United States

Feature interactions are essential for achieving high accuracy in recommender systems. Many studies take into account the interaction between every pair of features. However, this is suboptimal because some feature interactions may not be that relevant to the recommendation result and taking them into account may introduce noise and decrease recommendation accuracy. To make the best out of feature interactions, we propose a graph neural network approach to effectively model them, together with a novel technique to automatically detect those feature interactions that are beneficial in terms of recommendation accuracy. The automatic feature interaction detection is achieved via edge prediction with an L0 activation regularization. Our proposed model is proved to be effective through the information bottleneck principle and statistical interaction theory. Experimental results show that our model (i) outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, and (ii) automatically identifies beneficial feature interactions.

AAAI 2021

Detecting Beneficial Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Deep quantization methods have shown high efficiency on large-scale image retrieval. However, current models heavily rely on ground-truth information, hindering the application of quantization in label-hungry scenarios. A more realistic demand is to learn from inexhaustible uploaded images that are associated with informal tags provided by amateur users. Though such sketchy tags do not obviously reveal the labels, they actually contain useful semantic information for supervising deep quantization. To this end, we propose Weakly-Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization (WSDHQ), which is the first work to learn deep quantization from weakly tagged images. Specifically, 1) we use word embeddings to represent the tags and enhance their semantic information based on a tag correlation graph. 2) To better preserve semantic information in quantization codes and reduce quantization error, we jointly learn semantics-preserving embeddings and supervised quantizer on hypersphere by employing a well-designed fusion layer and tailor-made loss functions. Extensive experiments show that WSDHQ can achieve state-of-art performance in weakly-supervised compact coding.

Weakly Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization for Image Retrieval

In active learning, the ignorance of aligning unlabeled samples' distribution with that of labeled samples hinders the model trained upon labeled samples from selecting informative unlabeled samples. In this paper, we propose an agreement-discrepancy-selection (ADS) approach, and target at unifying distribution alignment with sample selection by introducing adversarial classifiers to the convolutional neural network (CNN). Minimizing classifiers' prediction discrepancy (maximizing prediction agreement) drives learning CNN features to reduce the distribution bias of labeled and unlabeled samples, while maximizing classifiers' discrepancy highlights informative samples. Iterative optimization of agreement and discrepancy loss calibrated with an entropy function drives aligning sample distributions in a progressive fashion for effective active learning. Experiments on image classification and object detection tasks demonstrate that ADS is task-agnostic, while significantly outperforms the previous methods when the labeled sets are small.

Agreement-Discrepancy-Selection: Active Learning with Progressive Distribution Alignment

Recent researches on information theory shed new light on the continuous attempts to open the black box of neural signal encoding. Inspired by the problem of lossy signal compression for wireless communication, this paper presents a Bitwise Bottleneck approach for quantizing and encoding neural network activations. Based on the rate-distortion theory, the Bitwise Bottleneck attempts to determine the most significant bits in activation representation by assigning and approximating the sparse coefficients associated with different bits. Given the constraint of a limited average code rate, the bottleneck minimizes the distortion for optimal activation quantization in a flexible layer-by-layer manner. Experiments over ImageNet and other datasets show that, by minimizing the quantization distortion of each layer, the neural network with bottlenecks achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy with low-precision activation. Meanwhile, by reducing the code rate, the proposed method can improve the memory and computational efficiency by over six times compared with the deep neural network with standard single-precision representation. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/CQUlearningsystemgroup/BitwiseBottleneck.

Optimizing Information Theory Based Bitwise Bottlenecks for Efficient Mixed-Precision Activation Quantization

Self-Supervised monocular visual odometry (VO) is often cast into a view synthesis problem based on depth and camera pose estimation. One of the key challenges is to accurately and robustly estimate depth with occlusions and moving objects in the scene. Existing methods simply detect and mask out regions of occlusions locally by several convolutional layers, and then perform only partial view synthesis in the rest of the image. However, occlusion and moving object detection is an unsolved problem itself which requires global layout information. Inaccurate detection inevitably results in incorrect depth as well as pose estimation. In this work, instead of locally detecting and masking out occlusions and moving objects, we propose to alleviate their negative effects on monocular VO implicitly but more effectively from two global perspectives. First, a multi-scale non-local attention module, consisting of both intra-stage augmented attention and cascaded across-stage attention, is proposed for robust depth estimation given occlusions, alleviating the impacts of occlusions via global attention modeling. Second, adversarial learning is introduced in view synthesis for monocular VO. Unlike existing methods that use pixel-level losses on the quality of synthesized views, we enforce the synthetic view to be indistinguishable from the real one at the scene-level. Such a global constraint again helps cope with occluded and moving regions. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art in both pose estimation and depth recovery.

A Global Occlusion-Aware Approach to Self-Supervised Monocular Visual Odometry

This paper proposes a spatiotemporal deep learning framework, Trajectory-based Graph Neural Network (TrGNN), that mines the underlying causality of flows from historical vehicle trajectories and incorporates that into road traffic prediction. The vehicle trajectory transition patterns are studied to explicitly model the spatial traffic demand via graph propagation along the road network; an attention mechanism is designed to learn the temporal dependencies based on neighborhood traffic status; and finally, a fusion of multi-step prediction is integrated into the graph neural network design. The proposed approach is evaluated with a real-world trajectory dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed TrGNN model achieves over 5% error reduction when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches across all metrics for normal traffic, and up to 14% for atypical traffic during peak hours or abnormal events. The advantage of trajectory transitions especially manifest itself in inferring high fluctuation of flows as well as non-recurrent flow patterns.

Traffic Flow Prediction with Vehicle Trajectories

This paper tackles the purely unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) problem that requires no annotations. Some previous methods adopt clustering techniques to generate pseudo labels and use the produced labels to train Re-ID models progressively. These methods are relatively simple but effective. However, most clustering-based methods take each cluster as a pseudo identity class, neglecting the large intra-ID variance caused mainly by the change of camera views. To address this issue, we propose to split each single cluster into multiple proxies and each proxy represents the instances coming from the same camera. These camera-aware proxies enable us to deal with large intra-ID variance and generate more reliable pseudo labels for learning. Based on the camera-aware proxies, we design both intra and inter-camera contrastive learning components for our Re-ID model to effectively learn the ID discrimination ability within and across cameras. Meanwhile, a proxy-balanced sampling strategy is also designed, which facilitates our learning further. Extensive experiments on three large-scale Re-ID datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms most unsupervised methods by a significant margin. Especially, on the challenging MSMT17 dataset, we gain 14.3 percent Rank-1 and 10.2 percent mAP improvements when compared to the second place. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/CAP-master.

Camera-Aware Proxies for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Since the Lipschitz properties of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely considered to be related to adversarial robustness, we theoretically characterize the L-1 norm and L-infinity norm of 2D multi-channel convolutional layers and provide efficient methods to compute the exact L-1 norm and L-infinity norm. Based on our theorem, we propose a novel regularization method termed norm decay, which can effectively reduce the norms of convolutional layers and fully-connected layers. Experiments show that norm-regularization methods, including norm decay, weight decay, and singular value clipping, can improve generalization of CNNs. However, they can slightly hurt adversarial robustness. Observing this unexpected phenomenon, we compute the norms of layers in the CNNs trained with three different adversarial training frameworks and surprisingly find that adversarially robust CNNs have comparable or even larger layer norms than their non-adversarially robust counterparts. Furthermore, we prove that under a mild assumption, adversarially robust classifiers can be achieved using neural networks, and an adversarially robust neural network can have an arbitrarily large Lipschitz constant. For this reason, enforcing small norms on CNN layers may be neither necessary nor effective in achieving adversarial robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/youweiliang/norm_robustness.

Large Norms of CNN Layers Do Not Hurt Adversarial Robustness

Existing single-stage detectors for locating objects in point clouds often treat object localization and category classification as separate tasks, so the localization accuracy and classification confidence may not well align. To address this issue, we present a new single-stage detector named the Confident
IoU-Aware Single-Stage object Detector (CIA-SSD). First, we design the lightweight Spatial-Semantic Feature Aggregation module to adaptively fuse
high-level abstract semantic features and low-level spatial features for accurate predictions of bounding boxes and classification confidence. Also, the
predicted confidence is further rectified with our designed IoU-aware confidence rectification module to make the confidence more consistent with the
localization accuracy. Based on the rectified confidence, we further formulate the Distance-variant IoU-weighted NMS to obtain smoother regressions and avoid redundant predictions. We experiment CIA-SSD on 3D car detection in the KITTI test set and show that it attains top performance in terms of the official ranking metric (moderate AP 80.28%) and above 32 FPS inference speed, outperforming all prior single-stage detectors. The code is available at
https://github.com/Vegeta2020/CIA-SSD.

CIA-SSD: Confident IoU-Aware Single-Stage Object Detector From Point Cloud

It is observed in the literature that data augmentation can significantly mitigate membership inference (MI) attack. However, in this work, we challenge this observation by proposing new MI attacks to utilize the information of augmented data.  MI attack  is widely used to measure the model's information leakage of the training set. We establish the optimal membership inference when the model is trained with augmented data, which inspires us to formulate the MI attack  as a set classification problem, i.e., classifying a set of augmented instances instead of a single data point, and design input permutation invariant features. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed approach universally outperforms original methods when the model is trained with data augmentation. Even further, we show that the proposed approach  can achieve higher MI attack success rates on models trained with some data augmentation than the existing methods on  models trained without data augmentation. Notably, we achieve a 70.1\% MI attack success rate on CIFAR10 against a wide residual network while the previous best approach only attains 61.9\%. This suggests the privacy risk of models trained with data augmentation could be largely underestimated.

How Does Data Augmentation Affect Privacy in Machine Learning?

When allocating indivisible resources or tasks, an envy-free allocation or equitable allocation may not exist. We present a sufficient condition and an algorithm to achieve envy-freeness and equitability when monetary transfers are allowed. The approach works for any agent valuation functions (positive or negative) as long as they satisfy superadditivity. For the case of additive utilities, we present a characterization of allocations that can simultaneously be made equitable and envy-free via payments. Our study shows that superadditive valuations constitute the largest class of valuations for which an envy-free and equitable outcome exists for all instances. We then present a distributed algorithm to compute an approximately envy-free outcome for any class of valuations.

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Next from AAAI 2021

Weakly Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization for Image Retrieval

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FIDAM-Eval: A Framework for Evaluating Feature Interaction Detection and Attribution Methods

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