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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer severe performance degradation when the interaction data is scarce, which limits their real-world application. Recently, visual representation learning has been shown to be effective and promising for boosting sample efficiency in RL. These methods usually rely on contrastive learning and data augmentation to train a transition model, which is different from how the model is used in RL---performing value-based planning.  Accordingly, the learned representation by these visual methods may be good for recognition but not optimal for estimating state value and solving the decision problem. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, called value-consistent representation learning (VCR), to learn representations that are directly related to decision-making. More specifically, VCR trains a model to predict the future state (also referred to as the &quot;imagined state&#39;&#39;) based on the current one and a sequence of actions. Instead of aligning this imagined state with a real state returned by the environment, VCR applies a Q value head on both of the states and obtains two distributions of action values. Then a distance is computed and minimized to force the imagined state to produce a similar action value prediction as that by the real state. We develop two implementations of the above idea for the discrete and continuous action spaces  respectively. We conduct experiments on Atari 100k and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks to validate their effectiveness for improving sample efficiency. It has been demonstrated that our methods achieve new state-of-the-art performance for search-free RL algorithms. 

AAAI 2023

Value-Consistent Representation Learning for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

data efficiency

reinforcement 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. 
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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.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer severe performance degradation when the interaction data is scarce, which limits their real-world application. Recently, visual representation learning has been shown to be effective and promising for boosting sample efficiency in RL. These methods usually rely on contrastive learning and data augmentation to train a transition model, which is different from how the model is used in RL---performing value-based planning.  Accordingly, the learned representation by these visual methods may be good for recognition but not optimal for estimating state value and solving the decision problem. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, called value-consistent representation learning (VCR), to learn representations that are directly related to decision-making. More specifically, VCR trains a model to predict the future state (also referred to as the "imagined state'') based on the current one and a sequence of actions. Instead of aligning this imagined state with a real state returned by the environment, VCR applies a Q value head on both of the states and obtains two distributions of action values. Then a distance is computed and minimized to force the imagined state to produce a similar action value prediction as that by the real state. We develop two implementations of the above idea for the discrete and continuous action spaces  respectively. We conduct experiments on Atari 100k and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks to validate their effectiveness for improving sample efficiency. It has been demonstrated that our methods achieve new state-of-the-art performance for search-free RL algorithms. 

poster

The prevailing graph neural network models have achieved significant progress in graph representation learning. However, in this paper, we uncover an ever-overlooked phenomenon: the pre-trained graph representation learning model tested with full graphs underperforms the model tested with well-pruned graphs. This observation reveals that there exist confounders in graphs, which may interfere with the model learning semantic information, and current graph representation learning methods have not eliminated their influence. To tackle this issue, we propose Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning (RCGRL) to learn robust graph representations against confounding effects. RCGRL introduces an active approach to generate instrumental variables under unconditional moment restrictions, which empowers the graph representation learning model to eliminate confounders, thereby capturing discriminative information that is causally related to downstream predictions. We offer theorems and proofs to guarantee the theoretical effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and multiple benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art methods, RCGRL achieves better prediction performance and generalization ability.

Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning against Confounding Effects

Face reenactment and reconstruction benefit various applications in self-media, VR, etc. Recent face reenactment methods use 2D facial landmarks to implicitly retarget facial expressions and poses from driving videos to source images,
while they suffer from pose and expression preservation issues for cross-identity scenarios, i.e., when the source and the driving subjects are different. Current self-supervised face reconstruction methods also demonstrate impressive results.
However, these methods do not handle large expressions well, since their training data lacks samples of large expressions, and 2D facial attributes are inaccurate on such samples. To mitigate the above problems, we propose to explore the inner connection between the two tasks, i.e., using face reconstruction to provide 
sufficient 3D information for reenactment, and synthesizing videos paired with captured face model parameters through face reenactment to enhance the
expression module of face reconstruction. In particular, we propose a novel cascade framework named JR2Net for Joint Face Reconstruction and Reenactment, which begins with the training of a coarse reconstruction network, followed by a 3D-aware face reenactment network based on the coarse reconstruction results. In the end, we train an expression tracking network based on our synthesized videos composed by image-face model parameter pairs. Such an expression tracking network can further enhance the coarse face reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our JR2Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several face reconstruction and reenactment benchmarks.

JR2Net: Joint Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction and Reenactment

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to recognize both known and novel categories from a set of unlabeled data, based on another dataset labeled with only known categories. Without considering differences between known and novel categories, current methods learn about them in a coupled manner, which can hurt model's generalization and discriminative ability. Furthermore, the coupled training approach prevents these models transferring category-specific knowledge explicitly from labeled data to unlabeled data, which can lose high-level semantic information and impair model performance. To mitigate above limitations, we present a novel model called Decoupled Prototypical Network (DPN). By formulating a bipartite matching problem for category prototypes, DPN can not only decouple known and novel categories to achieve different training targets effectively, but also align known categories in labeled and unlabeled data to transfer category-specific knowledge explicitly and capture high-level semantics. Furthermore, DPN can learn more discriminative features for both known and novel categories through our proposed Semantic-aware Prototypical Learning (SPL). Besides capturing meaningful semantic information, SPL can also alleviate the noise of hard pseudo labels through semantic-weighted soft assignment. Extensive experiments show that DPN outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin on all evaluation metrics across multiple benchmark datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/DPN.

Generalized Category Discovery with Decoupled Prototypical Network


Recent breakthroughs in semi-supervised semantic segmentation have been developed through contrastive learning. In prevalent pixel-wise contrastive learning solutions, the model maps pixels to deterministic representations and regularizes them in the latent space. However, there exist inaccurate pseudo-labels which map the ambiguous representations of pixels to the wrong classes due to the limited cognitive ability of the model. In this paper, we define pixel-wise representations from a new perspective of probability theory and propose a Probabilistic Representation Contrastive Learning (PRCL) framework that improves representation quality by taking its probability into consideration. Through modelling the mapping from pixels to representations as the probability via multivariate Gaussian distributions, we can tune the contribution of the ambiguous representations to tolerate the risk of inaccurate pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we define prototypes in the form of distributions, which indicates the confidence of a class, while the point prototype cannot. More- over, we propose to regularize the distribution variance to enhance the reliability of representations. Taking advantage of these benefits, high-quality feature representations can be derived in the latent space, thereby the performance of se- mantic segmentation can be further improved. We conduct sufficient experiment to evaluate PRCL on Pascal VOC and CityScapes to demonstrate its superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Xie/PRCL.

Boosting Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Probabilistic Representations

Finding a \emph{single} best solution is the most common objective in combinatorial optimization problems. However, such a single solution may not be applicable to real-world problems as objective functions and constraints are only ``approximately'' formulated for original real-world problems. To solve this issue, finding \emph{multiple} solutions is a natural direction, and diversity of solutions is an important concept in this context. Unfortunately, finding diverse solutions is much harder than finding a single solution. To cope with the difficulty, we investigate the approximability of finding diverse solutions. As a main result, we propose a framework to design approximation algorithms for finding diverse solutions, which yields several outcomes including constant-factor approximation algorithms for finding diverse matchings in graphs and diverse common bases in two matroids and PTASes for finding diverse minimum cuts and interval schedulings.

A Framework to Design Approximation Algorithms for Finding Diverse Solutions in Combinatorial Problems

This paper is about editing Boolean classifiers, i.e., determining how a Boolean classifier should be modified when new pieces of evidence must be incorporated. Our main goal is to delineate what are the rational ways of making such edits. This goes through a number of rationality postulates inspired from those considered so far for belief revision. We give a representation theorem and present some families of edit operators satisfying the postulates.

Editing Boolean Classifiers: A Belief Change Perspective

Safe control methods are often intended to behave safely even in worst-case human uncertainties. However, humans may exploit such safety-first systems, which results in greater risk for everyone. Despite their significance, no prior work has investigated and accounted for such factors in safe control. In this paper, we leverage an interaction-based payoff structure from game theory to model humans’ short-sighted, self-seeking behaviors and how humans change their strategies toward machines based on prior experience. We integrate such strategic human behaviors into a safe control architecture. As a result, our approach achieves better safety and performance trade-offs when compared to both deterministic worst-case safe control techniques and equilibrium-based stochastic methods. Our findings suggest an urgent need to fundamentally rethink the safe control framework used in human-technology interaction in pursuit of greater safety for all.

Rethinking Safe Control in the Presence of Self-Seeking Humans

The networked-loan is major financing support for Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) in a number of countries. But external shocks may weaken the financial networks' robustness; an accidental default may spread across the network and collapse the whole network. Thus, predicting the critical firms in networked-loans to stem contagion risk and prevent potential systemic financial crises is of crucial significance to the long-term health of inclusive finance and sustainable economic development. Existing approaches in the banking industry dismiss the contagion risk across loan networks and need extensive knowledge with sophisticated financial expertise. Regarding the issues, we propose a novel approach to predict critical firms for stemming contagion risk in the bank industry with deep reinforcement learning integrated with high-order graph message-passing networks. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines significantly on the dataset from a large commercial bank. Moreover, we also conducted empirical studies on the real-world loan dataset for risk mitigation. The proposed approach enables financial regulators and risk managers to better track and understands contagion and systemic risk in networked-loans. The superior performance also represents a paradigm shift in addressing the modern challenges in financing support of MSMEs and sustainable economic development.

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