United States

In this paper we tackle the challenge of making the stochastic coordinate descent algorithm differentially private. 
Compared to the classical gradient descent algorithm where updates operate on a single model vector and controlled noise addition to this vector suffices to hide critical information about individuals, stochastic coordinate descent crucially relies on keeping auxiliary information in memory during training. 
This auxiliary information provides an additional privacy leak and poses the major challenge addressed in this work. 
Driven by the insight that under independent noise addition, the consistency of the auxiliary information holds in expectation, we present DP-SCD, the first differentially private stochastic coordinate descent algorithm. We analyze our new method theoretically and argue that decoupling and parallelizing coordinate updates is essential for its utility. On the empirical side we demonstrate competitive performance against the popular stochastic gradient descent alternative (DP-SGD) while requiring significantly less tuning.

AAAI 2021

Differentially Private Stochastic Coordinate Descent

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

technical paper

Many real-world classification problems often have classes with very few labeled training samples. Moreover, all possible classes may not be initially available for training, and may be given incrementally. Deep learning models need to deal with this two-fold problem in order to perform well in real-life situations. In this paper, we propose a novel Few-Shot Lifelong Learning (FSLL) method that enables deep learning models to perform lifelong/continual learning on few-shot data. Our method selects very few parameters from the model for training every new set of classes instead of training the full model. This helps in preventing overfitting. We choose the few parameters from the model in such a way that only the currently unimportant parameters get selected. By keeping the important parameters in the model intact, our approach minimizes catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, we minimize the cosine similarity between the new and the old class prototypes in order to maximize their separation, thereby improving the classification performance. We also show that integrating our method with self-supervision improves the model performance significantly. We experimentally show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods on the miniImageNet, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200 datasets. Specifically, we outperform the state-of-the-art method by an absolute margin of 19.27% for the CUB dataset.

Few-Shot Lifelong Learning

Recently, a non-local (NL) operation has been designed as the central building block for deep-net models to capture long-range dependencies (Wang et al. 2018). Despite its excellent performance, it does not consider the interaction between positions across channels and layers, which is crucial in fine-grained classification tasks. To address the limitation, we target at singer identification (SID) task and present a fully generalized non-local (FGNL) module to help identify fine-grained vocals. Specifically, we first propose a FGNL operation, which extends the NL operation to explore the correlations between positions across channels and layers. Secondly, we further apply a depth-wise convolution with Gaussian kernel in the FGNL operation to smooth feature maps for better generalization. More, we modify the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) scheme into the FGNL module to adaptively emphasize correlated feature channels to help uncover relevant feature responses and eventually the target singer. Evaluating results on the benchmark artist20 dataset shows that the FGNL module significantly improves the accuracy of the deep-net models in SID. Codes are available at https://github.com/ian-k-1217/Fully-Generalized-Non-Local-Network.

Positions, Channels, and Layers: Fully Generalized Non-Local Network for Singer Identification

Unsupervised training of deep representations has demonstrated remarkable potentials in mitigating the prohibitive expenses on annotating labeled data recently. Among them is predicting transformations as a pretext task to self-train representations, which has shown great potentials for unsupervised learning. However, existing approaches in this category learn representations by either treating a discrete set of transformations as separate classes, or using the Euclidean distance as the metric to minimize the errors between transformations. None of them has been dedicated to revealing the vital role of the geometry of transformation groups in learning representations. Indeed, an image must continuously transform along the curved manifold of a transformation group rather than through a straight line in the forbidden ambient Euclidean space. This suggests the use of geodesic distance to minimize the errors between the estimated and groundtruth transformations. Particularly, we focus on homographies, a general group of planar transformations containing the Euclidean, similarity and affine transformations as its special cases. To avoid an explicit computing of intractable Riemannian logarithm, we project homographies onto an alternative group of rotation transformations SR(3) with a tractable form of geodesic distance. Experiments demonstrate the proposed approach to Auto-Encoding Transformations exhibits superior performances on a variety of recognition problems.

Auto-Encoding Transformations in Reparameterized Lie Groups for Unsupervised Learning

The question of conditional inference, i.e., of which conditional sentences of the form ``if A then, normally, B'' should follow from a set KB of such sentences, has been one of the classic questions of AI, with several well-known solutions proposed. Perhaps the most notable is the rational closure construction of Lehmann and Magidor, under which the set of inferred conditionals forms a rational consequence relation, i.e., satisfies all the rules of preferential reasoning, *plus* Rational Monotonicity. However, this last named rule is not universally accepted, and other researchers have advocated working within the larger class of *disjunctive* consequence relations, which satisfy the weaker requirement of Disjunctive Rationality. While there are convincing arguments that the rational closure forms the ``simplest'' rational consequence relation extending a given set of conditionals, the question of what is the simplest *disjunctive* consequence relation has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a solution to this question and explore some of its properties.

Conditional Inference under Disjunctive Rationality

We begin with the hypothesis that a model must be able to understand individual objects and relationships between objects in order to generate complex scenes with multiple objects well. Our layout-to-image-generation method, which we call Object-Centric Generative Adversarial Network (or OC-GAN), relies on a novel Scene-Graph Similarity Module (SGSM). The SGSM learns representations of the spatial relationships between objects in the scene, which lead to our model's improved layout-fidelity. We also propose changes to the conditioning mechanism of the generator that enhance its object instance-awareness. Apart from improving image quality, our contributions mitigate two failure modes in previous approaches: (1) spurious objects being generated without corresponding bounding boxes in the layout, and (2) overlapping bounding boxes in the layout leading to merged objects in images. Extensive quantitative evaluation and ablation studies demonstrate the impact of our contributions, with our model outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches on both the COCO-Stuff and Visual Genome datasets. Finally, we address an important limitation of evaluation metrics used in previous works by introducing SceneFID -- an object-centric adaptation of the popular FrÃ©chet Inception Distance metric, that is better suited for multi-object images.

Object-Centric Image Generation from Layouts

Occluded person re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging task as different human parts may become invisible in cluttered scenes, making it hard to match person images of different identities. Most existing methods address this challenge by aligning spatial features of body parts according to semantic information (e.g. human poses) or feature similarities but this approach is complicated and sensitive to noises. This paper presents Matching on Sets (MoS), a novel method that positions occluded person re-ID as a set matching task without requiring spatial alignment. MoS encodes a person image by a pattern set as represented by a `global vectorâ€™ with each element capturing one specific visual pattern, and it introduces Jaccard distance as a metric to compute the distance between pattern sets and measure image similarity. To enable Jaccard distance over continuous real numbers, we employ minimization and maximization to approximate the operations of intersection and union, respectively. In addition, we design a Jaccard triplet loss that enhances the pattern discrimination and allows to embed set matching into deep neural networks for end-to-end training. In the inference stage, we introduce a conflict penalty mechanism that detects mutually exclusive patterns in the pattern union of image pairs and decreases their similarities accordingly. Extensive experiments over three widely used datasets (Market1501, DukeMTMC and Occluded-DukeMTMC) show that MoS achieves superior re-ID performance. Additionally, it is tolerant of occlusions and outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins for Occluded-DukeMTMC.

Matching on Sets: Conquer Occluded Person Re-Identification Without Alignment

Many systems proposed for the implementation of ethical reasoning involve an encoding of user values as a set of rules or a model.  We consider the question of how changes of context affect these encodings.
We propose the use of a reasoning cycle, in which information about the ethical reasoner's context is imported in a logical form, and we propose that context-specific aspects of an ethical encoding be prefaced by a guard formula.  This guard formula should evaluate to true when the reasoner is in the appropriate context and the relevant parts of the reasoner's rule set or model should be updated accordingly.  This architecture allows techniques for the model-checking of agent-based autonomous systems to be used to verify that all contexts respect key stakeholder values.  We implement this framework using the hybrid ethical reasoning agents system (HERA) and the model-checking agent programming languages (MCAPL) framework.

Verifiable Machine Ethics in Changing Contexts

The significant progress on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has facilitated realistic single-object image generation based on language input. However, complex-scene generation (with various interactions among multiple objects) still suffers from messy layouts and object distortions, due to diverse configurations in layouts and appearances. Prior methods are mostly object-driven and ignore their inter-relations that play a significant role in complex-scene images. This work explores relationship-aware complex-scene image generation, where multiple objects are inter-related as a scene graph. With the help of relationships, we propose three major updates in the generation framework. First, reasonable spatial layouts are inferred by jointly considering the semantics and relationships among objects. Compared to standard location regression, we show relative scales and distances serve a more reliable target. Second, since the relations between objects have significantly influenced an object's appearance, we design a relation-guided generator to generate objects reflecting their relationships. Third, a novel scene graph discriminator is proposed to guarantee the consistency between the generated image and the input scene graph. Our method tends to synthesize plausible layouts and objects, respecting the interplay of multiple objects in an image. Experimental results on Visual Genome and HICO-DET datasets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms prior arts in terms of IS and FID metrics. Based on our user study and visual inspection, our method is more effective in generating logical layout and appearance for complex-scenes.

Exploiting Relationship for Complex-Scene Image Generation

Human language is ambiguous, with intended meanings recovered via pragmatic reasoning in context. Such reliance on context is essential for the efficiency of human communication. Programming languages, in stark contrast, are defined by unambiguous grammars. In this work, we aim to make programming languages more concise by allowing programmers to utilize a controlled level of ambiguity. Specifically, we allow single-character abbreviations for common keywords and identifiers. Our system first proposes a set of strings that can be abbreviated by the user. Using only 100 abbreviations, we observe that a large dataset of Python code can be compressed by 15%, a number that can be improved even further by specializing the abbreviations to a particular code base. We then use a contextualized sequence-to-sequence model to rank potential expansions of inputs that include abbreviations. In an offline reconstruction task our model achieves accuracies ranging from 93% to 99%, depending on the programming language and user settings. The model is small enough to run on a commodity CPU in real-time. We evaluate the usability of our system in a user study, integrating it in Microsoft VSCode, a popular code text editor. We observe that our system performs well and is complementary to traditional autocomplete features.

Pragmatic Code Autocomplete

When describing an image, reading text in the visual scene is crucial to understand the key information. Recent work explores the TextCaps task, i.e. image captioning with reading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens, which requires models to read text and cover them in generated captions. Existing approaches fail to generate accurate descriptions because of their (1) poor reading ability; (2) inability to choose the crucial words among all extracted OCR tokens; (3) repetition of words in predicted captions. To this end, we propose a Confidence-aware Non-repetitive Multimodal Transformers (CNMT) to tackle the above challenges. Our CNMT consists of a reading, a reasoning and a generation modules, in which Reading Module employs better OCR systems to enhance text reading ability and a confidence embedding to select the most noteworthy tokens. To address the issue of word redundancy in captions, our Generation Module includes a repetition mask to avoid predicting repeated word in captions. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on TextCaps dataset, improving from 81.0 to 93.0 in CIDEr. Our source code is publicly available.

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