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Recent work has shown that Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) are able to greatly reduce computational costs and memory footprints, facilitating model deployment on resource-constrained devices. However, in comparison to their full-precision counterparts, BNNs suffer from severe accuracy degradation. Research aiming to reduce this accuracy gap has thus far largely focused on specific network architectures with few or no 1 Ã— 1 convolutional layers, for which standard binarization methods do not work well. Because 1 Ã— 1 convolutions are common in the design of modern architectures (e.g. GoogleNet, ResNet, DenseNet), it is crucial to develop a method to binarize them effectively for BNNs to be more widely adopted. In this work, we propose an â€œElastic-Linkâ€ (EL) module to enrich information flow within a BNN by adaptively adding real-valued input features to the subsequent convolutional output features. The proposed EL module is easily implemented and can be used in conjunction with other methods for BNNs. We demonstrate that adding EL to BNNs produces a significant improvement on the challenging large-scale ImageNet dataset. For example, we raise the top-1 accuracy of binarized ResNet26 from 57.9% to 64.0%. EL also aids con-vergence in the training of binarized MobileNet, for which a top-1 accuracy of 56.4% is achieved. Finally, with the integration of ReActNet, it yields a new state-of-the-art result of 71.9% top-1 accuracy.

AAAI 2022

Elastic-Link for Binarized Neural Networks

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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. 

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art deep learning model for representation learning on graphs. However, it remains notoriously challenging to train and inference GCNs over large graph datasets, limiting their application to large real-world graphs and hindering the exploration of deeper and more sophisticated GCN graphs. This is because as the graph size grows, the sheer number of node features and the large adjacency matrix can easily explode the required memory and data movements. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we explore the possibility of drawing lottery tickets when sparsifying GCN graphs, i.e., subgraphs that largely shrink the adjacency matrix yet are capable of achieving accuracy comparable to or even better than their full graphs. Specifically, we for the first time discover the existence of graph early-bird (GEB) tickets that emerge at the very early stage when sparsifying GCN graphs, and propose a simple yet effective detector to automatically identify the emergence of such GEB tickets. Furthermore, we advocate graph-model co-optimization and develop a generic efficient GCN early-bird training framework dubbed GEBT that can significantly boost the efficiency of GCN training by (1) drawing joint early-bird tickets between the GCN graphs and models and (2) enabling simultaneously sparsification of both the GCN graphs and models. Experiments on various GCN models and datasets consistently validate our GEB finding and the effectiveness of our GEBT, e.g., our GEBT achieves up to 80.2% ~ 85.6% and 84.6% ~ 87.5% savings of GCN training and inference costs while offering a comparable or even better accuracy as compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our source code and supplementary appendix are available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/Early-Bird-GCN.

Early-Bird GCNs: Graph-Network Co-Optimization Towards More Efficient GCN Training and Inference via Drawing Early-Bird Lottery Tickets

We present Laneformer, a conceptually simple yet powerful transformer-based architecture tailored for lane detection that is a long-standing research topic for visual perception in autonomous driving. The dominant paradigms rely on purely CNN-based architectures which often fail in incorporating relations of long-range lane points and global contexts induced by surrounding objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). Inspired by recent advances of the transformer encoder-decoder architecture in various vision tasks, we move forwards to design a new end-to-end Laneformer architecture that revolutionizes the conventional transformers into better capturing the shape and semantic characteristics of lanes, with minimal overhead in latency. First, coupling with deformable pixel-wise self-attention in the encoder, Laneformer presents two new row and column self-attention operations to efficiently mine point context along with the lane shapes. Second, motivated by the appearing objects would affect the decision of predicting lane segments, Laneformer further includes the detected object instances as extra inputs of multi-head attention blocks in the encoder and decoder to facilitate the lane point detection by sensing semantic contexts. Specifically, the bounding box locations of objects are added into Key module to provide interaction with each pixel and query while the ROI-aligned features are inserted into Value module. Extensive experiments demonstrate our Laneformer achieves state-of-the-art performances on CULane benchmark, in terms of 77.1% F1 score. We hope our simple and effective Laneformer will serve as a strong baseline for future research in self-attention models for lane detection.

Laneformer: Object-Aware Row-Column Transformers for Lane Detection

In recent years, plentiful evidence illustrates that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) achieve extraordinary accomplishments on the node classification task. However, GCNs may be vulnerable to adversarial attacks on label-scarce dynamic graphs. Many existing works aim to strengthen the robustness of GCNs; for instance, adversarial training is used to shield GCNs against malicious perturbations. However, these works fail on dynamic graphs for which label scarcity is a pressing issue. To overcome label scarcity, self-training attempts to iteratively assign pseudo-labels to highly confident unlabeled nodes but such attempts may suffer serious degradation under dynamic graph perturbations. In this paper, we generalize noisy supervision as a kind of self-supervised learning method and then propose a novel Bayesian self-supervision model, namely GraphSS, to address the issue. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphSS can not only affirmatively alert the perturbations on dynamic graphs but also effectively recover the prediction of a node classifier when the graph is under such perturbations. These two advantages prove to be generalized over three classic GCNs across five public graph datasets.

Defending Graph Convolutional Networks Against Dynamic Graph Perturbations via Bayesian Self-Supervision

Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KEPLMs) are pre-trained models with relation triples injecting from knowledge graphs to improve language understanding abilities.Experiments show that our model outperforms other KEPLMs significantly over zero-shot knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. To guarantee effective knowledge injection, previous studies integrate models with knowledge encoders for representing knowledge retrieved from knowledge graphs. The operations for knowledge retrieval and encoding bring significant computational burdens, restricting the usage of such models in real-world applications that require high inference speed. In this paper, we propose a novel KEPLM named DKPLM that
 decomposes knowledge injection process of the pre-trained language models in pre-training, fine-tuning and inference stages, which facilitates the applications of KEPLMs in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we first detect knowledge-aware long-tail entities as the target for knowledge injection, enhancing the KEPLMs' semantic understanding abilities and avoiding injecting redundant information.
 The embeddings of long-tail entities are replaced by ``pseudo token representations'' formed by relevant knowledge triples. We further design the relational knowledge decoding task for pre-training to force the models to truly understand the injected knowledge by relation triple reconstruction. Experiments show that our model outperforms other KEPLMs significantly over zero-shot knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. We further show that DKPLM has a higher inference speed than other competing models due to the decomposing mechanism.

DKPLM: Decomposable Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-Trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding

End-to-end speech-to-text translation (E2E-ST) is becoming increasingly popular due to the potential of its less error propagation, lower latency, and fewer parameters. Given the triplet training corpusã€ˆspeech, transcription, translationã€‰, the conventional high-quality E2E-ST system leverages theã€ˆspeech, transcriptionã€‰pair to pre-train the model and then utilizes theã€ˆspeech, translationã€‰pair to optimize it further. However, this process only involves two-tuple data at each stage, and this loose coupling fails to fully exploit the association between triplet data. In this paper, we attempt to model the joint probability of transcription and translation based on the speech input to directly leverage such triplet data. Based on that, we propose a novel regularization method for model training to improve the agreement of dual-path decomposition within triplet data, which should be equal in theory. To achieve this goal, we introduce two Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization terms into the model training objective to reduce the mismatch between output probabilities of dual-path. Then the well-trained model can be naturally transformed as the E2E-ST models by a pre-defined early stop tag. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art E2E-ST baselines on all 8 language pairs while achieving better performance in the automatic speech recognition task.

Regularizing End-to-End Speech Translation with Triangular Decomposition Agreement

With the wide application of electronic health records (EHR) in healthcare facilities, health event prediction with deep learning has gained more and more attention. A common feature of EHR data used for deep-learning-based predictions is historical diagnoses. Existing work mainly regards a diagnosis as an independent disease and does not consider clinical relations among diseases in a visit. Many machine learning approaches assume disease representations are static in different visits of a patient. However, in real practice, multiple diseases that are frequently diagnosed at the same time reflect hidden patterns that are conducive to prognosis. Moreover, the development of a disease is not static since some diseases can emerge or disappear and show various symptoms in different visits of a patient. To effectively utilize this combinational disease information and explore the dynamics of diseases, we propose a novel context-aware learning framework using transition functions on dynamic disease graphs. Specifically, we construct a global disease co-occurrence graph with multiple node properties for disease combinations. We design dynamic subgraphs for each patient's visit to leverage global and local contexts. We further define three diagnosis roles in each visit based on the variation of node properties to model disease transition processes. Experimental results on two real-world EHR datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state of the art in predicting health events.

Context-Aware Health Event Prediction via Transition Functions on Dynamic Disease Graphs

The task of summarization often requires a non-trivial understanding of the given text at the semantic level. In this work, we essentially incorporate the constituent structure into the single document summarization via the Graph Neural Networks to learn the semantic meaning of tokens. More specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical heterogeneous graph attention network over constituency-based parse trees for syntax-aware summarization. This approach reflects psychological findings that humans will pinpoint specific selection patterns to construct summaries hierarchically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is effective for both the abstractive and extractive summarization tasks on five benchmark datasets from various domains. Moreover, further performance improvement can be obtained by virtue of state-of-the-art pre-trained models.

Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network for Syntax-Aware Summarization

Simplicial neural networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a new direction in graph learning which expands the idea of convolutional architectures from node space to simplicial complexes on graphs. Instead of predominantly assessing pairwise relations among nodes as in the current practice, simplicial complexes allow us to describe higher-order interactions and multi-node graph structures. By building upon connection between the convolution operation and the new block Hodge-Laplacian, we propose the first SNN for link prediction. Our new Block Simplicial Complex Neural Networks (BScNets) model generalizes existing graph convolutional network (GCN) frameworks by systematically incorporating salient interactions among multiple higher-order graph structures of different dimensions. We discuss theoretical foundations behind BScNets and illustrate its utility for link prediction on eight real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experiments indicate that BScNets outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a significant margin while maintaining low computation costs. Finally, we show utility of BScNets as a new promising alternative for tracking spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and measuring the effectiveness of the healthcare risk mitigation strategies.

BScNets: Block Simplicial Complex Neural Networks

Heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance when the aggregation of clients' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, clients may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output space, and/or model architecture, which can easily lead to the misalignment of their local gradients. To improve the tolerance to heterogeneity, we propose a novel federated prototype learning (FedProto) framework in which the clients and server communicate the abstract class prototypes instead of the gradients. FedProto aggregates the local prototypes collected from different clients, and then sends the global prototypes back to all clients to regularize the training of local models. The training on each client aims to minimize the classification error on the local data while keeping the resulting local prototypes sufficiently close to the corresponding global ones. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis to the convergence rate of FedProto under non-convex objectives. In experiments, we propose a benchmark setting tailored for heterogeneous FL, with FedProto outperforming several recent FL approaches on multiple datasets.

FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning Across Heterogeneous Clients

A key trait of daily conversations between individuals is the ability to express empathy towards others, and exploring ways to implement empathy is a crucial step towards human-like dialogue systems. Previous approaches on this topic mainly focus on detecting and utilizing the user's emotion for generating empathetic responses. However, since empathy includes both aspects of affection and cognition, we argue that in addition to identifying the user's emotion, cognitive understanding of the user's situation should also be considered. To this end, we propose a novel approach for empathetic response generation, which leverages commonsense to draw more information about the user's situation and uses this additional information to further enhance the empathy expression in generated responses. We evaluate our approach on EMPATHETICDIALOGUES, which is a widely-used benchmark dataset for empathetic response generation. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baseline models in both automatic and human evaluations and can generate more informative and empathetic responses. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sahandfer/CEM.

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