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In dialogue state tracking (DST), the exploitation of dialogue history is a crucial research direction, and the existing DST models can be divided into two categories: full-history models and partial-history models. Since the “select first, use later” mechanism explicitly filters the distracting information being passed to the downstream state prediction, the partial-history models have recently achieved a performance advantage over the full-history models. However, besides the redundant information, some critical dialogue context information was inevitably filtered out by the partial-history models simultaneously. To reconcile the contextual consideration with avoiding the introduction of redundant information, we propose DICE-DST, a model-agnostic module widely applicable to the partial-history DST models, which aims to strengthen the ability of context exploitation for the encoder of each DST model. Specifically, we first construct a teacher encoder and devise two contextual reasoning tasks to train it to acquire extensive dialogue contextual knowledge. Then we transfer the contextual knowledge from the teacher encoder to the student encoder via a novel turn-level attention-alignment distillation. Experimental results show that our approach extensively improves the performance of partial-history DST models and thereby achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple mainstream datasets while keeping high efficiency.

AAAI 2023

Learning to Imagine: Distillation-based Interactive Context Exploitation for Dialogue State Tracking

context supplementation

dialogue state tracking

knowledge distillation

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

In the point cloud analysis task, the existing local feature aggregation descriptors (LFAD) do not fully utilize the neighborhood information of center points. Previous methods only use the distance information to constrain the local aggregation process, which is easy to be affected by abnormal points and cannot adequately fit the original geometry of the point cloud. This paper argues that fine-grained geometric information (FGGI) plays an important role in the aggregation of local features. Based on this, we propose a gradient-based local attention module to address the above problem, which is called Gradient Attention Module (GAM). GAM simplifies the process of extracting the gradient information in the neighborhood to explicit representation using the Zenith Angle matrix and Azimuth Angle matrix, which makes the module 35X faster. The comprehensive experiments on the ScanObjectNN dataset, ShapeNet dataset, S3DIS dataset, Modelnet40 dataset, and KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness, efficientness, and generalization of our newly proposed GAM for 3D point cloud analysis. Especially in S3DIS, GAM achieves the highest index in the current point-based model with mIoU/OA/mAcc of 74.4%/90.6%/83.2%.

GAM : Gradient Attention Module of Optimization for Point Clouds Analysis

Convolution neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers have their own advantages and both have been widely used for dense prediction in multi-task learning (MTL). Most of the current studies on MTL solely rely on CNN or Transformer. In this work, we present a novel MTL model by combining both merits of deformable CNN and query-based Transformer for multi-task learning of dense prediction. Our method, named DeMT, is based on a simple and effective encoder-decoder architecture (i.e., deformable mixer encoder and task-aware transformer decoder). First, the deformable mixer encoder contains two types of operators: the channel-aware mixing operator leveraged to allow communication among different channels (i.e., efficient channel location mixing), and the spatial-aware deformable operator with deformable convolution applied to efficiently sample more informative spatial locations (i.e., deformed features). Second, the task-aware transformer decoder consists of the task interaction block and task query block. The former is applied to capture task interaction features via self-attention. The latter leverages the deformed features and task-interacted features to generate the corresponding task-specific feature through a query-based Transformer for corresponding task predictions. Extensive experiments on two dense image prediction datasets, NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context, demonstrate that our model uses fewer GFLOPs and significantly outperforms current Transformer- and CNN-based competitive models on a variety of metrics. The codes is available at https://github.com/yangyangxu0/DeMT.

DeMT: Deformable Mixer Transformer for Multi-Task Learning of Dense Prediction

Image-based single-modality compression learning approaches have demonstrated exceptionally powerful encoding and decoding capabilities in the past few years , but suffer from blur and severe semantics loss at extremely low bitrates. To address this issue, we propose a multimodal machine learning method for text-guided image compression, in which the semantic information of text is used as prior information to guide image compression for better compression performance. We fully study the role of text description in different components of the codec, and demonstrate its effectiveness. In addition, we adopt the image-text attention module and image-request complement module to better fuse image and text features, and propose an improved multimodal semantic-consistent loss to produce semantically complete reconstructions. Extensive experiments, including a user study, prove that our method can obtain visually pleasing results at extremely low bitrates, and achieves a comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art methods, even though these methods are at 2x to 4x bitrates of ours.

Multi-Modality Deep Network for Extreme Learned Image Compression

While several benefits were realized for multilingual vision-language pretrained models, recent benchmarks across various tasks and languages showed poor cross-lingual generalisation when multilingually pre-trained vision-language models are applied to non-English data, with a large gap between (supervised) English performance and (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we explore the poor performance of these models on a zero-shot cross-lingual visual question answering (VQA) task, where models are fine-tuned on English visual-question data and evaluated on 7 typologically diverse languages. We improve cross-lingual transfer with three strategies: (1) we introduce a linguistic prior objective to augment the cross-entropy loss with a similarity-based loss to guide the model during training, (2) we learn a task-specific subnetwork that improves cross-lingual generalisation and reduces variance without model modification, (3) we augment training examples using synthetic code-mixing to promote alignment of embeddings between source and target languages. Our experiments on xGQA using the pretrained multilingual multimodal transformers UC2 and M3P demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of the proposed fine-tuning strategy for 7 languages, outperforming existing transfer methods with sparse models.

Improving the Cross-Lingual Generalisation in Visual Question Answering

Multivariate time series anomaly detection has been extensively studied under the semi-supervised setting, where a training dataset with all normal instances is required. However, preparing such a dataset is very laborious since each single data instance should be fully guaranteed to be normal. It is, therefore, desired to explore multivariate time series anomaly detection methods based on the dataset without any label knowledge. In this paper, we propose MTGFlow, an unsupervised anomaly detection approach for Multivariate Time series anomaly detection via dynamic Graph and entity-aware normalizing Flow, leaning only on a widely accepted hypothesis that abnormal instances exhibit sparse densities than the normal. However, the complex interdependencies among entities and the diverse inherent characteristics of each entity pose significant challenges on the density estimation, let alone to detect anomalies based on the estimated possibility distribution. To tackle these problems, we propose to learn the mutual and dynamic relations among entities via a graph structure learning model, which helps to model accurate distribution of multivariate time series. Moreover, taking account of distinct characteristics of the individual entities, an entity-aware normalizing flow is developed to describe each entity into a parameterized normal distribution, thereby producing fine-grained density estimation. Incorporating these two strategies, MTGFlow achieves superior anomaly detection performance. Experiments on five public datasets with seven baselines are conducted, MTGFlow outperforms the SOTA methods by up to 5.0 AUROC%. Codes will be released at https://github.com/zqhang/Detecting-Multivariate-Time-Series-Anomalies-with-Zero-Known-Label.

Detecting Multivariate Time Series Anomalies with Zero Known Label

We study a non-cooperative two-sided facility location game in which facilities and clients behave strategically.
This is in contrast to many other facility location games in which clients simply visit their closest facility.
Facility agents select a location on a graph to open a facility to attract as much purchasing power as possible, while client agents choose which facilities to patronize by strategically distributing their purchasing power in order to minimize their total waiting time. Here, the waiting time of a facility depends on its received total purchasing power.    
We show that our client stage is an atomic splittable congestion game, which implies existence, uniqueness and efficient computation of a client equilibrium.
Therefore, facility agents can efficiently predict client behavior and make strategic decisions accordingly.
Despite that, we prove that subgame perfect equilibria do not exist in all instances of this game and that their existence is NP-hard to decide.
On the positive side, we provide a simple and efficient algorithm to compute 3-approximate subgame perfect equilibria.

Strategic Facility Location with Clients that Minimize Total Waiting Time

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have powerful capability to embed rich structural and semantic information of a heterogeneous graph into node representations. Existing HGNNs inherit many mechanisms from graph neural networks (GNNs) over homogeneous graphs, especially the attention mechanism and the multi-layer structure. These mechanisms bring excessive complexity, but seldom work studies whether they are really effective on heterogeneous graphs. This paper conducts an in-depth and detailed study of these mechanisms and proposes Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (SeHGNN). To easily capture structural information, SeHGNN pre-computes the neighbor aggregation using a light-weight mean aggregator, which reduces complexity by removing overused neighbor attention and avoiding repeated neighbor aggregation in every training epoch. To better utilize semantic information, SeHGNN adopts the single-layer structure with long metapaths to extend the receptive field, as well as a transformer-based semantic fusion module to fuse features from different metapaths. As a result, SeHGNN exhibits the characteristics of simple network structure, high prediction accuracy, and fast training speed. Extensive experiments on five real-world heterogeneous graphs demonstrate the superiority of SeHGNN over the state-of-the-arts on both accuracy and training speed.

Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

Temporal Activity Detection aims to predict activity classes per frame, in contrast to video-level predictions in Activity Classification (i.e., Activity Recognition). Due to the expensive frame-level annotations required for detection, the scale of detection datasets is limited. Thus, commonly, previous work on temporal activity detection resorts to fine-tuning a classification model pretrained on large-scale classification datasets (e.g., Kinetics-400). However, such pretrained models are not ideal for downstream detection, due to the disparity between the pretraining and the downstream fine-tuning tasks. In this work, we propose a novel weakly-guided self-supervised pretraining method for detection. We leverage weak labels (classification) to introduce a self-supervised pretext task (detection) by generating frame-level pseudo labels, multi-action frames, and action segments. Simply put, we design a detection task similar to downstream, on large-scale classification data, without extra annotations.} We show that the models pretrained with the proposed weakly-guided self-supervised detection task outperform prior work on multiple challenging activity detection benchmarks, including Charades and MultiTHUMOS. Our extensive ablations further provide insights on when and how to use the proposed models for activity detection. Code is available at github.com/kkahatapitiya/SSDet.

Weakly-guided Self-supervised Pretraining for Temporal Activity Detection

Not all semantics become confusing when deploying a semantic segmentation model for real-world scene understanding of adverse weather. The true semantics of most pixels have a high likelihood of appearing in the few top classes according to confidence ranking. In this paper, we replace the one-hot pseudo label with a candidate label set (CLS) that consists of only a few ambiguous classes and exploit its effects on self-training-based unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a coarse-to-fine process. In the coarse-level process, adaptive CLS selection is proposed to pick a minimal set of confusing candidate labels based on the reliability of label predictions. Then, representation learning and label rectification are iteratively performed to facilitate feature clustering in an embedding space and to disambiguate the confusing semantics. Experimentally, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three realistic foggy benchmarks.

Only a Few Classes Confusing: Pixel-wise Candidate Labels Disambiguation for Foggy Scene Understanding

Inference-time adaptation methods for semantic parsing are useful for leveraging examples from newly-observed domains without repeated fine-tuning. Existing approaches typically bias the decoder by simply concatenating input-output example pairs (cases) from the new domain at the encoder’s input in a Seq-to-Seq model. Such methods cannot adequately leverage the structure of logical forms in the case examples. We propose StructCBR, a structured case-based reasoning approach, which leverages subtree-level similarity between logical forms of cases and candidate outputs, resulting in better decoder decisions. For the task of adapting Text-to-SQL models to unseen schemas, we show that exploiting case examples in a structured manner via StructCBR offers consistent performance improvements over prior inference-time adaptation methods across five different databases. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to attempt inference-time adaptation of Text-to-SQL models, and harness trainable structured similarity between subqueries.

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Learning to Imagine: Distillation-based Interactive Context Exploitation for Dialogue State Tracking

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