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Batch Normalization (BN) as an important component assists Deep Neural Networks in achieving promising performance for extensive learning tasks by scaling distribution of feature representations within mini-batches. However, the application of BN suffers from performance degradation under the scenario of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), since the estimated statistics fail to concurrently describe two different domains. In this paper, we develop a novel normalization technique, named Collaborative Normalization (CoN), for eliminating domain discrepancy and accelerating the model training of neural networks for UDA. Unlike typical strategies only exploiting domain-specific statistics during normalization, our CoN excavates cross-domain knowledge and simultaneously scales features from various domains by mimicking the merits of collaborative representation. Our CoN can be easily plugged into popular neural network backbones for cross-domain learning. On the one hand, theoretical analysis guarantees that models with CoN promote discriminability of feature representations and accelerate convergence rate; on the other hand, empirical study verifies that replacing BN with CoN in popular network backbones effectively improves classification accuracy in most learning tasks across three cross-domain visual benchmarks.

AAAI 2022

Cross-Domain Collaborative Normalization via Structural Knowledge

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. 

Current researches on spoken language understanding (SLU) heavily are limited to a simple setting: the plain text-based SLU that takes the user utterance as input and generates its corresponding semantic frames (e.g., intent and slots). Unfortunately, such a simple setting may fail to work in complex real-world scenarios when an utterance is semantically ambiguous, which cannot be achieved by the text-based SLU models. In this paper, we first introduce a new and important task, Profile-based Spoken Language Understanding (ProSLU), which requires the model that not only relies on the plain text but also the supporting profile information to predict the correct intents and slots. To this end, we further introduce a large-scale human-annotated Chinese dataset with over 5K utterances and their corresponding supporting profile information (Knowledge Graph (KG), User Profile (UP), Context Awareness (CA)). In addition, we evaluate several state-of-the-art baseline models and explore a multi-level knowledge adapter to effectively incorporate profile information. Experimental results reveal that all existing text-based SLU models fail to work when the utterances are semantically ambiguous and our proposed framework can effectively fuse the supporting information for sentence-level intent detection and token-level slot filling. Finally, we summarize key challenges and provide new points for future directions, which hopes to facilitate the research.

Text is No More Enough! A Benchmark for Profile-Based Spoken Language Understanding

Despite deep learning (DL) success in classification problems, DL classifiers do not provide a sound mechanism to decide when to refrain from predicting. Recent works tried to control the overall prediction risk with classification with rejection options. However, existing works overlook the different significance of different classes. We introduce Set-classifier with class-specific RIsk Bounds (SCRIB) to tackle this problem, assigning multiple labels to each example. Given the output of a black-box model on the validation set, SCRIB constructs a set-classifier that controls the class-specific prediction risks. The key idea is to reject when the set classifier returns more than one label. We validated SCRIB on several medical applications, including sleep staging on electroencephalogram(EEG) data, X-ray COVID image classification, and atrial fibrillation detection based on electrocardiogram (ECG) data.SCRIB obtained desirable class-specific risks, which are 35%-88% closer to the target risks than baseline methods.

SCRIB: Set-Classifier with Class-Specific Risk Bounds for Blackbox Models

Existing portrait matting methods either require auxiliary inputs that are costly to obtain or involve multiple stages that are computationally expensive, making them less suitable for real-time applications. In this work, we present a light-weight matting objective decomposition network (MODNet) for portrait matting in real-time with a single input image. The key idea behind our efficient design is by optimizing a series of sub-objectives simultaneously via explicit constraints. In addition, MODNet includes two novel techniques for improving model efficiency and robustness. First, an Efficient Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (e-ASPP) module is introduced to fuse multi-scale features for semantic estimation. Second, a self-supervised sub-objectives consistency (SOC) strategy is proposed to adapt MODNet to real-world data to address the domain shift problem common to trimap-free methods. MODNet is easy to be trained in an end-to-end manner. It is much faster than contemporaneous methods and runs at 67 frames per second on a 1080Ti GPU. Experiments show that MODNet outperforms prior trimap-free methods by a large margin on both Adobe Matting Dataset and a carefully designed photographic portrait matting (PPM-100) benchmark proposed by us. Further, MODNet achieves remarkable results on daily photos and videos.

MODNet: Real-Time Trimap-Free Portrait Matting via Objective Decomposition

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) involves answering questions that require external knowledge not present in the image. Existing methods first retrieve knowledge from external resources, then reason over the selected knowledge, the input image, and question for answer prediction. However, this two-step approach could lead to mismatches that potentially limit the VQA performance. For example, the retrieved knowledge might be noisy and irrelevant to the question, and the re-embedded knowledge features during reasoning might deviate from their original meanings in the knowledge base (KB). To address this challenge, we propose PICa, a simple yet effective method that Prompts GPT3 via the use of Image Captions, for knowledge-based VQA. Inspired by GPT-3's power in knowledge retrieval and question answering, instead of using structured KBs as in previous work, we treat GPT-3 as an implicit and unstructured KB that can jointly acquire and process relevant knowledge. Specifically, we first convert the image into captions (or tags) that GPT-3 can understand, then adapt GPT-3 to solve the VQA task in a few-shot manner by just providing a few in-context VQA examples. We further boost performance by carefully investigating: (i) what text formats best describe the image content, and (ii) how in-context examples can be better selected and used. PICa unlocks the first use of GPT-3 for multimodal tasks. By using only 16 examples, PICa surpasses the supervised state of the art by an absolute +8.6 points on the OK-VQA dataset. We also benchmark PICa on VQAv2, where PICa also shows a decent few-shot performance.

An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA

Crime prediction plays an impactful role in enhancing public security and sustainable development of urban. With recent advances in data collection and integration technologies, a large amount of urban data with rich crime-related information and fine-grained spatio-temporal logs have been recorded. Such helpful information can boost our understandings of the temporal evolution and spatial factors of urban crimes and can enhance accurate crime prediction. However, the vast majority of existing crime prediction algorithms either do not distinguish different types of crime or treat each crime type separately, which fails to capture the intrinsic correlations among different types of crime. In this paper, we perform crime prediction exploiting the cross-type and spatio-temporal correlations of urban crimes. In particular, we verify the existence of correlations among different types of crime from temporal and spatial perspectives, and propose a coherent framework to mathematically model these correlations for crime prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Multi-Type Urban Crime Prediction

Bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision problems to maximize the cumulative reward. One potential application is mobile health, where the goal is to promote the user's health through personalized interventions based on user specific information acquired through wearable devices. Important considerations include the type of, and frequency with which data is collected (e.g. GPS, or continuous monitoring), as such factors can severely impact app performance and users' adherence. In order to balance the need to collect data that is useful with the constraint of impacting app performance, one needs to be able to assess the usefulness of variables. Bandit feedback data are sequentially correlated, so traditional testing procedures developed for independent data cannot apply. Recently, a statistical testing procedure was developed for the actor-critic bandit algorithm. An actor-critic algorithm maintains two separate models, one for the actor, the action selection policy, and the other for the critic, the reward model. The performance of the algorithm as well as the validity of the test are guaranteed only when the critic model is correctly specified. However, misspecification is frequent in practice due to incorrect functional form or missing covariates. In this work, we propose a modified actor-critic algorithm which is robust to critic misspecification and derive a novel testing procedure for the actor parameters in this case.

Robust Tests in Online Decision-Making

Mixed communities of organisms are found in many environments -- from the human gut to marine ecosystems -- and can have profound impact on human health and the environment. Metagenomics studies the genomic material of such communities through high-throughput sequencing that yields DNA subsequences for subsequent analysis. A fundamental problem in the standard workflow, called binning, is to discover clusters, of genomic subsequences, associated with the constituent organisms. Inherent noise in the subsequences, various biological constraints that need to be imposed on them and the skewed cluster size distribution exacerbate the difficulty of this unsupervised learning problem. In this paper, we present a new formulation using a graph where the nodes are subsequences and edges represent homophily information. In addition, we model biological constraints providing heterophilous signal about nodes that cannot be clustered together. We solve the binning problem by developing new algorithms for (i) graph representation learning that preserves both homophily relations and heterophily constraints (ii) constraint-based graph clustering method that addresses the problems of skewed cluster size distribution. Extensive experiments, on real and synthetic datasets, demonstrate that our approach, called RepBin, outperforms a wide variety of competing methods. Our constraint-based graph representation learning and clustering methods, that may be useful in other domains as well, advance the state-of-the-art in both metagenomics binning and graph representation learning.

RepBin: Constraint-Based Graph Representation Learning for Metagenomic Binning

Generating absent keyphrases, which do not appear in the input document, is challenging in the keyphrase prediction task. Most previous works treat the problem as an autoregressive sequence-to-sequence generation task, which demonstrates promising results for generating grammatically correct and fluent absent keyphrases. However, such an end-to-end process with a complete data-driven manner is unconstrained, which is prone to generate keyphrases inconsistent with the input document. In addition, the existing autoregressive decoding method makes the generation of keyphrases must be done from left to right, leading to slow speed during inference. In this paper, we propose a constrained absent keyphrase generation method in a prompt-based learning fashion. Specifically, the prompt will be created firstly based on the keywords, which are defined as the overlapping words between absent keyphrase and document. Then, a mask-predict decoder is used to complete the absent keyphrase on the constraint of prompt. Experiments on keyphrase generation benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. In addition, we evaluate the performance of constrained absent keyphrases generation from an information retrieval perspective. The result shows that our approach can generate more consistent keyphrases, which can improve document retrieval performance. What's more, with a non-autoregressive decoding manner, our model can speed up the absent keyphrase generation by 8.67Ã— compared with the autoregressive method.

Fast and Constrained Absent Keyphrase Generation by Prompt-Based Learning

Data augmentation is an efficient way to elevate 3D object detection performance. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective online crop-and-paste data augmentation pipeline for structured 3D point cloud scenes, named CorrelaBoost. Observing that 3D objects should have reasonable relative positions in a structured scene because of the objects' functionalities and natural relationships, we express this correlation as a kind of interactive force. An energy field called Correlation Field can be calculated correspondingly across the whole 3D space. According to the Correlation Field, we propose two data augmentation strategies to explore highly congruent positions that a designated object may be pasted to: 1) Category Consistent Exchanging and 2) Energy Optimized Transformation. We conduct exhaustive experiments on various popular benchmarks with different detection frameworks and the results illustrate that our method brings huge free-lunch improvement and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of data augmentation. It is worth noting that the performance of VoteNet with mAP@0.5 is improved by 7.7 on ScanNetV2 dataset and 5.0 on SUN RGB-D dataset. Our method is simple to implement and increases few computational overhead.

Correlation Field for Boosting 3D Object Detection in Structured Scenes

Vision transformers have recently demonstrated great success in various computer vision tasks, motivating a tremendously increased interest in their deployment into many real-world IoT applications. 
 However, powerful ViTs are often too computationally expensive to be fitted onto real-world resource-constrained platforms, due to (1) their quadratically increased complexity with the number of input tokens and (2) their overparameterized self-attention heads and model depth. In parallel, different images are of varied complexity and their different regions can contain various levels of visual information, e.g., a sky background is not as informative as a foreground object in object classification tasks, indicating that treating those regions equally in terms of model complexity is unnecessary while such opportunities for trimming down ViTs' complexity have not been fully exploited.
 To this end, we propose a Multi-grained Input-Adaptive Vision Transformer framework dubbed MIA-Former that can input-adaptively adjust the structure of ViTs at three coarse-to-fine-grained granularities (i.e., model depth and the number of model heads/tokens).
 In particular, our MIA-Former adopts a low-cost network trained with a hybrid supervised and reinforcement learning method to skip the unnecessary layers, heads, and tokens in an input adaptive manner, reducing the overall computational cost. Furthermore, an interesting side effect of our MIA-Former is that its resulting ViTs are naturally equipped with improved robustness against adversarial attacks over their static counterparts, because MIA-Former's multi-grained dynamic control improves the model diversity similar to the effect of ensemble and thus increases the 
 difficulty of adversarial attacks against all its sub-models.
 Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate that the proposed MIA-Former framework can (1) effectively allocate adaptive computation budgets to the difficulty of input images, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, e.g., up to 16.5\% computation savings with the same or even a higher accuracy compared with the SOTA dynamic transformer models, and (2) boost ViTs' robustness accuracy under various adversarial attacks over their vanilla counterparts by 2.4\% and 3.0\%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/MIA-Former.

Cross-Domain Collaborative Normalization via Structural Knowledge

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Text is No More Enough! A Benchmark for Profile-Based Spoken Language Understanding

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Cross-Domain Collaborative Normalization via Structural Knowledge

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Text is No More Enough! A Benchmark for Profile-Based Spoken Language Understanding

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