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Dominance breaking is shown to be an effective technique to improve the solving speed of Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs).  The paper proposes separate techniques to generalize and make more efficient the nogood generation phase of an automated dominance breaking framework by Lee and Zhong&#39;s. The first contribution is in giving conditions that allow skipping the checking of non-efficiently checkable constraints and yet still produce sufficient useful nogoods, thus opening up possibilities to apply the technique on COPs that were previously impractical. The second contribution identifies and avoids the generation of dominance breaking nogoods that are both logically and propagation redundant.  The nogood generation model is strengthened using the notion of Common Assignment Elimination to avoid generation of nogoods that are subsumed by other nogoods, thus reducing the search space substantially. Extensive experimentation confirms the benefits of the new proposals.

AAAI 2021

Towards More Practical and Efficient Automatic Dominance Breaking

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. 

Dominance breaking is shown to be an effective technique to improve the solving speed of Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs).  The paper proposes separate techniques to generalize and make more efficient the nogood generation phase of an automated dominance breaking framework by Lee and Zhong's. The first contribution is in giving conditions that allow skipping the checking of non-efficiently checkable constraints and yet still produce sufficient useful nogoods, thus opening up possibilities to apply the technique on COPs that were previously impractical. The second contribution identifies and avoids the generation of dominance breaking nogoods that are both logically and propagation redundant.  The nogood generation model is strengthened using the notion of Common Assignment Elimination to avoid generation of nogoods that are subsumed by other nogoods, thus reducing the search space substantially. Extensive experimentation confirms the benefits of the new proposals.

technical paper

The prosperous development of social e-commerce has spawned diverse recommendation demands, and accompanied a new recommendation paradigm, share recommendation. Signiï¬cantly different from traditional binary recommendations (e.g., item recommendation and friend recommendation), share recommendation models ternary interactions among ã€ˆ User, Item, Friend ã€‰ , which aims to recommend a most likely friend to a user who would like to share a speciï¬c item, progressively becoming an indispensable service in social e-commerce. Seamlessly integrating the social relations and purchase behaviours, share recommendation improves user stickiness and monetizes the user inï¬‚uence, meanwhile encountering three unique challenges: rich heterogeneous information, complex ternary interaction, and asymmetric share action. In this paper, we ï¬rst study the share recommendation problem and propose a heterogeneous graph neural network based share recommendation model, called HGSRec. Speciï¬cally, HGSRec delicately designs a tripartite heterogeneous GNNs to describe the multifold characteristics of users and items, and then dynamically fuses them via capturing potential ternary dependency with a dual co-attention mechanism, followed by a transitive triplet representation to depict the asymmetry of share action and predict whether share action happens. Ofï¬‚ine experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HGSRec with signiï¬cant improvements (11.7%-14.5%) over the state-of-the-arts, and online A/B testing on Taobao platform further demonstrates the high industrial practicability and stability of HGSRec.

Who You Would Like to Share With? A Study of Share Recommendation in Social E-Commerce

Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.

Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Medical Dialogue Generation

The current leading 6D object pose estimation methods rely heavily on annotated real data, which is highly costly to acquire. To overcome this, many works have proposed to introduce computer-generated synthetic data.
However, bridging the gap between the synthetic and real data remains a severe problem.
Images depicting different levels of realism/semantics usually have different transferability between the synthetic and real domains.
Inspired by this observation, we introduce an approach, SD-Pose, that explicitly decomposes the input image into multi-level semantic representations and then combines the merits of each representation to bridge the domain gap.
Our comprehensive analyses and experiments show that our semantic decomposition strategy can fully utilize the different domain similarities of different representations, thus allowing us to outperform the state of the art on modern 6D object pose datasets without accessing any real data during training.

SD-Pose: Semantic Decomposition for Cross-Domain 6D Object Pose Estimation

Human attention mechanisms often work in a top-down manner, yet it is not well explored in vision research. Here, we propose the Top-Down Attention Framework (TDAF) to capture top-down attentions, which can be easily adopted in most existing models. The designed Recursive Dual-Directional Nested Structure in it forms two sets of orthogonal paths, recursive and structural ones, where bottom-up spatial features and top-down attention features are extracted respectively. Such spatial and attention features are nested deeply, therefore, the proposed framework works in a mixed top-down and bottom-up manner. Empirical evidence shows that our TDAF can capture effective stratified attention information and boost performance. ResNet with TDAF achieves 2.0% improvements on ImageNet. For object detection, the performance is improved by 2.7% AP over FCOS. For pose estimation, TDAF improves the baseline by 1.6%. And for action recognition, the 3D-ResNet adopting TDAF achieves improvements of 1.7% accuracy.

TDAF: Top-Down Attention Framework for Vision Tasks

Cervical dysplasia diagnosis via visual investigation is a challenging problem. Recent approaches use deep learning techniques to extract features and require the downsampling of high-resolution cervical screening images to smaller sizes for training. Such a reduction may result in the loss of visual details that appear weakly and locally within a cervical image. To overcome this challenge, our work divides an image into patches and then represents it from patch features. We aggregate patch patterns into an image feature in a weighted manner by considering the patch--image label relation. The weights are visualized as a heatmap to explain where the diagnosis results come from. We further introduce a spatial regulator to guide the classifier to focus on the cervix region and to adjust the weight distribution, without requiring any manual annotations of the cervix region. A novel iterative algorithm is designed to refine the regulator, which is able to capture the variations in cervix center locations and shapes. Experiments on an 18-year real-world dataset indicate a minimal of 3.47%, 4.59%, 8.54% improvements over the state-of-the-art in accuracy, F1, and recall measures, respectively.

A Spatial Regulated Patch-Wise Approach for Cervical Dysplasia Diagnosis

To model the context history in multi-turn conversations has become a critical step towards a better understanding of the user query in question answering systems. To utilize the context history, most existing studies treat the whole context as input, which will inevitably face the following two challenges. First, modeling a long history can be costly as it requires more computation resources. Second, the long context history consists of a lot of irrelevant information that makes it difficult to model appropriate information relevant to the user query. To alleviate these problems, we propose a reinforcement learning based method to capture and backtrack the related conversation history to boost model performance in this paper. Our method seeks to automatically backtrack the history information with the implicit feedback from the model performance. We further consider both immediate and delayed rewards to guide the reinforced backtracking policy. Extensive experiments on a large conversational question answering dataset show that the proposed method can help to alleviate the problems arising from longer context history. Meanwhile, experiments show that the method yields better performance than other strong baselines, and the actions made by the method are insightful.

Reinforced History Backtracking for Conversational Question Answering

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been successfully applied to many real-life problems. However, the huge memory cost of deep CNN models poses a great challenge of deploying them on memory-constrained devices (e.g., mobile phones). One popular way to reduce the memory cost of deep CNN model is to train binary CNN where the weights in convolution filters are either 1 or -1 and therefore each weight can be efficiently stored using a single bit. However, the compression ratio of existing binary CNN models is upper bounded by  âˆ¼ 32. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method to compress deep CNN model by stacking low-dimensional binary convolution filters. Our proposed method approximates a standard convolution filter by selecting and stacking filters from a set of low-dimensional binary convolution filters. This set of low-dimensional binary convolution filters is shared across all filters for a given convolution layer. Therefore, our method will achieve much larger compression ratio than binary CNN models. In order to train our proposed model, we have theoretically shown that our proposed model is equivalent to select and stack intermediate feature maps generated by low-dimensional binary filters. Therefore,  our proposed model can be efficiently trained using the split-transform-merge strategy. We also provide detailed analysis of the memory and computation cost of our model in model inference. We compared the proposed method with other five popular model compression techniques on two benchmark datasets. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed method achieves much higher compression ratio than existing methods while maintains comparable accuracy.

Compressing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks by Stacking Low-Dimensional Binary Convolution Filters

In decision making tasks under uncertainty, humans display characteristic biases in seeking, integrating, and acting upon information relevant to the task. Here, we reexamine data from previous carefully designed experiments, collected at scale, that measured and catalogued these biases in aggregate form. We design deep learning
models that replicate these biases in aggregate, while also capturing individual variation in behavior. A key finding of our work is that paucity of data collected from each individual subject can be overcome by sampling large numbers of subjects from the population, while still capturing individual differences. We predict human behavior with high accuracy without making any assumptions about task goals, reward structure, or individual biases, thus providing a model-agnostic fit to human behavior in the task. Such an approach can sidestep potential limitations in modeler-specified inductive biases, and has implications for computational modeling of human cognitive function in general, and of human-AI interfaces in particular.

Model-Agnostic Fits for Understanding Information Seeking Patterns in Humans

Existing person re-identification (Re-ID) methods mostly prepare all training data in advance, while real-world Re-ID data are inherently captured over time or from different locations, which requires a model to be incrementally generalised from sequential learning of piecemeal new data without forgetting what is already learned. In this work, we call this lifelong person Re-ID, characterised by solving a problem of unseen class identification subject to continuous new domain generalisation and adaptation with class imbalanced learning. We formulate a new Generalising without Forgetting method (GwFReID) for lifelong Re-ID and design a comprehensive learning objective that accounts for classification coherence, distribution coherence and representation coherence in a unified framework. This design helps to simultaneously learn new information, distil old knowledge and solve class imbalance, which enables GwFReID to incrementally improve model generalisation without catastrophic forgetting of what is already learned. Extensive experiments on eight Re-ID benchmarks, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet show the superiority of GwFReID over the state-of-the-art methods.

Generalizing without Forgetting for Lifelong Person Re-Identification

One of the main purposes of deep metric learning is to construct an embedding space that has well-generalized embeddings on both seen (training) classes and unseen (test) classes. Most existing works have tried to achieve this using different types of metric objectives and hard sample mining strategies with given training data. However, learning with only the training data can be overfitted to the seen classes, leading to the lack of generalization capability on unseen classes. To address this problem, we propose a simple regularizer called Proxy Synthesis that exploits synthetic classes for stronger generalization in deep metric learning. The proposed method generates synthetic embeddings and proxies that work as synthetic classes, and they mimic unseen classes when computing proxy-based losses. Proxy Synthesis derives an embedding space considering class relations and smooth decision boundaries for robustness on unseen classes. Our method is applicable to any proxy-based losses, including softmax and its variants. Extensive experiments on four famous benchmarks in image retrieval tasks demonstrate that Proxy Synthesis significantly boosts the performance of proxy-based losses and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our implementation is available at github.com/navervision/proxy-synthesis.

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