this work, we first reveal the difficulties in applying existing diffusion models to the field of speech enhancement. Then we introduce DR-DiffuSE, a simple and effective framework for speech enhancement using conditional diffusion models. We present three strategies (two in diffusion training and one in reverse sampling) to tackle the condition collapse and guarantee the sufficient use of condition information. For efficiency, we introduce the fast sampling technique to reduce the sampling process into several steps and exploit a refinement network to calibrate the defective speech. Our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance to the GAN-based model and shows a significant improvement over existing DDPM-based algorithms.

Revisiting Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Speech Enhancement: Condition Collapse, Efficiency and Refinement

Recent model-extraction attacks on Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) systems have moved towards data-free approaches, showing the feasibility of stealing models trained with difficult-to-access data. However, these attacks are ineffective or limited due to the low accuracy of extracted models and the high number of queries to the models under attack. The high query cost makes such techniques infeasible for online MLaaS systems that charge per query.
We create a novel approach to get higher accuracy and query efficiency than prior data-free model extraction techniques. Specifically, we introduce a novel generator training scheme that maximizes the disagreement loss between two clone models that attempt to copy the model under attack. This loss, combined with diversity loss and experience replay, enables the generator to produce better instances to train the clone models. Our evaluation on popular datasets CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 shows that our approach improves the final model accuracy by up to 3.42% and 18.48% respectively. The average number of queries required to achieve the accuracy of the prior state of the art is reduced by up to 64.95%. We hope this will promote future work on feasible data-free model extraction and defenses against such attacks.

DisGUIDE: Disagreement-Guided Data-Free Model Extraction

Noisy labels damage the performance of deep networks.  For robust learning, a prominent two-stage pipeline alternates between eliminating possible incorrect labels and semi-supervised training. However, discarding part of noisy labels could result in a loss of information, especially when the corruption has a dependency on data, e.g., class-dependent or instance-dependent. Moreover, from the training dynamics of a representative two-stage method DivideMix, we identify the domination of confirmation bias: pseudo-labels fail to correct a considerable amount of noisy labels, and consequently, the errors accumulate. To sufficiently exploit information from noisy labels and mitigate wrong corrections, we propose Robust Label Refurbishment (Robust LR)—a new hybrid method that integrates pseudo-labeling and confidence estimation techniques to refurbish noisy labels. We show that our method successfully alleviates the damage of both label noise and confirmation bias. As a result, it achieves state-of-the-art performance across datasets and noise types, namely CIFAR under different levels of synthetic noise and mini-WebVision and ANIMAL-10N with real-world noise.


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