United States

Camera relocalization has various applications in autonomous driving. Previous camera pose regression models consider only ideal scenarios where there is little environmental perturbation. To deal with challenging driving environments that may have changing seasons, weather, illumination, and the presence of unstable objects, we propose RobustLoc, which derives its robustness against perturbations from neural differential equations. Our model uses a convolutional neural network to extract feature maps from multi-view images, a robust neural differential equation diffusion block module to diffuse information interactively, and a branched pose decoder with multi-layer training to estimate the vehicle poses. Experiments demonstrate that RobustLoc surpasses current state-of-the-art camera pose regression models and achieves robust performance in various environments.

AAAI 2023

RobustLoc: Robust Camera Pose Regression in Challenging Driving Environments

rob: localization

cv: vision for robotics & autonomous driving

cv: applications

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

Deep generative models have demonstrated superior performance in lossless compression on identically distributed data. However, in real-world scenarios, data to be compressed are of various distributions and usually cannot be known in advance. Thus, commercially expected neural compression must have strong Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization capabilities. Compared with traditional compression methods, deep learning methods have intrinsic flaws for OoD generalization. In this work, we make the attempt to tackle this challenge via exploiting a zoo of Deep Autoregressive models (DAMix). We build a model zoo consisting of autoregressive models trained on data from diverse distributions. In the test phase, we select useful expert models by a simple model evaluation score and adaptively aggregate the predictions of selected models. By assuming the outputs from each expert models are biased in favor of their training distributions, a von Mises-Fisher based filter is proposed to recover the value of unbiased predictions that provides more accurate density estimations than single model. We derive the posterior of unbiased predictions as well as concentration parameters in the filter, and a novel temporal Stein variational gradient descent for sequential data is proposed to adaptively update the posterior distributions. We evaluate DAMix on 22 image datasets, including in-distribution and OoD data, and demonstrate that making use of unbiased predictions has up to 45.6\% improvement over the single model trained on ImageNet.

DAMix: Exploiting Deep Autoregressive Model Zoo for Improving Lossless Compression Generalization

Transformer networks are able to capture patterns in data coming from many domains (text, images, videos, proteins, etc.) with little or no change to architecture components. We perform a theoretical analysis of the core component responsible for signal propagation between elements, i.e. the self-attention matrix. We ask the following question: Can self-attention matrix approximate arbitrary patterns? How small is the query dimension $d$ required for such approximation? Our first result shows that the task of deciding whether approximation of a given pattern is possible or not is NP-hard for a fixed $d > 1$. In practice, self-attention matrix typically exhibits two properties: it is sparse, and it changes dynamically depending on the input to the module. Motivated by this observation, we show that the self-attention matrix can provably approximate sparse matrices. While the parameters of self-attention are fixed, various sparse matrices can be approximated by only modifying the inputs. Our proof is based on the random projection technique and uses the seminal Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. In particular, we show that, in order to approximate any sparse matrix up to a given precision defined in terms of preserving matrix element ratios, $d$ grows only logarithmically with the sequence length $n$ (i.e. $d = O(\log n)$).

On the Expressive Flexibility of Self-Attention Matrices

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. 
GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function.
Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. 
In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. 
Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. 
This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. 
This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. 
The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks. 

Graph Ordering Attention Networks

Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF) has emerged as a central formalism in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning.
Preferences in AF allow to represent the comparative strength of arguments in a simple yet expressive way. 
Preference-based AF (PAF) has been proposed to extend AF with preferences of the form a > b, whose intuitive meaning is that argument a is better than b. 
In this paper we generalize PAF by introducing conditional preferences of the form a > b \leftarrow body that informally state that a is better than b whenever the condition expressed by body is true.
The resulting framework, namely Conditional Preference-based AF (CPAF), extends the PAF semantics under three well-known preference criteria, i.e. democratic, elitist, and KTV.  
After introducing CPAF, we study the complexity of the verification problem (deciding whether a set of arguments is a ``best'' extension) as well as of the credulous and skeptical acceptance problems (deciding whether a given argument belongs to any or all ``best'' extensions, respectively) under multiple-status semantics (that is, complete, preferred, stable, and semi-stable semantics) for the above-mentioned preference criteria. 

Abstract Argumentation Framework with Conditional Preferences

Taxonomy expansion is the process of incorporating a large number of additional nodes (i.e., ''queries'') into an existing taxonomy (i.e., ''seed''), with the most important step being the selection of appropriate positions for each query.
Enormous efforts have been made by exploring the seed's structure.
However, existing approaches are deficient in their mining of structural information in two ways: poor modeling of the hierarchical semantics and failure to capture directionality of is-a relation.
This paper seeks to address these issues by explicitly denoting each node as the combination of inherited feature (i.e., structural part) and incremental feature (i.e., supplementary part).
Specifically, the inherited feature originates from ''parent'' nodes and is weighted by an inheritance factor.
With this node representation, the hierarchy of semantics in taxonomies (i.e., the inheritance and accumulation of features from ''parent'' to ''child'') could be embodied.
Additionally, based on this representation, the directionality of is-a relation could be easily translated into the irreversible inheritance of features.
Inspired by the Darmois-Skitovich Theorem, we implement this irreversibility by a non-Gaussian constraint on the supplementary feature.
A log-likelihood learning objective is further utilized to optimize the proposed model (dubbed DNG), whereby the required non-Gaussianity is also theoretically ensured.
Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets verify the superiority of DNG relative to several strong baselines.

DNG: Taxonomy Expansion by Exploring the Intrinsic Directed Structure on Non-Gaussian Space

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has attracted a surge of attention due to its superior performance for learning node/graph representations without labels. However, in practice, the underlying class distribution of unlabeled nodes for the given graph is usually imbalanced. This highly imbalanced class distribution inevitably deteriorates the quality of learned node representations in GCL. Indeed, we empirically find that most state-of-the-art GCL methods cannot obtain discriminative representations and exhibit poor performance on imbalanced node classification. Motivated by this observation, we propose a principled GCL framework on Imbalanced node classification (ImGCL), which automatically and adaptively balances the representations learned from GCL without labels. Specifically, we first introduce the online clustering based progressively balanced sampling (PBS) method with theoretical rationale, which balances the training sets based on pseudo-labels obtained from learned representations in GCL. We then develop the node centrality based PBS method to better preserve the intrinsic structure of graphs, by upweighting the important nodes of the given graph. Extensive experiments on multiple imbalanced graph datasets and imbalanced settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which significantly improves the performance of the recent state-of-the-art GCL methods. Further experimental ablations and analyses show that the ImGCL framework consistently improves the representation quality of nodes in under-represented (tail) classes.

ImGCL: Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Imbalanced Node Classification

Most domain adaptation methods for machine reading comprehension (MRC) use a pre-trained question-answer (QA) construction model to generate pseudo QA pairs for MRC transfer. Such a process will inevitably introduce mismatched pairs (i.e., Noisy Correspondence) due to i) the unavailable QA pairs in target documents, and ii) the domain shift during applying the QA construction model to the target domain. Undoubtedly, the noisy correspondence will degenerate the performance of MRC, which however is neglected by existing works. To solve such an untouched problem, we propose to construct QA pairs by additionally using the dialogue related to the documents, as well as a new domain adaptation method for MRC. Specifically, we propose Robust Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension (RMRC) method which consists of an answer extractor (AE), a question selector (QS), and an MRC model. Specifically, RMRC filters out the irrelevant answers by estimating the correlation to the document via the AE, and extracts the questions by fusing the candidate questions in multiple rounds of dialogue chats via the QS. With the extracted QA pairs, MRC is fine-tuned and provides the feedback to optimize the QS through a novel reinforced self-training method. Thanks to the optimization of the QS, our method will greatly alleviate the noisy correspondence problem caused by the domain shift. To the best of our knowledge, this could be the first study to reveal the influence of noisy correspondence in domain adaptation MRC models and show a feasible solution to achieve the robustness against the mismatched pairs. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Robust Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) possess powerful prediction capability thanks to their over-parameterization design, although the large model complexity makes it suffer from noisy supervision. Recent approaches seek to eliminate impacts from noisy labels by excluding data points with large loss values and showing promising performance. However, these approaches usually associate with significant computation overhead and lack of theoretical analysis. In this paper, we adopt a perspective to connect label noise with epistemic uncertainty. We design a simple, efficient, and theoretically provable robust algorithm named USDNL for DNNs with uncertainty-based Dropout. Specifically, we estimate the epistemic uncertainty of the network prediction after early training through single Dropout. The epistemic uncertainty is then combined with cross-entropy loss to select the clean samples during training. Finally, we theoretically show the equivalence of replacing selection loss with single cross-entropy loss. Compared to existing small-loss selection methods, USDNL features its simplicity for practical scenarios by only applying Dropout to a standard network, while still achieving high model accuracy. Extensive empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that USDNL outperforms other methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/kovelxyz/USDNL.

USDNL: Uncertainty-based Single Dropout in Noisy Label Learning

Methods to identify cause-effect relationships currently mostly assume the variables to be scalar random variables. However, in many fields the objects of interest are vectors or groups of scalar variables.
We present a new constraint-based non-parametric approach for inferring the causal relationship between two vector-valued random variables from observational data. Our method employs sparsity estimates of directed and undirected graphs and is based on two new principles for groupwise causal reasoning that we justify theoretically in Pearl's graphical model-based causality framework. Our theoretical considerations are complemented by two new causal discovery algorithms for causal interactions between two random vectors which find the correct causal direction reliably in simulations even if interactions are nonlinear. We evaluate our methods empirically and compare them to other state-of-the-art techniques. 

Vector causal inference between two groups of variables

A key to knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is to choose a proper representation space, e.g., point-wise Euclidean space and complex vector space. In this paper, we propose a unified perspective of embedding and introduce uncertainty into KGE from the view of group theory. Our model can incorporate existing models (i.e., generality), ensure the computation is tractable (i.e., efficiency) and enjoy the expressive power of complex random variables (i.e., expressiveness). The core idea is that we embed entities/relations as elements of a symmetric group, i.e., permutations of a set. Permutations of different sets can reflect different properties of embedding. And the group operation of symmetric groups is easy to compute. In specific, we show that the embedding of many existing models, point vectors, can be seen as elements of a symmetric group. To reflect uncertainty, we first embed entities/relations as permutations of a set of random variables. A permutation can transform a simple random variable into a complex random variable for greater expressiveness, called a normalizing flow. We then define scoring functions by measuring the similarity of two normalizing flows, namely NFE. We construct several instantiating models and prove that they are able to learn logical rules. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing uncertainty and our model. The code is available at https://github.com/changyi7231/NFE.

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RobustLoc: Robust Camera Pose Regression in Challenging Driving Environments

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