United States

Generating new images with desired properties (e.g. new view/poses) from source images has been enthusiastically pursued recently, due to its wide range of potential applications. One way to ensure high-quality generation is to use multiple sources with complementary information such as different views of the same object. However, as source images are often misaligned due to the large disparities among the camera settings, strong assumptions have been made in the past with respect to the camera(s) or/and the object in interest, limiting the application of such techniques. Therefore, we propose a new general approach which models multiple types of variations among sources, such as view angles, poses, facial expressions, in a unified framework, so that it can be employed on datasets of vastly different nature. We verify our approach on a variety of data including humans bodies, faces, city scenes and 3D objects. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the better performance of our method than the state of the art.

AAAI 2022

Pose Guided Image Generation from Misaligned Sources via Residual Flow Based Correction

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. 

3D facial landmark detection is extensively used in many research fields such as face registration, facial shape analysis, and face recognition. Most existing methods involve traditional features and 3D face models for the detection of landmarks, and their performances are limited by the hand-crafted intermediate process. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D facial landmark detection method, which directly locates the coordinates of landmarks from 3D point cloud with a well-customized graph convolutional network. The graph convolutional network learns geometric features adaptively for 3D facial landmark detection with the assistance of constructed 3D heatmaps, which are Gaussian functions of distances to each landmark on a 3D face. On this basis, we further develop a local surface unfolding and registration module to predict 3D landmarks from the heatmaps. The proposed method forms the first baseline of deep point cloud learning method for 3D facial landmark detection. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed method exceeds the existing approaches by a clear margin on BU-3DFE and FRGC datasets for landmark localization accuracy and stability, and also achieves high-precision results on a recent large-scale dataset.

Learning to Detect 3D Facial Landmarks via Heatmap Regression with Graph Convolutional Network

Generalizing the medical image segmentation algorithms to unseen domains is an important research topic for computer-aided diagnosis and surgery. Most existing methods require a fully labeled dataset in each source domain. Although some researchers developed a semi-supervised domain generalized method, it still requires the domain labels. This paper presents a novel confidence-aware cross pseudo supervision algorithm for semi-supervised domain generalized medical image segmentation. The main goal is to enhance the pseudo label quality for unlabeled images from unknown distributions. To achieve it, we perform the Fourier transformation to learn low-level statistic information across domains and augment the images to incorporate cross-domain information. With these augmentations as perturbations, we feed the input to a confidence-aware cross pseudo supervision network to measure the variance of pseudo labels and regularize the network to learn with more confident pseudo labels. Our method sets new records on public datasets, i.e., M&Ms and SCGM. Notably, without using domain labels, our method surpasses the prior art that even uses domain labels by 11.67% on Dice on M&Ms dataset with 2% labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/XMed-Lab/EPL SemiDG.

Enhancing Pseudo Label Quality for Semi-Supervised Domain-Generalized Medical Image Segmentation

Syntax has been shown to benefit Coreference Resolution from incorporating long-range dependencies and structured information captured by syntax trees, either in traditional statistical machine learning based systems or recently proposed neural models. However, most leading systems use only dependency trees. We argue that constituent trees also encode important information, such as explicit span-boundary signals captured by nested multi-word phrases, extra linguistic labels and hierarchical structures useful for detecting anaphora. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective graph-based method to incorporate constituent syntactic structures. Moreover, we also explore to utilise higher-order neighbourhood information to encode rich structures in constituent trees. A novel message propagation mechanism is therefore proposed to enable information flow among elements in syntax trees. Experiments on the English and Chinese portions of OntoNotes 5.0 benchmark show that our proposed model either beats a strong baseline or achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Fantabulous-J/Coref-Constituent-Graph.

Incorporating Constituent Syntax for Coreference Resolution

Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are known to learn from biases and artefacts within their training data, impacting how well they generalise to other unseen datasets. Existing de-biasing approaches focus on preventing the models from learning these biases, which can result in restrictive models and lower performance. We instead investigate teaching the model how a human would approach the NLI task, in order to learn features that will generalise better to previously unseen examples. Using natural language explanations, we supervise the model's attention weights to encourage more attention to be paid to the words present in the explanations, significantly improving model performance. Our experiments show that the in-distribution improvements of this method are also accompanied by out-of-distribution improvements, with the supervised models learning from features that generalise better to other NLI datasets. Analysis of the model indicates that human explanations encourage increased attention on the important words, with more attention paid to words in the premise and less attention paid to punctuation and stopwords.

Supervising Model Attention with Human Explanations for Robust Natural Language Inference

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its feasibility in solving combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). The learning-to-rank techniques have been studied in the field of information retrieval. While several COPs can be formulated as the prioritization of input items, as is common in the information retrieval, it has not been fully explored how the learning-to-rank techniques can be incorporated into deep RL for COPs. 
 In this paper, we present the learning-to-rank distillation-based COP framework, where a high-performance ranking policy obtained by RL for a COP can be distilled into a non-iterative, simple model, thereby achieving a low-latency COP solver. Specifically, we employ the approximated ranking distillation to render a score-based ranking model learnable via gradient descent. Furthermore, we use the efficient sequence sampling to improve the inference performance with a limited delay. 
 With the framework, we demonstrate that a distilled model not only achieves comparable performance to its respective, high-performance RL, but also provides several times faster inferences. We evaluate the framework with several COPs such as priority-based task scheduling and multidimensional knapsack, demonstrating the benefits of the framework in terms of inference latency and performance.

An Efficient Combinatorial Optimization Model Using Learning-to-Rank Distillation

Despite the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) for real-world applications over time-series data such as mobile health, little is known about how to train robust DNNs for time-series domain due to its unique characteristics compared to images and text data. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a novel algorithmic framework referred as RObust Training for Time-Series (RO-TS) to create robust deep models for time-series classification tasks. Specifically, we formulate a min-max optimization problem over the model parameters by explicitly reasoning about the robustness criteria in terms of additive perturbations to time-series inputs measured by the global alignment kernel (GAK) based distance. 
We also show the generality and advantages of our formulation using the summation structure over time-series alignments by relating both GAK and dynamic time warping (DTW).
This problem is an instance of a family of compositional min-max optimization problems, which are challenging and open with unclear theoretical guarantee. 
We propose a principled stochastic compositional alternating gradient descent ascent (SCAGDA) algorithm for this family of optimization problems. Unlike traditional methods for time-series that require approximate computation of distance measures, SCAGDA approximates the GAK based distance on-the-fly using a moving average approach. We theoretically analyze the convergence rate of SCAGDA and provide strong theoretical support for the estimation of GAK based distance.
Our experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that RO-TS creates more robust deep models when compared to adversarial training using prior methods that rely on data augmentation or new definitions of loss functions. We also demonstrate the importance of GAK for time-series data over the Euclidean distance.

Training Robust Deep Models for Time-Series Domain: Novel Algorithms and Theoretical Analysis

Graph neural networks are a promising architecture for learning and inference with graph-structured data. Yet, how to generate informative, fixed dimensional features for graphs with varying size and topology can still be challenging. Typically, this is achieved through graph-pooling, which summarizes a graph by compressing all its nodes into a single vector. Is such a â€œcollapsing-styleâ€ graph-pooling the only choice for graph classification? From complex system's point of view, properties of a complex system arise largely from the interaction among its components. Therefore, we speculate that preserving the interacting relation between parts, instead of pooling them together, could benefit system level prediction. To verify this, we propose SLIM, a graph neural network model for Structural Landmarking and Interaction Modelling. The main idea is to compute a set of end-to-end optimizable sub-structure landmarks, so that any input graph can be projected onto these (spatially) local structural representatives for a faithful, global characterization. By doing so, explicit interaction between component parts of a graph can be leveraged directly in generating discriminative graph representation. Encouraging results are observed on benchmark datasets for graph classification, demonstrating the value of interaction modelling in the design of graph neural networks.

Structural Landmarking and Interaction Modelling: A “SLIM” Network for Graph Classification

Optimizing the combustion efficiency of a thermal power generating unit (TPGU) is a highly challenging and critical task in the energy industry. We develop a new data-driven AI system, namely DeepThermal, to optimize the combustion control strategy for TPGUs. At its core, is a new model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework, called MORE, which leverages historical operational data of a TGPU to solve a highly complex constrained Markov decision process problem via purely offline training. In DeepThermal, we first learn a data-driven combustion process simulator from the offline dataset. The RL agent of MORE is then trained by combining real historical data as well as carefully filtered and processed simulation data through a novel restrictive exploration scheme. DeepThermal has been successfully deployed in four large coal-fired thermal power plants in China. Real-world experiments show that DeepThermal effectively improves the combustion efficiency of TPGUs. We also report the superior performance of MORE by comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithms on the standard offline RL benchmarks.

DeepThermal: Combustion Optimization for Thermal Power Generating Units Using Offline Reinforcement Learning

Traditionally, when recommender systems are formalized as multi-armed bandits, the policy of the recommender system influences the rewards accrued, but not the length of interaction. However, in real-world systems, dissatisfied users may depart (and never come back). In this work, we propose a novel multi-armed bandit setup that captures such policy-dependent horizons. Our setup consists of a finite set of user types, and multiple arms with Bernoulli payoffs.
Each (user type, arm) tuple corresponds to an (unknown) reward probability. Each user's type is initially unknown 
and can only be inferred through their response to recommendations. Moreover, if a user is dissatisfied with their recommendation, they might depart the system. We first address the case where all users share the same type, 
demonstrating that a recent UCB-based algorithm is optimal. We then move forward to the more challenging case,
where users are divided among two types. While naive approaches cannot handle this setting, 
we provide an efficient learning algorithm that achieves O(sqrt(T)ln(T)) regret, where T is the number of users.

Modeling Attrition in Recommender Systems with Departing Bandits

Goal-achieving problems are puzzles that set up a specific situation with a clear objective. An example that is well-studied is the category of life-and-death (L&D) problems for Go, which helps players hone their skill of identifying region safety. Many previous methods like lambda search try null moves first, then derive so-called relevance zones (RZs), outside of which the opponent does not need to search. This paper first proposes a novel RZ-based approach, called the RZ-Based Search (RZS), to solving L&D problems for Go. RZS tries moves before determining whether they are null moves post-hoc. This means we do not need to rely on null move heuristics, resulting in a more elegant algorithm, so that it can also be seamlessly incorporated into AlphaZero's super-human level play in our solver. To repurpose AlphaZero for solving, we also propose a new training method called Faster to Life (FTL), which modifies AlphaZero to entice it to win more quickly. We use RZS and FTL to solve L&D problems on Go, namely solving 68 among 106 problems from a professional L&D book while a previous state-of-the-art program TSUMEGO-EXPLORER solves 11 only. Finally, we discuss that the approach is generic in the sense that RZS is applicable to solving many other goal-achieving problems for board games.

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Learning to Detect 3D Facial Landmarks via Heatmap Regression with Graph Convolutional Network

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