Canada

Large-scale pre-trained Vision Language Models (VLMs) have proven effective for zero-shot classification. Despite the success, most traditional VLMs-based methods are restricted by the assumption of partial source supervision or ideal target vocabularies, which rarely satisfy the open-world scenario. In this paper, we aim at a more challenging setting, Realistic Zero-Shot Classification, which assumes no annotation but instead a broad vocabulary. To address the new problem, we propose the Self Structural Semantic Alignment (S3A) framework, which extracts the structural semantic information from unlabeled data while simultaneously self-learning. Our S3A framework adopts a unique Cluster-Vote-Prompt-Realign (CVPR) algorithm, which iteratively groups unlabeled data to derive structural semantics for pseudo-supervision. Our CVPR algorithm includes iterative clustering on images, voting within each cluster to identify initial class candidates from the vocabulary, generating discriminative prompts with large language models to discern confusing candidates, and realigning images and the vocabulary as structural semantic alignment. Finally, we propose to self-train the CLIP image encoder with both individual and structural semantic alignment through a teacher-student learning strategy. Our comprehensive experiments across various generic and fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that the S3A method substantially improves over existing VLMs-based approaches, achieving a more than 15% accuracy improvement over CLIP on average. Our codes, models, and prompts are publicly released at https://github.com/sheng-eatamath/S3A.

AAAI 2024

S3A: Towards Realistic Zero-Shot Classification via Self Structural Semantic Alignment

representation learning for vision

object detection & categorization

language and vision

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. 

Recently, the Binary Constraint Tree (BCT), a tree structured Binary Constraint Network (BCN), has been shown to be more succinct than various ad-hoc constraints. In this paper, we investigate the modelling power of a well-known tractable hybrid class generalizing BCT, i.e. the class of BCNs satisfying Broken Triangle Property (BTP) called BTP Networks (BTPNs). We show that the consistency checker of BTPN can be computed by polysize monotone circuit, thus, some global constraints cannot be encoded as polysize BTPN, such as the AllDifferent and Linear constraints. Then our study reveals that BTPN is strictly more succinct than the DNNF constraint and all 14 ad-hoc constraints discussed in (Wang and Yap 2023), such as the context-free grammar, BCT and smart table constraints. Furthermore, we also show that BTPN is as powerful as DNNF in terms of computing various operations and queries. In addition, we prove that it is NP-hard to determine the minimum sized BTPN encoding a constraint.

Encoding Constraints as Binary Constraint Networks Satisfying BTP

Effective exploration is crucial to discovering optimal strategies for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in complex coordination tasks. Existing methods mainly utilize intrinsic rewards to enable committed exploration or use role-based learning for decomposing joint action spaces instead of directly conducting a collective search in the entire action-observation space. However, they often face challenges obtaining specific joint action sequences to reach successful states in long-horizon tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Imagine, Initialize, and Explore (IIE), a novel method that offers a promising solution for efficient multi-agent exploration in complex scenarios. IIE employs a transformer model to imagine how the agents reach a critical state that can influence each other's transition functions. Then, we initialize the environment at this state using a simulator before the exploration phase. We formulate the imagination as a sequence modeling problem, where the states, observations, prompts, actions, and rewards are predicted autoregressively. The prompt consists of timestep-to-go, return-to-go, influence value, and one-shot demonstration, specifying the desired state and trajectory as well as guiding the action generation. By initializing agents at the critical states, IIE significantly increases the likelihood of discovering potentially important under-explored regions. Despite its simplicity, empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms multi-agent exploration baselines on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and SMACv2 environments. Particularly, IIE shows improved performance in the sparse-reward SMAC tasks and produces more effective curricula over the initialized states than other generative methods, such as CVAE-GAN and diffusion models.

Imagine, Initialize, and Explore: An Effective Exploration Method in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Neural architecture search-based multi-modal classification (NAS-MMC) methods can individually obtain the optimal classifier for different multi-modal data sets in an automatic manner. However, most existing NAS-MMC methods are dramatically time consuming due to the requirement for training and evaluating enormous models. In this paper, we propose an efficient evolutionary-based NAS-MMC method called divide-and-conquer neural architecture search (DC-NAS). Specifically, the evolved population is first divided into k+1 sub-populations, and then k sub-populations of them evolve on k small-scale data sets respectively that are obtained by splitting the entire data set using the k-fold stratified sampling technique; the remaining one evolves on the entire data set. To solve the sub-optimal fusion model problem caused by the training strategy of partial data, two kinds of sub-populations that are trained using partial data and entire data exchange the learned knowledge via two special knowledge bases. With the two techniques mentioned above, DC-NAS achieves the training time reduction and classification performance improvement. Experimental results show that DC-NAS achieves the state-of-the-art results in term of classification performance, training efficiency and the number of model parameters than the compared NAS-MMC methods on three popular multi-modal tasks including multi-label movie genre classification, action recognition with RGB and body joints and dynamic hand gesture recognition.

DC-NAS: Divide-and-Conquer Neural Architecture Search for Multi-Modal Classification

Multimodal learning is susceptible to modality missing, which poses a major obstacle for its practical applications and, thus, invigorates increasing research interest. In this paper, we investigate two challenging problems: 1) when modality missing exists in the training data, how to exploit the incomplete samples while guaranteeing that they are properly supervised? 2) when the missing rates of different modalities vary, causing or exacerbating the imbalance among modalities, how to address the imbalance and ensure all modalities are well-trained. To tackle these two challenges, we first introduce the variational information bottleneck (VIB) method for the cross-modal representation learning of missing modalities, which capitalizes on the available modalities and the labels as supervision. Then, accounting for the imbalanced missing rates, we define relative advantage to quantify the advantage of each modality over others. Accordingly, a bi-level optimization problem is formulated to adaptively regulate the supervision of all modalities during training. As a whole, the proposed approach features Relative advantage aware Cross-modal representation learning (abbreviated as RedCore) for missing modalities with imbalanced missing rates. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that RedCore outperforms competing models in that it exhibits superior robustness against either large or imbalanced missing rates. Our code has been submitted as supplementary material, and is also available at: https://github.com/nobodyresearcher/RedCore.

RedCore: Relative Advantage Aware Cross-Modal Representation Learning for Missing Modalities with Imbalanced Missing Rates | VIDEO

Vision-Language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large corpora have demonstrated notable success across a range of downstream tasks. In light of the rapidly increasing size of pre-trained VLMs, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has garnered attention as a viable alternative to full fine-tuning. One such approach is the adapter, which introduces a few trainable parameters into the pre-trained models while preserving the original parameters during adaptation.
In this paper, we present a novel modeling framework that recasts adapter tuning after attention as a graph message passing process on attention graphs, where the projected query and value features and attention matrix constitute the node features and the graph adjacency matrix, respectively. Within this framework, tuning adapters in VLMs necessitates handling heterophilic graphs, owing to the disparity between the projected query and value space.
To address this challenge, we propose a new adapter architecture, p-adapter, which employs p-Laplacian message passing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, the attention weights are re-normalized based on the features, and the features are then aggregated using the calibrated attention matrix, enabling the dynamic exploitation of information with varying frequencies in the heterophilic attention graphs.
We conduct extensive experiments on different pre-trained VLMs and multi-modal tasks, including visual question answering, visual entailment, and image captioning. The experimental results validate our method's significant superiority over other PETL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/p-Adapter/.

p-Laplacian Adaptation for Generative Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

The stability-plasticity dilemma is a major challenge in continual learning, as it involves balancing the conflicting objectives of maintaining performance on previous tasks while learning new tasks. In this paper, we propose the recall-oriented continual learning framework to address this challenge. Inspired by the human brain's ability to separate the mechanisms responsible for stability and plasticity, our framework consists of a two-level architecture where an inference network effectively acquires new knowledge and a generative network recalls past knowledge when necessary. In particular, to maximize the stability of past knowledge, we investigate the complexity of knowledge depending on different representations, and thereby introducing generative adversarial meta-model (GAMM) that incrementally learns task-specific parameters instead of input data samples of the task. Through our experiments, we show that our framework not only effectively learns new knowledge without any disruption but also achieves high stability of previous knowledge in both task-aware and task-agnostic learning scenarios.

Recall-Oriented Continual Learning with Generative Adversarial Meta-Model | VIDEO

Task-free online continual learning (TF-CL) is a challenging problem where the model incrementally learns tasks without explicit task information. Although training with entire data from the past, present as well as future is considered as the gold standard, naive approaches in TF-CL with the current samples may be conflicted with learning with samples in the future, leading to catastrophic forgetting and poor plasticity. Thus, a proactive consideration of an unseen future sample in TF-CL becomes imperative. Motivated by this intuition, we propose a novel TF-CL framework considering future samples and show that injecting adversarial perturbations on both input data and decision-making is effective. Then, we propose a novel method named Doubly Perturbed Continual Learning (DPCL) to efficiently implement these input and decision-making perturbations. Specifically, for input perturbation, we propose an approximate perturbation method that injects noise into the input data as well as the feature vector and then interpolates the two perturbed samples. For decision-making process perturbation, we devise multiple stochastic classifiers. We also investigate a memory management scheme and learning rate scheduling reflecting our proposed double perturbations. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods by large margins on various TF-CL benchmarks.

Doubly Perturbed Task Free Continual Learning

The Forward-Forward (FF) Algorithm has been recently proposed to alleviate the issues of backpropagation (BP) commonly used to train deep neural networks. However, its current formulation exhibits limitations such as the generation of negative data, slower convergence, and inadequate performance on complex tasks. In this paper, we take the main ideas of FF and improve them by leveraging channel-wise competitive learning in the context of convolutional neural networks for image classification tasks. A layer-wise loss function is introduced that promotes competitive learning and eliminates the need for negative data construction. To enhance both the learning of compositional features and feature space partitioning, a channel-wise feature separator and extractor block is proposed that complements the competitive learning process. Our method outperforms recent FF-based models on image classification tasks, achieving testing errors of 0.58%, 7.69%, 21.89%, and 48.77% on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 respectively. Our approach bridges the performance gap between FF learning and BP methods, indicating the potential of our proposed approach to learn useful representations in a layer-wise modular fashion, enabling more efficient and flexible learning.

Convolutional Channel-Wise Competitive Learning for the Forward-Forward Algorithm

Motivated by applications to classification problems on metric data, we study \textit{Weighted Metric Clustering} problem: given a metric $d$ over $n$ points, the goal is to find a $k$-partition of these points into clusters $C_1,\ldots, C_k$, while \textit{minimizing} $\sum_{i=1}^k \sum_{j=1}^{k} \sum_{u \in C_i} \sum_{v \in C_j} A_{ij}\, d_{uv}$, where $A$ is a $k \times k$ symmetric matrix with non-negative entries. Specific choices of $A$ lead to Weighted Metric Clustering capturing well-studied graph partitioning problems in metric spaces, such as Min-Uncut, Min-$k$-Sum, Min-$k$-Cut, and more.

Our main result is that Weighted Metric Clustering admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS). Our algorithm handles all the above problems using the Sherali-Adams linear programming relaxation. This subsumes several prior works, unifies many of the techniques for various metric clustering objectives, and yields a PTAS for several new problems, including metric clustering on manifolds and a new family of hierarchical clustering objectives. Our experiments on the hierarchical clustering objective show that it better captures the ground-truth structural information compared to the popular Dasgupta's objective.

Approximation Scheme for Weighted Metric Clustering via Sherali-Adams

This paper studies the Partial Optimal Transport (POT) problem between two unbalanced measures with at most $n$ supports and its applications in various AI tasks such as color transfer or domain adaptation. There is hence the need for fast approximations of POT with increasingly large problem sizes in arising applications. We first theoretically and experimentally investigate the infeasibility of the state-of-the-art Sinkhorn algorithm for POT due to its incompatible rounding procedure, which consequently degrades its qualitative performance in real world applications like point-cloud registration. To this end, we propose a novel rounding algorithm for POT, and then provide a feasible Sinkhorn procedure with a revised computation complexity of $\mathcal{\widetilde O}(n^2/\varepsilon^4)$. Our rounding algorithm also permits the development of two first-order methods to approximate the POT problem. The first algorithm, Adaptive Primal-Dual Accelerated Gradient Descent (APDAGD), finds an $\varepsilon$-approximate solution to the POT problem in $\mathcal{\widetilde O}(n^{2.5}/\varepsilon)$, which is better in $\varepsilon$ than revised Sinkhorn. The second method, Dual Extrapolation, achieves the computation complexity of $\mathcal{\widetilde O}(n^2/\varepsilon)$, thereby being the best in the literature. We further demonstrate the flexibility of POT compared to standard OT as well as the practicality of our algorithms on real applications where two marginal distributions are unbalanced.

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