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Good representations can help RL agents perform concise modeling of their surroundings, and thus support effective decision-making in complex environments. 
 Previous methods learn good representations by imposing extra constraints on dynamics.
 However, in the causal perspective, the causation between the action and its effect is not fully considered in those methods, which leads to the ignorance of the underlying relations among the action effects on the transitions. 
 Based on the intuition that the same action always causes similar effects among different states, we induce such causation by taking the invariance of action effects among states as the relation.
 By explicitly utilizing such invariance, in this paper, we show that a better representation can be learned and potentially improves the sample efficiency and the generalization ability of the learned policy. 
 We propose Invariant Action Effect Model (IAEM) to capture the invariance in action effects, where the effect of an action is represented as the residual of representations from neighboring states.
 IAEM is composed of two parts:
 (1) a new contrastive-based loss to capture the underlying invariance of action effects;
 (2) an individual action effect and provides a self-adapted weighting strategy to tackle the corner cases where the invariance does not hold.
 The extensive experiments on two benchmarks, i.e. Grid-World and Atari, show that the representations learned by IAEM preserve the invariance of action effects. 
 Moreover, with the invariant action effect, IAEM can accelerate the learning process by 1.6x, rapidly generalize to new environments by fine-tuning on a few components, and outperform other dynamics-based representation methods by 1.4x in limited steps.

AAAI 2022

Invariant Action Effect Model for Reinforcement Learning

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. 

technical paper

Scene graph in a video conveys a wealth of information about objects and their relationships in the scene, thus benefiting many downstream tasks such as video captioning and visual question answering. Existing methods of scene graph generation require large-scale training videos annotated with objects and relationships in each frame to learn a powerful model. However, such comprehensive annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. On the other hand, it is much easier and less cost to annotate images with scene graphs, so we investigate leveraging annotated images to facilitate training a scene graph generation model for unannotated videos, namely image-to-video scene graph generation. This task presents two challenges: 1) infer unseen dynamic relationships in videos from static relationships in images due to the absence of motion information in images; 2) adapt objects and static relationships from images to video frames due to the domain shift between them. To address the first challenge, we exploit external commonsense knowledge to infer the unseen dynamic relationship from the temporal evolution of static relationships. We tackle the second challenge by hierarchical adversarial learning to reduce the data distribution discrepancy between images and video frames. Extensive experiment results on two benchmark video datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Adaptive Image-to-Video Scene Graph Generation via Knowledge Reasoning and Adversarial Learning

Image-text retrieval plays a central role in bridging vision and language, which aims to reduce the semantic discrepancy between images and texts. Most of existing works rely on refined words and objects representation through the data-oriented method to capture the word-object cooccurrence. Such approaches are prone to ignore the asymmetric action relation between images and texts, that is, the text has explicit action representation (i.e., verb phrase) while the image only contains implicit action information. In this paper, we propose Action-aware Memory-Enhanced embedding (AME) method for image-text retrieval, which aims to emphasize the action information when mapping the images and texts into a shared embedding space. Specifically, we integrate action prediction along with an action-aware memory bank to enrich the image and text features with action-similar text features. The effectiveness of our proposed AME method is verified by comprehensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets.

Motion-Aware Embedding Enhancement for Image-Text Retrieval

Text content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking methods represent watermarks by replacing words in original sentences with synonyms from handcrafted lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), but they do not consider the substitution's impact on the overall sentence's meaning. Recently, a transformer-based network was proposed to embed watermarks by modifying the unobtrusive words (e.g., function words), which also impair the sentence's logical and semantic coherence. Besides, one well-trained network fails on other different types of text content.
 To address the limitations mentioned above, we propose a natural language watermarking scheme based on context-aware lexical substitution (LS). Specifically, we employ BERT to suggest LS candidates by inferring the semantic relatedness between the candidates and the original sentence. Based on this, a selection strategy in terms of synchronicity and substitutability is further designed to test whether a word is exactly suitable for carrying the watermark signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under both objective and subjective metrics, our watermarking scheme can well preserve the semantic integrity of original sentences and has a better transferability than existing methods. Besides, the proposed LS approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the Stanford Word Substitution Benchmark.

Tracing Text Provenance via Context-Aware Lexical Substitution

Adversarial training is so far the most effective strategy in defending against adversarial examples. However, it suffers from high computational costs due to the iterative adversarial attacks in each training step. Recent studies show that it is possible to achieve fast Adversarial Training by performing a single-step attack with random initialization. However, such an approach still lags behind state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithms on both stability and model robustness. In this work, we develop a new understanding towards Fast Adversarial Training, by viewing random initialization as performing randomized smoothing for better optimization of the inner maximization problem. Following this new perspective, we also propose a new initialization strategy, backward smoothing, to further improve the stability and model robustness over single-step robust training methods.
 Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves similar model robustness as the original TRADES method while using much less training time (~3x improvement with the same training schedule).

Efficient Robust Training via Backward Smoothing

We propose an end-to-end image compression and analysis model with Transformers, targeting to the cloud-based image classification application. Instead of placing an existing Transformer-based image classification model directly after an image codec, we aim to redesign the Vision Transformer (ViT) model to perform image classification from the compressed features and facilitate image compression with the long-term information from the Transformer. Specifically, we first replace the patchify stem (i.e., image splitting and embedding) of the ViT model with a lightweight image encoder modelled by a convolutional neural network. The compressed features generated by the image encoder are injected convolutional inductive bias and are fed to the Transformer for image classification bypassing image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a feature aggregation module to fuse the compressed features with the selected intermediate features of the Transformer, and feed the aggregated features to a deconvolutional neural network for image reconstruction. The aggregated features can obtain the long-term information from the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer and improve the compression performance. The rate-distortion-accuracy optimization problem is finally solved by a two-step training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both the image compression and the classification tasks.

Towards End-to-End Image Compression and Analysis with Transformers

We formalize a voting model for plurality elections that combines Iterative Voting and Calculus of Voting. Each iteration, autonomous agents simultaneously maximize the utility they expect from candidates. Agents are aware of neither other individuals' preferences or choices, nor of the distribution of preferences. They know only of candidates' latest vote shares and with that calculate expected rewards from each candidate, pondering the probability that voting for each would alter the election. We define the general form of those pivotal probabilities, then we derive efficient exact and approximated calculations. Lastly, we prove formally the model converges with asymptotically large electorates and show via simulations that it nearly always converges even with very few agents.

Iterative Calculus of Voting under Plurality

Offline reinforcement learning aims to maximize the expected cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. The basic principle of current offline reinforcement learning methods is to restrict the policy to the offline dataset action space. However, they ignore the case where the dataset's trajectories fail to cover the state space completely. Especially, when the dataset's size is limited, it is likely that the agent would encounter unseen states during test time. Prior policy-constrained methods are incapable of correcting the state deviation, and may lead the agent to its unexpected regions further. In this paper, we propose the state deviation correction (SDC) method to constrain the policy's induced state distribution by penalizing the out-of-distribution states which might appear during the test period. We first perturb the states sampled from the logged dataset, then simulate noisy next states on the basis of a dynamics model and the policy. We then train the policy to minimize the distances between the noisy next states and the offline dataset. In this manner, we allow the trained policy to guide the agent to its familiar regions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in a GridWorld setup, offline Mujoco control suite, and a modified offline Mujoco dataset with a finite number of valuable samples.

State Deviation Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in supervised deep learning methods are enabling remote measurements of photoplethysmography-based physiological signals using facial videos. The performance of these supervised methods, however, are dependent on the availability of large labelled data. Contrastive learning as a self-supervised method has recently achieved state-of-the-art performances in learning representative data features by maximising mutual information between different augmented views. However, existing data augmentation techniques for contrastive learning are not designed to learn physiological signals from videos and often fail when there are complicated noise and subtle and periodic colour/shape variations between video frames. To address these problems, we present a novel self-supervised spatiotemporal learning framework for remote physiological signal representation learning, where there is a lack of labelled training data. Firstly, we propose a landmark-based spatial augmentation that splits the face into several informative parts based on the Shafer's dichromatic reï¬‚ection model to characterise subtle skin colour fluctuations. We also formulate a sparsity-based temporal augmentation exploiting Nyquistâ€“Shannon sampling theorem to effectively capture periodic temporal changes by modelling physiological signal features. Furthermore, we introduce a constrained spatiotemporal loss which generates pseudo-labels for augmented video clips. It is used to regulate the training process and handle complicated noise. We evaluated our framework on 3 public datasets and demonstrated superior performances than other self-supervised methods and achieved competitive accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Dylan-H-Wang/SLF-RPM.

Self-Supervised Representation Learning Framework for Remote Physiological Measurement Using Spatiotemporal Augmentation Loss

Traditional symbolic reasoning engines, while attractive for their precision and explicability, have a few major drawbacks: the use of brittle inference procedures that rely on exact matching (unification) of logical terms, an inability to deal with uncertainty, and the need for a precompiled rule-base of knowledge (the â€œknowledge acquisitionâ€ problem). To address these issues, we devise a novel logical reasoner called Braid, that supports probabilistic rules, and uses the notion of custom unification functions and dynamic rule generation to overcome the brittle matching and knowledge-gap problem prevalent in traditional reasoners. In this paper, we describe the reasoning algorithms used in Braid, and their implementation in a distributed task-based framework that builds proof/explanation graphs for an input query. We use a simple QA example from a children's story to motivate Braid's design and explain how the various components work together to produce a coherent logical explanation. Finally, we evaluate Braid on the ROC Story Cloze test and achieve close to state-of-the-art results while providing frame-based explanations.

Braid: Weaving Symbolic and Neural Knowledge into Coherent Logical Explanations

Understanding how the predictions of deep learning models are formed during the training process is crucial to improve model performance and fix model defects, especially when we need to investigate nontrivial training strategies such as active learning, and track the root cause of unexpected training results such as performance degeneration.

In this work, we propose a time-travelling visual solution DeepVisualInsight (DVI), aiming to manifest the spatio-temporal causality while training a deep learning image classifier. The spatio-temporal causality demonstrates how the gradient-descent algorithm and various training data sampling techniques can influence and reshape the layout of learnt input representation and the classification boundaries in consecutive epochs. Such causality allows us to observe and analyze the whole learning process in the visible low dimensional space. Technically, we propose four spatial and temporal properties and design our visualization solution to satisfy them. These properties preserve the most important information when projecting and inverse-projecting input samples between the visible low-dimensional and the invisible high-dimensional space, for causal analyses. Our extensive experiments show that, comparing to baseline approaches, we achieve the best visualization performance regarding the spatial/temporal properties and visualization efficiency. Moreover, our case study shows that our visual solution can well reflect the characteristics of various training scenarios, showing good potential of DVI as a debugging tool for analyzing deep learning training processes.

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