United States

Learning on evolving(dynamic) graphs has caught the attention of researchers as static methods exhibit limited performance in this setting. The existing methods for dynamic graphs learn spatial features by local neighborhood aggregation, which essentially only captures the low pass signals and local interactions. In this work, we go beyond current approaches to incorporate global features for effectively learning representations of a dynamically evolving graph. 
We propose to do so by capturing the spectrum of the dynamic graph. Since static methods to learn the graph spectrum would not consider the history of the evolution of the spectrum as the graph evolves with time, we propose an approach to learn the graph wavelets to capture this evolving spectra.
Further, we propose a framework that integrates the dynamically captured spectra in the form of these learnable wavelets into spatial features for incorporating local and global interactions. Experiments on eight standard datasets show that our method significantly outperforms related methods on various tasks for dynamic graphs.

AAAI 2023

Learnable Spectral Wavelets on Dynamic Graphs to Capture Global Interactions

dynamic graphs

spectral graph wavelets

graph representation learning

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. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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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

Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, the high energy cost and long inference delay prevent Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) from seeing broader adoption including for edge and mobile computing. Efficient NLP research aims to comprehensively consider computation, time and carbon emission for the entire life-cycle of NLP, including data preparation, model training and inference. In this survey, we focus on the inference stage and review the current state of model compression and acceleration for pretrained language models, including benchmarks, metrics and methodology.

A Survey on Model Compression and Acceleration for Pretrained Language Models

The FastMap algorithm has been proposed as an inexpensive metric embedding which provides admissible distance estimates between all vertices in an embedding. As an embedding, it also supports additional operations such as taking the median location of two vertices, which is important in some problems. This paper studies several aspects of FastMap embeddings, showing the relationship of FastMap to general additive heuristics. We discover that as an admissible heuristic, FastMap is not as strong as previous suggested. However, by combining FastMap with the ideas of differential heuristics, we can significantly improve the performance of FastMap heuristics. We show the impact of these ideas in both single-agent pathfinding and the Multi-Agent Meeting problem, where the performance of algorithms using our improved FastMap embedding is improved by up to a factor of two.


Analyzing and Improving the Use of the FastMap Embedding in Pathfinding Tasks

3D point cloud semantic segmentation aims to group all points into different semantic categories, which benefits important applications such as point cloud scene reconstruction and understanding. Existing supervised point cloud semantic segmentation methods usually require large-scale annotated point clouds for training and cannot handle new categories. While a few-shot learning method was proposed recently to address these two problems, it suffers from high computational complexity caused by graph construction and inability to learn fine-grained relationships among points due to the use of pooling operations. In this paper, we further address these problems by developing a new multi-layer transformer network for few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation. In the proposed network, the query point cloud features are aggregated based on the class-specific support features in different scales. Without using pooling operations, our method makes full use of all pixel-level features from the support samples. By better leveraging the support features for few-shot learning, the proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, with 15% less inference time, over existing few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation models on the S3DIS dataset and the ScanNet dataset. Our code is available
at https://github.com/czzhang179/SCAT.

Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Stratified Class-specific Attention Based Transformer Network

The spread of rumors along with breaking events seriously hinders the truth in the era of social media. Previous studies reveal that due to the lack of annotated resources, rumors presented in minority languages are hard to be detected. Furthermore, the unforeseen breaking events not involved in yesterday's news exacerbate the scarcity of data resources. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot framework based on prompt learning to detect rumors falling in different domains or presented in different languages. More specifically, we firstly represent rumor circulated on social media as diverse propagation threads, then design a hierarchical prompt encoding mechanism to learn language-agnostic contextual representations for both prompts and rumor data. To further enhance domain adaptation, we model the domain-invariant structural features from the propagation threads, to incorporate structural position representations of influential community response. In addition, a new virtual response augmentation method is used to improve model training. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for detecting rumors at early stages.

Zero-Shot Rumor Detection with Propagation Structure via Prompt Learning

We study the composition style in deep image matting, a notion that characterizes a data generation flow on how to exploit limited foregrounds and random backgrounds to form a training dataset. Prior art executes this flow in a completely random manner by simply going through the foreground pool or by optionally combining two foregrounds before foreground-background composition. In this work, we first show that naive foreground combination can be problematic and therefore derive an alternative formulation to reasonably combine foregrounds. Our second contribution is an observation that matting performance can benefit from a certain occurrence frequency of combined foregrounds and their associated source foregrounds during training. Inspired by this, we introduce a novel composition style that binds the source and combined foregrounds in a definite triplet. In addition, we also find that different orders of foreground combination lead to different foreground patterns, which further inspires a quadruplet-based composition style. Results under controlled experiments on four matting baselines show that our composition styles outperform existing ones and invite consistent performance improvement on both composited and real-world datasets.

Infusing Definiteness into Randomness: Rethinking Composition Styles for Deep Image Matting

Existing semantic segmentation works have been mainly focused on designing effective decoders; however, the computational load introduced by the overall structure has long been ignored, which hinders their applications on resource-constrained hardwares. In this paper, we propose a head-free lightweight architecture specifically for semantic segmentation, named Adaptive Frequency Transformer (AFFormer). AFFormer adopts a parallel architecture to leverage prototype representations as specific learnable local descriptions which replaces the decoder and preserves the rich image semantics on high-resolution features. Although removing the decoder compresses most of the computation, the accuracy of the parallel structure is still limited by low computational resources. Therefore, we employ heterogeneous operators (CNN and vision Transformer) for pixel embedding and prototype representations to further save computational costs. Moreover, it is very difficult to linearize the complexity of the vision Transformer from the perspective of spatial domain. Due to the fact that semantic segmentation is very sensitive to frequency information, we construct a lightweight prototype learning block with adaptive frequency filter of complexity $O(n)$ to replace standard self attention with $O(n^{2})$. Extensive experiments on widely adopted datasets demonstrate that AFFormer achieves superior accuracy while retaining only 3M parameters. On the ADE20K dataset, AFFormer achieves 41.8 mIoU and 4.6 GFLOPs, which is 4.4 mIoU higher than Segformer, with  45% less GFLOPs. On the Cityscapes dataset, AFFormer achieves 78.7 mIoU and 34.4 GFLOPs, which is 2.5 mIoU higher than Segformer with 72.5% less GFLOPs.

Head-Free Lightweight Semantic Segmentation with Linear Transformer

Quantification (or prevalence estimation) algorithms aim at predicting the class distribution of unseen sets (or bags) of examples. These methods are useful for two main tasks: 1) quantification applications, for instance when we need to track the proportions of several groups of interest over time, and 2) domain adaptation problems, in which we usually need to adapt a previously trained classifier to a different --albeit related-- target distribution according to the estimated prevalences. This paper analyzes several binary quantification algorithms showing that not only do they share a common framework but are, in fact, equivalent. Inspired by this study, we propose a new method that extends one of the approaches analyzed. After an empirical evaluation of all these methods using synthetic and benchmark datasets, the paper concludes recommending three of them due to their precision, efficiency, and diversity.

An Equivalence Analysis of Binary Quantification Methods

Multi-instance learning (MIL) is a supervised learning where each example is a labeled bag with many instances. The typical MIL strategies are to train an instance-level feature extractor followed by aggregating instances features as bag-level representation with labeled information. However, learning such a bag-level representation highly depends on a large number of labeled datasets, which are difficult to get in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we make the first attempt to propose a robust Self-supervised Multi-Instance LEarning architecture with Structure awareness (SMILEs) that learns unsupervised bag representation. Our proposed approach is: 1) permutation invariant to the order of instances in bag; 2) structure-aware to encode the topological structures among the instances; and 3) robust against instances noise or permutation. Specifically, to yield robust MIL model without label information, we augment the multi-instance bag and train the representation encoder to maximize the correspondence between the representations of the same bag in its different augmented forms. Moreover, to capture topological structures from nearby instances in bags, our framework learns optimal graph structures for the bags and these graphs are optimized together with message passing layers and the ordered weighted averaging operator towards contrastive loss. Our main theorem characterizes the permutation invariance of the bag representation. Compared with state-of-the-art supervised MIL baselines, SMILEs achieves average improvement of 4.9%, 4.4% in classification accuracy on 5 benchmark datasets and 20 newsgroups datasets, respectively. In addition, we show that the model is robust to the input corruption.

Robust Self-supervised Multi-instance Learning with Structure Awareness

Neural network quantization aims to accelerate and trim full-precision neural network models by using low bit approximations. Methods adopting the quantization aware training (QAT) paradigm have recently seen a rapid growth, but are often conceptually complicated. This paper proposes a novel and highly effective QAT method, quantized feature distillation (QFD). QFD first trains a quantized (or binarized) representation as the teacher, then quantize the network using knowledge distillation (KD). Quantitative results show that QFD is more flexible and effective (i.e., quantization friendly) than previous quantization methods. QFD surpasses existing methods by a noticeable margin on not only image classification but also object detection, albeit being much simpler. Furthermore, QFD quantizes ViT and Swin-Transformer on MS-COCO detection and segmentation, which verifies its potential in real world deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that vision transformers have been quantized in object detection and image segmentation tasks.

Quantized Feature Distillation for Network Quantization

Real-time video perception tasks are often challenging over the resource-constrained edge devices due to the concerns of accuracy drop and hardware overhead, where saving computations is the key to performance improvement. Existing methods either rely on domain-specific neural chips or priorly searched models, which require specialized optimization according to different task properties. In this work, we propose a general and task-independent Patch Automatic Skip Scheme (PASS), a novel end-to-end learning pipeline to support diverse video perception settings by decoupling acceleration and tasks. The gist is to capture the temporal similarity across video frames and skip the redundant computations at patch level, where patch is a non-overlapping square block in visual. PASS equips each convolution layer with a learnable gate to selectively determine which patches could be safely skipped without degrading model accuracy. As to each layer, a desired gate needs to make flexible skip decisions based on intermediate features without any annotations, which cannot be achieved by conventional supervised learning paradigm. To address this challenge, we are the first to construct a tough self-supervisory procedure for optimizing these gates, which learns to extract contrastive representation, i.e., distinguishing similarity and difference, from frame sequence. These high-capacity gates can serve as a plug-and-play module for convolutional neural network (CNN) backbones to implement patch-skippable architectures, and automatically generate proper skip strategy to accelerate different video-based downstream tasks, e.g., outperforming the state-of-the-art MobileHumanPose (MHP) in 3D pose estimation and FairMOT in multiple object tracking, by up to 9.43 times and 12.19 times speedups, respectively. By directly processing the raw data of frames, PASS can generalize to real-time video streams on commodity edge devices, e.g., NVIDIA Jetson Nano and mobile phones, and achieves efficient performance in realistic deployment.

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A Survey on Model Compression and Acceleration for Pretrained Language Models

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