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Overparameterized deep neural networks have redundant neurons that do not contribute to the network&#39;s accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel channel regeneration technique that reinvigorates these redundant channels by re-initializing its batch normalization scaling factor gamma. This re-initialization of BN gamma promotes regular weight updates during training. Furthermore, we show that channel regeneration encourages the channels to contribute equally to the learned representation and further boosts the generalization accuracy. We apply our technique at regular intervals of the training cycle to improve channel utilization. The solutions proposed in previous works either raise the total computational cost or increase the model complexity. Integrating the proposed channel regeneration technique into the training methodology of efficient architectures requires minimal effort and comes at no additional cost in size or memory. Extensive experiments on several image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the channel regeneration technique to compact architectures. 

AAAI 2023

Channel Regeneration: Improving Channel Utilization for Compact DNNs

efficient

quantization

pruning

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.

Overparameterized deep neural networks have redundant neurons that do not contribute to the network's accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel channel regeneration technique that reinvigorates these redundant channels by re-initializing its batch normalization scaling factor gamma. This re-initialization of BN gamma promotes regular weight updates during training. Furthermore, we show that channel regeneration encourages the channels to contribute equally to the learned representation and further boosts the generalization accuracy. We apply our technique at regular intervals of the training cycle to improve channel utilization. The solutions proposed in previous works either raise the total computational cost or increase the model complexity. Integrating the proposed channel regeneration technique into the training methodology of efficient architectures requires minimal effort and comes at no additional cost in size or memory. Extensive experiments on several image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the channel regeneration technique to compact architectures. 

poster

The immune repertoire is a collection of immune recep-tors that has emerged as an important biomarker for both diagnostic and therapeutic of cancer patients. In terms of deep learning, analyzing immune repertoire is a challeng-ing multiple-instance learning problem in which the im-mune repertoire of an individual is a bag, and the immune receptor is an instance. Although several deep learning methods for immune repertoire analysis are introduced, they consider the immune repertoire as a set-like struc-ture that doesn’t take account of the nature of the im-mune response. When the immune response occurs, mu-tations are introduced to the immune receptor sequence sequentially to optimize the immune response against the pathogens that enter our body. As a result, immune receptors for the specific pathogen have the lineage of evolution; thus, immune repertoire is better represented as a graph-like structure. In this work, we present our novel method graph representation of immune repertoire (GRIP), which analyzes the immune repertoire as a hier-archical graph structure and utilize the collection of graph neural network followed by graph pooling and transformer to efficiently represents the immune reper-toire as an embedding vector. We show that GRIP predict the survival probability of cancer patients better than the set-based methods and graph-based structure is critical for performance. Also, GRIP provides interpretable re-sults, which prove that GRIP adequately use the progno-sis-related immune receptor and give further possibility to use the GRIP as the novel biomarker searching tool

GRIP: Graph representation of immune repertoire using graph neural network and transformer

Online bipartite-matching platforms are ubiquitous and find applications in important areas such as crowdsourcing and ridesharing. In the most general form, the platform consists of three entities: two sides to be matched and a platform operator that decides the matching. The design of algorithms for such platforms has traditionally focused on the operator’s (expected) profit. Since fairness has become an important consideration that was ignored in the existing algorithms a collection of online matching algorithms have been developed that give a fair treatment guarantee for one side of the market at the expense of a drop in the operator’s profit. In this paper, we generalize the existing work to offer fair treatment guarantees to both sides of the market simultaneously, at a calculated worst case drop to operator profit. We consider group and individual Rawlsian fairness criteria. Moreover, our algorithms have theoretical guarantees and have adjustable parameters that can be tuned as desired to balance the trade-off between the utilities of the three sides. We also derive hardness results that give clear upper bounds over the performance of any algorithm.

Rawlsian Fairness in Online Bipartite Matching: Two-sided, Group, and Individual

Compared with the feature-based distillation methods, logits distillation can liberalize the requirements of consistent feature dimension between teacher and student networks, while the performance is deemed inferior in face recognition. One major challenge is that the light-weight student network has difficulty fitting the target logits due to its low model capacity, which is attributed to the significant number of identities in face recognition. Therefore, we seek to probe the target logits to extract the primary knowledge related to face identity, and discard the others, to make the distillation more achievable for the student network. Specifically, there is a tail group with near-zero values in the prediction, containing minor knowledge for distillation. To provide a clear perspective of its impact, we first partition the logits into two groups, i.e., Primary Group and Secondary Group, according to the cumulative probability of the softened prediction. Then, we reorganize the Knowledge Distillation (KD) loss of grouped logits into three parts, i.e., Primary-KD, Secondary-KD, and Binary-KD. Primary-KD refers to distilling the primary knowledge from the teacher, Secondary-KD aims to refine minor knowledge but increases the difficulty of distillation, and Binary-KD ensures the consistency of knowledge distribution between teacher and student. We experimentally found that (1) Primary-KD and Binary-KD are indispensable for KD, and (2) Secondary-KD is the culprit restricting KD at the bottleneck. Therefore, we propose a Grouped Knowledge Distillation (GKD) that retains the Primary-KD and Binary-KD but omits Secondary-KD in the ultimate KD loss calculation. Extensive experimental results on popular face recognition benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of proposed GKD over state-of-the-art methods.

Grouped Knowledge Distillation for Deep Face Recognition

In this paper, we consider the parallel implementation of an already-trained deep model on multiple processing nodes (a.k.a. workers). Specifically, we investigate as to how a deep model should be divided into several parallel sub-models, each of which is executed efficiently by a worker. Since latency due to synchronization and data transfer among workers negatively impacts the performance of the parallel implementation, it is desirable to have minimum interdependency among parallel sub-models. To achieve this goal, we propose to rearrange the neurons in the neural network, partition them (without changing the general topology of the neural network), and modify the weights such that the interdependency among sub-models is minimized under the computations and communications constraints of the workers while minimizing its impact on the performance of the model. We propose RePurpose, a layer-wise model restructuring and pruning technique that guarantees the performance of the overall parallelized model. To efficiently apply RePurpose, we propose an approach based on $\ell_0$ optimization and the Munkres assignment algorithm. We show that, compared to the existing methods, RePurpose significantly improves the efficiency of the distributed inference via parallel implementation, both in terms of communication and computational complexity.

Efficient Distributed Inference of Deep Neural Networks via Restructuring and Pruning

A primary objective of news articles is to establish the factual record for an event, frequently achieved by conveying both the details of the specified event (i.e., the 5 Ws; Who, What, Where, When and Why regarding the event) and how people reacted to it (i.e., reported statements). However, existing work on news summarization almost exclusively focuses on the event details. In this work, we propose the novel task of summarizing the reactions of different speakers, as expressed by their reported statements, to a given event. To this end, we create a new multi-document summarization benchmark, SumREN, comprising 745 summaries of reported statements from various public figures obtained from 633 news articles discussing 132 events. We propose an automatic silver-training data generation approach for our task, which helps smaller models like BART achieve GPT-3 level performance on this task. Finally, we introduce a pipeline-based framework for summarizing reported speech, which we empirically show to generate summaries that are more abstractive and factual than baseline query-focused summarization approaches.  

SumREN: Summarizing Reported Speech about Events in News

Causal analysis for time series data, in particular estimating individualized treatment effect (ITE), is a key task in many real world applications, such as finance, retail, healthcare,  etc. Real world time series, i.e., large-scale irregular or sparse and intermittent time series, raise significant challenges to existing work attempting to estimate treatment effects. Specifically, the existence of hidden confounders can lead to  biased treatment estimates and complicate the causal inference process. In particular, anomaly hidden confounders which exceed the typical range can lead to high variance estimates. Moreover,  in continuous time settings with irregular samples, it is challenging to directly handle the dynamics of causality. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in Lipschitz regularization and neural controlled differential equations (CDE)  to develop an effective and scalable solution, namely LipCDE, to address the above challenges. LipCDE can directly model the dynamic causal relationships between historical data and outcomes with irregular samples by considering the boundary of hidden confounders given by Lipschitz constrained neural networks. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of LipCDE. 

Estimating Treatment Effects from Irregular Time Series Observations with Hidden Confounders

Self Attention has shown the excellent performance in tracking due to its global modeling capability. However, it brings two challenges: First, its global receptive field has less attention on local structure and inter-channel associations, which limits the semantics to distinguish objects and backgrounds; Second, its feature fusion with linear process cannot avoid the interference of non-target semantic objects. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a robust tracking method named GdaTFT by defining the Global Dilated Attention (GDA) and Target Focusing Network (TFN). The GDA provides a new global semantics modeling approach to enhance the semantic objects while eliminating the background. It is defined via the local focusing module, dilated attention and channel adaption module. Thus, it promotes semantics by focusing local key information, building long-range dependencies and enhancing the semantics of channels. Subsequently, to distinguish the target and non-target objects both with rich semantics, the TFN is proposed to accurately focus the target region. Different from the present feature fusion, it uses the template as the query to build a point-to-point correlation between the template and search region, and finally achieves part-level augmentation of target feature in the search region. Thus, the TFN efficiently augments the target embedding while weakening the non-target objects. Experiments on challenging benchmarks (LaSOT, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, OTB-100) demonstrate that the GdaTFT outperforms many state-of-the-art trackers and achieves leading performance. Code will be available.

Global Dilated Attention and Target Focusing Network for Robust Tracking

We study the problem of learning a single occurrence regular expression with interleaving (SOIRE) from a set of text strings possibly with noise. SOIRE fully supports interleaving and covers a large portion of regular expressions used in practice. Learning SOIREs is challenging because it requires heavy computation and text strings usually contain noise in practice. Most of the previous studies only learn restricted SOIREs and are not robust on noisy data. To tackle these issues, we propose a noise-tolerant differentiable learning approach SOIREDL for SOIRE. We design a neural network to simulate SOIRE matching and theoretically prove that certain assignments of the set of parameters learnt by the neural network, called faithful encodings, are one-to-one corresponding to SOIREs for a bounded size. Based on this correspondence, we interpret the target SOIRE from an assignment of the set of parameters of the neural network by exploring the nearest faithful encodings. Experimental results show that SOIREDL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially on noisy data.

A Noise-tolerant Differentiable Learning Approach for Single Occurrence Regular Expression with Interleaving

Micro-Expression Recognition (MER) is challenging because the Micro-Expressions' (ME) motion is too weak to distinguish. This hurdle can be tackled by enhancing intensity for a more accurate acquisition of movements. However, existing magnification strategies tend to use the features of facial images that include not only intensity clues as intensity features, leading to the intensity representation deficient of credibility. In addition, the intensity variation over time, which is crucial for encoding movements, is also neglected. To this end, we provide a reliable scheme to extract intensity clues while considering their variation on the time scale. First, we devise an Intensity Distillation (ID) loss to acquire the intensity clues by contrasting the difference between frames, given that the difference in the same video lies only in the intensity. Then, the intensity clues are calibrated to follow the trend of the original video. Specifically, we build the intensity tendency in the original video as a prototype, wherein the intensity values are presumptive and can dynamically change during each iteration, enabling the network to perceive the overall tendency of the video. Then, the intensity clues are encouraged to converge towards this prototype, achieved by a Wilcoxon rank sum test (Wrst) method. Experimental results on three public ME databases i.e. CASME II, SAMM, and SMIC-HS validate the superiority against state-of-the-art methods.

CMNet: Contrastive Magnification Network for Micro-Expression Recognition

Graph pooling is a crucial operation for encoding hierarchical structures within graphs. Most existing graph pooling approaches formulate the problem as a node clustering task which effectively captures the graph topology. Conventional methods ask users to specify an appropriate number of clusters as a hyperparameter, then assuming that all input graphs share the same number of clusters. In inductive settings where the number of clusters could vary, however, the model should be able to represent this variation in its pooling layers in order to learn suitable clusters. Thus we propose GMPool, a novel differentiable graph pooling architecture that automatically determines the appropriate number of clusters based on the input data. The main intuition involves a grouping matrix defined as a quadratic form of the pooling operator, which induces use of binary classification probabilities of pairwise combinations of nodes. GMPool obtains the pooling operator by first computing the grouping matrix, then decomposing it. Extensive evaluations on molecular property prediction tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional methods.

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