Canada

In this paper, we explore a specific optimization problem that involves the combination of a differentiable nonconvex function and a nondifferentiable function. The differentiable component lacks a global Lipschitz continuous gradient, posing challenges for optimization.  To address this issue and accelerate the convergence, we propose a Bregman proximal stochastic gradient method with extrapolation (BPSGE), which only requires smooth adaptivity of the differentiable part.  Under variance reduction framework, we not only analyze the subsequential and global convergence of the proposed algorithm under certain conditions,  but also analyze the sublinear convergence rate of the subsequence, and the complexity of the algorithm, revealing that the BPSGE algorithm requires at most $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ iterations in expectation to attain an $\varepsilon$-stationary point.  To validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, we conduct numerical experiments on three real-world applications: graph regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), matrix factorization with weakly-convex regularization, and NMF with nonconvex sparsity constraints. These experiments demonstrate that BPSGE is faster than the baselines without extrapolation.

AAAI 2024

A Bregman Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method with Extrapolation for Nonconvex Nonsmooth Problems | VIDEO

proximal stochastic gradient

non-lipschitz smoothness

bregman distance

extrapolation

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. 

AAAI 2022

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.<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. 

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated impressive performance in novel view synthesis. However, NeRF and most of its variants still rely on traditional complex pipelines to provide extrinsic and intrinsic camera parameters, such as COLMAP. Recent works, like NeRFmm, BARF, and L2G-NeRF, directly treat camera parameters as learnable and estimate them through differential volume rendering. However, these methods work for forward-looking scenes with slight motions and fail to tackle the rotation scenario in practice.To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel \underline{c}amera parameter \underline{f}ree neural radiance field (CF-NeRF), which incrementally reconstructs 3D representations and recovers the camera parameters inspired by incremental structure from motion (SfM). Given a sequence of images, CF-NeRF estimates the camera parameters of images one by one and reconstructs the scene through initialization, implicit localization, and implicit optimization. To evaluate our method, we use a challenging real-world dataset NeRFBuster which provides 12 scenes under complex trajectories. Results demonstrate that CF-NeRF is robust to camera rotation and achieves state-of-the-art results without providing prior information and constraints.

CF-NeRF: Camera Parameter Free Neural Radiance Fields with Incremental Learning | VIDEO

Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation  have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the algorithmic study of a novel variant of SE tournament manipulation that aims to model the fact that certain matchups are highly desired in a sporting context, incentivizing an organizer to manipulate the bracket to make such matchups take place.  We obtain both hardness and tractability results. We show that while the problem of computing a bracket enforcing a given set of matches in an SE tournament is NP-hard, there are natural restrictions that lead to polynomial-time solvability. In particular, we show polynomial-time solvability if there is a linear ordering on the ability of players with only a constant number of exceptions where a player with lower ability beats a player with higher ability.

An Exercise in Tournament Design: When Some Matches Must Be Scheduled

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a prominent rule-based language for knowledge representation and reasoning with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. The aim to capture the essence of removing (ir)relevant details in ASP programs led to the investigation of different notions, from strong persistence (SP) forgetting, to faithful abstractions, and, recently, strong simplifications, where the latter two can be seen as relaxed and strengthened notions of forgetting, respectively. Although it was observed that these notions are related, especially given that they have characterizations through the semantics for strong equivalence, it remained unclear whether they can be brought together. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing a novel relativized equivalence notion, which is a relaxation of the recent simplification notion, that is able to capture all related notions from the literature. We provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for relativized simplifiability, which shows that the challenging part is for when the context programs do not contain all the atoms to remove. We then introduce an operator that combines projection and a relaxation of SP-forgetting to obtain the relativized simplifications. We furthermore provide complexity results that complete the overall picture.

A Unified View on Forgetting and Strong Equivalence Notions in Answer Set Programming | VIDEO

We study the design of iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs). The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, several papers have recently proposed machine learning (ML)-based preference elicitation algorithms that aim to elicit only the most important information from bidders. However, from a practical point of view, the main shortcoming of this prior work is that those designs elicit bidders' preferences via value queries (i.e., “What is your value for the bundle {A, B}?''). In most real-world ICA domains, value queries are considered impractical, since they impose an unrealistically high cognitive burden on bidders, which is why they are not used in practice. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by designing an ML-powered combinatorial clock auction that elicits information from the bidders only via demand queries (i.e., “At prices p, what is your most preferred bundle of items?''). We make two key technical contributions: First, we present a novel method for training an ML model on demand queries. Second, based on those trained ML models, we introduce an efficient method for determining the demand query with the highest clearing potential, for which we also provide a theoretical foundation. We experimentally evaluate our ML-based demand query mechanism in several spectrum auction domains and compare it against the most established real-world ICA: the combinatorial clock auction (CCA). Our mechanism significantly outperforms the CCA in terms of efficiency in all domains, it achieves higher efficiency in a significantly reduced number of rounds, and, using linear prices, it exhibits vastly higher clearing potential. Thus, with this paper we bridge the gap between research and practice and propose the first practical ML-powered ICA.

Machine Learning-Powered Combinatorial Clock Auction

Existing class-agnostic counting models typically rely on a single type of prompt, e.g., box annotations. This paper aims to establish a comprehensive prompt-based counting framework capable of generating density maps for concerned objects indicated by various prompt types, such as box, point, and text. To achieve this goal, we begin by converting prompts from different modalities into prompt masks without requiring training. These masks are then integrated into a class-agnostic counting methodology for predicting density maps. Furthermore, we introduce a fixed-point inference along with an associated loss function to improve counting accuracy, all without introducing new parameters. The effectiveness of this method is substantiated both theoretically and experimentally. Additionally, a contrastive training scheme is implemented to mitigate dataset bias inherent in current class-agnostic counting datasets, a strategy whose effectiveness is confirmed by our ablation study. Our model excels in prominent class-agnostic datasets and exhibits superior performance in cross-dataset adaptation tasks.

A Fixed-Point Approach to Unified Prompt-Based Counting | VIDEO

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.

InstructDoc: A Dataset for Zero-Shot Generalization of Visual Document Understanding with Instructions

DEtection TRansformer (DETR)-based models have achieved remarkable performance. However, they are accompanied by a large computation overhead cost, which significantly prevents their applications on resource-limited devices. Prior arts attempt to reduce the computational burden of DETR using low-bit quantization, while these methods sacrifice a severe significant performance on weight-activation-attention low-bit quantization. We observe that the number of matching queries and positive samples affect much on the representation capacity of queries in DETR, while quantifying queries of DETR further reduces its representational capacity, thus leading to a severe performance drop. We introduce a new quantization strategy based on Auxiliary Queries for DETR (AQ-DETR), aiming to enhance the capacity of quantized queries. In addition, a layer-by-layer distillation is proposed to reduce the quantization error between quantized attention and full-precision counterpart. Through our extensive experiments on large-scale open datasets, the performance of the 4-bit quantization of DETR and Deformable DETR models is comparable to  full-precision counterparts.

AQ-DETR: Low-Bit Quantized Detection Transformer with Auxiliary Queries

Humor is a crucial part of human communication. Understanding humor and generating humorous responses in dialogue can provide natural and empathic human-computer interactions.
However, most existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform  unsatisfactorily in humor generation.
On one hand, the serious shortage of humor corpus and datasets pose challenges for constructing models that can understand and generate humorous expressions. On the other hand, humor generation relies on rich knowledge and commonsense, which is often tacit and unspoken.
In this paper, we construct the largest Chinese Explainable Humor Response Dataset to date with chain-of-humor and humor mind map annotations, which can be used to comprehensively evaluate as well as improve the humorous response ability of PLMs.
We further design humor-related auxiliary tasks to further enhance PLMs' humorous response performance.
Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed dataset and auxiliary tasks effectively help PLMs to generate humorous responses, laying the groundwork for future humor research.

Talk Funny! A Large-Scale Humor Response Dataset with Chain-of-Humor Interpretation

Transferable black-box adversarial attacks against classifiers by disturbing the intermediate-layer features have been extensively studied in recent years. However, these methods have not yet achieved satisfactory performances when directly applied to object detectors. This is largely because the features of detectors are fundamentally different from that of the classifiers. In this study, we propose a simple but effective method to improve the transferability of adversarial examples for object detectors by leveraging the properties of spatial consistency and limited equivariance of object detectors’ features. Specifically, we combine a novel loss function and deliberately designed data augmentation to distort the backbone features of object detectors by suppressing significant features corresponding to objects and amplifying the surrounding vicinal features corresponding to object boundaries. As such the target object and background area on the generated adversarial samples are more likely to be confused by other detectors. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art black-box transferability for untargeted attacks on various models, including one/two-stage, CNN/Transformer-based, and anchor-free/anchor-based detectors.

Transferable Adversarial Attacks for Object Detection Using Object-Aware Significant Feature Distortion | VIDEO

The Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) has recently gained popularity in the field of computer vision, thanks to its image generation applications, such as Imagen, Latent Diffusion Models, and Stable Diffusion, which have demonstrated impressive capabilities and sparked much discussion within the community. Recent investigations have further unveiled the utility of DPM in the domain of medical image analysis, as underscored by the commendable performance exhibited by the medical image segmentation model across various tasks. Although these models were originally underpinned by a UNet architecture, there exists a potential avenue for enhancing their performance through the integration of vision transformer mechanisms. However, we discovered that simply combining these two models resulted in subpar performance. To effectively integrate these two cutting-edge techniques for the Medical image segmentation, we propose a novel Transformer-based Diffusion framework, called MedSegDiff-V2. We verify its effectiveness on 20 medical image segmentation tasks with different image modalities. Through comprehensive evaluation, our approach demonstrates superiority over prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies. Code is released at https://github.com/WuJunde/MedSegDiff.

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CF-NeRF: Camera Parameter Free Neural Radiance Fields with Incremental Learning | VIDEO

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