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Scribble supervised semantic segmentation has achieved great advances in pseudo label exploitation, yet suffers insufficient label exploration for the mass of unannotated regions.
In this work, we propose a novel exploratory inference learning (EIL) framework, which facilitates efficient probe on unlabeled pixels and promotes selecting confident candidates for boosting the evolved segmentation. 
The exploration of unannotated regions is formulated as an iterative decision making process, where a policy searcher learns to infer in the unknown space and the reward to the exploratory policy is based on a contrastive measurement of candidates. 
In particular, we devise the contrastive reward with the inter-class attraction and the intra-class repulsion in the feature space w.r.t the pseudo labels. 
The unlabeled exploration and the labeled exploitation are jointly balanced to improve the segmentation, and framed in a close-looping end-to-end network.
Comprehensive evaluations on the benchmark datasets (including PASCAL VOC 2012~\cite{everingham2010pascal} and PASCAL Context~\cite{hariharan2011semantic}) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed EIL when compared with other state-of-the-art methods for the scribble-supervised semantic segmentation problem.

AAAI 2023

Exploratory Inference Learning for Scribble Supervised Semantic Segmentation

unlabeled exploration

exploratory inference learning

scribble-supervised semantic segmentation

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

Multi-document summarization (MDS) aims to generate a summary for a number of related documents. We propose HGSUM — an MDS model that extends an encoder-decoder architecture to incorporate a heterogeneous graph to repre-
sent different semantic units (e.g., words and sentences) of the documents. This contrasts with existing MDS models which do not consider different edge types of graphs and as such do not capture the diversity of relationships in the documents.
To preserve only key information and relationships of the documents in the heterogeneous graph, HGSUM uses graph pooling to compress the input graph. And to guide HGSUM to learn the compression, we introduce an additional objective that maximizes the similarity between the compressed graph and the graph constructed from the ground-truth summary during training. HGSUM is trained end-to-end with graph similarity and standard cross-entropy objectives. Experimental results over MULTI-NEWS, WCEP-100, and ARXIV show that HGSUM outperforms state-of-the-art MDS models. The code for our model and experiments is available at: https://github.com/oaimli/HGSum.

Compressed Heterogeneous Graph for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization

Although remarkable progress has been made in recent years, current multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) research is still bounded by the lack of real ground truth, objective evaluation function, and robust fusion strategy. In this paper, we study the MEF problem from a new perspective. We don’t utilize any synthesized ground truth, design any loss function, or develop any fusion strategy. Our proposed method EMEF takes advantage of the wisdom of multiple imperfect MEF contributors including both conventional and deep learning-based methods. Specifically, EMEF consists of two main stages: pre-train an imitator network and tune the imitator in the runtime. In the first stage, we make a unified network imitate different MEF targets in a style modulation way. In the second stage, we tune the imitator network by optimizing the style code, in order to find an optimal fusion result for each input pair. In the experiment, we construct EMEF from four stateof-the-art MEF methods and then make comparisons with the individuals and several other competitive methods on the latest released MEF benchmark dataset. The promising experimental results provide evidence for our ensemble approach to “get the best of all worlds”.

EMEF: Ensemble Multi-Exposure Image Fusion

Altruistic punishment (or punishment) has been extensively shown as an important mechanism for promoting cooperation in human societies. In AI, the emergence of punishment has received much recent interest. In this paper, we contribute with a novel evolutionary game theoretic model to study the impacts of environmental feedback. Whereas a population of agents plays public goods games, there exists a third-party population whose payoffs depend not only on whether to punish or not, but also on the state of the environment (e.g., how cooperative the agents in a social dilemma are). Focusing on one-shot public goods games, we show that environmental feedback, by itself, can lead to the emergence of punishment. We analyze the co-evolution of punishment and cooperation, and derive conditions for their co-presence, co-dominance and co-extinction. Moreover, we show that the system can exhibit bistability as well as cyclic dynamics. Our findings provide a new explanation for the emergence of punishment.  On the other hand, our results also alert the need for careful design of implementing punishment in multi-agent systems, as the resulting evolutionary dynamics can be somewhat complex.

Emergence of Punishment in Social Dilemma with Environmental Feedback

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative method for synthesizing high-quality and diverse set of images. In this paper, we propose a video generation method based on diffusion models, where the effects of motion are modeled in an implicit condition manner, i.e. one can sample plausible video motions according to the latent feature of frames. We improve the quality of the generated videos by proposing multiple strategies such as sampling space truncation, robustness penalty, and positional group normalization. Various experiments are conducted on datasets consisting of videos with different resolutions and different number of frames. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art generative adversarial network-based methods by a significant margin in terms of FVD scores as well as perceptible visual quality. 

VIDM: Video Implicit Diffusion Models

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a problem modeling and solving framework for several problems in KR with growing industrial applications. Also for studies of computational complexity and deeper insights into the hardness and its sources, ASP has been attracting researchers for many years. These studies resulted in fruitful characterizations in terms of complexity classes, fine-grained insights in form of dichotomy-style results, as well as detailed parameterized complexity landscapes. Recently, this lead to a novel result establishing that for the measure treewidth, which captures structural density of a program, the evaluation of the well-known class of normal programs is expected to be slightly harder than deciding satisfiability (SAT). However, it is unclear how to utilize this structural power of ASP. This paper deals with a novel reduction from SAT to normal ASP that goes beyond well-known encodings: We explicitly utilize the structural power of ASP, whereby we sublinearly decrease the treewidth, which probably cannot be significantly improved. Then, compared to existing results, this characterizes hardness in a fine-grained way by establishing the required functional dependency of the dependency graph’s cycle length (SCC size) on the treewidth. Thereby, we do not only improve this dependency for a family of almost-tight programs, we also utilize the reduction for lower bounds that close the gap to existing upper bounds.

Characterizing Structural Hardness of Logic Programs: What makes Cycles and Reachability Hard for Treewidth?

A dramatic increase in real-world video volume with extremely diverse and emerging topics naturally forms a long-tailed video distribution in terms of their categories, and it spotlights the need for Video Long-Tailed Recognition (VLTR).
In this work, we summarize the challenges in VLTR and explore how to overcome them.
The challenges are: (1) it is impractical to re-train the whole model for high-quality features, (2) acquiring frame-wise labels requires extensive cost, and (3) long-tailed data triggers biased training.
Yet, most existing works for VLTR unavoidably utilize image-level features extracted from pretrained models which are task-irrelevant, and learn by video-level labels.
Therefore, to deal with such (1) task-irrelevant features and (2) video-level labels, we introduce two complementary learnable feature aggregators.
Learnable layers in each aggregator are to produce task-relevant representations, and each aggregator is to assemble the snippet-wise knowledge into a video representative.
Then, we propose Minority-Oriented Vicinity Expansion (MOVE) that explicitly leverages the class frequency into approximating the vicinity distributions to alleviate (3) biased training.
By combining these solutions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale VideoLT and synthetically induced Imbalanced-MiniKinetics200. 
With VideoLT features from ResNet-50, it attains 18% and 58% relative improvements on head and tail classes over the previous state-of-the-art method, respectively. 

Minority-Oriented Vicinity Expansion with Attentive Aggregation for Video Long-Tailed Recognition

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the leading paradigm for solving graph analytical problems in various real-world applications. Nevertheless, GNNs could potentially render biased predictions towards certain demographic subgroups.  Understanding how the bias in predictions arises is critical, as it guides the design of GNN debiasing mechanisms. However, most existing works overwhelmingly focus on GNN debiasing, but fall short on explaining how such bias is induced. In this paper, we study a novel problem of interpreting GNN unfairness through attributing it to the influence of training nodes. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy named Probabilistic Distribution Disparity (PDD) to measure the bias exhibited in GNNs, and develop an algorithm to efficiently estimate the influence of each training node on such bias. We verify the validity of PDD and the effectiveness of influence estimation through experiments on real-world datasets. Finally, we also demonstrate how the proposed framework could be used for debiasing GNNs. Open-source code can be found at https://github.com/yushundong/BIND.

Interpreting Unfairness in Graph Neural Networks via Training Node Attribution

Exploration under sparse rewards is a key challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. One possible solution to this issue is to exploit inherent task structures for an acceleration of exploration. In this paper, we present a novel exploration approach, which encodes a special structural prior on the reward function into exploration, for sparse-reward multi-agent tasks. Specifically, a novel entropic exploration objective which encodes the structural prior is proposed to accelerate the discovery of rewards. By maximizing the lower bound of this objective, we then propose an algorithm with moderate computational cost, which can be applied to practical tasks. Under the sparse-reward setting, we show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in the multiple-particle environment, the Google Research Football and StarCraft II micromanagement tasks. To the best of our knowledge, on some hard tasks (such as \texttt{27m\_vs\_30m}) which have relatively larger number of agents and need non-trivial strategies to defeat enemies, our method is the first to learn winning strategies under the sparse-reward setting.

Subspace-Aware Exploration for Sparse-Reward Multi-Agent Tasks

The use of counterfactual explanations (CFXs) is an increasingly popular explanation strategy for machine learning models. However, recent studies have shown that these explanations may not be robust to changes in the underlying model (e.g., following retraining), which raises questions about their reliability in real-world applications. Existing attempts towards solving this problem are heuristic, and the robustness to model changes of resulting CFXs is evaluated with only a small number of retrained models, failing to provide exhaustive guarantees. To this end, we propose ∆-robustness, the first notion to formally and deterministically assess the robustness (to model changes) of CFXs for neural networks. We introduce an abstraction framework based on interval neural networks to verify the ∆-robustness of CFXs against a possibly infinite set of changes to the model parameters, i.e., weights and biases. We then demonstrate the utility of this approach in two distinct ways. First, we  analyse the ∆-robustness of a number of CFX generation methods from the literature and show they unanimously host significant deficiencies in this regard. Second, we demonstrate how embedding ∆-robustness within existing methods can provide CFXs which are provably robust. 

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Exploratory Inference Learning for Scribble Supervised Semantic Segmentation

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Compressed Heterogeneous Graph for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization

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