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Imitation learning (IL) has recently shown impressive performance in training a reinforcement learning agent with human demonstrations, eliminating the difficulty of designing elaborate reward functions in complex environments. However, most IL methods work under the assumption of the optimality of the demonstrations and thus cannot learn policies to surpass the demonstrators. Some methods have been investigated to obtain better-than-demonstration (BD) performance with inner human feedback or preference labels. In this paper, we propose a method to learn rewards from suboptimal demonstrations via a weighted preference learning technique (LERP). Specifically, we first formulate the suboptimality of demonstrations as the inaccurate estimation of rewards. The inaccuracy is modeled with a reward noise random variable following the Gumbel distribution. Moreover, we derive an upper bound of the expected return with different noise coefficients and propose a theorem to surpass the demonstrations. Unlike existing literature, our  analysis does not depend on the linear reward constraint. Consequently, we develop a BD model with a weighted preference learning technique. Experimental results on continuous control and high-dimensional discrete control tasks show the superiority of our LERP method over other state-of-the-art BD  methods.

AAAI 2023

Learning Noise-Induced Reward Functions for Surpassing Demonstrations in Imitation Learning

learning preferences

inverse reinforcement learning

imitation 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

Recent years, graph contrastive learning (GCL), which aims to learn representations from unlabeled graphs, has made great progress. However, the existing GCL methods mostly adopt human-designed graph augmentations, which are sensitive to various graph datasets. In addition, the contrastive losses originally developed in computer vision have been directly applied to graph data, where the neighboring nodes are regarded as negatives and consequently pushed far apart from the anchor. However, this is contradictory with the homophily assumption of net-works that connected nodes often belong to the same class and should be close to each other. In this work, we propose an end-to-end automatic GCL method, named NCLA to apply neighbor contrastive learning on learnable graph augmentation. Several graph augmented views with adaptive topology are automatically learned by the multi-head graph attention mechanism, which can be compatible with various graph datasets without prior domain knowledge. In addition, a neighbor contrastive loss is devised to allow multiple positives per anchor by taking network topology as the supervised signals. Both augmentations and embeddings are learned end-to-end in the pro-posed NCLA. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that NCLA yields the state-of-the-art node classification performance on self-supervised GCL and even exceeds the supervised ones, when the labels are extremely limited. Our code is released at https://github.com/shenxiaocam/NCLA.

Neighbor Contrastive Learning on Learnable Graph Augmentation

Designing a point cloud upsampler, which aims to generate a clean and dense point cloud given a sparse point representation, is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision. A line of attempts achieves this goal by establishing a point-to-point mapping function via deep neural networks. However, these approaches are prone to produce outlier points due to the lack of explicit surface-level constraints. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel surface regularizer into the upsampler network by forcing the neural network to learn the underlying parametric surface represented by bicubic functions and rotation functions, where the new generated points are then constrained on the underlying surface. These designs are integrated into two different networks for two tasks that take advantages of upsampling layers -- point cloud upsampling and point cloud completion for evaluation. The state-of-the-art experimental results on both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The implementation code will be available at https://github.com/corecai163/PSCU.

Parametric Surface Constrained Upsampler Network for Point Cloud

Capsule neural networks replace simple, scalar-valued neurons with vector-valued capsules. They are motivated by the pattern recognition system in the human brain, where complex objects are decomposed into a hierarchy of simpler object parts. Such a hierarchy is referred to as a parse-tree. Conceptually, capsule neural networks have been defined to mimic this behavior. The capsule neural network (CapsNet), by Sabour, Frosst, and Hinton, is the first actual implementation of the conceptual idea of capsule neural networks. CapsNets achieved state-of-the-art performance on simple image recognition tasks with fewer parameters and greater robustness to affine transformations than comparable approaches. This sparked extensive follow-up research. However, despite major efforts, no work was able to scale the CapsNet architecture to more reasonable-sized datasets. Here, we provide a reason for this failure and argue that it is most likely not possible to scale CapsNets beyond toy examples. In particular, we show that the concept of a parse-tree, the main idea behind capsule neuronal networks, is not present in CapsNets. We also show theoretically and experimentally that CapsNets suffer from a vanishing gradient problem that results in the starvation of many capsules during training.

Why Capsule Neural Networks Do Not Scale: Challenging the Dynamic Parse-Tree Assumption

Image guidance is an effective strategy for depth super-resolution. Generally, most existing methods employ hand-crafted operators to decompose the high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) ingredients from low-resolution depth maps and guide the HF ingredients by directly concatenating them with image features. However, the hand-designed operators usually cause inferior HF maps (e.g., distorted or structurally missing) due to the diverse appearance of complex depth maps. Moreover, the direct concatenation often results in weak guidance because not all image features have a positive effect on the HF maps. In this paper, we develop a recurrent structure attention guided (RSAG) framework, consisting of two important parts. First, we introduce a deep contrastive network with multi-scale filters for adaptive frequency-domain separation, which adopts contrastive networks from large filters to small ones to calculate the pixel contrasts for adaptive high-quality HF predictions. Second, instead of the coarse concatenation guidance, we propose a recurrent structure attention block, which iteratively utilizes the latest depth estimation and the image features to jointly select clear patterns and boundaries, aiming at providing refined guidance for accurate depth recovery. In addition, we fuse the features of HF maps to enhance the edge structures in the decomposed LF maps. Extensive experiments show that our approach obtains superior performance compared with state-of-the-art depth super-resolution methods.

Recurrent Structure Attention Guidance for Depth Super-Resolution

Dialogue rewriting aims to transform multi-turn, context-dependent dialogues into well-formed, context-independent text for most NLP systems. Previous dialogue rewriting benchmarks and systems assume a fluent and informative utterance to rewrite. Unfortunately, dialogue utterances from real-world systems are frequently noisy and with various kinds of errors that can make them almost uninformative. In this paper, we first present Real-world Dialogue Rewriting Corpus (RealDia), a new benchmark to evaluate how well current dialogue rewriting systems can deal with real-world noisy and uninformative dialogue utterances. RealDia contains annotated multi-turn dialogues from real scenes with ASR errors, spelling errors, redundancies and other noises that are ignored by previous dialogue rewriting benchmarks. We show that previous dialogue rewriting approaches are neither effective nor data-efficient to resolve RealDia. Then this paper presents Skeleton-Guided Rewriter (SGR), which can resolve the task of dialogue rewriting via a skeleton-guided generation paradigm. Experiments show that RealDia is a much more challenging benchmark for real-world dialogue rewriting, and SGR can effectively resolve the task and outperform previous approaches by a large margin.

Dialogue Rewriting via Skeleton-Guided Generation

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks in online advertising and recommendation. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) serves as a core component in many deep CTR prediction models, but it has been widely shown that applying a vanilla MLP network alone is ineffective in learning complex feature interactions. As such, many two-stream models (e.g., Wide&Deep, DeepFM, and DCN) have recently been proposed, aiming to integrate two parallel sub-networks to learn feature interactions from two different views for enhanced CTR prediction. In addition to one MLP stream that learns feature interactions implicitly, most of the existing research focuses on designing another stream to complement the MLP stream with explicitly enhanced feature interactions. 
Instead, this paper presents a simple two-stream feature interaction model, namely FinalMLP, which employs only MLPs in both streams yet achieves surprisingly strong performance. In contrast to sophisticated network design in each stream, our work enhances CTR modeling through a feature selection module, which produces differentiated feature inputs to two streams, and a group-wise bilinear fusion module, which effectively captures stream-level interactions across two streams. We show that FinalMLP achieves competitive or even better performance against many existing two-stream CTR models on four open benchmark datasets and also brings significant CTR improvements during an online A/B test in our industrial news recommender system. We envision that the simple yet effective FinalMLP model could serve as a new strong baseline for future development of two-stream CTR models. Our source code will be available at MindSpore/models and FuxiCTR/model_zoo.

FinalMLP: An Enhanced Two-Stream MLP Model for CTR Prediction

Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of Optimal {T}ransport ({OT}), provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it is often intractable to precisely compute, especially for high dimensional and continuous settings. To alleviate this problem, we develop a novel regularization by using the fact that c-cyclical monotonicity is often necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality in OT problems, and incorporate it into the dual formulation of Wasserstein barycenters. For efficient computations, we adopt a variational distribution as the approximation of the true continuous barycenter, so as to frame the Wasserstein barycenters problem as an optimization problem with respect to variational parameters. Upon those ideas, we propose a novel end-to-end continuous approximation method, namely Variational Wasserstein Barycenters with c-Cyclical Monotonicity Regularization (VWB-\textsc{cmr}\xspace), given sample access to the input distributions. We show theoretical convergence analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of VWB-\textsc{cmr}\xspace on synthetic data and real applications of subset posterior aggregation.

Variational Wasserstein Barycenters with c-Cyclical Monotonicity Regularization

Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.

TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models

Text-guided image editing models have shown remarkable results. However, there remain two problems. First, they employ fixed manipulation modules for various editing requirements (e.g., color changing, texture changing, content adding and removing), which results in over-editing or insufficient editing. Second, they do not clearly distinguish between text-required and text-irrelevant parts, which leads to inaccurate editing.
To solve these limitations, we propose:
(i) a Dynamic Editing Block (DEBlock) which composes different editing modules dynamically for various editing requirements.
(ii) a Composition Predictor (Comp-Pred) which predicts the composition weights for DEBlock according to the inference on target texts and source images.
(iii) a Dynamic text-adaptive Convolution Block (DCBlock) which queries source image features to distinguish text-required parts and text-irrelevant parts.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DE-Net achieves excellent performance and manipulates source images more correctly and accurately.

DE-Net: Dynamic Text-guided Image Editing Adversarial Networks

Reflectance layer estimation from a single image is a challenging task in computer vision. It is more challenging when the input image contains shadows or specular highlights, which often render an inaccurate estimate of the reflectance layer. To this end, we propose a two-stage learning method, including reflectance guidance and a shadow/specular-aware network to tackle the problem. In the first stage, an initial reflectance layer free from shadows and specularity is obtained with the constraint of novel losses that are guided by prior-based shadow-free and specular-free images. To further enforce the reflectance layer to be independent from shadows and specularity in the second-stage refinement, we introduce a shadow/specular-aware network that distinguishes the reflectance image from the input image. Our network employs a classifier to categorize shadow/shadow-free, specular/specular-free classes, enabling the activation features to work as attention maps that focus on shadow/specular regions. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the reflectance layer that is free from shadows and specularity.

Learning Noise-Induced Reward Functions for Surpassing Demonstrations in Imitation Learning

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