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Hierarchical reinforcement learning has focused on discovering temporally extended actions, such as options, that can provide benefits in problems requiring extensive exploration. One promising approach that learns these options end-to-end is the option-critic (OC) framework. We examine and show in this paper that OC does not decompose a problem into simpler sub-problems, but instead increases the size of the search over policy space with each option considering the entire state space during learning. This issue can result in practical limitations of this method, including sample inefficient learning. To address this problem, we introduce Context-Specific Representation Abstraction for Deep Option Learning (CRADOL), a new framework that considers both temporal abstraction and context-specific representation abstraction to effectively reduce the size of the search over policy space. Specifically, our method learns a factored belief state representation that enables each option to learn a policy over only a subsection of the state space. We test our method against hierarchical, non-hierarchical, and modular recurrent neural network baselines, demonstrating significant sample efficiency improvements in challenging partially observable environments.

AAAI 2022

Context-Specific Representation Abstraction for Deep Option Learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



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. 

Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired training data to show the diversity of images' descriptions, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming for TextCap pair annotations with extra texts. Based on the insight mentioned above, we investigate how to generate diverse captions that focus on different image parts using an unpaired training paradigm. We propose the Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal InferenCe (MAGIC) framework for diverse and unpaired TextCap. This framework can adaptively construct multiple multimodal relational graphs of images and model complex relationships among graphs to represent descriptive diversity. Moreover, a cascaded generative adversarial network is developed from modeled graphs to infer the unpaired caption generation in imageâ€“sentence feature alignment and linguistic coherence levels. We validate the effectiveness of MAGIC in generating diverse captions from different relational information items of an image. Experimental results show that MAGIC can generate very promising outcomes without using any imageâ€“caption training pairs.

MAGIC: Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe for Diverse and Unpaired Text-Based Image Captioning

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based decentralized policy gradient tracking (MDPGT) where a new momentum-based variance reduction technique is used to approximate the local policy gradient surrogate with importance sampling, and an intermediate parameter is adopted to track two consecutive policy gradient surrogates. MDPGT provably achieves the best available sample complexity of O(N -1 e -3) for converging to an e-stationary point of the global average of N local performance functions (possibly nonconcave). This outperforms the state-of-the-art sample complexity in decentralized model-free reinforcement learning and when initialized with a single trajectory, the sample complexity matches those obtained by the existing decentralized policy gradient methods. We further validate the theoretical claim for the Gaussian policy function. When the required error tolerance e is small enough, MDPGT leads to a linear speed up, which has been previously established in decentralized stochastic optimization, but not for reinforcement learning. Lastly, we provide empirical results on a multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark environment to support our theoretical findings.

MDPGT: Momentum-Based Decentralized Policy Gradient Tracking

Video-based person re-identification~(re-ID) is an important technique in visual surveillance systems which aims to match video snippets of people captured by different cameras. Existing methods are mostly based on convolutional neural networks~(CNNs), whose building blocks either process local neighbor pixels at a time, or, when 3D convolutions are used to model temporal information, suffer from the misalignment problem caused by person movement. In this paper, we propose to overcome the limitations of normal convolutions with a human-oriented graph method. Specifically, features located at person joint keypoints are extracted and connected as a spatial-temporal graph. These keypoint features are then updated by message passing from their connected nodes with a graph convolutional network~(GCN). During training, the GCN can be attached to any CNN-based person re-ID model to assist representation learning on feature maps, whilst it can be dropped after training for better inference speed. Our method brings significant improvements over the CNN-based baseline model on the MARS dataset with generated person keypoints and a newly annotated dataset: PoseTrackReID. It also defines a new state-of-the-art method in terms of top-1 accuracy and mean average precision in comparison to prior works.

Keypoint Message Passing for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

To deal with ambiguities in partial multi-label learning (PML), existing popular PML research attempts to perform disambiguation by direct ground-truth label identification. However, these approaches can be easily misled by noisy false-positive labels in the iteration of updating the model parameter and the latent ground-truth label variables. When labeling information is ambiguous, we should depend more on underlying structure of data, such as label and feature correlations, to perform disambiguation for partially labeled data. Moreover, large margin nearest neighbour (LMNN) is a popular strategy that considers data structure in classification. However, due to the ambiguity of labeling information in PML, traditional LMNN cannot be used to solve the PML problem directly. In addition, embedding is an effective technology to decrease the noise information of data. Inspried by LMNN and embedding technology, we propose a novel PML paradigm called Partial Multi-label Learning via Large Margin Nearest Neighbour Embeddings (PML-LMNNE), which aims to conduct disambiguation by projecting labels and features into a lower-dimension embedding space and reorganize the underlying structure by LMNN in the embedding space simultaneously. An efficient algorithm is designed to implement the proposed method and the convergence rate of the algorithm is analyzed. Moreover, we present a theoretical analysis of the generalization error bound for the proposed PML-LMNNE, which shows that the generalization error converges to the sum of two times the Bayes error over the labels when the number of instances goes to infinity. Comprehensive experiments on artificial and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed PML-LMNNE.

Partial Multi-Label Learning via Large Margin Nearest Neighbour Embeddings

In this paper, we propose a simple unsupervised graph representation learning method to conduct effective and efficient contrastive learning. Specifically, the proposed multiplet loss explores the complementary information between the structural information and neighbor information to enlarge the inter-class variation, as well as adds an upper bound loss to achieve the finite distance between positive embeddings and anchor embeddings for reducing the intra-class variation. As a result, both enlarging inter-class variation and reducing intra-class variation result in small generalization error, thereby obtaining an effective model. Furthermore, our method removes widely used data augmentation and discriminator from previous graph contrastive learning methods, meanwhile available to output low-dimensional embeddings, leading to an efficient model. Experimental results on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method, compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source codes are released at https://github.com/YujieMo/SUGRL.

Simple Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning

Traditional text classification requires thousands of annotated data or an additional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system, which are expensive to obtain in real applications. This paper presents a Contrast-Enhanced Semi-supervised Text Classification (CEST) framework under label-limited settings without incorporating any NMT systems. We propose a certainty-driven sample selection method and a contrast-enhanced similarity graph to utilize data more efficiently in self-training, alleviating the annotation-starving problem. The graph imposes a smoothness constraint on the unlabeled data to improve the coherence and the accuracy of pseudo-labels. Moreover, CEST formulates the training as a â€œlearning from noisy labelsâ€ problem and performs the optimization accordingly. A salient feature of this formulation is the explicit suppression of the severe error propagation problem in conventional semi-supervised learning. With solely 30 labeled data per class for both training and validation dataset, CEST outperforms the previous state-of-the-art algorithms by 2.11% accuracy and only falls within the 3.04% accuracy range of fully-supervised pre-training language model fine-tuning on thousands of labeled data.

Contrast-Enhanced Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Few Labels

Omnidirectional images, also called 360â—¦images, have attracted extensive attention in recent years, due to the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) technologies. During omnidirectional image processing including capture, transmission, consumption, and so on, measuring the perceptual quality of omnidirectional images is highly desired, since it plays a great role in guaranteeing the immersive quality of experience (IQoE). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the perceptual quality of omnidirectional images from both subjective and objective perspectives. Specifically, we construct the largest so far subjective omnidirectional image quality database, where we consider several key influential elements, i.e., realistic non-uniform distortion, viewing condition, and viewing behavior, from the user view. In addition to subjective quality scores, we also record head and eye movement data. Besides, we make the first attempt by using the proposed database to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) for blind omnidirectional image quality assessment. To be consistent with the human viewing behavior in the VR device, we extract viewports from each omnidirectional image and incorporate the user viewing conditions naturally in the proposed model. The proposed model is composed of two parts, including a multi-scale CNN-based feature extraction module and a perceptual quality prediction module. The feature extraction module is used to incorporate the multi-scale features, and the perceptual quality prediction module is designed to regress them to perceived quality scores. The experimental results on our database verify that the proposed model achieves the competing performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Perceptual Quality Assessment of Omnidirectional Images

In this paper, we propose a vision-language pre-training model, Clinical-BERT, for the medical domain, and devise three domain-specific tasks: Clinical Diagnosis (CD), Masked MeSH Modeling (MMM), Image-MeSH Matching (IMM), together with one general pre-training task: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), to pre-train the model. The CD task helps the model to learn medical domain knowledge by predicting disease from radiographs. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) words are important semantic components in radiograph reports, and the MMM task helps the model focus on the prediction of MeSH words. The IMM task helps the model learn the alignment of MeSH words with radiographs by matching scores obtained by a two-level sparse attention: region sparse attention and word sparse attention. Region sparse attention generates corresponding visual features for each word, and word sparse attention enhances the contribution of images-MeSH matching to the matching scores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to learn domain knowledge during pre-training for the medical domain. We evaluate the pre-training model on Radiograph Diagnosis and Reports Generation tasks across four challenging datasets: MIMIC-CXR, IU X-Ray, COV-CTR, and NIH, and achieve state-of-the-art results for all the tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our pre-training model.

Clinical-BERT: Vision-Language Pre-Training for Radiograph Diagnosis and Reports Generation

Column Generation (CG) is an effective method for solving large-scale optimization problems. CG starts by solving a subproblem with a subset of columns (i.e., variables) and gradually includes new columns that can improve the solution of the current subproblem. The new columns are generated as needed by repeatedly solving a pricing problem, which is often NP-hard and is a bottleneck of the CG approach. To tackle this, we propose a Machine-Learning-based Pricing Heuristic (MLPH) that can generate many high-quality columns efficiently. In each iteration of CG, our MLPH leverages an ML model to predict the optimal solution of the pricing problem, which is then used to guide a sampling method to efficiently generate multiple high-quality columns. Using the graph coloring problem, we empirically show that MLPH significantly enhances CG as compared to six state-of-the-art methods, and the improvement in CG can lead to substantially better performance of the branch-and-price exact method.

Enhancing Column Generation by a Machine-Learning-Based Pricing Heuristic for Graph Coloring

By interpreting Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as the message passing from the spatial perspective, their success is attributed to Laplacian smoothing. However, it also leads to serious over-smoothing issue by stacking many layers. Recently, many efforts have been paid to overcome this issue in semi-supervised learning. Unfortunately, it is more serious in unsupervised node representation learning task due to the lack of supervision information. Thus, most of the unsupervised or self-supervised GNNs often employ \textit{one-layer GCN} as the encoder. Essentially, the over-smoothing issue is caused by the over-simplification of the existing message passing, which possesses two intrinsic limits: blind message and uniform passing. In this paper, a novel Diverse and Interactive Message Passing (DIMP) is proposed for self-supervised learning by overcoming these limits. Firstly, to prevent the message from blindness and make it interactive between two connected nodes, the message is determined by both the two connected nodes instead of the attributes of one node. Secondly, to prevent the passing from uniformness and make it diverse over different attribute channels, different propagation weights are assigned to different elements in the message. To this end, a natural implementation of the message in DIMP is the element-wise product of the representations of two connected nodes. From the perspective of numerical optimization, the proposed DIMP is equivalent to performing an overlapping community detection via expectation-maximization (EM). Both the objective function of the community detection and the convergence of EM algorithm guarantee that DMIP can prevent from over-smoothing issue. Extensive evaluations on node-level and graph-level tasks demonstrate the superiority of DIMP on improving performance and overcoming over-smoothing issue.

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