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Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages and among different object detectors. Therefore, the current methods with fixed thresholds have sub-optimal performance, and are difficult to be applied to other detectors. In order to resolve this obstacle, we propose a Calibrated Teacher, of which the confidence estimation of the prediction is well calibrated to match its real precision. In this way, different detectors in different training stages would share a similar distribution of the output confidence, so that multiple detectors could share the same fixed threshold and achieve better performance. Furthermore, we present a simple but effective Focal IoU Weight (FIoU) for the classification loss. FIoU aims at reducing the loss weight of false negative samples caused by the missing annotation, and thus works as the complement of the teacher-student paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our methods set new state-of-the-art under all different sparse settings in COCO. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/CalibratedTeacher.

AAAI 2023

Calibrated Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection

sparsely annotated

confidence calibration

object detection

semi-supervised 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.

poster


We study the synthesis under environment specifications problem for LTL/LTLf which, in particular, generalizes FOND (strong) planning with these temporal goals. We consider the case where the agent cannot enforce its goal --- for which the argument for using best-effort strategies has been made  --- and study the intermediate ground, between enforcing and best-effort strategies, of dominant strategies. Intuitively, such strategies achieve the goal against any environment for which it is achievable.  

We show that dominant strategies may exist when enforcing ones do not, while still sharing with the latter many desirable properties such as being interchangeable with each other, and being monotone with respect to tightening of environment specifications. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of dominant strategies, and show that deciding if they exist is 2EXPTIME-complete --- the same as for enforcing strategies. Finally, we give a uniform, optimal, game-theoretic algorithm for simultaneously solving the three synthesis problems of enforcing, dominant, and best-effort strategies. 

Reactive Synthesis of Dominant Strategies

There are many news articles reporting the obstacles confronting poverty-stricken households in access to public transits. These barriers create a great deal of inconveniences for these impoverished families and more importantly, they contribute a lot of social inequalities. A typical approach addressing the issue is to build more transport infrastructure to offer more opportunities to access the public transits especially for those deprived communities. Examples include adding more bus lines connecting needy residents to railways systems and extending existing bus lines to areas with low socioeconomic status. Recently, a new strategy is proposed, which is to harness the ubiquitous ride-hailing services to connect disadvantaged households with the nearest public transportations. Compared with the former infrastructure-based solution, the ride-hailing-based strategy enjoys a few exclusive benefits such as higher effectiveness and more flexibility.

In this paper, we propose an optimization model to study how to integrate the two approaches together for equity-promotion purposes. Specifically, we aim to design a strategy of allocating a given limited budget to different candidate programs such that the overall social equity is maximized, which is defined as the minimum covering ratio among all pre-specified protected groups of households (based on race, income, etc.). We have designed a linear-programming (LP) based rounding algorithm, which proves to achieve an optimal approximation ratio of 1-1/e. Additionally, we test our algorithm against a few baselines on real data assembled by outsourcing multiple public datasets collected in the city of Chicago. Experimental results confirm our theoretical predictions and demonstrate the effectiveness of our LP-based strategy in promoting social equity, especially when the budget is insufficient.

Equity Promotion in Public Transportation

We study monitoring of linear-time arithmetic properties against finite traces generated by an unknown dynamic system. The monitoring state is determined by considering at once the trace prefix seen so far, and all its possible finite-length, future continuations. This makes monitoring at least as hard as satisfiability and validity. Traces consist of finite sequences of assignments of a fixed set of variables to numerical values. Properties are specified in a logic we call ALTLf ,combining LTLf (LTL on finite traces) with linear arithmetic constraints that may carry lookahead, i.e., variables may be compared over multiple instants of the trace. While the monitoring problem for this setting is undecidable in general, we show decidability for (a) properties without lookahead, and (b) properties with lookahead that satisfy the abstract, semantic condition of finite summary, studied before in the context of model checking. We then single out concrete, practically relevant classes of constraints guaranteeing finite summary. Feasibility is witnessed by a prototype implementation.

Monitoring Arithmetic Temporal Properties on Finite Traces

Data augmentation with Mixup has been proven an effective method to regularize the current deep neural networks. Mixup generates virtual samples and corresponding labels at once through linear interpolation. However, this one-stage generation paradigm and the use of linear interpolation have the following two defects:
(1) The label of the generated sample is directly combined from the labels of the original sample pairs without reasonable judgment, which makes the labels likely to be ambiguous.
(2) linear combination significantly limits the sampling space for generating samples.
To tackle these problems, we propose a novel and effective augmentation method based on global clustering relationships named Global Mixup. Specifically, we transform the previous one-stage augmentation process into two-stage, decoupling the process of generating virtual samples from the labeling. And for the labels of the generated samples, relabeling is performed based on clustering by calculating the global relationships of the generated samples.
In addition, we are no longer limited to linear relationships but generate more reliable virtual samples in a larger sampling space.Extensive experiments for CNN, LSTM, and BERT on five tasks show that Global Mixup significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines. Further experiments also demonstrate the advantage of Global Mixup in low-resource scenarios.

Global Mixup: Eliminating Ambiguity with Clustering

Healthcare acquired infections (HAIs) (e.g., Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection) have complex transmission pathways, spreading not just via direct person-to-person contacts, but also via contaminated surfaces. Prior work in mathematical epidemiology has led to a class of models – which we call load sharing models – that provide a discrete-time, stochastic formalization of HAI-spread on temporal contact networks. The focus of this paper is the source detection problem for the load sharing model. The source detection problem has been studied extensively in SEIR type models, but this prior work does not apply to load sharing models.
We show that a natural formulation of the source detection problem for the load sharing model is computationally hard, even to approximate. We then present two alternate formulations that are much more tractable. The tractability of our problems depends crucially on the submodularity of the expected number of infections as a function of the source set. Prior techniques for showing submodularity, such as the "live graph" technique are not applicable for the load sharing model and our key technical contribution is to use a more sophisticated "coupling" technique to show the submodularity result. We propose algorithms for our two problem formulations by extending existing algorithmic results from submodular optimization and combining these with an expectation propagation heuristic for the load sharing model that leads to orders-of-magnitude speedup. We present experimental results on temporal contact networks based on fine-grained EMR data from three different hospitals. Our results on synthetic outbreaks on these networks show that our algorithms outperform baselines by up to 5.97 times. Furthermore, case studies based on hospital outbreaks of Clostridioides difficile infection show that our algorithms identify clinically meaningful sources.

Detecting Sources of Healthcare Associated Infections

Despite impressive success in many tasks, deep learning models are shown to rely on spurious features, which will catastrophically fail when generalized to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is proposed to alleviate this issue by extracting domain-invariant features for OOD generalization. Nevertheless, recent work shows that IRM is only effective for a certain type of distribution shift (e.g., correlation shift) while it fails for other cases (e.g., diversity shift). Meanwhile, another thread of method, Adversarial Training (AT), has shown better domain transfer performance, suggesting that it has the potential to be an effective candidate for extracting domain-invariant features. This paper investigates this possibility by exploring the similarity between the IRM and AT objectives. Inspired by this connection, we propose Domain-wise Adversarial Training (DAT), an AT-inspired method for alleviating distribution shift by domain-specific perturbations. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DAT can effectively remove domain-varying features and improve OOD generalization under both correlation shift and diversity shift.

On the Connection between Invariant Learning and Adversarial Training for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Autonomous systems are often deployed in the open world with incomplete specification of objectives or constraints, due to practical limitations in precise model specification. Operating based on such models may produce negative side effects (NSEs), which affect the safety and reliability of the system. We focus on mitigating NSEs assuming an underlying Markov decision process (MDP) based planning model. First, we learn a model of NSEs using observed data which contains state-action trajectories and the severity of associated .NSEs. Unlike previous work that associated NSEs with state-action pairs, our framework associates NSEs with entire trajectories, which is highly general and models non-Markovian dependence on states and actions. Second, we learn finite state controllers (FSCs) that predict the NSE severity for a given trajectory, and also generalize well to unseen data. Finally, we develop a constrained MDP model that uses information from both the underlying MDP and the learned FSC for planning while avoiding NSEs. Empirical evaluations show the effectiveness of our approach in learning and mitigating non-Markovian NSEs from a limited amount of historical data, and outperforming the previous best method.

Planning and Learning for Non-Markovian Negative Side Effects Using Finite State Controllers

Despite improvements in safe water and sanitation services in low-income countries, a substantial proportion of the population in Africa still does not have access to these essential services. Up-to-date fine-scale maps of low-income settlements are urgently needed by authorities  to improve service provision. We aim to develop a cost-effective solution to generate fine-scale maps of these vulnerable populations using multi-source public information. The problem is challenging as ground-truth maps are available at only a limited number of cities, and the patterns are heterogeneous across cities. Recent attempts tackling the spatial heterogeneity issue focus on scenarios where true labels partially exist for each input region, which are unavailable for the present problem. We propose a dynamic point-to-region co-learning framework to learn heterogeneity patterns that cannot be reflected by point-level information and generalize deep learners to new areas with no labels. We also propose an attention-based correction layer to remove spurious signatures, and a region-gate to capture both region-invariant and variant patterns. Experiment results on real-world fine-scale data in three cities of Kenya show that the proposed approach can largely improve model performance on various base network architectures.

Calibrated Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection

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