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Exiting simple samples in adaptive multi-exit networks through early modules is an effective way to achieve high computational efficiency. One can observe that deployments of multi-exit architectures on resource-constrained devices are easily limited by high memory footprint of early modules. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named recurrent aggregation operator (ReX), which uses recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to effectively aggregate intra-patch features within a large receptive field to get delicate local representations, while bypassing large early activations. The resulting model, named ReXNet, can be easily extended to dynamic inference by introducing a novel consistency-based early exit criteria, which is based on the consistency of classification decisions over several modules, rather than the entropy of the prediction distribution. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., Visual Wake Words, ImageNet-1k, demonstrate that our method consistently reduces the peak RAM and average latency of a wide variety of adaptive models on low-power devices.

AAAI 2022

ReX: An Efficient Approach to Reducing Memory Cost in Image Classification

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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. 

Discovering the underneath causal relations is the fundamental ability for reasoning about the surrounding environment and predicting the future states in the physical world. Counterfactual prediction from visual input, which requires simulating future states based on unrealized situations in the past, is a vital component in causal relation tasks. In this paper, we work on the confounders that have effect on the physical dynamics, including masses, friction coefficients, etc., to bridge relations between the intervened variable and the affected variable whose future state may be altered. We propose a neural network framework combining Global Causal Relation Attention (GCRA) and Confounder Transmission Structure (CTS). The GCRA looks for the latent causal relations between different variables and estimates the confounders by capturing both spatial and temporal information. The CTS integrates and transmits the learnt confounders in a residual way, so that the estimated confounders can be encoded into the network as a constraint for object positions when performing counterfactual prediction. Without any access to ground truth information about confounders, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method on various benchmarks by fully utilizing the constraints of confounders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can generalize to unseen environments and maintain good performance.

Deconfounding Physical Dynamics with Global Causal Relation and Confounder Transmission for Counterfactual Prediction

Category-level 6D pose estimation can be better generalized to unseen objects in a category compared with instance-level 6D pose estimation. However, existing category-level 6D pose estimation methods usually require supervised training with a sufficient number of 6D pose annotations of objects which makes them difficult to be applied in real scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a self-supervised framework for category-level 6D pose estimation in this paper. We leverage DeepSDF as a 3D object representation and design several novel loss functions based on DeepSDF to help the self-supervised model predict unseen object poses without any 6D object pose labels and explicit 3D models in real scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art fully supervised methods on the category-level NOCS benchmark.

Self-Supervised Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation with Deep Implicit Shape Representation

Recent research on model interpretability in natural language processing extensively uses feature scoring methods for identifying which parts of the input are the most important for a model to make a prediction (i.e. explanation or rationale). However, previous research has shown that there is no clear best scoring method across various text classification tasks while practitioners typically have to make several other ad-hoc choices regarding the length and the type of the rationale (e.g. short or long, contiguous or not). Inspired by this, we propose a simple yet effective and flexible method that allows selecting optimally for each data instance: (1) a feature scoring method; (2) the length; and (3) the type of the rationale. Our method is inspired by input erasure approaches to interpretability which assume that the most faithful rationale for a prediction should be the one with the highest difference between the model's output distribution using the full text and the text after removing the rationale as input respectively. Evaluation on four standard text classification datasets shows that our proposed method provides more faithful, comprehensive and highly sufficient explanations compared to using a fixed feature scoring method, rationale length and type. More importantly, we demonstrate that a practitioner is not required to make any ad-hoc choices in order to extract faithful rationales using our approach.

Flexible Instance-Specific Rationalization of NLP Models

We study multi-unit auctions in social networks, where each buyer has a fixed budget and can spread the sale information to the network neighbors. We design a mechanism encouraging buyers to report their valuations truthfully and spread the sale information. Our design uses the idea of the clinching mechanism to decide the transaction price and can be viewed as a network version of the mechanism. Most of the previous clinching mechanisms search for the transaction prices by increasing the current price. Our mechanism directly computes the transaction prices in polynomial time. Furthermore, the mechanism applies a technique to iteratively activate new buyers in the network. This ensures utility preservations of the buyers and benefits the seller. We prove key properties of our mechanism, such as no-positive-transfers, individual rationality, incentive compatibility, non-wastefulness and social welfare preservation.

Multi-Unit Auction in Social Networks with Budgets

Since no classical planner consistently outperforms all others, it is important to select a planner that works well for a given classical planning task. The two strongest approaches for planner selection use image and graph convolutional neural networks. They have the drawback that the learned models are complicated and uninterpretable. To obtain explainable models, we identify a small set of simple task features and show that elementary and interpretable machine learning techniques can use these features to solve roughly as many tasks as the complex approaches based on neural networks.

Explainable Planner Selection for Classical Planning

Sparse Neural Networks (NNs) can match the generalization of dense NNs using a fraction of the compute/storage for inference, and have the potential to enable efficient training. However, naively training unstructured sparse NNs from random initialization results in significantly worse generalization, with the notable exceptions of Lottery Tickets (LTs) and Dynamic Sparse Training (DST). In this work, we attempt to answer: (1) why training unstructured sparse networks from random initialization performs poorly and; (2) what makes LTs and DST the exceptions? We show that sparse NNs have poor gradient flow at initialization and propose a modified initialization for unstructured connectivity. Furthermore, we find that DST methods significantly improve gradient flow during training over traditional sparse training methods. Finally, we show that LTs do not improve gradient flow, rather their success lies in re-learning the pruning solution they are derived from â€” however, this comes at the cost of learning novel solutions.

Gradient Flow in Sparse Neural Networks and How Lottery Tickets Win

Running machine learning algorithms on large and rapidly growing volumes of data is often computationally expensive, one common trick to reduce the size of a data set, and thus reduce the computational cost of machine learning algorithms, is probability sampling. It creates a sampled data set by including each data point from the original data set with a known probability. Although the benefit of running machine learning algorithms on the reduced data set is obvious, one major concern is that the performance of the solution obtained from samples might be much worse than that of the optimal solution when using the full data set.  In this paper, we examine the performance loss caused by  probability sampling in the context of adaptive submodular maximization. We consider a simple probability sampling method which selects each data point with probability at least r.  If we set r=1, our problem reduces to finding a solution based on the original full data set. We define sampling gap as the largest ratio between the optimal solution obtained from the full data set and the optimal solution obtained from the samples,  over independence systems. Our main contribution is to show that if the sampling probability of each data point is at least r and the utility function is policywise submodular, then the sampling gap is both upper bounded and lower bounded by 1/r. We show that the property of policywise submodular can be found in a wide range of real-world applications, including pool-based active learning and adaptive viral marketing.

Optimal Sampling Gaps for Adaptive Submodular Maximization

For users to trust planning algorithms, they must be able to understand the planner's outputs and the reasons for each action selection. This output does not tend to be user-friendly, often consisting of sequences of parametrised actions or task networks. And these may not be practical for non-expert users who may find it easier to read natural language descriptions. In this paper, we propose PlanVerb, a domain and planner-independent method for the verbalization of task plans. It is based on semantic tagging of actions and predicates. Our method can generate natural language descriptions of plans including causal explanations. The verbalized plans can be summarized by compressing the actions that act on the same parameters. We further extend the concept of verbalization space, previously applied to robot navigation, and apply it to planning to generate different kinds of plan descriptions for different user requirements. Our method can deal with PDDL and RDDL domains, provided that they are tagged accordingly. Our user survey evaluation shows that users can read our automatically generated plan descriptions and that the explanations help them answer questions about the plan.

PlanVerb: Domain-Independent Verbalization and Summary of Task Plans

The success of the state-of-the-art video deblurring methods stems mainly from implicit or explicit estimation of alignment among the adjacent frames for latent video restoration. However, due to the influence of the blur effect, estimating the alignment information from the blurry adjacent frames is not a trivial task. Inaccurate estimations will interfere the following frame restoration. Instead of estimating alignment information, we propose a simple and effective deep Recurrent Neural Network with Multi-scale Bi-directional Propagation (RNN-MBP) to effectively propagate and gather the information from unaligned neighboring frames for better video deblurring. Specifically, we build a Multi-scale Bi-directional Propagation (MBP) module with two U-Net RNN cells which can directly exploit the inter-frame information from unaligned neighboring hidden states by integrating them in different scales. Moreover, to better evaluate the proposed algorithm and existing state-of-the-art methods on real-world blurry scenes, we also create a Real-World Blurry Video Dataset (RBVD) by a well-designed Digital Video Acquisition System (DVAS) and use it as the training and evaluation dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RBVD dataset effectively improve the performance of existing algorithms on real-world blurry videos, and the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on three typical benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/XJTU-CVLAB-LOWLEVEL/RNN-MBP.

Deep Recurrent Neural Network with Multi-Scale Bi-Directional Propagation for Video Deblurring

Clustering is a popular unsupervised learning tool often used to discover groups within a larger population such as customer segments, or patient subtypes. However, despite its use as a tool for subgroup discovery and description few state-of-the-art algorithms provide any rationale or description behind the clusters found. We propose a novel approach for interpretable clustering that both clusters data points and constructs polytopes around the discovered clusters to explain them. Our framework allows for additional constraints on the polytopes including ensuring that the hyperplanes constructing the polytope are axis-parallel or sparse with integer coefficients. We formulate the problem of constructing clusters via polytopes as a Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Program (MINLP). To solve our formulation we propose a two phase approach where we first initialize clusters and polytopes using alternating minimization, and then use coordinate descent to boost clustering performance. We benchmark our approach on a suite of synthetic and real world clustering problems, where our algorithm outperforms state of the art interpretable and non-interpretable clustering algorithms.

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Deconfounding Physical Dynamics with Global Causal Relation and Confounder Transmission for Counterfactual Prediction

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Next from AAAI 2022

Deconfounding Physical Dynamics with Global Causal Relation and Confounder Transmission for Counterfactual Prediction

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Finding the SWEET Spot: Analysis and Improvement of Adaptive Inference in Low Resource Settings

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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