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Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) segments objects without heavy burden of dense annotation. While as a price, generated pseudo-masks exist obvious noisy pixels, which result in sub-optimal segmentation models trained over these pseudo-masks. But rare studies notice or work on this problem, even these noisy pixels are inevitable after their improvements on pseudo-mask. So we try to improve WSSS in the aspect of noise mitigation. And we observe that many noisy pixels are of high confidences, especially when the response range is too wide or narrow, presenting an uncertain status. Thus, in this paper, we simulate noisy variations of response by scaling the prediction map in multiple times for uncertainty estimation. The uncertainty is then used to weight the segmentation loss to mitigate noisy supervision signals. We call this method URN, abbreviated from Uncertainty estimation via Response scaling for Noise mitigation. Experiments validate the benefits of URN, and our method achieves state-of-the-art results at 71.2% and 41.5% on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 respectively, without extra models like saliency detection. Code is available at https://github.com/XMed-Lab/URN.

AAAI 2022

Uncertainty Estimation via Response Scaling for Pseudo-Mask Noise Mitigation in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

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. 

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without any constraints on the label sets. However, domain shift and category shift make UniDA extremely challenging, mainly attributed to the requirement of identifying both shared â€œknownâ€ samples and private â€œunknownâ€ samples. Previous methods barely exploit the intrinsic manifold structure relationship between two domains for feature alignment, and they rely on the softmax-based scores with class competition nature to detect underlying â€œunknownâ€ samples. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel evidential neighborhood contrastive learning framework called TNT to address these issues. Specifically, TNT first proposes a new domain alignment principle: semantically consistent samples should be geometrically adjacent to each other, whether within or across domains. From this criterion, a cross-domain multi-sample contrastive loss based on mutual nearest neighbors is designed to achieve common category matching and private category separation. Second, toward accurate â€œunknownâ€ sample detection, TNT introduces a class competition-free uncertainty score from the perspective of evidential deep learning. Instead of setting a single threshold, TNT learns a category-aware heterogeneous threshold vector to reject diverse â€œunknownâ€ samples. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that TNT significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art UniDA methods.

Evidential Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Universal Domain Adaptation

Even though graphic layout generation has attracted growing attention recently, it is still challenging to synthesis realistic and diverse layouts, due to the complicated element relationships and varied element arrangements. In this work, we seek to improve the performance of layout generation by incorporating the concept of regions, which consist of a smaller number of elements and appears like a simple layout, into the generation process. Specifically, we leverage Variational Autoencoder (VAE) as the overall architecture and decompose the decoding process into two stages. The first stage predicts representations for regions, and the second stage fills in the detailed position for each element within the region based on the predicted region representation. Compared to prior studies that merely abstract the layout into a list of elements and generate all the element positions in one go, our approach has at least two advantages. First, by the two-stage decoding, our approach decouples the complex layout generation task into several simple layout generation tasks, which reduces the problem difficulty. Second, the predicted regions can help the model roughly know what the graphic layout looks like and serve as global context to improve the generation of detailed element positions. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the existing methods, especially on the complex graphic layouts.

Coarse-to-Fine Generative Modeling for Graphic Layouts

Graph walking based on reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in navigating an agent to automatically complete various reasoning tasks over an incomplete knowledge graph (KG) by exploring multi-hop relational paths. However, existing multi-hop reasoning approaches only work well on short reasoning paths and tend to miss the target entity with the increasing path length. This is undesirable for many reasoning tasks in real-world scenarios, where short paths connecting the source and target entities are not available in incomplete KGs, and thus the reasoning performances drop drastically unless the agent is able to seek out more clues from longer paths. To address the above challenge, in this paper, we propose a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework, which trains two agents (Giant and Dwarf) to walk over a KG jointly and search for the answer collaboratively. Our approach tackles the reasoning challenge in long paths by assigning one of the agents (Giant) searching on cluster-level paths quickly and providing stage-wise hints for another agent (Dwarf). Finally, experimental results on several KG reasoning benchmarks show that our approach can search answers more accurately and efficiently, and outperforms existing RL-based methods for long path queries by a large margin.

Learning to Walk with Dual Agents for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Networked discrete dynamical systems are often used to model the spread of contagions and decision-making by agents in coordination games. Fixed points of such dynamical systems represent configurations to which the system converges. In the dissemination of undesirable contagions (such as rumors and misinformation), convergence to fixed points with a small number of affected nodes is a desirable goal. Motivated by such considerations, we formulate a novel optimization problem of finding a nontrivial fixed point of the system with the minimum number of affected nodes. We establish that, unless P = NP, there is no polynomial-time algorithm for approximating a solution to this problem to within the factor n^(1 - epsilon) for any constant epsilon > 0. To cope with this computational intractability, we identify several special cases for which the problem can be solved efficiently. Further, we introduce an integer linear program to address the problem for networks of reasonable sizes. For solving the problem on larger networks, we propose a general heuristic framework along with greedy selection methods. Extensive experimental results on real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics. A full version of the manuscript, source code and data are
available at: https://github.com/bridgelessqiu/NMIN-FPE

Finding Nontrivial Minimum Fixed Points in Discrete Dynamical Systems: Complexity, Special Case Algorithms and Heuristics

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the first choice methods for graph machine learning problems thanks to their ability to learn state-of-the-art level representations from graph-structured data. However, centralizing a massive amount of real-world graph data for GNN training is prohibitive due to user-side privacy concerns, regulation restrictions, and commercial competition. Federated Learning is the de-facto standard for collaborative training of machine learning models over many distributed edge devices without the need for centralization. Nevertheless, training graph neural networks in a federated setting is vaguely defined and brings statistical and systems challenges. This work proposes SpreadGNN, a novel multi-task federated training framework capable of operating in the presence of partial labels and absence of a central server for the first time in the literature. We provide convergence guarantees and empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on a variety of non-I.I.D. distributed graph-level molecular property prediction datasets with partial labels. Our results show that SpreadGNN outperforms GNN models trained over a central server-dependent federated learning system, even in constrained topologies.

SpreadGNN: Decentralized Multi-Task Federated Learning for Graph Neural Networks on Molecular Data

We present a novel dynamic recommendation model that focuses on users who have interactions in the past but turn relatively inactive recently. Making effective recommendations to these time-sensitive cold-start users is critical to maintain the user base of a recommender system. Due to the sparse recent interactions, it is challenging to capture these users' current preferences precisely. Solely relying on their historical interactions may also lead to outdated recommendations misaligned with their recent interests. The proposed model leverages historical and current user-item interactions and dynamically factorizes a user's (latent) preference into time-specific and time-evolving representations that jointly affect user behaviors. These latent factors further interact with an optimized item embedding to achieve accurate and timely recommendations. Experiments over real-world data help demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed time-sensitive cold-start recommendation model.

A Dynamic Meta-Learning Model for Time-Sensitive Cold-Start Recommendations

Sparse decision tree optimization has been one of the most fundamental problems in AI since its inception and is a challenge at the core of interpretable machine learning. Sparse decision tree optimization is computationally hard, and despite steady effort since the 1960's, breakthroughs have been made on the problem only within the past few years, primarily on the problem of finding optimal sparse decision trees. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms often require impractical amounts of computation time and memory to find optimal or near-optimal trees for some real-world datasets, particularly those having several continuous-valued features. Given that the search spaces of these decision tree optimization problems are massive, can we practically hope to find a sparse decision tree that competes in accuracy with a black box machine learning model? We address this problem via smart guessing strategies that can be applied to any optimal branch-and-bound-based decision tree algorithm. The guesses come from knowledge gleaned from black box models. We show that by using these guesses, we can reduce the run time by multiple orders of magnitude while providing bounds on how far the resulting trees can deviate from the black box's accuracy and expressive power. Our approach enables guesses about how to bin continuous features, the size of the tree, and lower bounds on the error for the optimal decision tree. Our experiments show that in many cases we can rapidly construct sparse decision trees that match the accuracy of black box models. To summarize: when you are having trouble optimizing, just guess.

Fast Sparse Decision Tree Optimization via Reference Ensembles

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many graph learning tasks such as node classification, graph classification and link prediction. For the classification task, GNNs' performance often highly depends on the number of labeled nodes and thus could be significantly hampered due to the expensive annotation cost. The sparse literature on active learning for GNNs has primarily focused on selecting only one sample each iteration, which becomes inefficient for large scale datasets. In this paper, we study the batch active learning setting for GNNs where the learning agent can acquire labels of multiple samples at each time. We formulate batch active learning as a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning problem and present a novel reinforced batch-mode active learning framework BiGeNe. To avoid the combinatorial explosion of the joint action space, we introduce a value decomposition method that factorizes the total Q-value into the average of individual Q-values. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-agent Q-network consisting of a graph convolutional network (GCN) component and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) component. The GCN component takes both the informativeness and inter-dependences between nodes into account and the GRU component enables the agent to consider interactions between selected nodes in the same batch. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Batch Active Learning with Graph Neural Networks via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Unpaired video-to-video translation aims to translate videos between a source and a target domain without the need of paired training data, making it more feasible for real applications. Unfortunately, the translated videos generally suffer from temporal and semantic inconsistency. To address this, many existing works adopt spatiotemporal consistency constraints incorporating temporal information based on motion estimation. However, the inaccuracies in the estimation of motion deteriorate the quality of the guidance towards spatiotemporal consistency, which leads to unstable translation. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that regularizes the spatiotemporal consistency by synthesizing motions in input videos with the generated optical flow instead of estimating them. Therefore, the synthetic motion can be applied in the regularization paradigm to keep motions consistent across domains without the risk of errors in motion estimation. Thereafter, we utilize our unsupervised recycle and unsupervised spatial loss, guided by the pseudo-supervision provided by the synthetic optical flow, to accurately enforce spatiotemporal consistency in both domains. Experiments show that our method is versatile in various scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating temporally and semantically consistent videos. Code is available at: https://github.com/wangkaihong/Unsup_Recycle_GAN/.

Learning Temporally and Semantically Consistent Unpaired Video-to-Video Translation through Pseudo-Supervision from Synthetic Optical Flow

Language models (LMs) can reproduce (or amplify) toxic language seen during training, which poses a risk to their practical application. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to study this phenomenon. We analyze the impact of prompts, decoding strategies and training corpora on the output toxicity. Based on our findings, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised method for language models to ``detoxify'' themselves without an additional large corpus or external discriminator. Compared to a supervised baseline, our proposed method shows better toxicity reduction with good generation quality in the generated content under multiple settings. Warning: some examples shown in the paper may contain uncensored offensive content.

Uncertainty Estimation via Response Scaling for Pseudo-Mask Noise Mitigation in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

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Uncertainty Estimation via Response Scaling for Pseudo-Mask Noise Mitigation in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

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Evidential Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Universal Domain Adaptation

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