United States

Neural sequence labeling (NSL) aims at assigning labels for input language tokens, which covers a broad range of applications, such as named entity recognition (NER) and slot filling, etc. However, the satisfying results achieved by traditional supervised-based approaches heavily depend on the large amounts of human annotation data, which may not be feasible in real-world scenarios due to data privacy and computation efficiency issues. This paper presents SeqUST, a novel uncertain-aware self-training framework for NSL to address the labeled data scarcity issue and to effectively utilize unlabeled data. Specifically, we incorporate Monte Carlo (MC) dropout in Bayesian neural network (BNN) to perform uncertainty estimation at the token level and then select reliable language tokens from unlabeled data based on the model confidence and certainty. A well-designed masked sequence labeling task with a noise-robust loss supports robust training, which aims to suppress the problem of noisy pseudo labels. In addition, we develop a Gaussian-based consistency regularization technique to further improve the model robustness on Gaussian-distributed perturbed representations. This effectively alleviates the over-fitting dilemma originating from pseudo-labeled augmented data. 
Extensive experiments over six benchmarks demonstrate that our SeqUST framework effectively improves the performance of self-training, and consistently outperforms strong baselines by a large margin in low-resource scenarios. 

AAAI 2023

Uncertainty-aware Self-training for Low-resource Neural Sequence Labeling

low-resource neural sequence labeling

uncertainty estimation

self-training

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

The study of generative models is a promising branch of deep learning techniques, which has been successfully applied to different scenarios, such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. While in most of the existing works, the generative models are realized as a centralized structure, raising the threats of security and privacy and the overburden of communication costs. Rare efforts have been committed to investigating distributed generative models, especially when the training data comes from multiple heterogeneous sources under realistic IoT settings. In this paper, to handle this challenging problem, we design a federated generative model framework that can learn a powerful generator for the hierarchical IoT systems. Particularly, our generative model framework can solve the problem of distributed data generation on multi-source heterogeneous data in two scenarios, i.e., feature related scenario and label related scenario. In addition, in our federated generative models, we develop a synchronous and an asynchronous updating methods to satisfy different application requirements. Extensive experiments on a simulated dataset and multiple real datasets are conducted to evaluate the data generation performance of our proposed generative models through comparison with the state-of-the-arts.

Federated Generative Model on Multi-Source Heterogeneous Data in IoT

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims at estimating the policy with which training data are generated. In particular, this work considers a scenario where the data are collected from multiple sources. In this case, neglecting data heterogeneity, existing approaches for behavior estimation suffers from behavior misspecification. To overcome this drawback, the present study proposes a latent variable model to infer a set of policies from data, which allows an agent to use as behavior policy the policy that best describes a particular trajectory. This model provides with a agent fine-grained characterization for multi-source data and helps it overcome behavior misspecification. This work also proposes a learning algorithm for this model and illustrates its practical usage via extending an existing offline RL algorithm. Lastly, with extensive evaluation this work confirms the existence of behavior misspecification and the efficacy of the proposed model.

Behavior Estimation from Multi-Source Data for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.

GPTR: Gestalt-Perception Transformer for Diagram Object Detection

By modifying the training dataset of a model, Poisoning Attacks can introduce deleterious outcomes that are disproportionately large relative to the modifications required. While defences against specific attacks do exist, they in general do not provide any guarantees, leaving them potentially countered by novel attacks. In contrast, by examining worst-case behaviours Certified Robustness makes it possible to provide guarantees of the robustness of a sample against adversarial attacks modifying a finite number of training samples, known as pointwise certification. We achieve this by exploiting both Differential Privacy and the Sampled Gaussian Mechanism to ensure the invariance of predictions for each testing instance against finite numbers of poisoned examples. In doing so, our model provides guarantees of adversarial robustness that are more than twice as large as those provided by prior certifications.

Enhancing the Antidote: Improved Pointwise Certifications against Poisoning Attacks

Detecting objects as multiple keypoints is an important approach in the anchor-free object detection methods while corner pooling is an effective feature encoding method for corner positioning. The corners of the bounding box are located by summing the feature maps which are max-pooled in the x and y directions respectively by corner pooling. In the unidirectional max pooling operation, the features of the densely arranged objects of the same class are prone to occlusion. To this end, we propose a method named Gradient Corner Pooling. The spatial distance information of objects on the feature map is encoded during the unidirectional pooling process, which effectively alleviates the occlusion of the homogeneous object features. Further, the computational complexity of gradient corner pooling is the same as traditional corner pooling and hence it can be implemented efficiently. Gradient corner pooling obtains consistent improvements for various keypoint-based methods by directly replacing corner pooling. We verify the gradient corner pooling algorithm on the dataset and in real scenarios, respectively. The networks with gradient corner pooling located the corner points earlier in the training process and achieve an average accuracy improvement of 0.2%-1.6% on the MS-COCO dataset. The detectors with gradient corner pooling show better angle adaptability for arrayed objects in the actual scene test.

Gradient Corner Pooling for Keypoint-Based Object Detection

Offline reinforcement learning could learn effective policies from a fixed dataset, which is promising for real-world applications. However, in offline decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning, due to the discrepancy between the behavior policy and learned policy, the transition dynamics in offline experiences do not accord with the transition dynamics in online execution, which creates severe errors in value estimates, leading to uncoordinated low-performing policies. One way to overcome this problem is to bridge offline training and online tuning. However, considering both deployment efficiency and sample efficiency, we could only collect very limited online experiences, making it insufficient to use merely online data for updating the agent policy. To utilize both offline and online experiences to tune the policies of agents, we introduce \emph{online transition correction} (OTC) to implicitly correct the offline transition dynamics by modifying sampling probabilities. We design two types of distances, \textit{i.e.}, embedding-based and value-based distance, to measure the similarity between transitions, and further propose an adaptive rank-based prioritization to sample transitions according to the transition similarity. OTC is simple yet effective to increase data efficiency and improve agent policies in online tuning. Empirically, OTC outperforms baselines in a variety of tasks.

Online Tuning for Offline Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Federated Learning, as a popular paradigm for collaborative training, is vulnerable against privacy attacks. Different privacy levels regarding users' attitudes need to be satisfied locally, while a strict privacy guarantee for the global model is also required centrally. Personalized Local Differential Privacy (PLDP) is suitable for preserving users' varying local privacy, yet only provides a central privacy guarantee equivalent to the worst-case local privacy level. Thus, achieving strong central privacy as well as personalized local privacy with a utility-promising model is a challenging problem. In this work, a general framework (APES) is built up to strengthen model privacy under personalized local privacy by leveraging the privacy amplification effect of the shuffle model.  To tighten the privacy bound, we quantify the heterogeneous contributions to the central privacy user by user. The contributions are characterized by the ability of generating “echos” from the perturbation of each user,  which is carefully measured by proposed methods Neighbor Divergence and Clip-Laplace Mechanism. Furthermore, we propose a refined framework (S-APES) with the post-sparsification technique to reduce privacy loss in high-dimension scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of shuffling on personalized local privacy is considered for the first time. We provide a strong privacy amplification effect, and the bound is tighter than the baseline result based on existing methods for uniform local privacy. Experiments demonstrate that our frameworks ensure comparable or higher accuracy for the global model.

Echo of Neighbors: Privacy Amplification for Personalized Private Federated Learning with Shuffle Model

For image local forgery detection, the existing methods require a large amount of labeled data for training, and most of them cannot detect multiple types of forgery simultaneously. In this paper, we firstly analyzed the JPEG compression traces which are mainly caused by different JPEG compression chains, and designed a trace extractor to learn such traces. Then, we utilized the trace extractor as the backbone and trained self-supervised to strengthen the discrimination ability of learned traces. With its benefits, regions with different JPEG compression chains can easily be distinguished within a forged image. Furthermore, our method does not rely on a large amount of training data, and even does not require any forged images for training. Experiments show that the proposed method can detect image local forgery on different datasets without re-training, and keep stable performance over various types of image local forgery.

Self-Supervised Image Local Forgery Detection by JPEG Compression Trace

As manual point-wise label is time and labor-intensive for fully supervised large-scale point cloud  semantic segmentation, weakly supervised method is increasingly active. However, existing methods fail to generate high-quality pseudo labels effectively, leading to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised point cloud semantic segmentation framework via receptive-driven pseudo label consistency and structural consistency to mine potential knowledge. Specifically, we propose three consistency contrains: pseudo label consistency among different scales,  semantic structure consistency between intra-class features and class-level relation structure consistency between pair-wise categories.  Three consistency constraints are jointly used to effectively prepares and utilizes pseudo labels simultaneously for stable training. Finally, extensive experimental results on three challenging datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and even achieves comparable performance to the fully supervised methods. 

Weakly Supervised 3D Segmentation via Receptive-driven Pseudo Label Consistency and Structural Consistency

Adversarial imitation learning has become a widely used imitation learning framework. The discriminator is often trained by taking expert demonstrations and policy trajectories as examples respectively from two categories (positive vs. negative) and the policy is then expected to produce trajectories that are indistinguishable from the expert demonstrations. But in the real world, the collected expert demonstrations are more likely to be imperfect, where only an unknown fraction of the demonstrations are optimal. Instead of treating imperfect expert demonstrations as absolutely positive or negative, we investigate unlabeled imperfect expert demonstrations as they are. A positive-unlabeled adversarial imitation learning algorithm is developed to dynamically sample expert demonstrations that can well match the trajectories from the constantly optimized agent policy. The trajectories of an initial agent policy could be closer to those non-optimal expert demonstrations, but within the framework of adversarial imitation learning, agent policy will be optimized to cheat the discriminator and produce trajectories that are similar to those optimal expert demonstrations. Theoretical analysis shows that our method learns from the imperfect demonstrations via a self-paced way. Experimental results on MuJoCo and RoboSuite platforms demonstrate the effectiveness of our method from different aspects. 

Uncertainty-aware Self-training for Low-resource Neural Sequence Labeling

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Federated Generative Model on Multi-Source Heterogeneous Data in IoT

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