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VQA is an ambitious task aiming to answer any image-related question. However, in reality, it is hard to build such a system once for all since the needs of users are continuously updated, and the system has to implement new functions. Thus, Continual Learning (CL) ability is a must in developing advanced VQA systems. Recently, a pioneer work split a VQA dataset into disjoint answer sets to study this topic. However, CL on VQA involves not only the expansion of label sets (new Answer sets). It is crucial to study how to answer questions when deploying VQA systems to new environments (new Visual scenes) and how to answer questions requiring new functions (new Question types). Thus, we propose CLOVE, a benchmark for Continual Learning On Visual quEstion answering, which contains scene- and function-incremental settings for the two aforementioned CL scenarios. In terms of methodology, the main difference between CL on VQA and classification is that the former additionally involves expanding and preventing forgetting of reasoning mechanisms, while the latter focusing on class representation. Thus, we propose a real-data-free replay-based method tailored for CL on VQA, named Scene Graph as Prompt for Symbolic Replay. Using a piece of scene graph as a prompt, it replays pseudo scene graphs to represent the past images, along with correlated QA pairs. A unified VQA model is also proposed to utilize the current and replayed data to enhance its QA ability. Finally, experimental results reveal challenges in CLOVE and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code and data
are available at https://github.com/showlab/CLVQA.

AAAI 2023

Symbolic Replay: Scene Graph as Prompt for Continual Learning on VQA Task

scene graph

continual learning

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. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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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.

poster

We investigate top-m arm identification, a basic problem in bandit theory, in a multi-agent learning model in which agents collaborate to learn an objective function.  We are interested in designing collaborative learning algorithms that achieve maximum speedup (compared to single-agent learning algorithms) using minimum communication cost, as communication is frequently the bottleneck in multi-agent learning.  We give both algorithmic and impossibility results, and conduct a set of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms. 

Communication-Efficient Collaborative Best Arm Identification

We study the problem of graph structure identification, i.e., of recovering the graph of dependencies among time series. We model these time series data as components of the state of linear stochastic networked dynamical systems. We assume partial observability, where the state evolution of only a subset of nodes comprising the network is observed. We devise a new feature vector computed from the observed time series and prove that these features are linearly separable, i.e., there exists a hyperplane that separates the cluster of features associated
with connected pairs of nodes from those associated with disconnected pairs. This renders the features amenable to train a variety of classifiers to perform causal inference. In particular, we use these features to train Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs). The resulting causal inference mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts w.r.t. sample-complexity. The trained CNNs generalize well over structurally distinct networks (dense or sparse) and noise-level profiles. Remarkably, they also generalize well to real-world networks while trained over a synthetic network (realization of a random graph). Finally, the proposed method consistently reconstructs the graph in a pairwise manner, that is, by deciding if an edge or arrow is present or absent in each pair of nodes, from the corresponding time series of each pair. This fits the framework of large-scale systems, where observation or processing of all nodes in the network is prohibitive.

Recovering the Graph Underlying Networked Dynamical Systems under Partial Observability: A Deep Learning Approach

Generative self-supervised learning (SSL), especially masked autoencoders, has become one of the most exciting learning paradigms and has shown great potential in handling graph data. However, real-world graphs are always heterogeneous, which poses three critical challenges that existing methods ignore: 1) how to capture complex graph structure? 2) how to incorporate various node attributes? and 3) how to encode different node positions? In light of this, we study the problem of generative SSL on heterogeneous graphs and propose HGMAE, a novel heterogeneous graph masked autoencoder model to address these challenges. HGMAE captures comprehensive graph information via two innovative masking techniques and three unique training strategies. In particular, we first develop metapath masking and adaptive attribute masking with dynamic mask rate to enable effective and stable learning on heterogeneous graphs. We then design several training strategies including metapath-based edge reconstruction to adopt complex structural information, target attribute restoration to incorporate various node attributes, and positional feature prediction to encode node positional information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HGMAE outperforms both contrastive and generative state-of-the-art baselines on several tasks across multiple datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/meettyj/HGMAE.

Heterogeneous Graph Masked Autoencoders

Causal Emotion Entailment aims to identify causal utterances that are responsible for the target utterance with a non-neutral emotion in conversations. Previous works are limited in thorough understanding of the conversational context and accurate reasoning of the emotion cause. To this end, we propose Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network (KBCIN) with commonsense knowledge (CSK) leveraged as three bridges. Specifically, we construct a conversational graph for each conversation and leverage the event-centered CSK as the semantics-level bridge (S-bridge) to capture the deep inter-utterance dependencies in the conversational context via the CSK-Enhanced Graph Attention module. Moreover, social-interaction CSK serves as emotion-level bridge (E-bridge) and action-level bridge (A-bridge) to connect candidate utterances with the target one, which provides explicit causal clues for the Emotional Interaction module and Actional Interaction module to reason the target emotion. Experimental results show that our model achieves better performance over most baseline models. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/circle-hit/KBCIN.

Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) has attracted a lot of interest in recent years, especially for complex questions which require multiple facts to answer. Question decomposition is a promising way to answer complex questions. Existing decomposition methods split the question into sub-questions according to a single compositionality type, which is not sufficient for questions involving multiple compositionality types. In this paper, we propose Question Decomposition Tree (QDT) to represent the structure of complex questions. Inspired by recent advances in natural language generation (NLG), we present a two-staged method called Clue-Decipher to generate QDT. It can leverage the strong ability of NLG model and simultaneously preserve the original questions. To verify that QDT can enhance KBQA task, we design a decomposition-based KBQA system called QDTQA. Extensive experiments show that QDTQA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on ComplexWebQuestions dataset. Besides, our decomposition method improves an existing KBQA system by 12% and sets a new state-of-the-art on LC-QuAD 1.0.

Question Decomposition Tree for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases

Hyperparameter tuning is an essential task in automatic machine learning and big data management. 
To accelerate tuning, many recent studies focus on augmenting BO, the primary hyperparameter tuning strategy, by transferring information from other tuning tasks.
However, existing studies ignore program similarities in their transfer mechanism, thus they are sub-optimal in cross-program transfer when tuning tasks involve different programs. 
This paper proposes CaTHPO, a code-aware cross-program transfer hyperparameter optimization framework, which makes three improvements. 
(1) It learns code-aware program representation in a self-supervised manner to give an off-the-shelf estimate of program similarities. 
(2) It adjusts the surrogate and AF in BO based on program similarities, thus the hyperparameter search is guided by accumulated information across similar programs. 
(3) It presents a safe controller to dynamically prune undesirable sample points based on tuning experiences of similar programs. 
Extensive experiments on tuning various recommendation models and Spark applications have demonstrated that CatHPO can steadily obtain better and more robust hyperparameter performances within fewer samples than state-of-the-art competitors.  

Code-Aware Cross-Program Transfer Hyperparameter Optimization

Downsampling produces coarsened, multi-resolution representations of data and it is used, for example, to produce lossy compression and visualization of large images, reduce computational costs, and boost deep neural representation learning. 
Unfortunately, due to their lack of a regular structure, there is still no consensus on how downsampling should apply to graphs and linked data. Indeed reductions in graph data are still needed for the goals described above, but reduction mechanisms do not have the same focus on preserving topological structures and properties, while allowing for resolution-tuning, as is the case in regular data downsampling.
In this paper, we take a step in this direction, introducing a unifying interpretation of downsampling in regular and graph data. In particular, we define a graph coarsening mechanism which is a graph-structured counterpart of controllable equispaced coarsening mechanisms in regular data. We prove theoretical guarantees for distortion bounds on path lengths, as well as the ability to preserve key topological properties in the coarsened graphs. We leverage these concepts to define a graph pooling mechanism that we empirically assess in graph classification tasks, providing a greedy algorithm that allows efficient parallel implementation on GPUs, and showing that it compares favorably against pooling methods in literature.

Generalizing Downsampling from Regular Data to Graphs

Random forests are decision tree ensembles that can be used 
to solve a variety of machine learning problems. However, as
the number of trees and their individual size can be large,
their decision making process is often incomprehensible.
We show that their decision process can be naturally represented 
as an argumentation problem, which allows creating global explanations 
via argumentative reasoning. We generalize sufficient and necessary 
argumentative explanations using a Markov network encoding, discuss 
the relevance of these explanations and establish relationships to
families of abductive explanations from the literature. As the complexity 
of the explanation problems is high, we present an efficient approximation algorithm with probabilistic approximation guarantees.

Explaining Random Forests using Bipolar Argumentation and Markov Networks

In this paper, we develop machine learning techniques to identify unknown printers in early modern (c.~1500--1800) English printed books.
Specifically, we focus on matching uniquely damaged character type-imprints in anonymously printed books to works with known printers in order to provide evidence of their origins.
Until now, this work has been limited to manual investigations by analytical bibliographers.
We present a Contrastive Attention-based Metric Learning approach to identify similar damage across character image pairs, which is sensitive to very subtle differences in glyph shapes, yet robust to various confounding sources of noise associated with digitized historical books. 
To overcome the scarce amount of supervised data, we design a random data synthesis procedure that aims to simulate bends, fractures, and inking variations induced by the early printing process.
Our method successfully improves downstream damaged type-imprint matching among printed works from this period, as validated by in-domain human experts. The results of our approach on two important philosophical works from the Early Modern period demonstrate potential to extend the extant historical research about the origins and content of these books. 

Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print

We introduce a novel method based on semidefinite program (SDP) for the tight and efficient verification of neural networks. The proposed SDP relaxation advances the present SoA in SDP-based neural network verification by adding a set of linear constraints based on eigenvectors. We extend this novel SDP relaxation by combining it with a branch-and-bound method that can provably close the relaxation gap up to zero. We show formally that the proposed approach leads to a provably tighter solution than the present SoA. We report experimental results showing that the proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of verified accuracy  while retaining an acceptable computational overhead. 


Symbolic Replay: Scene Graph as Prompt for Continual Learning on VQA Task

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