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Deep Metric Learning (DML) is a group of techniques that aim to measure the similarity between objects through the neural network. Although the number of DML methods has rapidly increased in recent years,  most previous studies cannot effectively handle noisy data, which commonly exists in practical applications and often leads to serious performance deterioration. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we build a connection between noisy samples and hard samples in the framework of self-paced learning, and propose a \underline{B}alanced \underline{S}elf-\underline{P}aced \underline{M}etric \underline{L}earning (BSPML) algorithm with a denoising multi-similarity formulation, where noisy samples are treated as extremely hard samples and adaptively excluded from the model training by  sample weighting. Especially, due to the pairwise relationship  and a new balance regularization term, the sub-problem  \emph{w.r.t.}  sample weights is a  nonconvex  quadratic function.  To efficiently solve this nonconvex  quadratic problem, we propose a doubly stochastic projection coordinate gradient algorithm. Importantly, we  theoretically prove  the convergence  not only for the doubly stochastic projection coordinate gradient algorithm, but also for our BSPML algorithm. Experimental results on several standard  data sets demonstrate that our BSPML algorithm has   better generalization ability and robustness  than  the state-of-the-art   robust DML approaches.

AAAI 2023

Denoising Multi-Similarity Formulation: A Self-paced Curriculum-Driven Approach for Robust Metric Learning

ml: representation learning

cv: representation learning for vision

ml: deep neural network algorithms

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

During the last decades, multi-label classification (MLC) has attracted the attention of more and more researchers due to its wide real-world applications. Many boosting methods for MLC have been proposed and achieved great successes. However, these methods only extend existing boosting frameworks to MLC and take loss functions in multi-label version to guide the iteration. These loss functions generally give a comprehensive evaluation on the label set entirety, and thus the characteristics of different labels are ignored. In this paper, we propose a multi-path AdaBoost framework specific to MLC, where each boosting path is established for distinct label and the combination of them is able to provide a maximum optimization to Hamming Loss. In each iteration, classifiers chain is taken as the base classifier to strengthen the connection between multiple AdaBoost paths and exploit the label correlation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. 

AdaBoost.C2: Boosting Classifiers Chains for Multi-label Classification

Deep clustering is a fundamental task in machine learning and data mining that aims at learning clustering-oriented feature representations. In previous studies, most of deep clustering methods follow the idea of self-supervised representation learning by maximizing the consistency of all similar instance pairs while ignoring the effect of feature redundancy on clustering performance. In this paper, to address the above issue, we design a dual mutual information constrained clustering method named DMICC which is based on deep contrastive clustering architecture, in which the dual mutual information constraints are particularly employed with solid theoretical guarantees and experimental validations. Specifically, at the feature level, we reduce the redundancy among features by minimizing the mutual information across all the dimensionalities to encourage the neural network to extract more discriminative features. At the instance level, we maximize the mutual information of the similar instance pairs to obtain more unbiased and robust representations. The dual mutual information constraints happen simultaneously and thus complement each other to jointly optimize better features that are suitable for the clustering task. We also prove that our adopted mutual information constraints are superior in feature extraction, and the proposed dual mutual information constraints are clearly bounded and thus solvable. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms most other clustering algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/Li-Hyn/DMICC.

Dual Mutual Information Constraints for Discriminative Clustering

Recently, to reap the quantum advantage, empowering reinforcement learning (RL) with quantum computing has attracted much attention, which is dubbed as quantum RL (QRL). However, current QRL algorithms employ an online learning scheme, i.e., the policy that is run on a quantum computer needs to interact with the environment to collect experiences, which could be expensive and dangerous for practical applications. In this paper, we aim to solve this problem in an offline learning manner. To be more specific, we develop the first offline quantum RL (offline QRL) algorithm named CQ2L (Conservative Quantum Q-learning), which learns from offline samples and does not require any interaction with the environment. CQ2L utilizes variational quantum circuits (VQCs), which are improved with data re-uploading and scaling parameters, to represent Q-value functions of agents. To suppress the overestimation of Q-values resulting from offline data, we first employ a double Q-learning framework to reduce the overestimation bias; then a penalty term that encourages generating conservative Q-values is designed. We conduct abundant experiments to demonstrate that the proposed method CQ2L can successfully solve offline QRL tasks that the online counterpart could not.

Offline Quantum Reinforcement Learning in A Conservative Manner

Recent work has shown that representation learning plays a critical role in sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) from pixels. Unfortunately, in real-world scenarios, representation learning is usually fragile to task-irrelevant distractions such as variations in background or viewpoint. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel clustering-based approach, namely Clustering with Bisimulation Metrics (CBM), which learns robust representations by grouping visual observations in the latent space. Specifically, CBM alternates between two steps: (1) grouping observations by measuring their bisimulation distances to the learned prototypes; (2) learning a set of prototypes according to the current cluster assignments. Computing cluster assignments with bisimulation metrics enables CBM to capture task-relevant information, as bisimulation metrics quantify the behavioral similarity between observations. Moreover, CBM encourages the consistency of representations within each group, which facilitates filtering out task-irrelevant information and thus induces robust representations against distractions. An appealing feature is that CBM can achieve sample-efficient representation learning even if multiple distractions exist simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that CBM significantly improves the sample efficiency of popular visual RL algorithms and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both multiple and single distraction settings.

Robust Representation Learning by Clustering with Bisimulation Metrics for Visual Reinforcement Learning with Distractions

Despite the great achievements of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in graph learning, conventional GNNs struggle to break through the upper limit of the expressiveness of first-order Weisfeiler-Leman graph isomorphism test algorithm (1-WL) due to the consistency of the propagation paradigm of GNNs with the 1-WL.Based on the fact that it is easier to distinguish the original graph through subgraphs, we propose a  novel framework neural network framework called Substructure Aware Graph Neural Networks (SAGNN) to address these issues. We first propose a  Cut subgraph  which can be obtained from the original graph by continuously and selectively removing edges. Then we extend the random walk encoding paradigm to the return probability of the rooted node on the subgraph to capture the structural information and use it as a node feature to improve the expressiveness of GNNs. We theoretically prove that our framework is more powerful than 1-WL, and is superior in structure perception. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework,  achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of well-proven graph tasks, and GNNs equipped with our framework perform flawlessly even in 3-WL failed graphs. Specifically, our framework achieves a maximum performance improvement of 83% compared to the base models and  32% compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Substructure Aware Graph Neural Networks

Incremental few-shot object detection aims at detecting novel classes without forgetting knowledge of the base classes with only a few labeled training data from the novel classes. Most related prior works are on incremental object detection that rely on the availability of abundant training samples per novel class that substantially limits the scalability to real-world setting where novel data can be scarce. In this paper, we propose the Incremental-DETR that does incremental few-shot object detection via fine-tuning and self-supervised learning on the DETR object detector. To alleviate severe over-fitting with few novel class data, we first fine-tune the class-specific components of DETR with self-supervision from additional object proposals generated using Selective Search as pseudo labels. We further introduce an incremental few-shot fine-tuning strategy with knowledge distillation on the class-specific components of DETR to encourage the network in detecting novel classes without forgetting the base classes. Extensive experiments conducted on standard incremental object detection and incremental few-shot object detection settings show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.  Our source code is available at https://github.com/dongnana777/Incremental-DETR.

Incremental-DETR: Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection via Self-Supervised Learning

In this paper, we address a special scenario of semi-supervised learning, where the label missing is caused by a preceding filtering mechanism, i.e., an instance can enter a subsequent process in which its label is revealed if and only if it passes the filtering mechanism. The rejected instances are prohibited to enter the subsequent labeling process due to economical or ethical reasons, making the support of the labeled and unlabeled distributions isolated from each other. In this case, semi-supervised learning approaches which rely on certain coherence of the labeled and unlabeled distribution would suffer from the consequent distribution mismatch, and hence result in poor prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a Small-Paced Self-Training framework, which iteratively discovers labeled and unlabeled instance subspaces with bounded Wasserstein distance. We theoretically prove that such a framework may achieve provably low error on the pseudo labels during learning. Experiments on both benchmark and pneumonia diagnosis tasks show that our method is effective.

Semi-Supervised Learning with Support Isolation by Small-Paced Self-Training

Compared with the image-based static facial expression recognition (SFER) task, the dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) task based on video sequences is closer to the natural expression recognition scene. However, DFER is often more challenging. One of the main reasons is that video sequences often contain frames with different expression intensities, especially for the facial expressions in the real-world scenarios, while the images in SFER frequently present uniform and high expression intensities. Nevertheless, if the expressions with different intensities are treated equally, the features learned by the networks will have large intra-class and small inter-class differences, which are harmful to DFER. To tackle this problem, we propose the global convolution-attention block (GCA) to rescale the channels of the feature maps. In addition, we introduce the intensity-aware loss (IAL) in the training process to help the network distinguish the samples with relatively low expression intensities. Experiments on two in-the-wild dynamic facial expression datasets (i.e., DFEW and FERV39k) indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art DFER approaches. The source code will be available at https://github.com/muse1998/IAL-for-Facial-Expression-Recognition.

Intensity-Aware Loss for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild

Contrastive learning has emerged as one of the most promising self-supervised methods. It can efficiently learn the transferable representations of samples through the instance-level discrimination task. In general, the performance of the contrastive learning method can be further improved by projecting the transferable high-dimensional representations into the low-dimensional feature space. This is because the model can learn more abstract discriminative information. However, when low-dimensional features cannot provide sufficient discriminative information to the model (e.g., the samples are very similar to each other), the existing contrastive learning method will be limited to a great extent. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a general module called the Feature Reconstruction Amplifier (FRA) for adding additional high-dimensional feature information to the model. Specifically, FRA reconstructs the low-dimensional feature embeddings with Gaussian noise vectors and projects them to a high-dimensional reconstruction space. In this reconstruction space, we can add additional feature information through the designed loss. We have verified the effectiveness of the module itself through exhaustive ablation experiments. In addition, we perform linear evaluation and transfer learning on five common visual datasets, the experimental results demonstrate that our method is superior to recent advanced contrastive learning methods.

Contrastive Learning with the Feature Reconstruction Amplifier

A {\em knockout (or single-elimination) tournament} is a format of a competition that is very popular in practice (particularly in sports, elections and decision making), and which has been extensively and intensively studied from a theoretical point of view for more than a decade. Particular attention has been devoted to the {\sc Tournament Fixing} problem, where, roughly speaking, the objective is to determine whether we can conduct the knockout tournament in a way that makes our favorite player win. Here, part of the input is a tournament graph $D$ that encodes the winner of each possible match. A sequence of papers has studied the parameterized complexity of {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to the {\em feedback arc set number} ($\mathbf{fas}$) of $D$. Given that this parameter yielded tractability (specifically, solvability in time  $\mathbf{fas}^{\OO(\mathbf{fas})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$), it has been asked explicitly and repeatedly whether {\sc Tournament Fixing} is FPT also with respect to the {\em feedback vertex set number} ($\mathbf{fvs}$) of $D$ [Ramanujan and Szeider, AAAI'17; Gupta et al., IJCAI'18; Gupta et al., IJCAI'19; Roy, PhD Thesis, 2021; Suksompong, IJCAI'21]. We answer this question positively. In fact, although $\mathbf{fvs}$ can be {\em arbitrarily smaller} than $\mathbf{fas}$, we attain a runtime of $\mathbf{fvs}^{\OO(\mathbf{fvs})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$. So, additionally, our work subsumes the best known algorithm for {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to $\mathbf{fas}$.

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Denoising Multi-Similarity Formulation: A Self-paced Curriculum-Driven Approach for Robust Metric Learning

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