United States

Normalizing flows (NF) build upon invertible neural networks and have wide applications in probabilistic modeling. Currently, building a powerful yet computationally efficient flow model relies on empirical fine-tuning over a large design space. While introducing neural architecture search (NAS) to NF is desirable, the invertibility constraint of NF brings new challenges to existing NAS methods whose application is limited to unstructured neural networks. Developing efficient NAS methods specifically for NF remains an open problem. We present AutoNF, the first automated NF architectural optimization framework. First, we present a new mixture distribution formulation that allows efficient differentiable architecture search of flow models without violating the invertibility constraint. Second, under the new formulation, we convert the original NP-hard combinatorial NF architectural optimization problem to an unconstrained continuous relaxation admitting the discrete optimal architectural solution, circumventing the loss of optimality due to binarization in architectural optimization.   We evaluate AutoNF with various density estimation datasets and show its superior performance-cost trade-offs over a set of existing hand-crafted baselines.

AAAI 2023

AutoNF: Automated Architecture Optimization of Normalizing Flows with Unconstrained Continuous Relaxation Admitting Optimal Discrete Solution

architecture search

optimization

normalizing flows

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

Since rain streaks exhibit diverse geometric appearances and irregular overlapped phenomena, these complex characteristics challenge the design of an effective single image deraining model. To this end, rich local-global information representations are increasingly indispensable for better satisfying rain removal. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Hybrid CNN-Transformer Feature Fusion Network (dubbed as HCT-FFN) in a stage-by-stage progressive manner, which can harmonize these two architectures to help image restoration by leveraging their individual learning strengths. Specifically, we stack a sequence of the degradation-aware mixture of experts (DaMoE) modules in the CNN-based stage, where appropriate local experts adaptively enable the model to emphasize spatially-varying rain distribution features. As for the Transformer-based stage, a background-aware vision Transformer (BaViT) module is employed to complement spatially-long feature dependencies of images, so as to achieve global texture recovery while preserving the required structure. Considering the indeterminate knowledge discrepancy among CNN features and Transformer features, we introduce an interactive fusion branch at adjacent stages to further facilitate the reconstruction of high-quality deraining results. Extensive evaluations show the effectiveness and extensibility of our developed HCT-FFN. The source code is available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/HCT-FFN.

Hybrid CNN-Transformer Feature Fusion for Single Image Deraining

The generalization ability often determines the success of machine learning algorithms in practice. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical importance to understand and bound the generalization error of machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide the first generalization results of the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm in the distributed asynchronous decentralized setting. Our analysis is based on the uniform stability tool, where stable means that the learned model does not change much in small variations of the training set. Under some mild assumptions, we perform a comprehensive generalizability analysis of the asynchronous decentralized SGD, including generalization error and excess generalization error bounds for the strongly convex, convex, and non-convex cases. Our theoretical results reveal the effects of the learning rate, training data size, training iterations, decentralized communication topology, and asynchronous delay on the generalization performance of the asynchronous decentralized SGD. We also study the optimization error regarding the objective function values and investigate how the initial point affects the excess generalization error. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets to validate the theoretical findings.

Stability-Based Generalization Analysis of the Asynchronous Decentralized SGD

Data augmentation (DA) has been extensively studied to fa-
cilitate model optimization in many tasks. Prior DA works fo-
cus on designing augmentation operations themselves, while
leaving selecting suitable samples for augmentation out of
consideration. This might incur visual ambiguities and fur-
ther induce training biases. In this paper, we propose an ef-
fective approach, dubbed SelectAugment, to select samples
for augmentation in a deterministic and online manner based
on the sample contents and the network training status. To
facilitate the policy learning, in each batch, we exploit the
hierarchy of this task by first determining the augmenta-
tion ratio and then deciding whether to augment each train-
ing sample under this ratio. We model this process as two-
step decision-making and adopt Hierarchical Reinforcement
Learning (HRL) to learn the selection policy. In this way, the
negative effects of the randomness in selecting samples to
augment can be effectively alleviated and the effectiveness
of DA is improved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that
our proposed SelectAugment significantly improves various
off-the-shelf DA methods on image classification and fine-
grained image recognition.

SelectAugment: Hierarchical Deterministic Sample Selection for Data Augmentation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been a prevailing technique for tackling various analysis tasks on graph data. A key premise for the remarkable performance of GNNs relies on complete and trustworthy initial graph descriptions (i.e., node features and graph structure), which is often not satisfied since real-world graphs are often incomplete due to various unavoidable factors. In particular, GNNs face greater challenges when both node features and graph structure are incomplete at the same time. The existing methods either focus on feature completion or structure completion. They usually rely on the matching relationship between features and structure, or employ joint learning of node representation and feature (or structure) completion in the hope of achieving mutual benefit. However, recent studies confirm that the mutual interference between features and structure leads to the degradation of GNN performance. When both features and structure are incomplete, the mismatch between features and structure caused by the missing randomness exacerbates the interference between the two, which may trigger incorrect completions that negatively affect node representation. To this end, in this paper we propose a general GNN framework based on teacher-student distillation to improve the performance of GNNs on incomplete graphs, namely T2-GNN. To avoid the interference between features and structure, we separately design feature-level and structure-level teacher models to provide targeted guidance for student model (base GNNs, such as GCN) through distillation. Then we design two personalized methods to obtain well-trained feature and structure teachers. To ensure that the knowledge of the teacher model is comprehensively and effectively distilled to the student model, we further propose a dual distillation mode to enable the student to acquire as much expert knowledge as possible. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new framework on graphs with incomplete features and structure.

T2-GNN: Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Incomplete Features and Structure via Teacher-Student Distillation

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been shown to learn visual representations with great transferability, which achieves promising accuracy for zero-shot classification. To further improve its downstream performance, existing works propose additional learnable modules upon CLIP and fine-tune them by few-shot training sets. However, the resulting extra training cost and data requirement severely hinder the efficiency for model deployment and knowledge transfer. In this paper, we introduce a free-lunch enhancement method,CALIP, to boost CLIP's zero-shot performance via a parameter-free Attention module. Specifically, we guide visual and textual representations to interact with each other and explore cross-modal informative features via attention. As the pre-training has largely reduced the embedding distances between two modalities, we discard all learnable parameters in the attention and bidirectionally update the multi-modal features, enabling the whole process to be parameter-free and training-free. In this way, the images are blended with textual-aware signals and the text representations become visual-guided for better adaptive zero-shot alignment. We evaluate CALIP on various benchmarks of 14 datasets for both 2D image and 3D point cloud few-shot classification, showing consistent zero-shot performance improvement over CLIP. Based on that, we further insert a small number of linear layers in CALIP's attention module and verify our robustness under the few-shot settings, which also achieves leading performance compared to existing methods. Those extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for efficient enhancement of CLIP.

CALIP: Zero-Shot Enhancement of CLIP with Parameter-free Attention

Online Knowledge Distillation (OKD) is designed to alleviate the dilemma that the high-capacity pre-trained teacher model is not available. However, the existing methods mostly focus on improving the ensemble prediction accuracy from multiple students (\textit{a.k.a.} branches), which often overlook the homogenization problem that makes student model saturate quickly and hurts the performance. We assume that the intrinsic bottleneck of the homogenization problem comes from the identical branch architecture and coarse ensemble strategy. We propose a novel Adaptive Hierarchy-Branch Fusion framework for Online Knowledge Distillation, termed AHBF-OKD, which designs \emph{hierarchical branches} and \emph{adaptive hierarchy-branch fusion} module to boost the model diversity and aggregate complementary knowledge. Specifically, we first introduce hierarchical branch architectures to construct diverse peers by increasing the depth of branches monotonously on the basis of target branch. To effectively transfer knowledge from the most complex branch to the simplest target branch, we propose an adaptive hierarchy-branch fusion module to create hierarchical teacher assistants recursively, which regards the target branch as the smallest teacher assistant. During the training, the teacher assistant from the previous hierarchy is explicitly distilled by the teacher assistant and the branch from the current hierarchy. Thus, the important scores to different branches are effectively and adaptively allocated to reduce the branch homogenization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AHBF-OKD on different datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet 2012. For example, on ImageNet 2012, the distilled ResNet-18 achieves Top-1 error of 29.28\%, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art  methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/linruigong965/AHBF}.

Adaptive Hierarchy-Branch Fusion for Online Knowledge Distillation

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which facilitates the interaction between users and the database. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL semantic parsing dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnam). Upon MultiSpider we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL  (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under various settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.


MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Neural networks (NN) are an increasingly important representation of action policies pi. Recent work has extended predicate abstraction to prove safety of such pi, through policy predicate abstraction (PPA) which over-approximates the state space subgraph induced by pi. The advantage of PPA is that reasoning about the NN – calls to SMT solvers – is required only locally, at individual abstract state transitions, in contrast to bounded model checking (BMC) where SMT must reason globally about sequences of NN decisions. Indeed, it has been shown that PPA can outperform a simple BMC implementation. However, the abstractions underlying these results (i.e., the abstraction predicates) were supplied manually. Here we automate this step. We extend counterexample guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) to PPA. This involves dealing with a new source of spuriousness in abstract unsafe paths, pertaining not to transition behavior but to the decisions of the neural network pi. We introduce two methods tackling this issue based on the states involved, and we show that global SMT calls deciding spuriousness exactly can be avoided. We devise algorithmic enhancements leveraging incremental computation and heuristic search. We show empirically that the resulting verification tool has significant advantages over an encoding into the state-of-the-art model checker nuXmv. In particular, ours is the only approach in our experiments that succeeds in proving policies safe.

Neural Policy Safety Verification via Predicate Abstraction: CEGAR

Fairness in influence maximization has been a very active research topic recently. Most works in this context study the question of how to find seeding strategies (deterministic or probabilistic) such that nodes or communities in the network get their fair share of coverage. Different fairness criteria have been used in this context. All these works assume that the entity that is spreading the information has an inherent interest in spreading the information fairly, otherwise why would they want to use the developed fair algorithms? This assumption may however be flawed in reality -- the spreading entity may be purely efficiency-oriented. In this paper we propose to study two optimization problems with the goal to modify the network structure by adding links in such a way that efficiency-oriented information spreading becomes automatically fair. We study the proposed optimization problems both from a theoretical and experimental perspective, that is, we give several hardness and hardness of approximation results, provide efficient algorithms for some special cases, and more importantly provide heuristics for solving one of the problems in practice. In our experimental study we then first compare the proposed heuristics against each other and establish the most successful one. In a second experiment, we then show that our approach can be very successful in practice. That is, we show that already after adding a few edges to the networks the greedy algorithm that purely maximizes spread surpasses all fairness-tailored algorithms in terms of ex-post fairness. Maybe surprisingly, we even show that our approach achieves ex-post fairness values that are comparable or even better than the ex-ante fairness values of the currently most efficient algorithms that optimize ex-ante fairness.

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AutoNF: Automated Architecture Optimization of Normalizing Flows with Unconstrained Continuous Relaxation Admitting Optimal Discrete Solution

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