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Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is important to leverage the full potential of machine learning (ML). 
In practice, users are often interested in multi-objective (MO) problems, i.e., optimizing potentially conflicting objectives, like accuracy and energy consumption.
To tackle this, the vast majority of MO-ML algorithms return a Pareto front of non-dominated machine learning models to the user.
Optimizing the hyperparameters of such algorithms is non-trivial as evaluating a hyperparameter configuration entails evaluating the quality of the resulting Pareto front. 
In literature, there are known indicators that assess the quality of a Pareto front (e.g., hypervolume, R2) by quantifying different properties (e.g., volume, proximity to a reference point). However, choosing the indicator that leads to the desired Pareto front might be a hard task for a user. In this paper, we propose a human-centered interactive HPO approach tailored towards multi-objective ML leveraging preference learning to extract desiderata from users that guide the optimization.
Instead of relying on the user guessing the most suitable indicator for their needs, our approach automatically learns an appropriate indicator.
Concretely, we leverage pairwise comparisons of distinct Pareto fronts to learn such an appropriate quality indicator.
Then, we optimize the hyperparameters of the underlying MO-ML algorithm towards this learned indicator using a state-of-the-art HPO approach.
In an experimental study targeting the environmental impact of ML, we demonstrate that our approach leads to substantially better Pareto fronts compared to optimizing based on a wrong indicator pre-selected by the user, and performs comparable in the case of an advanced user knowing which indicator to pick.

AAAI 2024

Interactive Hyperparameter Optimization in Multi-Objective Problems via Preference Learning

hai: human-in-the-loop machine learning

ml: learning preferences or rankings

ml: auto ml and hyperparameter tuning

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising approach for mitigating the hallucination of large language models (LLMs). However, existing research lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented generation on different large language models, which make it challenging to identify the potential bottlenecks in the capabilities of RAG for different LLMs. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of Retrieval-Augmented Generation on large language models. We analyze the performance of different large language models in 4 fundamental abilities required for RAG, including noise robustness, negative rejection, information integration, and counterfactual robustness. To this end, we establish Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark (RGB), a new corpus for RAG evaluation in both English and Chinese. RGB divides the instances within the benchmark into 4 separate testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities required to resolve the case. Then we evaluate 6 representative LLMs on RGB to diagnose the challenges of current LLMs when applying RAG. Evaluation reveals that while LLMs exhibit a certain degree of noise robustness, they still struggle significantly in terms of negative rejection, information integration, and dealing with false information. The aforementioned assessment outcomes indicate that there is still a considerable journey ahead to effectively apply RAG to LLMs.

Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Accurate prediction of coupon usage is crucial for promoting user consumption through targeted coupon recommendations. However, in real-world coupon recommendations, the coupon allocation process is not solely determined by the model trained with the history interaction data but is also interfered with by marketing tactics desired to fulfill specific commercial goals.This interference creates an imbalance in the interactions, which causes the data to deviate from the user's natural preferences. We refer to this deviation as the matching bias. Such biased interaction data affects the efficacy of the model, and thus it is necessary to employ debiasing techniques to prevent any negative impact.
We investigate the mitigation of matching bias in coupon recommendations from a causal-effect perspective. By treating the attributes of users and coupons associated with marketing tactics as \emph{confounders}, we find the confounders open the backdoor path between user-coupon matching and the conversion, which introduces spurious correlation. To remove the bad effect, we propose a novel training paradigm named Backdoor Adjustment via Group Adaptation} (BAGA) for debiased coupon recommendations, which performs intervened training and inference, i.e., separately modeling each user-coupon group pair. However, modeling all possible group pairs greatly increases the computational complexity and cost. To address the efficiency challenge, we further present a simple but effective dual-tower multi-task framework and leverage the Customized Gate Control (CGC) model architecture, which separately models each user and coupon group with a separate expert module. We instantiate BAGA on five representative models: FM, DNN, NCF, MASKNET, and DEEPFM, and conduct comprehensive offline and online experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed paradigm.

Backdoor Adjustment via Group Adaptation for Debiased Coupon Recommendations

Optimal transport provides a metric which quantifies the dissimilarity between probability measures. For measures supported in discrete metric spaces, finding the optimal transport distance has cubic time complexity in the size of the space. However, measures supported on trees admit a closed-form optimal transport that can be computed in linear time. In this paper, we aim to find an optimal tree structure for a given discrete metric space so that the tree-Wasserstein distance approximates the optimal transport distance in the original space. One of our key ideas is to cast the problem in ultrametric spaces. This helps us optimize over the space of ultrametric trees --- a mixed-discrete and continuous optimization problem --- via projected gradient decent over the space of ultrametric matrices. During optimization, we project the parameters to the ultrametric space via a hierarchical minimum spanning tree algorithm, equivalent to the closest projection to ultrametrics under $\ell_\infty$ norm. Experimental results on real datasets show that our approach outperforms previous approaches (e.g. Flowtree, Quadtree) in approximating optimal transport distances. Finally, experiments on synthetic data generated on ground truth trees show that our algorithm can accurately uncover the underlying trees.

Learning Ultrametric Trees for Optimal Transport Regression

Recently, probabilistic predictive coding that directly models the conditional distribution of latent features across successive frames for temporal redundancy removal has yielded promising results.  Existing methods using a single-scale Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) must devise complex networks for conditional probability estimation in latent space, neglecting multiscale characteristics of video frames. Instead, this work proposes hierarchical probabilistic predictive coding, for which hierarchal VAEs are carefully designed to characterize multiscale latent features as a family of flexible priors and posteriors to predict the probabilities of future frames. Under such a hierarchical structure, lightweight networks are sufficient for prediction. The proposed method outperforms representative learned video compression models on common testing videos and demonstrates computational friendliness with much less memory footprint and faster encoding/decoding. Extensive experiments on adaptation to temporal patterns also indicate the better generalization of our hierarchical predictive mechanism. Furthermore, our solution is the first to enable progressive decoding that is favored in networked video applications with packet loss.

Deep Hierarchical Video Compression

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model that has revolutionised image segmentation. To apply SAM to surgical instrument segmentation, a common approach is to locate precise points or boxes of instruments and then use them as prompts for SAM in a zero-shot manner. However, we observe two problems with this naive pipeline: (1) the domain gap between natural objects and surgical instruments leads to inferior generalisation of SAM; and (2) SAM relies on precise point or box locations for accurate segmentation, requiring either extensive manual guidance or a well-performing specialist detector for prompt preparation, which leads to a complex multi-stage pipeline. To address these problems, we introduce SurgicalSAM, a novel end-to-end efficient-tuning approach for SAM to effectively integrate surgical-specific information with SAM’s pre-trained knowledge for improved generalisation. Specifically, we propose a lightweight prototype-based class prompt encoder for tuning, which directly generates prompt embeddings from class prototypes and eliminates the use of explicit prompts for improved robustness and a simpler pipeline. In addition, to address the low inter-class variance among surgical instrument categories, we propose contrastive prototype learning, further enhancing the discrimination of the class prototypes for more accurate class prompting. The results of extensive experiments on both EndoVis2018 and EndoVis2017 datasets demonstrate that SurgicalSAM achieves state-of-the-art performance while only requiring a small number of tunable parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/wenxi-yue/SurgicalSAM.

SurgicalSAM: Efficient Class Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation

With the rise of real-time rendering and the evolution of display devices, there is a growing demand for post-processing methods that offer high-resolution content in a high frame rate. Existing techniques often suffer from quality and latency issues due to the disjointed treatment of frame supersampling and extrapolation. In this paper, we  recognize the shared context and mechanisms between frame supersampling and extrapolation, and present a novel framework, Space-time Supersampling (STSS). By integrating them into a unified framework, STSS can improve the overall quality with lower latency. To implement an efficient architecture, we treat the aliasing and warping holes unified as reshading regions and put forth two key components to compensate the regions, namely Random Reshading Masking (RRM) and Efficient Reshading Module (ERM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior visual fidelity compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Notably, the performance is achieved within only 4ms, saving up to 75\% of time against the conventional two-stage pipeline that necessitates 17ms.

Low-Latency Space-Time Supersampling for Real-Time Rendering

Learning scene semantics that can be well generalized to foggy conditions is important for safety-crucial applications such as autonomous driving. 
Existing methods need both annotated clear images and foggy images to train a curriculum domain adaptation model.
Unfortunately, these methods can only generalize to the target foggy domain that has seen in the training stage, but the foggy domains vary a lot in both urban-scene styles and fog styles.
In this paper, we propose to learn scene segmentation well generalized to foggy-scenes under the domain generalization setting, which does not involve any foggy images in the training stage and can generalize to any arbitrary unseen foggy scenes. 
We argue that an ideal segmentation model that can be well generalized to foggy-scenes need to simultaneously enhance the content, de-correlate the urban-scene style and de-correlate the fog style. 
As the content (e.g., scene semantic) rests more in low-frequency features while the style of urban-scene and fog rests more in high-frequency features, we propose a novel bi-directional wavelet guidance (BWG) mechanism to realize the above three objectives in a divide-and-conquer manner. 
With the aid of Haar wavelet transformation,
the low frequency component is concentrated on the content enhancement self-attention, while the high frequency component is shifted to the style and fog self-attention for de-correlation purpose.
It is integrated into existing mask-level Transformer segmentation pipelines in a learnable fashion.
Large-scale experiments are conducted on four foggy-scene segmentation datasets under a variety of interesting settings.
The proposed method significantly outperforms existing directly-supervised, curriculum domain adaptation and domain generalization segmentation methods. 
Source code is available at https://github.com/BiQiWHU/BWG.

Learning Generalized Segmentation for Foggy-Scenes by Bi-directional Wavelet Guidance

Early smoke segmentation (ESS) enables the accurate identification of smoke sources, facilitating the prompt extinguishing of fires and preventing large-scale gas leaks. But ESS poses greater challenges than conventional object and regular smoke segmentation due to its small scale and transparent appearance, which can result in high miss detection rate and low precision. To address these issues, a Focus and Separation Network (FoSp) is proposed. We first introduce a Focus module employing bidirectional cascade which guides low-resolution and high-resolution features towards mid-resolution to locate and determine the scope of smoke, reducing the miss detection rate. Next, we propose a Separation module that separates smoke images into a pure smoke foreground and a smoke-free background, enhancing the contrast between smoke and background fundamentally, improving segmentation precision. Finally, a Domain Fusion module is developed to integrate the distinctive features of the two modules which can balance recall and precision to achieve high F_beta. Futhermore, to promote the development of ESS, we introduce a high-quality real-world dataset called SmokeSeg, which contains more small and transparent smoke than the existing datasets. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance on three available smoke segmentation datasets: SYN70K (mIoU: 83.00%), SMOKE5K (F_beta: 81.6%) and SmokeSeg (F_beta: 72.05%). The code can be found at https://github.com/LujianYao/FoSp.

FoSp: Focus and Separation Network for Early Smoke Segmentation

Human motion generation aims to produce plausible human motion sequences according to various conditional inputs, such as text or audio. Despite the feasibility of existing methods in generating motion based on short prompts and simple motion patterns, they encounter difficulties when dealing with long prompts or complex motions.
The challenges are two-fold: 1) the scarcity of human motion-captured data for long prompts and complex motions. 2) the high diversity of human motions in the temporal domain and the substantial divergence of distributions from conditional modalities, leading to a many-to-many mapping problem when generating motion with complex and long texts. 
In this work, we address these gaps by 1) elaborating the first dataset pairing long textual descriptions and 3D complex motions (HumanLong3D), and 2) proposing an autoregressive motion diffusion model (AMD). Specifically, AMD integrates the text prompt at the current timestep with the text prompt and action sequences at the previous timestep as conditional information to predict the current action sequences in an iterative manner.
Furthermore, we present its generalization for X-to-Motion with “No Modality Left Behind”, enabling for the first time the generation of high-definition and high-fidelity human motions based on user-defined modality input.

AMD: Autoregressive Motion Diffusion | VIDEO

We introduce a new amortized likelihood ratio estimator for likelihood-free simulation-based inference (SBI). Our estimator is simple to train and estimates the likelihood ratio using a single forward pass of the neural estimator. Our approach directly computes the likelihood ratio between two competing parameter sets which is different from the previous approach of comparing two neural network output values. We refer to our model as the direct neural ratio estimator (DNRE). As part of introducing the DNRE, we derive a corresponding Monte Carlo estimate of the posterior. We benchmark our new ratio estimator and compare to previous ratio estimators in the literature. We show that our new ratio estimator often outperforms these previous approaches. As a further contribution, we introduce a new derivative estimator for likelihood ratio estimators that enables us to compare likelihood-free Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with random-walk Metropolis-Hastings (MH). We show that HMC is equally competitive, which has not been previously shown. Finally, we include a novel real-world application of SBI by using our neural ratio estimator to design a quadcopter. Code is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/dnre.

Interactive Hyperparameter Optimization in Multi-Objective Problems via Preference Learning

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Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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