United States

Data augmentation is one of the most effective ways to stabilize learning by improving the generalization of machine-learning models. In recent years, automatic data augmentation methods, such as AutoAugment or Fast AutoAugment have been attracting attention; and these methods improved the results of image classification and object detection tasks. However, several problems remain. Most notably, a larger training dataset requires higher computational costs. When searching with a small dataset in an attempt to determine the data augmentation approach, the true data space and sampling data space do not fully correspond with each other, thereby causing the generalization performance to deteriorate. Moreover, in the existing automatic augmentation methods, the search phase is often dominated by an exceptional sub-policy, which results in a loss of diversity of operations. In this study, we solved these problems by introducing evolutionary computation to previous methods. As mentioned earlier, maintaining diversity is essential. Therefore, we adopted the thermodynamical genetic algorithm (TDGA), which can control the population diversity with a specific genetic operator, known as the thermodynamical selection rule. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, computational experiments were conducted using two benchmark datasets, CIFAR-10 and SVHN, as examples. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain various useful augmentation sub-policies for the problems while reducing the computational cost.

AAAI 2021

Evolutionary Approach for Autoaugment Using the Thermodynamical Genetic Algorithm

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

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. 

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive gains in image synthesis. GAN inversion was recently studied to understand and utilize the knowledge it learns, where a real image is inverted back to a latent code and can thus be reconstructed by the generator. Although increasing the number of latent codes can improve inversion quality to a certain extent, we find that important details may still be neglected when performing feature composition over all the intermediate feature channels. To address this issue, we propose a Prior multi-Subspace Feature Composition (PmSFC) approach for high-fidelity inversion. Considering that the intermediate features are highly correlated with each other, we incorporate a self-expressive layer in the generator to discover meaningful subspaces. In this case, the features at a channel can be expressed as a linear combination of those at other channels in the same subspace. We perform feature composition separately in the subspaces. The semantic differences between them benefit the inversion quality, since the inversion process is regularized based on different aspects of semantics. In the experiments, the superior performance of PmSFC demonstrates the effectiveness of prior subspaces in facilitating GAN inversion together with extended applications in visual manipulation.

High Fidelity GAN Inversion via Prior Multi-Subspace Feature Composition

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout the natural and social sciences, ranging from complex drug molecules to artificial neural networks. Evaluating their functional properties, e.g., drug effectiveness and prediction accuracy, is usually costly in terms of time, money, energy, or environment, becoming a bottleneck for the graph generation task. In this work, from the perspective of saving cost, we propose a novel Cost-Aware Graph Generation (CAGG) framework to generate graphs with optimal properties at as low cost as possible. By introducing a robust Bayesian graph neural network as the surrogate model and a goal-oriented training scheme for the generation model, the CAGG can approach the real expensive evaluation function and generate search space close to the optimal property, to avoid unnecessary evaluations. Intensive experiments conducted on two challenging real-world applications, including molecular discovery and neural architecture search, demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability. The results show that it can generate the optimal graphs and reduce the evaluation costs significantly compared to the state-of-the-art.

Cost-Aware Graph Generation: A Deep Bayesian Optimization Approach

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising machine learning paradigm that enables the analyzer to train a model without collecting users' raw data. To ensure users' privacy, differentially private federated learning has been intensively studied. The existing works are mainly based on the curator model or local model of differential privacy. However, both of them have pros and cons. The curator model allows greater accuracy but requires a trusted analyzer.  In the local model where users randomize local data before sending them to the analyzer, a trusted analyzer is not required but the accuracy is limited. In this work, by leveraging the \textit{privacy amplification} effect in the recently proposed shuffle model of differential privacy, we achieve the best of two worlds, i.e., accuracy in the curator model and strong privacy without relying on any trusted party. We first propose an FL framework in the shuffle model and a simple protocol (SS-Simple) extended from existing work. We find that SS-Simple only provides an insufficient privacy amplification effect in FL since the dimension of the model parameter is quite large. To solve this challenge, we propose an enhanced protocol (SS-Double) to increase the privacy amplification effect by subsampling. Furthermore, for boosting the utility when the model size is greater than the user population, we propose an advanced protocol (SS-Topk) with gradient sparsification techniques. We also provide theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations of the privacy amplification of the proposed protocols. Experiments on real-world dataset validate that SS-Topk improves the testing accuracy by 60.7% than the local model based FL. We highlight an observation that SS-Topk improves the accuracy by 33.94\% than the curator model based FL without any trusted party. Compared with non-private FL, our protocol SS-Topk only lose 1.48% accuracy under (2.348, 5e-6)-DP per epoch.

FLAME: Differentially Private Federated Learning in the Shuffle Model

Salient object location and segmentation are two different tasks in salient object detection (SOD). The former aims to globally find the most attractive objects in an image, whereas the latter can be achieved only using local regions that contain salient objects. However, previous methods mainly accomplish the two tasks simultaneously in a simple end-to-end manner, which leads to the ignorance of the differences between them. We assume that the human vision system orderly locates and segments objects, so we propose a novel progressive architecture with knowledge review network (PA-KRN) for SOD. It consists of three parts. (1) A coarse locating module (CLM) that uses body-attention label locates rough areas containing salient objects without boundary details. (2) An attention-based sampler highlights salient object regions with high resolution based on body-attention maps. (3) A fine segmenting module (FSM) finely segments salient objects. The networks applied in CLM and FSM are mainly based on our proposed knowledge review network (KRN) that utilizes the finest feature maps to reintegrate all previous layers, which can make up for the important information that is continuously diluted in the top-down path. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our single KRN can outperform state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our PA-KRN performs better and substantially surpasses the aforementioned methods.

Locate Globally, Segment Locally: A Progressive Architecture with Knowledge Review Network for Salient Object Detection

Continual relation extraction is an important task that focuses on extracting new facts incrementally from unstructured text. 
Given the sequential arrival order of the relations, this task is prone to two serious challenges, namely catastrophic forgetting and order-sensitivity. We propose a novel curriculum-meta learning method to tackle the above two challenges in continual relation extraction. We combine meta learning and curriculum learning to quickly adapt model parameters to a new task and to reduce interference of previously seen tasks on the current task. 
We design a novel relation representation learning method through the distribution of domain and range types of relations. 
Such representations are utilized to quantify the difficulty of tasks for the construction of curricula. Moreover, we also present novel difficulty-based metrics to quantitatively measure the extent of order-sensitivity of a given model, suggesting new ways to evaluate model robustness. 
Our comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques. 
The code is available at the anonymous GitHub repository: https://github.com/wutong8023/AAAI_CML.

Curriculum-Meta Learning for Order-Robust Continual Relation Extraction

In this paper, we propose a novel text-based talking-head video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity facial expressions and head motions in accordance with contextual sentiments as well as speech rhythm and pauses. To be specific, our framework consists of a speaker-independent stage and a speaker-specific stage. In the speaker-independent stage, we design three parallel networks to generate animation parameters of the mouth, upper face, and head from texts, separately. In the speaker-specific stage, we present a 3D face model guided attention network to synthesize videos tailored for different individuals. It takes the animation parameters as input and exploits an attention mask to manipulate facial expression changes for the input individuals. Furthermore, to better establish authentic correspondences between visual motions (i.e., facial expression changes and head movements) and audios, we leverage a high-accuracy motion capture dataset instead of relying on long videos of specific individuals. After attaining the visual and audio correspondences, we can effectively train our network in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves high-quality photo-realistic talking-head videos including various facial expressions and head motions according to speech rhythms and outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Write-a-Speaker: Text-Based Emotional and Rhythmic Talking-Head Generation

We present a method for learning dynamics of complex physical processes described by time-dependent nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). Our particular interest lies in extrapolating solutions in time beyond the range of temporal domain used in training. Our choice for a baseline method is physics-informed neural network (PINN) because the method parameterizes not only the solutions, but also the equations that describe the dynamics of physical processes. We demonstrate that PINN performs poorly on extrapolation tasks in many benchmark problems. To address this, we propose a novel method for better training PINN and demonstrate that our newly enhanced PINNs can accurately extrapolate solutions in time. Our method shows up to 72% smaller errors than state-of-the-art methods in terms of the standard L2-norm metric.

DPM: A Novel Training Method for Physics-Informed Neural Networks in Extrapolation

Goal recognition aims to recognize the set of candidate goals that are compatible with the observed behavior of an agent. In this paper, we develop a method based on the operator-counting framework that efficiently computes solutions that satisfy the observations and uses the information generated to solve goal recognition tasks. Our method reasons explicitly about both partial and noisy observations: estimating uncertainty for the former, and satisfying observations given the unreliability of the sensor for the latter. We evaluate our approach empirically over a large data set, analyzing its components on how each can impact the quality of the solutions. In general, our approach is superior to previous methods in terms of agreement ratio, accuracy, and spread. Finally, our approach paves the way for new research on combinatorial optimization to solve goal recognition tasks.

An LP-Based Approach for Goal Recognition as Planning

Many efficient algorithms have been designed to recover Nash equilibria of various classes of finite games. Special classes of continuous games with infinite strategy spaces, such as polynomial games, can be solved by semidefinite programming. In general, however, continuous games are not directly amenable to computational procedures. In this contribution, we develop an iterative strategy generation technique for finding a Nash equilibrium in a whole class of continuous two-person zero-sum games with compact strategy sets. The procedure, which is called the double oracle algorithm, has been successfully applied to large finite games in the past. We prove the convergence of the double oracle algorithm to a Nash equilibrium. Moreover, the algorithm is guaranteed to recover an approximate equilibrium in finitely-many steps. Our numerical experiments show that it outperforms fictitious play on several examples of games appearing in the literature. In particular, we provide a detailed analysis of experiments with a version of the continuous Colonel Blotto game.

Double Oracle Algorithm for Computing Equilibria in Continuous Games

Offline signature verification is a challenging issue that is widely used in various fields. Previous approaches model this task as a static feature matching or distance metric problem of two images. In this paper, we propose a novel Static-Dynamic Interaction Network (SDINet) model which introduces sequential representation into static signature images. A static signature image is converted to sequences by assuming pseudo dynamic processes in the static image. A static representation extracting deep features from signature images describes the global information of signatures. A dynamic representation extracting sequential features with LSTM networks characterizes the local information of signatures. A dynamic-to-static attention is learned from the sequences to
refine the static features. Through the static-to-dynamic conversion and the dynamic-to-static attention, the static representation and dynamic representation are unified into a compact framework. The proposed method was evaluated on four popular datasets of different languages. The extensive experimental results manifest the strength of our model.

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