United States

Multi-task deep reinforcement learning (DRL) ambitiously aims to train a general agent that masters multiple tasks simultaneously. However, varying learning speeds of different tasks compounding with negative gradients interference makes policy learning inefficient. In this work, we propose PiCor, an efficient multi-task DRL framework that splits learning into policy optimization and policy correction phases. The policy optimization phase improves the policy by any DRL algothrim on the sampled single task without considering other tasks. The policy correction phase first constructs an adaptive adjusted performance constraint set. Then the intermediate policy learned by the first phase is constrained to the set, which controls the negative interference and balances the learning speeds across tasks. Empirically, we demonstrate that PiCor outperforms previous methods and significantly improves sample efficiency on simulated robotic manipulation and continuous control tasks. We additionally show that adaptive weight adjusting can further improve data efficiency and performance.

AAAI 2023

PiCor: Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning with Policy Correction

multi-task learning

reinforcement learning

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

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.

We study the enumeration of answers to ontology-mediated queries
when the ontology is formulated in a description logic that supports
functional roles and the query is a CQ. In particular, we show that
enumeration is possible with linear preprocessing and constant delay
when a certain extension of the CQ (pertaining to functional roles)
is acyclic and free-connex acyclic. This holds both for complete answers and
for partial answers. We provide matching lower bounds for the
case where the query is self-join free.


Efficient Answer Enumeration in Description Logics with Functional Roles

The challenge of information extraction (IE) lies in the diversity of label schemas and the heterogeneity of structures.
Traditional methods require task-specific model design and rely heavily on expensive supervision, making them difficult to generalize to new schemas.
In this paper, we decouple IE into two basic abilities, structuring and conceptualizing, which are shared by different tasks and schemas.
Based on this paradigm, we propose to universally model various IE tasks with Unified Semantic Matching (USM) framework, which introduces three unified token linking operations to model the abilities of structuring and conceptualizing.
In this way, USM can jointly encode schema and input text, uniformly extract substructures in parallel, and controllably decode target structures on demand.
Empirical evaluation on 4 IE tasks shows that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance under the supervised experiments and shows strong generalization ability in zero/few-shot transfer settings.

Universal Information Extraction as Unified Semantic Matching

Most scanning LiDAR sensors generate a sequence of point clouds in real-time. While conventional 3D object detectors use a set of unordered LiDAR points acquired over a fixed time interval, recent studies have revealed that substantial performance improvement can be achieved by exploiting the spatio-temporal context present in a sequence of LiDAR point sets. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D object detection architecture, which can encode LiDAR point cloud sequences acquired by multiple successive scans. The encoding process of the point cloud sequence is performed on two different time scales. We first design a short-term motion-aware voxel encoding that captures the short-term temporal changes of point clouds driven by the motion of objects in each voxel. We also propose long-term motion-guided bird's eye view (BEV) feature enhancement that adaptively aligns and aggregates the BEV feature maps obtained by the short-term voxel encoding by utilizing the dynamic motion context inferred from the sequence of the feature maps. The experiments conducted on the public nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that the proposed 3D object detector offers significant improvements in performance compared to the baseline methods and that it sets a state-of-the-art performance for certain 3D object detection categories. Code is available at https://github.com/HYjhkoh/MGTANet.git.

MGTANet: Encoding Sequential LiDAR Points Using Long Short-Term Motion-Guided Temporal Attention for 3D Object Detection

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a sophisticated QA task, which aims at answering textual questions over given video-audio pairs with comprehensive multimodal reasoning. Through detailed causal-graph analyses and careful inspections of their learning processes, we reveal that AVQA models are not only prone to over-exploit prevalent language bias, but also suffer from additional joint-modal biases caused by the shortcut relations between textual-auditory/visual co-occurrences and dominated answers. In this paper, we propose a COllabrative CAusal (COCA) Regularization to remedy this more challenging issue of data biases.
Specifically, a novel Bias-centered Causal Regularization (BCR) is proposed to alleviate specific shortcut biases by intervening bias-irrelevant causal effects, and further introspect the predictions of AVQA models in counterfactual and factual scenarios. Based on the fact that the dominated bias impairing model robustness for different samples tends to be different, we introduce a Multi-shortcut Collaborative Debiasing (MCD) to measure how each sample suffers from different biases, and dynamically adjust their debiasing concentration to different shortcut correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness as well as backbone-agnostic ability of our COCA strategy, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale MUSIC-AVQA dataset.

COCA: COllaborative CAusal Regularization for Audio-Visual Question Answering

This study proposed a novel reward-based negotiating agent strategy using an issue-based represented deep policy network. We compared the negotiation strategies with reinforcement learning (RL) by the tournaments toward heuristics-based champion agents in multi-issue negotiation. A bilateral multi-issue negotiation in which the two agents exchange offers in turn was considered. Existing RL architectures for a negotiation strategy incorporate rich utility function that provides concrete information even though the rewards of RL are considered as generalized signals in practice. Additionally, in existing reinforcement learning architectures for negotiation strategies, both the issue-based representations of the negotiation problems and the policy network to improve the scalability of negotiation domains are yet to be considered. This study proposed a novel reward-based negotiation strategy through deep RL by considering an issue-based represented deep policy network for multi-issue negotiation. Comparative studies analyzed the significant properties of negotiation strategies with RL. The results revealed that the policy-based learning agents with issue-based representations achieved comparable or higher utility than the state-of-the-art baselines with RL and heuristics, especially in the large-sized domains. Additionally, negotiation strategies with RL based on the policy network can achieve agreements by effectively using each step.

Reward-based Negotiating Agent Strategies

Contrastive learning has been proven beneficial for self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Most contrastive learning methods utilize carefully designed augmentations to generate different movement patterns of skeletons for the same semantics. However, it is still a pending issue to apply strong augmentations, which distort the images/skeletons’ structures and cause semantic loss, due to their resulting unstable training. In this paper, we investigate the potential of adopting strong augmentations and propose a general hierarchical consistent contrastive learning framework (HiCLR) for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we first design a gradual growing augmentation policy to generate multiple ordered positive pairs, which guide to achieve the consistency of the learned representation from different views. Then, an asymmetric loss is proposed to enforce the hierarchical consistency via a directional clustering operation in the feature space, pulling the representations from strongly augmented views closer to those from weakly augmented views for better generalizability. Meanwhile, we propose and evaluate three kinds of strong augmentations for 3D skeletons to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments show that HiCLR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods notably on three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU60, NTU120, and PKUMMD.

Hierarchical Consistent Contrastive Learning for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Growing Augmentations

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have received ever-increasing popularity for their great capability of reducing storage burden as well as quickening inference time. However, there is a severe performance drop compared with {real-valued} networks, due to its intrinsic frequent weight oscillation during training. In this paper, we introduce a Resilient Binary Neural Network (ReBNN) to mitigate the frequent oscillation for better BNNs' training. We identify that the weight oscillation mainly stems from the non-parametric scaling factor. To address this issue, we propose to parameterize the scaling factor and introduce a weighted reconstruction loss to build an adaptive training objective. For the first time, we show that the weight oscillation  is  controlled by the balanced parameter attached to the reconstruction loss, which provides a theoretical foundation to  parameterize it in back propagation. Based on this, we learn our ReBNN by calculating the balanced parameter based on its maximum magnitude, which can  effectively mitigate the weight oscillation with a resilient training process. Extensive experiments are conducted  upon various network models, such as ResNet and Faster-RCNN for computer vision, as well as BERT for natural language processing. The results demonstrate the overwhelming performance of our ReBNN over prior arts. For example, our ReBNN achieves 66.9% Top-1 accuracy with ResNet-18 backbone on the ImageNet dataset, surpassing existing state-of-the-arts by a significant margin. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SteveTsui/ReBNN.

Resilient Binary Neural Network

Phase retrieval (PR) is an important nonlinear inverse problem in scientific imaging. It aims at reconstructing the phase of a signal from its intensity measurements. Recently, there is an increasing interest in deep learning-based PR. Motivated by the challenge of collecting ground-truth (GT) images in many domains, this paper proposes an unsupervised learning approach for PR, which trains a deep end-to-end model without using any GT image. The unsupervised learning from intensity measurements is done via a teacher-student online distillation framework. A teacher model is trained using a self-expressive loss with noise resistance, and a student model is trained with a consistency loss on augmented data to exploit the teacher's dark knowledge for improvement. An enhanced unfolding neural network is also developed for both the teacher and student models. Extensive experiments show that, the proposed approach not only outperforms existing unsupervised PR methods with higher computational efficiency, but also performs competitively against the supervised ones.

Unsupervised Deep Learning for Phase Retrieval via Teacher-Student Distillation

Current generative transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in long document summarization. However, this task witnessed a paradigm shift in developing ever-increasingly computationally-hungry models, focusing on effectiveness while ignoring the economic, environmental, and social costs of producing such results. Consequently, such extensive resources impact climate change and raise barriers to small and medium organizations characterized by low-resource regimes of hardware and data. As a result, this unsustainable trend has lifted many concerns in the community, proposing tools to monitor models' energy costs. Despite their importance, no evaluation measure considering models' eco-sustainability exists yet. In this work, we propose Carburacy, the first carbon-aware accuracy measure that captures both model effectiveness and eco-sustainability. We perform an extensive benchmark for long document summarization, comparing multiple state-of-the-art quadratic and linear transformers on several datasets under eco-sustainable regimes. Finally, thanks to Carburacy, we found optimal combinations of hyperparameters that let models be competitive in effectiveness with significantly lower costs.

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Efficient Answer Enumeration in Description Logics with Functional Roles

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