Canada

Deep learning architectures have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. This may be attributed to the use of over-parameterized, monolithic deep learning architectures executed on large datasets. Although such large architectures lead to increased accuracy, this is usually accompanied by a larger increase in computation and memory requirements during inference. While this is a non-issue in traditional machine learning (ML) pipelines, the recent confluence of machine learning and fields like the Internet of Things (IoT) has rendered such large architectures infeasible for execution in low-resource settings. For some datasets, large monolithic pipelines may be overkill for simpler inputs. To address this problem, previous efforts have proposed decision cascades where inputs are passed through models of increasing complexity until desired performance is achieved. However, we argue that cascaded prediction leads to sub-optimal throughput and increased computational cost due to wasteful intermediate computations. To address this, we propose PaSeR (Parsimonious Segmentation with Reinforcement Learning) a non-cascading, cost-aware learning pipeline as an efficient alternative to cascaded decision architectures. Through experimental evaluation on both real-world and standard datasets, we demonstrate that PaSeR achieves better accuracy while minimizing computational cost relative to cascaded models. Further, we introduce a new metric IoU/GigaFlop to evaluate the balance between cost and performance. On the real-world task of battery material phase segmentation, PaSeR yields a minimum performance improvement of 174% on the IoU/GigaFlop metric with respect to baselines. We also demonstrate PaSeR&#39;s adaptability to complementary models trained on a noisy MNIST dataset, where it achieved a minimum performance improvement on IoU/GigaFlop of 13.4% over SOTA models. Code will be released at github.com/scailab/paser.

AAAI 2024

Reinforcement Learning as a Parsimonious Alternative to Prediction Cascades: A Case Study on Image Segmentation | VIDEO

ml: reinforcement learning

ml: deep learning algorithms

cv: segmentation

Deep learning architectures have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. This may be attributed to the use of over-parameterized, monolithic deep learning architectures executed on large datasets. Although such large architectures lead to increased accuracy, this is usually accompanied by a larger increase in computation and memory requirements during inference. While this is a non-issue in traditional machine learning (ML) pipelines, the recent confluence of machine learning and fields like the Internet of Things (IoT) has rendered such large architectures infeasible for execution in low-resource settings. For some datasets, large monolithic pipelines may be overkill for simpler inputs. To address this problem, previous efforts have proposed decision cascades where inputs are passed through models of increasing complexity until desired performance is achieved. However, we argue that cascaded prediction leads to sub-optimal throughput and increased computational cost due to wasteful intermediate computations. To address this, we propose PaSeR (Parsimonious Segmentation with Reinforcement Learning) a non-cascading, cost-aware learning pipeline as an efficient alternative to cascaded decision architectures. Through experimental evaluation on both real-world and standard datasets, we demonstrate that PaSeR achieves better accuracy while minimizing computational cost relative to cascaded models. Further, we introduce a new metric IoU/GigaFlop to evaluate the balance between cost and performance. On the real-world task of battery material phase segmentation, PaSeR yields a minimum performance improvement of 174% on the IoU/GigaFlop metric with respect to baselines. We also demonstrate PaSeR's adaptability to complementary models trained on a noisy MNIST dataset, where it achieved a minimum performance improvement on IoU/GigaFlop of 13.4% over SOTA models. Code will be released at github.com/scailab/paser.

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. 

Integrating complementary strengths of raw data and logical rules to improve the learning generalization has been recently shown promising and effective, e.g., abductive learning is one generic framework that can learn the perception model from data and reason between rules simultaneously. However, the performance would be seriously decreased when inaccurate logical rules appear, which may be even worse than baselines using only raw data.
Efforts on this issue are highly desired while remain to be limited.  This paper proposes a simple and effective safe abductive learning method to alleviate the harm caused by inaccurate rules. Unlike the existing methods which directly use all rules without correctness checks, it utilizes them selectively by constructing a graphical model with an adaptive reasoning process to prevent performance hazards. Theoretically, we show that induction and abduction are mutually beneficial, and can be rigorously justified from a classical maximum likelihood estimation perspective.  Experiments on diverse tasks show that our method can tolerate at least twice as many inaccurate rules as accurate ones and achieve highly competitive performance while other methods can't.  Moreover, the proposal can refine inaccurate rules and works well in extended weakly supervised scenarios.

Safe Abductive Learning in the Presence of Inaccurate Rules

In this paper, we investigate the optimal online configuration of episodic Markov decision processes when the space of the possible configurations is continuous. Specifically, we study the interaction between a learner (referred to as the configurator) and an agent with a fixed, unknown policy, when the learner aims to minimize her losses by choosing transition functions in online fashion. The losses may be unrelated to the agent's rewards. This problem applies to many real-world scenarios where the learner seeks to manipulate the Markov decision process to her advantage. We study both deterministic and stochastic settings, where the losses are either fixed or sampled from an unknown probability distribution. We design two algorithms whose peculiarity is to rely on occupancy measures to explore with optimism the continuous space of transition functions, achieving constant regret in  deterministic settings and $\Tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret in stochastic settings, respectively. Moreover, we prove that the regret bound is tight with respect to any constant factor in deterministic settings. Finally, we compare the empiric performance of our algorithms with a baseline in synthetic experiments.

Online Markov Decision Processes Configuration with Continuous Decision Space

The identification of sensory cues associated with potential opportunities and dangers is frequently complicated by unrelated events that separate useful cues by long delays. As a result, it remains a challenging task for state-of-the-art spiking neural networks (SNNs) to establish long-term temporal dependency between distant cues. To address this challenge, we propose a novel biologically inspired Two-Compartment Leaky Integrate-and-Fire spiking neuron model, dubbed TC-LIF. The proposed model incorporates carefully designed somatic and dendritic compartments that are tailored to facilitate learning long-term temporal dependencies. Furthermore, the theoretical analysis is provided to validate the effectiveness of TC-LIF in propagating error gradients over an extended temporal duration. Our experimental results, on a diverse range of temporal classification tasks, demonstrate superior temporal classification capability, rapid training convergence, and high energy efficiency of the proposed TC-LIF model. Therefore, this work opens up a myriad of opportunities for solving challenging temporal processing tasks on emerging neuromorphic computing systems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhangShimin1/TC-LIF.

TC-LIF: A Two-Compartment Spiking Neuron Model for Long-Term Sequential Modelling

Video grounding aims to locate a moment of interest matching the given query sentence from an untrimmed video. Previous works ignore the \emph{sparsity dilemma} in video annotations, which fails to provide the context information between potential events and query sentences in the dataset. In this paper, we contend that exploiting easily available captions which describe general actions \ie, auxiliary captions defined in our paper, will significantly boost the performance. To this end, we propose an Auxiliary Caption Network (ACNet) for video grounding. Specifically, we first introduce dense video captioning to generate dense captions and then obtain auxiliary captions by Non-Auxiliary Caption Suppression (NACS). To capture the potential information in auxiliary captions, we propose Caption Guided Attention (CGA) project the semantic relations between auxiliary captions and query sentences into temporal space and fuse them into visual representations. Considering the gap between auxiliary captions and ground truth, we propose Asymmetric Cross-modal Contrastive Learning  (ACCL) for constructing more negative pairs to maximize cross-modal mutual information. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (\ie, ActivityNet Captions, TACoS and ActivityNet-CG) demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Exploiting Auxiliary Caption for Video Grounding

Real-world graphs are dynamic, constantly evolving with new interactions, such as financial transactions in financial networks. 
Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have been developed to effectively capture the evolving patterns in dynamic graphs.
While these models have demonstrated their superiority, being widely adopted in various important fields, their vulnerabilities against adversarial attacks remain largely unexplored.
In this paper, we propose T-SPEAR, a simple and effective adversarial attack method for link prediction on continuous-time dynamic graphs, focusing on investigating the vulnerabilities of TGNNs.
Specifically, before the training procedure of a victim model, which is a TGNN for link prediction, we inject edge perturbations to the data that are unnoticeable in terms of the four constraints we propose, and yet effective enough to cause malfunction of the victim model. 
Moreover, we propose a robust training approach T-SHIELD to mitigate the impact of adversarial attacks.
By using edge filtering and enforcing temporal smoothness to node embeddings, we enhance the robustness of the victim model.
Our experimental study shows that T-SPEAR significantly degrades the victim model's performance on link prediction tasks, and even more, our attacks are transferable to other TGNNs, which differ from the victim model assumed by the attacker.
Moreover, we demonstrate that T-SHIELD effectively filters out adversarial edges and exhibits robustness against adversarial attacks, surpassing the link prediction performance of the naive TGNN by up to 11.2% under T-SPEAR.
The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/wooner49/T-spear-shield

Spear and Shield: Adversarial Attacks and Defense Methods for Model-Based Link Prediction on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs

Graph Comparative Learning (GCL) is a self-supervised method that combines the advantages of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and comparative learning, making it promising for learning node representations. However, the GCN encoders used in these methods rely on the Fourier transform to learn fixed graph representations, which is inherently limited by the uncertainty principle involving spatial and spectral localization trade-offs. To overcome the inflexibility of existing methods and the computationally expensive eigen-decomposition and dense matrix multiplication, this paper proposes an Adaptive Spectral Wavelet Transform-based Self-Supervised Graph Neural Network (ASWT-SGNN). The proposed method employs spectral adaptive polynomials to approximate the filter function and optimize the wavelet using contrast loss. This design enables the creation of local filters in both spectral and spatial domains, allowing flexible aggregation of neighborhood information at various scales and facilitating controlled transformation between local and global information. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approach reduces computational complexity and addresses the limitation of graph convolutional neural networks, which are constrained by graph size and lack flexible control over the neighborhood aspect. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that ASWT-SGNN accurately approximates the filter function in high-density spectral regions, avoiding costly eigen-decomposition. Furthermore, ASWT-SGNN achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models in node classification tasks.

ASWT-SGNN: Adaptive Spectral Wavelet Transform-Based Self-Supervised Graph Neural Network

Graph clustering is a fundamental and challenging task in the field of graph mining where the objective is to group the nodes into clusters taking into consideration the topology of the graph. It has several applications in diverse domains spanning social network analysis, recommender systems, computer vision, and bioinformatics.  In this work, we propose a novel method, DGCluster, which primarily optimizes the modularity objective using graph neural networks and scales linearly with the graph size. Our method does not require the number of clusters to be specified as a part of the input and can also leverage the availability of auxiliary node level information. We extensively test DGCluster on several real-world datasets of varying sizes, across multiple popular cluster quality metrics. Our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant performance gains in almost all settings.

DGCLUSTER: A Neural Framework for Attributed Graph Clustering via Modularity Maximization

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) aims to reveal shared characteristics in dynamics and reward functions across diverse training tasks. This objective is achieved by meta-learning a policy that is conditioned on task representations with encoded trajectory data or context, thus allowing rapid adaptation to new tasks from a known task distribution. However, since the trajectory data generated by the policy may be biased, the task inference module tends to form spurious correlations between trajectory data and specific tasks, thereby leading to poor adaptation to new tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Meta-RL with task unCertAinty feedback through decoupled context-aware Reward and Dynamics components (MetaCARD). MetaCARD distinctly decouples the dynamics and rewards when inferring tasks and integrates task uncertainty feedback from policy evaluation into the task inference module. This design effectively reduces uncertainty in tasks with changes in dynamics or/and reward functions, thereby enabling accurate task identification and adaptation. The experiment results on both Meta-World and classical MuJoCo benchmarks show that MetaCARD significantly outperforms prevailing Meta-RL baselines, demonstrating its remarkable adaptation ability in sophisticated environments that involve changes in both reward functions and dynamics.

MetaCARD: Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Task Uncertainty Feedback via Decoupled Context-Aware Reward and Dynamics Components

Remote sensing imagery, despite its broad applications in helping achieve Sustainable Development Goals and tackle climate change, has not yet benefited from the recent advancements of versatile, task-agnostic vision language models (VLMs). A key reason is that the large-scale, semantically diverse image-text dataset required for developing VLMs is still absent for remote sensing images. Unlike natural images, remote sensing images and their associated text descriptions cannot be efficiently collected from the public Internet at scale. In this work, we bridge this gap by using geo-coordinates to automatically connect open, unlabeled remote sensing images with rich semantics covered in OpenStreetMap, and thus construct SkyScript, a comprehensive vision-language dataset for remote sensing images, comprising 2.6 million image-text pairs covering 29K distinct semantic tags. 
With continual pre-training on this dataset, we obtain a VLM that surpasses baseline models with a 6.2% average accuracy gain in zero-shot scene classification across seven benchmark datasets. It also demonstrates the ability of zero-shot transfer for fine-grained object attribute classification and cross-modal retrieval. We hope this dataset can support the advancement of VLMs for various multi-modal tasks in remote sensing, such as open-vocabulary classification, retrieval, captioning, and text-to-image synthesis.

SkyScript: A Large and Semantically Diverse Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing

Decision Transformer (DT), which employs expressive sequence modeling techniques to perform action generation, has emerged as a promising approach to offline policy optimization. However, DT generates actions conditioned on a desired future return, which is known to bear some weaknesses such as the susceptibility to environmental stochasticity. To overcome DT's weaknesses, we propose to empower DT with dynamic programming. Our method comprises three steps. First, we employ in-sample value iteration to obtain approximated value functions, which involves dynamic programming over the MDP structure. Second, we evaluate action quality in context with estimated advantages. We introduce two types of advantage estimators, IAE and GAE, which are suitable for different tasks. Third, we train an Advantage-Conditioned Transformer (ACT) to generate actions conditioned on the estimated advantages. Finally, during testing, ACT generates actions conditioned on a desired advantage. Our evaluation results validate that, by leveraging the power of dynamic programming, ACT demonstrates effective trajectory stitching and robust action generation in spite of the environmental stochasticity, outperforming baseline methods across various benchmarks. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of ACT's various design choices through ablation studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/ACT.

Reinforcement Learning as a Parsimonious Alternative to Prediction Cascades: A Case Study on Image Segmentation | VIDEO

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Safe Abductive Learning in the Presence of Inaccurate Rules

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Reinforcement Learning as a Parsimonious Alternative to Prediction Cascades: A Case Study on Image Segmentation | VIDEO

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Safe Abductive Learning in the Presence of Inaccurate Rules

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