Canada

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) aims to distill pretrained knowledge to a student model with the help of a generator without using original data. In such data-free scenarios, achieving stable performance of DFKD is essential due to the unavailability of validation data. Unfortunately, this paper has discovered that existing DFKD methods are quite sensitive to different teacher models, occasionally showing catastrophic failures of distillation, even when using well-trained teacher models. Our observation is that the generator in DFKD is not always guaranteed to produce precise yet diverse samples using the existing representative strategy of minimizing both class-prior and adversarial losses. Through our empirical study, we focus on the fact that class-prior not only decreases the diversity of generated samples, but also cannot completely address the problem of generating unexpectedly low-quality samples depending on teacher models. In this paper, we propose the teacher-agnostic data-free knowledge distillation (TA-DFKD) method, with the goal of more robust and stable performance regardless of teacher models. Our basic idea is to assign the teacher model a lenient expert role for evaluating samples, rather than a strict supervisor that enforces its class-prior on the generator. Specifically, we design a sample selection approach that takes only clean samples verified by the teacher model without imposing restrictions on the power of generating diverse samples. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method successfully achieves both robustness and training stability across various teacher models, while outperforming the existing DFKD methods.

AAAI 2024

Teacher as a Lenient Expert: Teacher-Agnostic Data-Free Knowledge Distillation | VIDEO

adversarial learning & robustness

deep generative models

transfer learning

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/)

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

We introduce a language-grounded visual prompting method to adapt the visual encoder of vision-language models for downstream tasks. By capitalizing on language integration, we devise a parameter-efficient strategy to adjust the input of the visual encoder, eliminating the need to modify or add to the model's parameters. Due to this design choice, our algorithm can operate even in black-box scenarios, showcasing adaptability in situations where access to the model's parameters is constrained. We will empirically demonstrate that, compared to prior art, grounding visual prompts with language enhances both the accuracy and speed of adaptation. Moreover, our algorithm excels in base-to-novel class generalization, overcoming limitations of visual prompting and exhibiting the capacity to generalize beyond seen classes. We thoroughly assess and evaluate our method across a variety of image recognition datasets, such as EuroSAT, UCF101, DTD, and CLEVR, spanning different learning situations, including few-shot learning, base-to-novel class generalization, and transfer learning.

LaViP: Language-Grounded Visual Prompting

One of the most important tasks in ride-hailing is order dispatching, i.e., assigning unserved orders to available drivers. Recent order dispatching has achieved a significant improvement due to the advance of reinforcement learning, which has been approved to be able to effectively address sequential decision-making problems like order dispatching. However, most existing reinforcement learning methods require agents to learn the optimal policy by interacting with environments online, which is challenging or impractical for real-world deployment due to high costs or safety concerns. For example, due to the spatiotemporally unbalanced supply and demand, online reinforcement learning-based order dispatching may significantly impact the revenue of the ride-hailing platform and passenger experience during the policy learning period. Hence, in this work, we develop an offline deep reinforcement learning framework called NondBREM for large-scale order dispatching, which learns policy from only the accumulated logged data to avoid costly and unsafe interactions with the environment. In NondBREM, a Nondeterministic Batch-Constrained Q-learning (NondBCQ) module is developed to reduce the algorithm extrapolation error and a Random Ensemble Mixture (REM) module that integrates multiple value networks with multi-head networks is utilized to improve the model generalization and robustness. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world ride-hailing datasets show the superiority of our design.

NondBREM: Nondeterministic Offline Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Order Dispatching

Value function factorization has achieved great success in multi-agent reinforcement learning by optimizing joint action-value functions through the maximization of factorized per-agent utilities. To ensure Individual-Global-Maximum property, existing works often focus on value factorization using monotonic functions, which are known to result in restricted representation expressiveness. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of monotonic factorization and present ConcaveQ, a novel non-monotonic value function factorization approach that goes beyond monotonic mixing functions and employs neural network representations of concave mixing functions. Leveraging the concave property in factorization, an iterative action selection scheme is developed to obtain optimal joint actions during training. It is used to update agents’ local policy networks, enabling fully decentralized execution. The effectiveness of the proposed ConcaveQ is validated across scenarios involving multi-agent predator-prey environment and StarCraft II micromanagement tasks. Empirical results exhibit significant improvement of ConcaveQ over state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches.

ConcaveQ: Non-monotonic Value Function Factorization via Concave Representations in Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents an Exploratory 3D Dance generation framework, E3D2, designed to address the exploration capability deficiency in existing music-conditioned 3D dance generation models. Current models often generate monotonous and simplistic dance sequences that misalign with human preferences because they lack exploration capabilities.The E3D2 framework involves a reward model trained from automatically-ranked dance demonstrations, which then guides the reinforcement learning process. This approach encourages the agent to explore and generate high quality and diverse dance movement sequences. The soundness of the reward model is both theoretically and experimentally validated. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of E3D2 on the AIST++ dataset.

Explore 3D Dance Generation via Reward Model from Automatically-Ranked Demonstrations | VIDEO

Neural reconstruction and rendering strategies have demonstrated state-of-the-art performances due, in part, to their ability to preserve high-level shape details. Existing approaches, however, either represent objects as implicit surface functions or neural volumes and still struggle to recover shapes with heterogeneous materials, in particular human skin, hair, or clothes. To this aim, we present a new hybrid implicit surface representation to model human shapes. This representation is composed of two surface layers that represent opaque and translucent regions on the clothed human body. We segment different regions automatically using visual cues and learn to reconstruct two signed distance functions (SDFs). We perform surface-based rendering on opaque regions (e.g., body, face, clothes) to preserve high-fidelity surface normals and volume rendering on translucent regions (e.g. hair). Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on 3d human reconstructions, and also shows competitive performances on other objects.

HISR: Hybrid Implicit Surface Representation for Photorealistic 3D Human Reconstruction

This paper addresses the task of counting human actions of interest using sensor data from wearable devices. We propose a novel exemplar-based framework, allowing users to provide exemplars of the actions they want to count by vocalizing predefined sounds ``one'', ``two'', and ``three''. Our method first localizes temporal positions of these utterances from the audio sequence. These positions serve as the basis for identifying exemplars representing the action class of interest. A similarity map is then computed between the exemplars and the entire sensor data sequence, which is further fed into a density estimation module to generate a sequence of estimated density values. Summing these density values provides the final count. To develop and evaluate our approach, we introduce a diverse and realistic dataset consisting of real-world data from 37 subjects and 50 action categories, encompassing both sensor and audio data. The experiments on this dataset demonstrate the viability of the proposed method in counting instances of actions from new classes and subjects that were not part of the training data. On average, the discrepancy between the predicted count and the ground truth value is 7.47, significantly lower than the errors of the frequency-based and transformer-based methods.

Count What You Want: Exemplar Identification and Few-Shot Counting of Human Actions in the Wild

Recently, Table Structure Recognition (TSR) task, aiming at identifying table structure into machine readable formats, has received increasing interest in the community. While impressive success, most single table component-based methods can not perform well on unregularized table cases distracted by not only complicated inner structure but also exterior capture distortion. In this paper, we raise it as Complex TSR problem, where the performance degeneration of existing methods is attributable to their inefficient component usage and redundant post-processing. To mitigate it, we shift our perspective from table component extraction towards the efficient multiple components leverage, which awaits further exploration in the field. Specifically, we propose a seminal method, termed GrabTab, equipped with newly proposed Component Deliberator, to handle various types of tables in a unified framework. Thanks to its progressive deliberation mechanism, our GrabTab can flexibly accommodate to most complex tables with reasonable components selected but without complicated post-processing involved. Quantitative experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, especially under more challenging scenes.

Grab What You Need: Rethinking Complex Table Structure Recognition with Flexible Components Deliberation | VIDEO

Speech emotions are crucial in human communication and are extensively used in fields like speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Most prior studies, such as speech emotion recognition, have categorized speech emotions into a fixed set of classes.  Yet, emotions expressed in human speech are often complex, and categorizing them into predefined groups can be insufficient to adequately represent speech emotions. On the contrary, describing speech emotions directly by means of natural language may be a more effective approach. Regrettably, there are not many studies available that have focused on this direction. Therefore, this paper proposes a speech emotion captioning framework named SECap, aiming at effectively describing speech emotions using natural language. Owing to the impressive capabilities of large language models in language comprehension and text generation, SECap employs LLaMA as the text decoder to allow the production of coherent speech emotion captions. In addition, SECap leverages HuBERT as the audio encoder to extract general speech features and Q-Former as the Bridge-Net to provide LLaMA with emotion-related speech features. To accomplish this, Q-Former utilizes mutual information learning to disentangle emotion-related speech features and speech contents, while implementing contrastive learning to extract more emotion-related speech features. The results of objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the SECap framework outperforms the HTSAT-BART baseline in all objective evaluations; 2) SECap can generate high-quality speech emotion captions that attain performance on par with human annotators in subjective mean opinion score tests.

SECap: Speech Emotion Captioning with Large Language Model

Salient Object Ranking (SOR) is the process of predicting the order of an observer's attention to objects when viewing a complex scene. Existing SOR methods primarily focus on ranking various scene objects simultaneously by exploring their spatial and semantic properties. However, their solutions of simultaneously ranking all salient objects do not align with human viewing behavior, and may result in incorrect attention shift predictions. We observe that humans view a scene through a sequential and continuous process involving a cycle of foveating to objects of interest with our foveal vision while using peripheral vision to prepare for the next fixation location. For instance, when we see a flying kite, our foveal vision captures the kite itself, while our peripheral vision can help us locate the person controlling it such that we can smoothly divert our attention to it next. By repeatedly carrying out this cycle, we can gain a thorough understanding of the entire scene. Based on this observation, we propose to model the dynamic interplay between foveal and peripheral vision to predict human attention shifts sequentially. To this end, we propose a novel SOR model, SeqRank, which reproduces foveal vision to extract high-acuity visual features for accurate salient instance segmentation while also modeling peripheral vision to select the object that is likely to grab the viewer’s attention next. By incorporating both types of vision, our model can mimic human viewing behavior better and provide a more faithful ranking among various scene objects. Most notably, our model improves the SA-SOR/MAE scores by +6.1%/-13.0% on IRSR, compared with the state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our model on the SOR benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/guanhuankang/SeqRank.

SeqRank: Sequential Ranking of Salient Objects

Object detection (OD) in computer vision has made significant progress in recent years, transitioning from closed-set labels to open-vocabulary detection (OVD) based on large-scale vision-language pre-training (VLP). However, current evaluation methods and datasets are limited to testing generalization over object types and referral expressions, which do not provide a systematic, fine-grained, and accurate benchmark of OVD models' abilities. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark named OVDEval, which includes 9 sub-tasks and introduces evaluations on commonsense knowledge, attribute understanding, position understanding, object relation comprehension, and more. The dataset is meticulously created to provide hard negatives that challenge models' true understanding of visual and linguistic input. Additionally, we identify a problem with the popular Average Precision (AP) metric when benchmarking models on these fine-grained label datasets and propose a new metric called Non-Maximum Suppression Average Precision (NMS-AP) to address this issue. Extensive experimental results show that existing top OVD models all fail on the new tasks except for simple object types, demonstrating the value of the proposed dataset in pinpointing the weakness of current OVD models and guiding future research. Furthermore, the proposed NMS-AP metric is verified by experiments to provide a much more truthful evaluation of OVD models, whereas traditional AP metrics yield deceptive results.

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LaViP: Language-Grounded Visual Prompting

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