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Cross entropy loss has served as the main objective function for classification-based tasks. Widely deployed for learning neural network classifiers, it shows both effectiveness and a probabilistic interpretation.  Recently, after the success of self supervised contrastive representation learning methods, supervised contrastive methods have been proposed to learn representations and have shown superior and more robust performance, compared to solely training with cross entropy loss. However, cross entropy loss is still needed to train the final classification layer. In this work, we investigate the possibility of learning both the representation and the classifier using one objective function that combines the robustness of contrastive learning and the probabilistic interpretation of  cross entropy loss. First,  we revisit a previously proposed contrastive-based objective function that approximates cross entropy loss and present a simple extension to learn  the classifier jointly. Second, we propose a new version of the supervised contrastive training that learns jointly the parameters of the classifier and the backbone of the network. We empirically show that these proposed objective functions demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and show a significant improvement over the standard cross entropy loss with more training stability and robustness in various challenging settings.

AAAI 2023

Contrastive Classification and Representation Learning with Probabilistic Interpretation

cross entropy loss

contrastive learning

classification

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

We present Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field (PDRF), a novel approach to efficiently reconstruct high quality radiance fields from blurry images. While current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) scene reconstruction methods achieve photo-realistic renderings from clean source views, their performances suffer when the source views are affected by blur, which is commonly observed in the wild. Previous deblurring methods either do not account for 3D geometry, or are computationally intense. To addresses these issues, PDRF uses a progressively deblurring scheme for radiance field modeling, which can accurately model blur with 3D scene context. PDRF further uses an efficient importance sampling scheme and results in fast scene optimization. We perform extensive experiments and show that PDRF is 15X faster than previous SoTA while achieving better performance on both synthetic and real scenes.

PDRF: Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field for Fast Scene Reconstruction from Blurry Images

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) aim to predict the next item that users will consume, by modeling the user interests within their item sequences. While most existing SRSs focus on a single type of user behavior, only a few pay attention to multi-behavior sequences, although they are very common in real-world scenarios. It is challenging to effectively capture the user interests within multi-behavior sequences, because the information about user interests is entangled throughout the sequences in complex relationships. To this end, we first address the characteristics of multi-behavior sequences that should be considered in SRSs, and then propose novel methods for Dynamic Multi-behavior Sequence modeling named DyMuS, which is a light version, and DyMuS+, which is an improved version, considering the characteristics. DyMuS first encodes each behavior sequence independently, and then combines the encoded sequences using dynamic routing, which dynamically integrates information required in the final result from among many candidates, based on correlations between the sequences. DyMuS+, furthermore, applies the dynamic routing even to encoding each behavior sequence to further capture the correlations at item-level. Moreover, we release a new, large and up-to-date dataset for multi-behavior recommendation. Our experiments on DyMuS and DyMuS+ show their superiority and the significance of capturing the characteristics of multi-behavior sequences.

Dynamic Multi-Behavior Sequence Modeling for Next Item Recommendation

The recently proposed Vision transformers (ViTs) have shown
very impressive empirical performance in various computer vision tasks,
and they are viewed as an important type of foundation model. However, ViTs are typically constructed with large-scale sizes, which then
severely hinder their potential deployment in many practical resources constrained applications. To mitigate this challenging problem, structured pruning is a promising solution to compress model size and enable
practical efficiency. However, unlike its current popularity for CNNs and
RNNs, structured pruning for ViT models is little explored.
In this paper, we propose GOHSP, a unified framework of Graph and
Optimization-based Structured Pruning for ViT models. We first develop
a graph-based ranking for measuring the importance of attention heads,
and the extracted importance information is further integrated to an
optimization-based procedure to impose the heterogeneous structured
sparsity patterns on the ViT models. Experimental results show that
our proposed GOHSP demonstrates excellent compression performance.
On CIFAR-10 dataset, our approach can bring 40% parameters reduction
with no accuracy loss for ViT-Small model. On ImageNet dataset, with
30% and 35% sparsity ratio for DeiT-Tiny and DeiT-Small models, our
approach achieves 1.65% and 0.76% accuracy increase over the existing
structured pruning methods, respectively.

GOHSP: A Unified Framework of Graph and Optimization-based Heterogeneous Structured Pruning for Vision Transformer

It is known that neural networks have the problem of being over-confident when directly using the output label distribution to generate uncertainty measures. Existing methods mainly resolve this issue by retraining the entire model to impose the uncertainty quantification capability so that the learned model can achieve desired performance in accuracy and uncertainty prediction simultaneously. However, training the model from scratch is computationally expensive, and a trade-off might exist between prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification. To this end, we consider a more practical post-hoc uncertainty learning setting, where a well-trained base model is given, and we focus on the uncertainty quantification task at the second stage of training. We propose a novel Bayesian uncertainty learning approach using the Dirichlet meta-model, which is effective and computationally efficient. Our proposed method requires no additional training data and is flexible enough to quantify different uncertainties and easily adapt to different application settings, including out-of-domain data detection, misclassification detection, and trustworthy transfer learning. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed meta-model approach's flexibility and superior empirical performance on these applications over multiple representative image classification benchmarks.

Post-hoc Uncertainty Learning using a Dirichlet Meta-Model

Subsampling algorithms are a natural approach to reduce data size before fitting models on massive datasets. In recent years, several works have proposed methods for subsampling rows from a data matrix while maintaining relevant information for classification. While these works are supported by theory and limited experiments, to date there has not been a comprehensive evaluation of these methods. In our work, we directly compare multiple methods for logistic regression drawn from the coreset and optimal subsampling literature and discover inconsistencies in their effectiveness. In many cases, methods do not outperform simple uniform subsampling.

A Coreset Learning Reality Check

We present a simple and yet effective interpolation-based regularization technique, aiming to improve the generalization of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on supervised graph classification. We leverage Mixup, an effective regularizer for vision, where random sample pairs and their labels are interpolated to create synthetic images for training. Unlike images with grid-like samples, graphs have arbitrary structure and topology, which can be very sensitive to any modification in terms of a graph's semantic meanings. This posts two unanswered questions:   Can we directly mixing up a pair of graph inputs?   If so, how well does such mixing strategy regularize the learning of GNNs?  To answer these two questions, we propose ifMixup, which adds dummy nodes to make two graphs have the same input size and then directly interpolates the two graph inputs. We empirically show that such simple mixing strategy can effectively regularize the graph classification learning, resulting in superior predictive accuracy to popular graph augmentation baselines. 

Interpolating Graph Pair to Regularize Graph Classification

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) proposes to solve difficult tasks by performing decision-making and control at successively higher levels of temporal abstraction. However, off-policy HRL often suffers from the problem of a non-stationary high-level policy since the low-level policy is constantly changing. In this paper, we propose a novel HRL approach for mitigating the non-stationarity by adversarially enforcing the high-level policy to generate subgoals compatible with the current instantiation of the low-level policy. In practice, the adversarial learning is implemented by training a simple state conditioned discriminator network concurrently with the high-level policy which determines the compatibility level of subgoals. Comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms shows that our approach improves both learning efficiency and performance in challenging continuous control tasks.

State-Conditioned Adversarial Subgoal Generation

Exploration into quantum machine learning has grown
tremendously in recent years due to the ability of quantum
computers to speed up classical programs. However, these ef-
forts have yet to solve unsupervised similarity detection tasks
due to the challenge of porting them to run on quantum com-
puters. To overcome this challenge, we propose SLIQ, the
first open-sourced work for resource-efficient quantum sim-
ilarity detection networks, built with practical and effective
quantum learning and variance-reducing algorithms.

SLIQ: Quantum Image Similarity Networks on Noisy Quantum Computers

Structural topology optimization, which aims to find the optimal physical structure that maximizes mechanical performance, is vital in engineering design applications in aerospace, mechanical, and civil engineering. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have recently emerged as a popular alternative to traditional iterative topology optimization methods. However, these models are often difficult to train, have limited generalizability, and due to their goal of mimicking optimal structures, neglect manufacturability and performance objectives like mechanical compliance. We propose TopoDiff - a conditional diffusion-model-based architecture to perform performance-aware and manufacturability-aware topology optimization that overcomes these issues. Our model introduces a surrogate model-based guidance strategy that actively favors structures with low compliance and good manufacturability. Our method significantly outperforms a state-of-art conditional GAN by reducing the average error on physical performance by a factor of eight and by producing eleven times fewer infeasible samples.
By introducing diffusion models to topology optimization, we show that conditional diffusion models have the ability to outperform GANs in engineering design synthesis applications too. Our work also suggests a general framework for engineering optimization problems using diffusion models and external performance with constraint-aware guidance.
We publicly share the data, code, and trained models here: https://decode.mit.edu/projects/topodiff/.

Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Topology Optimization

In the context of verification of data-aware processes, a formal approach based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) has been considered to verify parameterised safety properties. This approach requires a combination of model-theoretic notions and algorithmic techniques based on backward reachability. We introduce here Ontology-Based Processes, which are a variant of one of the most investigated models in this spectrum, namely simple artifact systems (SASs), where, instead of managing a database, we operate over a description logic (DL) ontology.  We prove that when the DL is expressed in (a slight extension of) RDFS, it enjoys suitable model-theoretic properties, and that by relying on such DL we can define Ontology-Based Processes to which backward reachability can still be applied.  Relying on these results we are able to show that in this novel setting, verification of safety properties is decidable in PSPACE.


Contrastive Classification and Representation Learning with Probabilistic Interpretation

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PDRF: Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field for Fast Scene Reconstruction from Blurry Images

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