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Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to predict unseen classes whose samples have never appeared during training. One of the most effective and widely used semantic information for zero-shot image classification are attributes which are annotations for class-level visual characteristics. However, the current methods often fail to discriminate those subtle visual distinctions between images due to not only the shortage of fine-grained annotations, but also the attribute imbalance and co-occurrence.  In this paper, we present a transformer-based end-to-end ZSL method named DUET, which integrates latent semantic knowledge from the pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a self-supervised multi-modal learning paradigm. Specifically, we (1) developed a cross-modal semantic grounding network to  investigate the model&#39;s capability of disentangling semantic attributes from the images; (2) applied an attribute-level contrastive learning strategy to further enhance the model&#39;s discrimination on fine-grained visual characteristics against the attribute co-occurrence and imbalance; (3) proposed a multi-task learning policy for considering multi-model objectives. We find that our DUET can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three standard ZSL benchmarks and a knowledge graph equipped ZSL benchmark. Its components are effective and its predictions are interpretable.

AAAI 2023

DUET: Cross-modal Semantic Grounding for Contrastive Zero-shot Learning

multimedia & multimodal data

mining of visual

representation learning for vision

multi-modal vision

language and vision

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.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to predict unseen classes whose samples have never appeared during training. One of the most effective and widely used semantic information for zero-shot image classification are attributes which are annotations for class-level visual characteristics. However, the current methods often fail to discriminate those subtle visual distinctions between images due to not only the shortage of fine-grained annotations, but also the attribute imbalance and co-occurrence.  In this paper, we present a transformer-based end-to-end ZSL method named DUET, which integrates latent semantic knowledge from the pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a self-supervised multi-modal learning paradigm. Specifically, we (1) developed a cross-modal semantic grounding network to  investigate the model's capability of disentangling semantic attributes from the images; (2) applied an attribute-level contrastive learning strategy to further enhance the model's discrimination on fine-grained visual characteristics against the attribute co-occurrence and imbalance; (3) proposed a multi-task learning policy for considering multi-model objectives. We find that our DUET can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three standard ZSL benchmarks and a knowledge graph equipped ZSL benchmark. Its components are effective and its predictions are interpretable.

poster

Mixture models of Plackett-Luce (PL) -- one of the most fundamental ranking models -- are an active research area of both theoretical and practical significance. Most previously proposed parameter estimation algorithms instantiate the EM algorithm, often with random initialization. However, such an initialization scheme may not yield a good initial estimate and the algorithms require multiple restarts, incurring a large time complexity. As for the EM procedure, while the E-step can be performed efficiently, maximizing the log-likelihood in the M-step is difficult due to the combinatorial nature of the PL likelihood function (Gormley and Murphy 2008). Therefore, previous authors favor algorithms that maximize surrogate likelihood functions (Zhao et al. 2018, 2020). However, the final estimate may deviate from the true maximum likelihood estimate as a consequence. In this paper, we address these known limitations. We propose an initialization algorithm that can provide a provably accurate initial estimate and an EM algorithm that maximizes the true log-likelihood function efficiently. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that our algorithm is competitive in terms of accuracy and speed to baseline algorithms, especially on datasets with a large number of items.

Efficient and Accurate Learning of Mixtures of Plackett-Luce Models

Parallel tempering (PT), also known as replica exchange, is the go-to workhorse for simulations of multi-modal distributions. The key to the success of PT is to adopt efficient swap schemes. The popular deterministic even-odd (DEO) scheme exploits the non-reversibility property and has successfully reduced the communication cost from $O(P^2)$ to $O(P)$ given sufficiently many $P$ chains. However, such an innovation largely disappears in big data due to the limited chains and few bias-corrected swaps. To handle this issue, we generalize the DEO scheme to promote non-reversibility and propose a few solutions to tackle the underlying bias caused by the geometric stopping time. Notably, in big data scenarios, we obtain an appealing communication cost $O(P\log P)$ based on the optimal window size. In addition, we also adopt stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with large and constant learning rates as exploration kernels. Such a user-friendly nature enables us to conduct approximation tasks for complex posteriors without much tuning costs.

Non-reversible Parallel Tempering for Deep Posterior Approximation

Dependency stochastic Boolean satisfiability (DSSAT) generalizes stochastic Boolean satisfiability (SSAT) in existential variables being Henkinized allowing their dependencies on randomized variables to be explicitly specified. It allows NEXPTIME problems of reasoning under uncertainty and partial information to be compactly encoded. To date, no decision procedure has been implemented for solving DSSAT formulas. This work provides the first such tool by converting DSSAT into SSAT with dependency elimination, similar to converting dependency quantified Boolean formula (DQBF) to quantified Boolean formula (QBF). Moreover, we extend (D)QBF preprocessing techniques and implement the first standalone (D)SSAT preprocessor. Experimental results show that solving DSSAT via dependency elimination is highly applicable and that existing SSAT solvers may benefit from preprocessing.

Lifting (D)QBF Preprocessing and Solving Techniques to (D)SSAT

We present HetNet (Multi-level \textbf{Het}erogeneous \textbf{Net}work), a highly efficient mirror detection network. Current mirror detection methods focus more on performance than efficiency, limiting the real-time applications (such as drones). Their lack of efficiency is aroused by the common design of adopting homogeneous modules at different levels, which ignores the difference between different levels of features. In contrast, HetNet detects potential mirror regions initially through low-level understandings (\textit{e.g.}, intensity contrasts) and then combines with high-level understandings (contextual discontinuity for instance) to finalize the predictions. To perform accurate yet efficient mirror detection, HetNet follows an effective architecture that obtains specific information at different stages to detect mirrors. We further propose a multi-orientation intensity-based contrasted module (MIC) and a reflection semantic logical module (RSL), equipped on HetNet, to predict potential mirror regions by low-level understandings and analyze semantic logic in scenarios by high-level understandings, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, HetNet runs 664% faster and draws an average performance gain of 8.9% on MAE, 3.1% on IoU, and 2.0% on F-measure on two mirror detection benchmarks.

Efficient Mirror Detection via Multi-level Heterogeneous Learning

Modeling continuous dynamical systems from discretely sampled observations is a fundamental problem in data science. Often, such dynamics are the result of non-local processes that present an integral over time. As such, these systems are modeled with Integro-Differential Equations (IDEs); generalizations of differential equations that comprise both an integral and a differential component. For example, brain dynamics are not accurately modeled by differential equations since their behavior is non-Markovian, i.e. dynamics are in part dictated by history. Here, we introduce the Neural IDE (NIDE), a novel deep learning framework based on the theory of IDEs where integral operators are learned using neural networks.  
    We test NIDE on several toy and brain activity datasets and demonstrate that NIDE outperforms other models. These tasks include time extrapolation as well as predicting dynamics from unseen initial conditions, which we test on whole-cortex activity recordings in freely behaving mice. Further, we show that NIDE can decompose dynamics into their Markovian and non-Markovian constituents, via the learned integral operator, which we test on fMRI brain activity recordings of people on ketamine. Finally, the integrand of the integral operator provides a latent space that gives insight into the underlying dynamics, which we demonstrate on wide-field brain imaging recordings. Altogether, NIDE is a novel approach that enables modeling of complex non-local dynamics with neural networks.

Neural Integro-Differential Equations

Efficient continual learning in humans is enabled by a rich set of neurophysiological mechanisms and the interactions between multiple memory systems. The brain efficiently encodes information in non-overlapping sparse codes, which facilitates the learning of new associations faster with controlled interference with previous associations. To mimic sparse coding in DNNs, we enforce activation sparsity along with a dropout mechanism which encourages the model to activate similar units for semantically similar inputs and have less overlap with activation patterns of semantically dissimilar inputs. This provides us with an efficient mechanism for balancing the reusability and interference of features, depending on the similarity of classes across the tasks. Furthermore, we employ sparse coding in a multiple-memory replay mechanism. Our method maintains an additional long-term semantic memory that aggregates and consolidates information encoded in the synaptic weights of the working model.  Our extensive evaluation and characteristics analysis show that equipped with these biologically inspired mechanisms, the model can further mitigate forgetting.

Sparse Coding in a Dual Memory System for Lifelong Learning

In recent years, graph neural network (GNN) based approaches
have emerged as a powerful technique to encode complex
topological structure of crystal materials in an enriched repre-
sentation space. These models are often supervised in nature
and using the property-specific training data, learn relation-
ship between crystal structure and different properties like
formation energy, bandgap, bulk modulus, etc. Most of these
methods require a huge amount of property-tagged data to
train the system which may not be available for different prop-
erties. However, there is an availability of a huge amount
of crystal data with its chemical composition and structural
bonds. To leverage these untapped data, this paper presents
CrysGNN, a new pre-trained GNN framework for crystalline
materials, which captures both node and graph level structural
information of crystal graphs using a huge amount of unla-
belled material data. Further, we extract distilled knowledge
from CrysGNN and inject into different state of the art prop-
erty predictors to enhance their property prediction accuracy.
We conduct extensive experiments to show that with distilled
knowledge from the pre-trained model, all the SOTA algo-
rithms are able to outperform their own vanilla version with
good margins. We also observe that the distillation process
provides significant improvement over the conventional ap-
proach of finetuning the pre-trained model. We will release the
pre-trained model along with the large dataset of 800K crys-
tal graph which we carefully curated; so that the pre-trained
model can be plugged into any existing and upcoming models
to enhance their prediction accuracy.

CrysGNN : Distilling pre-trained knowledge to enhance property prediction for crystalline materials.

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those algorithms that adheres to safety constraints at each decision step under complex and unknown dynamics. In this paper, we revisit prior work in this scope from the perspective of state-wise safe RL and categorize them as projection-based, recovery-based, and optimization-based approaches, respectively.  Furthermore, we propose Unrolling Safety Layer (USL), a joint method that combines safety optimization and safety projection. This novel technique explicitly enforces hard constraints via the deep unrolling architecture and enjoys structural advantages in navigating the trade-off between reward improvement and constraint satisfaction. To facilitate further research in this area,  we reproduce related algorithms in a unified pipeline and incorporate them into SafeRL-Kit, a toolkit that provides off-the-shelf interfaces and evaluation utilities for safety-critical tasks. We then perform a comparative study of the involved algorithms on six benchmarks ranging from robotic control to autonomous driving. The empirical results provide an insight into their applicability and robustness in learning zero-cost-return policies without task-dependent handcrafting. The project page is available at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/saferlkit}.

Evaluating Model-free Reinforcement Learning toward Safety-critical Tasks

Generating human mobility trajectories is of great importance to solve the lack of large-scale trajectory data in numerous applications, which is caused by privacy concerns. However, existing mobility trajectory generation methods still require real-world human trajectories centrally collected as the training data, where there exists an inescapable risk of privacy leakage. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose PateGail, a privacy-preserving imitation learning model to generate mobility trajectories, which utilizes the powerful generative adversary imitation learning (GAIL) model to simulate the decision-making process of humans. Further, in order to protect user privacy, we train this model collectively based on decentralized mobility data stored in user devices, where personal discriminators are trained locally to distinguish and reward the real and generated human trajectories. In the training process, only the generated trajectories and their rewards obtained based on personal discriminators are shared between the server and devices, whose privacy is further preserved by our proposed perturbation mechanisms with theoretical proof to satisfy differential privacy. Further, to better model the human decision-making process, we propose a novel aggregation mechanism of the rewards obtained from personal discriminators. We theoretically prove that under the reward obtained based on the aggregation mechanism, our proposed model maximizes the lower bound of the discounted total rewards of users. Extensive experiments show that the trajectories generated by our model are able to resemble real-world trajectories in terms of five key statistical metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms by over 38.19%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the synthetic trajectories are able to efficiently support practical applications, including mobility prediction and location recommendation.

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DUET: Cross-modal Semantic Grounding for Contrastive Zero-shot Learning

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