Canada

When dealing with tabular data, models based on decision
trees are a popular choice due to their high accuracy on these
data types, their ease of application, and explainability properties. However, when it comes to graph-structured data, it
is not clear how to apply them effectively, in a way that in-
corporates the topological information with the tabular data
available on the vertices of the graph. To address this challenge,
we introduce TREE-G. TREE-G modifies standard decision
trees, by introducing a novel split function that is specialized
for graph data. Not only does this split function incorporate
the node features and the topological information, but it also
uses a novel pointer mechanism that allows split nodes to
use information computed in previous splits. Therefore, the
split function adapts to the predictive task and the graph at
hand. We analyze the theoretical properties of TREE-G and
demonstrate its benefits empirically on multiple graph and
vertex prediction benchmarks. In these experiments, TREE-G
consistently outperforms other tree-based models and often
outperforms other graph-learning algorithms such as Graph
Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Kernels, sometimes by
large margins. Moreover, TREE-Gs models and their predic
tions can be explained and visualized.

AAAI 2024

TREE-G: Decision Trees Contesting Graph Neural Networks

graph learning

decision trees

graph neural networks

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

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.

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

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. 

Compound-Protein Interaction (CPI) prediction aims to predict the pattern and strength of compound-protein interactions for rational drug discovery. Existing deep learning-based methods utilize only the single modality of protein sequences or structures and lack the co-modeling of the joint distribution of the two modalities, which may lead to significant performance drops in complex real-world scenarios due to various factors, e.g., modality missing and domain shifting. More importantly, these methods only model protein sequences and structures at a single fixed scale, neglecting more fine-grained multi-scale information, such as those embedded in key protein fragments. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale Protein Sequence-structure Contrasting framework for CPI prediction (PSC-CPI), which captures the dependencies between protein sequences and structures through both intra-modality and cross-modality contrasting. We further apply length-variable protein augmentation to allow contrasting to be performed at different scales, from the amino acid level to the sequence level. Finally, in order to more fairly evaluate the model generalizability, we split the test data into four settings based on whether compounds and proteins have been observed during the training stage. Extensive experiments have shown that PSC-CPI generalizes well in all four settings, particularly in the more challenging ``Unseen-Both" setting, where neither compounds nor proteins have been observed during training. Furthermore, even when encountering a situation of modality missing, i.e., inference with only single-modality protein data, PSC-CPI still exhibits comparable or even better performance than previous approaches.

PSC-CPI: Multi-Scale Protein Sequence-Structure Contrasting for Efficient and Generalizable Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction

Call-and-response is a musical technique that enriches the creativity of music, crafting coherent musical ideas that mirror the back-and-forth nature of human dialogue with distinct musical characteristics. Although this technique is integral to numerous musical compositions, it remains largely uncharted in automatic music composition. To enhance the creativity of machine-composed music, we first introduce the Call-Response Dataset (CRD) containing 19,155 annotated musical pairs and crafted comprehensive objective evaluation metrics for musical assessment. Then, we design a knowledge-enhanced learning-based method to bridge the gap between human and machine creativity. Specifically, we train the composition module using the call-response pairs, supplementing it with musical knowledge in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Our experimental results underscore that our proposed model adeptly produces a wide variety of creative responses for various musical calls.

Responding to the Call: Exploring Automatic Music Composition Using a Knowledge-Enhanced Model

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their potential in rotation-sensitive scenarios has not been fully explored, and this limitation may be inherently attributed to the lack of spatial invariance in the data-forwarding process. In this study, we present a novel approach, termed Spatial Transform Decoupling (STD), providing a simple-yet-effective solution for oriented object detection with ViTs. Built upon stacked ViT blocks, STD utilizes separate network branches to predict the position, size, and angle of bounding boxes, effectively harnessing the spatial transform potential of ViTs in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Moreover, by aggregating cascaded activation masks (CAMs) computed upon the regressed parameters, STD gradually enhances features within regions of interest (RoIs), which complements the self-attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, STD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets including DOTA-v1.0 (82.24% mAP) and HRSC2016 (98.55% mAP), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/Spatial-Transform-Decoupling.

Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection

Hardware image signal processing (ISP), aiming at converting RAW inputs to RGB images, consists of a series of processing blocks, each with multiple parameters. Traditionally, ISP parameters are manually tuned in isolation by imaging experts according to application-specific quality and performance metrics, which is time-consuming and biased towards human perception due to complex interaction with the output image. Since the relationship between any single parameter’s variation and the output performance metric is a complex, non-linear function, optimizing such a large number of ISP parameters is challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Sequential ISP parameter optimization model, called the RL-SeqISP model, which utilizes deep reinforcement learning to jointly optimize all ISP parameters for a variety of imaging applications. Concretely, inspired by the sequential tuning process of human experts, the proposed model can progressively enhance image quality by seamlessly integrating information from both the image feature space and the parameter space. Furthermore, a dynamic parameter optimization module is introduced to avoid ISP parameters getting stuck into local optima, which is able to more effectively guarantee the optimal parameters resulting from the sequential learning strategy. These merits of the RL-SeqISP model as well as its high efficiency are substantiated by comprehensive experiments on a wide range of downstream tasks, including two visual analysis tasks (instance segmentation and object detection), and image quality assessment (IQA), as compared with representative methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, even using only 10% of the training data, our model outperforms other SOTA methods by an average of 7% mAP on two visual analysis tasks.

RL-SeqISP: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sequential Optimization for Image Signal Processing | VIDEO

Painterly image harmonization aims to harmonize a photographic foreground object on the painterly background. Different from previous auto-encoder based harmonization networks, we develop a progressive multi-stage harmonization network, which harmonizes the composite foreground from low-level styles (e.g., color, simple texture) to high-level styles (e.g., complex texture). Our network has better interpretability and harmonization performance. Moreover, we design an early-exit strategy to automatically decide the proper stage to exit, which can skip the unnecessary and even harmful late stages. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our progressive harmonization network.

Progressive Painterly Image Harmonization from Low-Level Styles to High-Level Styles

Most existing GAN inversion methods either achieve accurate reconstruction but lack editability or offer strong editability at the cost of fidelity. Hence, how to balance the distortion-editability trade-off is a significant challenge for GAN inversion.  To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-contextual discrepancy information compensation-based GAN-inversion method (SDIC), which consists of a discrepancy information prediction network (DIPN) and a discrepancy information compensation network (DICN). SDIC follows a ``compensate-and-edit'' paradigm and successfully bridges the gap in image details between the original image and the reconstructed/edited image. On the one hand, DIPN encodes the multi-level spatial-contextual information of the original and initial reconstructed images and then predicts a spatial-contextual guided discrepancy map with two hourglass modules. In this way, a reliable discrepancy map that models the contextual relationship and captures fine-grained image details is learned. On the other hand, DICN incorporates the predicted discrepancy information into both the latent code and the GAN generator with different transformations, generating high-quality reconstructed/edited images. This effectively compensates for the loss of image details during GAN inversion. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the excellent distortion-editability trade-off at a fast inference speed for both image inversion and editing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZzqLKED/SDIC.

Spatial-Contextual Discrepancy Information Compensation for GAN Inversion

The visual prompts have provided an efficient manner in addressing visual cross-domain problems. Previous works introduce domain prompts to tackle the classification Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) problem by placing image-level prompts on the input and fine-tuning prompts for each target domain. However, since the image-level prompts mask out continuous spatial details in the prompt-allocated region, it will suffer from inaccurate contextual information and limited domain knowledge extraction, particularly when dealing with dense prediction TTA problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Sparse Visual Domain Prompts (SVDP) approach, which applies minimal trainable parameters (e.g., 0.1%) to pixels across the entire image and reserves more spatial information of the input. To better apply SVDP in extracting domain-specific knowledge, we introduce the Domain Prompt Placement (DPP) method to adaptively allocates trainable parameters of SVDP on the pixels with large distribution shifts. Furthermore, recognizing that each target domain sample exhibits a unique domain shift, we design Domain Prompt Updating (DPU) strategy to optimize prompt parameters differently for each sample, facilitating efficient adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments were conducted on widely-used TTA and continual TTA benchmarks, and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks.

Exploring Sparse Visual Prompt for Domain Adaptive Dense Prediction | VIDEO

Existing recurrent optical flow deep learning networks are computationally expensive since they use a fixed large number of iterations to update the flow field for each sample. An efficient network should skip iterations when the flow improvement is limited. In this paper, we develop a Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for efficient optical flow estimation, which determines the optimal number of iterations per sample. The policy network achieves this by learning contextual information to realize whether flow improvement is bottlenecked or minimal. On the one hand, we use iteration embedding and historical hidden cell that includes previous iterations information, to inform whether the flow improvement encounters the bottleneck. On the other hand, we use the incremental loss to make the policy network implicitly perceive the magnitude of optical flow improvement in the subsequent iteration. Furthermore, the computational complexity in our dynamic network is controllable, allowing us to satisfy various resource preferences with a single trained model. Our policy network can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art optical flow networks. Extensive experiments show that our method maintains performance while reducing FLOPs by about 40%/20% for the Sintel/KITTI datasets.

Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for Efficient Optical Flow Estimation | VIDEO

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) involves identifying the attributes of individuals in person images. Existing PAR methods typically rely on CNNs as the backbone network to extract pedestrian features. However, CNNs process only one adjacent region at a time, leading to the loss of long-range inter-relations between different attribute-specific regions. To address this limitation, we leverage the Vision Transformer (ViT) instead of CNNs as the backbone for PAR, aiming to model long-range relations and extract more robust features. However, PAR suffers from an inherent attribute imbalance issue, causing ViT to naturally focus more on attributes that appear frequently in the training set and ignore some pedestrian attributes that appear less. The native features extracted by ViT are not able to tolerate the imbalance attribute distribution issue. To tackle this issue, we propose two novel components: the Selective Feature Activation Method (SFAM) and the Orthogonal Feature Activation Loss. SFAM smartly suppresses the more informative attribute-specific features, compelling the PAR model to capture discriminative features from regions that are easily overlooked. The proposed loss enforces an orthogonal constraint on the original feature extracted by ViT and the suppressed features from SFAM, promoting the complementarity of features in space. We conduct experiments on several benchmark PAR datasets, including PETA, PA100K, RAPv1, and RAPv2, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by GRL, IAA-Caps, ALM, and SSC in terms of mA on the four datasets, respectively.

Selective and Orthogonal Feature Activation for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition | VIDEO

We present that visual grounding and image captioning, which perform as two mutually inverse processes, can be bridged together for collaborative training by careful designs. By consolidating this idea, we introduce CyCo, a cyclic-consistent learning framework to ameliorate the independent training pipelines of visual grounding and image captioning. The proposed framework (1) allows the semi-weakly supervised training of visual grounding; (2) improves the performance of fully supervised visual grounding; (3) yields a general captioning model that can describe arbitrary image regions. Extensive experiments show that our fully supervised grounding model achieves state-of-the-art performance, and the semi-weakly supervised one also exhibits competitive performance compared to the fully supervised counterparts. Our image captioning model has the capability to freely describe image regions and meanwhile shows impressive performance on prevalent captioning benchmarks.

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PSC-CPI: Multi-Scale Protein Sequence-Structure Contrasting for Efficient and Generalizable Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction

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