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The demands of the modern world are increasingly responsible for causing psychological burdens and bringing adverse impacts on our mental health. As a result, neural conversational agents with empathetic responding and distress management capabilities have recently gained popularity. However, existing end-to-end empathetic conversational agents often generate generic and repetitive empathetic statements such as &quot;I am sorry to hear that&quot;, which fail to convey specificity to a given situation. Due to the lack of controllability in such models, they also impose the risk of generating toxic responses. Chatbots leveraging reasoning over knowledge graphs is seen as an efficient and fail-safe solution over end-to-end models. However, such resources are limited in the context of emotional distress. To address this, we introduce HEAL, a knowledge graph developed based on 1M distress narratives and their corresponding consoling responses curated from Reddit. It consists of 22K nodes identifying different types of stressors, speaker expectations, responses, and feedback types associated with distress dialogues and forms 104K connections between different types of nodes. Each node is associated with one of 41 affective states. Statistical and visual analysis conducted on HEAL reveals emotional dynamics between speakers and listeners in distress-oriented conversations and identifies useful response patterns leading to emotional relief. Automatic and human evaluation experiments show that HEAL&#39;s responses are more diverse, empathetic, and reliable compared to the baselines.

AAAI 2022

HEAL: A Knowledge Graph for Distress Management Conversations

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

The demands of the modern world are increasingly responsible for causing psychological burdens and bringing adverse impacts on our mental health. As a result, neural conversational agents with empathetic responding and distress management capabilities have recently gained popularity. However, existing end-to-end empathetic conversational agents often generate generic and repetitive empathetic statements such as "I am sorry to hear that", which fail to convey specificity to a given situation. Due to the lack of controllability in such models, they also impose the risk of generating toxic responses. Chatbots leveraging reasoning over knowledge graphs is seen as an efficient and fail-safe solution over end-to-end models. However, such resources are limited in the context of emotional distress. To address this, we introduce HEAL, a knowledge graph developed based on 1M distress narratives and their corresponding consoling responses curated from Reddit. It consists of 22K nodes identifying different types of stressors, speaker expectations, responses, and feedback types associated with distress dialogues and forms 104K connections between different types of nodes. Each node is associated with one of 41 affective states. Statistical and visual analysis conducted on HEAL reveals emotional dynamics between speakers and listeners in distress-oriented conversations and identifies useful response patterns leading to emotional relief. Automatic and human evaluation experiments show that HEAL's responses are more diverse, empathetic, and reliable compared to the baselines.

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. 

Current state-of-the-art saliency detection models rely heavily on large datasets of accurate pixel-wise annotations, but manually labeling pixels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. There are some weakly supervised methods developed for alleviating the problem, such as image label, bounding box label, and scribble label, while point label still has not been explored in this field. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection method using point supervision. To infer the saliency map, we first design an adaptive masked flood filling algorithm to generate pseudo labels. Then we develop a transformer-based point-supervised saliency detection model to produce the first round of saliency maps. However, due to the sparseness of the label, the weakly supervised model tends to degenerate into a general foreground detection model. To address this issue, we propose a Non-Salient Suppression (NSS) method to optimize the erroneous saliency maps generated in the first round and leverage them for the second round of training. Moreover, we build a new point-supervised dataset (P-DUTS) by relabeling the DUTS dataset. In P-DUTS, there is only one labeled point for each salient object. Comprehensive experiments on five largest benchmark datasets demonstrate our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods trained with the stronger supervision and even surpass several fully supervised state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/shuyonggao/PSOD.

Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection Using Point Supervison

Video anomaly detection aims to automatically identify unusual objects or behaviours by learning from normal videos. Previous methods tend to use simplistic reconstruction or prediction constraints, which leads to the insufficiency of learned representations for normal data. As such, we propose a novel bi-directional architecture with three consistency constraints to comprehensively regularize the prediction task from pixel-wise, cross-modal, and temporal-sequence levels. First, predictive consistency is proposed to consider the symmetry property of motion and appearance in forwards and backwards time, which ensures the highly realistic appearance and motion predictions at the pixel-wise level. Second, association consistency considers the relevance between different modalities and uses one modality to regularize the prediction of another one. Finally, temporal consistency utilizes the relationship of the video sequence and ensures that the predictive network generates temporally consistent frames. During inference, the pattern of abnormal frames is unpredictable and will therefore cause higher prediction errors. Experiments show that our method outperforms advanced anomaly detectors and achieves state-of-the-art results on UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and ShanghaiTech datasets.

Comprehensive Regularization in a Bi-Directional Predictive Network for Video Anomaly Detection

Video object detection has been an important yet challenging topic in computer vision. Traditional methods mainly focus on designing the image-level or box-level feature propagation strategies to exploit temporal information. This paper argues that with a more effective and efficient feature propagation framework, video object detectors can gain improvement in terms of both accuracy and speed. For this purpose, this paper studies object-level feature propagation, and proposes an object query propagation (QueryProp) framework for high-performance video object detection. The proposed QueryProp contains two propagation strategies: 1) query propagation is performed from sparse key frames to dense non-key frames to reduce the redundant computation on non-key frames; 2) query propagation is performed from previous key frames to the current key frame to improve feature representation by temporal context modeling. To further facilitate query propagation, an adaptive propagation gate is designed to achieve flexible key frame selection. We conduct extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset. QueryProp achieves comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art methods and strikes a decent accuracy/speed trade-off.

QueryProp: Object Query Propagation for High-Performance Video Object Detection

Deep neural networks are extremely vulnerable to malicious input data. As 3D data is increasingly used in vision tasks such as robots, autonomous driving and drones, the internal robustness of the classification models for 3D point cloud has received widespread attention. In this paper, we propose a novel method named SPGA (Shape Prior Guided Attack) to generate adversarial point cloud examples. We use shape prior information to make perturbations sparser and thus achieve imperceptible attacks. In particular, we propose a Spatially Logical Block (SLB) to apply adversarial points through sliding in the oriented bounding box. Moreover, we design an algorithm called FOFA for this type of task, which further refines the adversarial attack in the process of breaking down complicated problems into sub-problems. Compared with the methods of global perturbation, our attack method consumes significantly fewer computations, making it more efficient. Most importantly of all, SPGA can generate examples with a higher attack success rate (even in a defensive situation), less perturbation budget and stronger transferability.

Shape Prior Guided Attack: Sparser Perturbations on 3D Point Clouds

We revisit Semantic Scene Completion (SSC), a useful task to predict the semantic and occupancy representation of 3D scenes, in this paper. A number of methods for this task are always based on voxelized scene representations. Although voxel representations keep local structures of the scene, these methods suffer from heavy computation redundancy due to the existence of visible empty voxels when the network goes deeper. To address this dilemma, we propose our novel point-voxel aggregation network for this task. We first transfer the voxelized scenes to point clouds by removing these visible empty voxels and adopt a deep point stream to capture semantic information from the scene efficiently. Meanwhile, a light-weight voxel stream containing only two 3D convolution layers preserves local structures of the voxelized scenes. Furthermore, we design an anisotropic voxel aggregation operator to fuse the structure details from the voxel stream into the point stream, and a semantic-aware propagation module to enhance the up-sampling process in the point stream by semantic labels. We demonstrate that our model surpasses state-of-the-arts on two benchmarks by a large margin, with only the depth images as input.

Not All Voxels Are Equal: Semantic Scene Completion from the Point-Voxel Perspective

Spatial and channel attentions, modelling the semantic interdependencies in spatial and channel dimensions respectively, have recently been widely used for semantic segmentation. However, computing spatial and channel attentions separately sometimes causes errors, especially for those difficult cases. In this paper, we propose Channelized Axial Attention (CAA) to seamlessly integrate channel attention and spatial attention into a single operation with negligible computation overhead. Specifically, we break down the dot-product operation of the spatial attention into two parts and insert channel relation in between, allowing for independently optimized channel attention on each spatial location. We further develop grouped vectorization, which allows our model to run with very little memory consumption without slowing down the running speed. Comparative experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, including Cityscapes, PASCAL Context, and COCO-Stuff, demonstrate that our CAA outperforms many state-of-the-art segmentation models (including dual attention) on all tested datasets.

Channelized Axial Attention - Considering Channel Relation within Spatial Attention for Semantic Segmentation

Image-guided depth completion aims to generate dense depth maps with sparse depth measurements and corresponding RGB images. Currently, spatial propagation networks (SPNs) are the most popular affinity-based methods in depth completion, but they still suffer from the representation limitation of the fixed affinity and the over smoothing during iterations. 
 Our solution is to estimate independent affinity matrices in each SPN iteration, but it is over-parameterized and heavy calculation.This paper introduces an efficient model that learns the affinity among neighboring pixels with an attention-based, dynamic approach. Specifically, the Dynamic Spatial Propagation Network (DySPN) we proposed makes use of a non-linear propagation model (NLPM). It decouples the neighborhood into parts regarding to different distances and recursively generates independent attention maps to refine these parts into adaptive affinity matrices. Furthermore, we adopt a diffusion suppression (DS) operation so that the model converges at an early stage to prevent over-smoothing of dense depth. Finally, in order to decrease the computational cost required, we also introduce three variations that reduce the amount of neighbors and attentions needed while still retaining similar accuracy. In practice, our method requires less iteration to match the performance of other SPNs and yields better results overall. DySPN outperforms other state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods on KITTI Depth Completion (DC) evaluation by the time of submission and is able to yield SoTA performance in NYU Depth v2 dataset as well.

Dynamic Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion

In multi-view multi-label learning (MVML), each instance is described by several heterogeneous feature representations and associated with multiple valid labels simultaneously. Although diverse MVML methods have been proposed over the last decade, most previous studies focus on leveraging the shared subspace across different views to represent the multi-view consensus information, while it is still an open issue whether such shared subspace representation is necessary when formulating the desired MVML model. In this paper, we propose a DeepGCN based View-Specific MVML method (D-VSM) which can bypass seeking for the shared subspace representation, and instead directly encoding the feature representation of each individual view through the deep GCN to couple with the information derived from the other views. Specifically, we first construct all instances under different feature representations into the corresponding feature graphs respectively, and then integrate them into a unified graph by integrating the different feature representations of each instance. Afterwards, the graph attention mechanism is adopted to aggregate and update all nodes on the unified graph to form structural representation for each instance, where both intra-view correlations and inter-view alignments have been jointly encoded to discover the underlying semantic relations. Finally, we derive a label confidence score for each instance by averaging the label confidence of its different feature representations with the multi-label soft margin loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Beyond Shared Subspace: A View-Specific Fusion for Multi-View Multi-Label Learning

Existing image semantic segmentation methods favor learning consistent representations by extracting long-range contextual features with the attention, multi-scale, or graph aggregation strategies. These methods usually treat the misclassified and correctly classified pixels equally, hence misleading the optimization process and causing inconsistent intra-class pixel feature representations in the embedding space during learning. In this paper, we propose the auxiliary representation calibration head (RCH), which consists of the image decoupling, prototype clustering, error calibration modules and a metric loss function, to calibrate these error-prone feature representations for better intra-class consistency and segmentation performance. RCH could be incorporated into the hidden layers, trained together with the segmentation networks, and decoupled in the inference stage without additional parameters. Experimental results show that our method could significantly boost the performance of current segmentation methods on multiple datasets (e.g., we outperform the original HRNet and OCRNet by 1.1% and 0.9% mIoU on the Cityscapes test set). Codes are available at https://github.com/VipaiLab/RCH.

Renovate Yourself: Calibrating Feature Representation of Misclassified Pixels for Semantic Segmentation

In logic-based knowledge representation, query answering has essentially replaced mere satisfiability checking as the inferencing problem of primary interest. For knowledge bases in the basic description logic ALC, the computational complexity of conjunctive query (CQ) answering is well known to be EXPTIME-complete and hence not harder than satisfiability. This does not change when the logic is extended by certain features (such as counting or role hierarchies), whereas adding others (inverses, nominals or transitivity together with role-hierarchies) turns CQ answering exponentially harder.
 We contribute to this line of results by showing the surprising fact that even extending ALC by just the Self operator â€“ which proved innocuous in many other contexts â€“ increases the complexity of CQ entailment to 2EXPTIME. As common for this type of problem, our proof establishes a reduction from alternating Turing machines running in exponential space, but several novel ideas and encoding tricks are required to make the approach work in that specific, restricted setting.

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