United States

Temporal grounding aims to localize a video moment which is semantically aligned with a given natural language query. Existing methods typically apply a detection or regression pipeline on the fused representation with the research focus on designing complicated prediction heads or fusion strategies. Instead, from a perspective on temporal grounding as a metric-learning problem, we present a Mutual Matching Network (MMN), to directly model the similarity between language queries and video moments in a joint embedding space. This new metric-learning framework enables fully exploiting negative samples from two new aspects: constructing negative cross-modal pairs in a mutual matching scheme and mining negative pairs across different videos. These new negative samples could enhance the joint representation learning of two modalities via cross-modal mutual matching to maximize their mutual information. Experiments show that our MMN achieves highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods on four video grounding benchmarks. Based on MMN, we present a winner solution for the HC-STVG challenge of the 3rd PIC workshop. This suggests that metric learning is still a promising method for temporal grounding via capturing the essential cross-modal correlation in a joint embedding space. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MMN.

AAAI 2022

Negative Sample Matters: A Renaissance of Metric Learning for Temporal Grounding

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

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. 

Single image generation (SIG), described as generating diverse samples that have the same visual content as the given natural image, is first introduced by SinGAN, which builds a pyramid of GANs to progressively learn the internal patch distribution of the single image. It shows excellent performance in a wide range of image manipulation tasks. However, SinGAN has some limitations. Firstly, due to lack of semantic information, SinGAN cannot handle the object images well as it does on the scene and texture images. Secondly, the independent progressive training scheme is time-consuming and easy to cause artifacts accumulation. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we dig into the single image generation problem and improve SinGAN by fully-utilization of internal and external priors. The main contributions of this paper include: 1) We interpret single image generation from the perspective of the general generative task, that is, to learn a diverse distribution from the Dirac distribution composed of a single image. In order to solve this non-trivial problem, we construct a regularized latent variable model to formulate SIG. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to give a clear formulation and optimization goal of SIG, and all the existing methods for SIG can be regarded as special cases of this model. 2) We design a novel Prior-based end-to-end training GAN (PetsGAN), which is infused with internal prior and external prior to overcome the problems of SinGAN. For one thing, we employ the pre-trained GAN model to inject external prior for image generation, which can alleviate the problem of lack of semantic information and generate natural, reasonable and diverse samples, even for the object image. For another, we fully-utilize the internal prior by a differential Patch Matching module and an effective reconstruction network to generate consistent and realistic texture. 3) We construct abundant of qualitative and quantitative experiments on three datasets. The experimental results show our method surpasses other methods on both generated image quality, diversity, and training speed. Moreover, we apply our method to other image manipulation tasks (e.g., style transfer, harmonization) and the results further prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

PetsGAN: Rethinking Priors for Single Image Generation

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to small input perturbations known as adversarial attacks. Inspired by the fact that these adversaries are constructed by iteratively minimizing the confidence of a network for the true class label, we propose the anti-adversary layer, aimed at countering this effect. In particular, our layer generates an input perturbation in the opposite direction of the adversarial one and feeds the classifier a perturbed version of the input. Our approach is training-free and theoretically supported. We verify the effectiveness of our approach by combining our layer with both nominally and robustly trained models and conduct large-scale experiments from black-box to adaptive attacks on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet. Our layer significantly enhances model robustness while coming at no cost on clean accuracy.

Combating Adversaries with Anti-Adversaries

With Artificial Intelligence on the rise, human interaction with autonomous agents becomes more frequent. Effective human-agent collaboration requires users to understand the agent's behavior, as failing to do so may cause reduced productivity, misuse or frustration. Agent strategy summarization methods are used to describe the strategy of an agent to users through demonstrations. A summary's objective is to maximize the user's understanding of the agent's aptitude by showcasing its behaviour in a selected set of world states. While shown to be useful, we show that current methods are limited when tasked with comparing between agents, as each summary is independently generated for a specific agent. In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating dependent and contrastive summaries that emphasize the differences between agent policies by identifying states in which the agents disagree on the best course of action. We conducted user studies to assess the usefulness of disagreement-based summaries for identifying superior agents and conveying agent differences. Results show disagreement-based summaries lead to improved user performance compared to summaries generated using HIGHLIGHTS, a strategy summarization algorithm which generates summaries for each agent independently.

I Don’t Think So”: Summarizing Policy Disagreements for Agent Comparison Yotam Amitai, Ofra Amir 00:15:49 https://slideslive.com/38976257 38976257 <iframe src=https://slideslive.com/embed/presentation/38976257" width="800" height="415" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" sandbox="allow-forms allow-pointer-lock allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Recent works have shown explainability and robustness are two crucial ingredients of trustworthy and reliable text classification. However, previous works usually address one of two aspects: i) how to extract accurate rationales for explainability while being beneficial to prediction; ii) how to make the predictive model robust to different types of adversarial attacks. Intuitively, a model that produces helpful explanations should be more robust against adversarial attacks, because we cannot trust the model that outputs explanations but changes its prediction under small perturbations. To this end, we propose a joint classification and rationale extraction model named AT-BMC. It includes two key mechanisms: mixed Adversarial Training (AT) is designed to use various perturbations in discrete and embedding space to improve the model's robustness, and Boundary Match Constraint (BMC) helps to locate rationales more precisely with the guidance of boundary information. Performances on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed AT-BMC outperforms baselines on both classification and rationale extraction by a large margin. Robustness analysis shows that the proposed AT-BMC decreases the attack success rate effectively by up to 69%. The results indicate that there are connections between robust models and better explanations.

Unifying Model Explainability and Robustness for Joint Text Classification and Rationale Extraction

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural networks. While most of the studies focus on single-task neural networks with computer vision datasets, very little research has considered complex multi-task models that are common in real applications. In this paper, we evaluate the design choices that impact the robustness of multi-task deep learning networks. We provide evidence that blindly adding auxiliary tasks, or weighing the tasks provides a false sense of robustness. Thereby, we tone down the claim made by previous research and study the different factors which may affect robustness. In particular, we show that the choice of the task to incorporate in the loss function are important factors that can be leveraged to yield more robust models. We provide the appendix, all our algorithms, models, and open source-code at https://github.com/yamizi/taskaugment

Adversarial Robustness in Multi-Task Learning: Promises and Illusions

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focus on the identification of the most relevant concepts but do not provide concise, formal explanations of how such concepts are leveraged by the classifier to make predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end differentiable approach enabling the extraction of logic explanations from neural networks using the formalism of First-Order Logic. The method relies on an entropy-based criterion which automatically identifies the most relevant concepts. We consider four different case studies to demonstrate that: (i) this entropy-based criterion enables the distillation of concise logic explanations in safety-critical domains from clinical data to computer vision; (ii) the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art white-box models in terms of classification accuracy.

Entropy-Based Logic Explanations of Neural Networks

Point cloud registration is a fundamental step for many tasks. In this paper, we propose a neural network named DetarNet to decouple the translation t and rotation R, so as to overcome the performance degradation due to their mutual interference in point cloud registration. First, a Siamese Network based Progressive and Coherent Feature Drift (PCFD) module is proposed to align the source and target points in high-dimensional feature space, and accurately recover translation from the alignment process. Then we propose a Consensus Encoding Unit (CEU) to construct more distinguishable features for a set of putative correspondences. After that, a Spatial and Channel Attention (SCA) block is adopted to build a classification network for finding good correspondences. Finally, the rotation is obtained by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). In this way, the proposed network decouples the estimation of translation and rotation, resulting in better performance for both of them. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DetarNet improves registration performance on both indoor and outdoor scenes. Our code will be available in https://github.com/ZhiChen902/DetarNet.

DeTarNet: Decoupling Translation and Rotation by Siamese Network for Point Cloud Registration

Explanations shed light on a machine learning model's rationales and can aid in identifying deficiencies in its reasoning process. Explanation generation models are typically trained in a supervised way given human explanations. When such annotations are not available, explanations are often selected as those portions of the input that maximise a downstream task's performance, which corresponds to optimising an explanation's Faithfulness to a given model. Faithfulness is one of several so-called diagnostic properties, which prior work has identified as useful for gauging the quality of an explanation without requiring annotations. Other diagnostic properties are Data Consistency, which measures how similar explanations are for similar input instances, and Confidence Indication, which shows whether the explanation reflects the confidence of the model. In this work, we show how to directly optimise for these diagnostic properties when training a model to generate sentence-level explanations, which markedly improves explanation quality, agreement with human rationales, and downstream task performance on three complex reasoning tasks.

Diagnostics-Guided Explanation Generation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification aims at learning on an unlabeled target domain with only labeled data in source domain. Currently, the state-of-the-arts usually solve this problem by pseudo-label-based clustering and fine-tuning in target domain. However, the reason behind the noises of pseudo labels is not sufficiently explored, especially for the popular multi-branch models. We argue that the consistency between different feature spaces is the key to the pseudo labels' quality. Then a SElf-Consistent pseudo label RefinEmenT method, termed as SECRET, is proposed to improve consistency by mutually refining the pseudo labels generated from different feature spaces. The proposed SECRET gradually encourages the improvement of pseudo labels' quality during training process, which further leads to better cross-domain Re-ID performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method. Specifically, our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts by 6.3% in terms of mAP on the challenging dataset MSMT17. In the purely unsupervised setting, our method also surpasses existing works by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/SECRET.

SECRET: Self-Consistent Pseudo Label Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

The developmental approach, simulating a cognitive development of a human, arises as a way to nurture a human-level commonsense and overcome the limitations of data-driven approaches. However, neither a virtual environment nor an evaluation platform exists for the overall development of core cognitive skills. We present the VECA(Virtual Environment for Cognitive Assessment), which consists of two main components: (i) a first benchmark to assess the overall cognitive development of an AI agent, and (ii) a novel toolkit to generate diverse and distinct cognitive tasks. VECA benchmark virtually implements the cognitive scale of Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-IV(Bayley-4), the gold-standard developmental assessment for human infants and toddlers. Our VECA toolkit provides a human toddler-like embodied agent with various human-like perceptual features crucial to human cognitive development, e.g., binocular vision, 3D-spatial audio, and tactile receptors. We compare several modern RL algorithms on our VECA benchmark and seek their limitations in modeling human-like cognitive development. We further analyze the validity of the VECA benchmark, as well as the effect of human-like sensory characteristics on cognitive skills.

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