Canada

Unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS) aims to discover and recognize meaningful categories without any labels. 
For a successful USS, two key abilities are required: 1) information compression and 2) clustering capability.
Previous methods have relied on feature dimension reduction for information compression, however, this approach may hinder the process of clustering.
In this paper, we propose a novel USS framework called Expand-and-Quantize Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation (EQUSS), which combines the benefits of high-dimensional spaces for better clustering and product quantization for effective information compression.
Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EQUSS achieves state-of-the-art results on three standard benchmarks.
In addition, we analyze the entropy of USS features, which is the first step towards understanding USS from the perspective of information theory.

AAAI 2024

Expand-and-Quantize: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Using High-Dimensional Space and Product Quantization

scene analysis & understanding

unsupervised & self-supervised learning

segmentation

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* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements

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NAML 2021

The annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. The goals of NAML are to spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications, to connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements and to build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community.


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. 

The partially observable constrained optimization problems (POCOPs) impede data-driven optimization techniques since an infeasible solution of POCOPs can provide little information about the objective as well as the constraints. We endeavor to design an efficient and provable method for expensive POCOPs under the framework of constrained Bayesian optimization. Our method consists of two key components. Firstly, we present an improved design of the acquisition functions that introduce balanced exploration during optimization. We rigorously study the convergence properties of this design to demonstrate its effectiveness. Secondly, we propose Gaussian processes embedding different likelihoods as the surrogate model for partially observable constraints. This model leads to a more accurate representation of the feasible regions compared to traditional classification-based models. Our proposed method is empirically studied on both synthetic and real-world problems. The results demonstrate the competitiveness of our method for solving POCOPs.

Constrained Bayesian Optimization under Partial Observations: Balanced Improvements and Provable Convergence

The vision-and-language navigation (VLN) task necessitates an agent to perceive the surroundings, follow natural language instructions, and act in photo-realistic unseen environments. Most of the existing methods employ the entire image or object features to represent navigable viewpoints. However, these representations are insufficient for proper action prediction, especially for the REVERIE task, which uses concise high-level instructions, such as “Bring me the blue cushion in the master bedroom”. To address enhancing representation, we propose an augmented commonsense knowledge model (ACK) to leverage commonsense information as a spatio-temporal knowledge graph for improving agent navigation. Specifically, the proposed approach involves constructing a knowledge base by retrieving commonsense information from ConceptNet, followed by a refinement module to remove noisy and irrelevant knowledge. We further present ACK which consists of knowledge graph-aware cross-modal and concept aggregation modules to enhance visual representation and visual-textual data alignment by integrating visible objects, commonsense knowledge, and concept history, which includes object and knowledge temporal information. Moreover, we add a new pipeline for the commonsense-based decision-making process which leads to more accurate local action prediction. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed model noticeably outperforms the baseline and archives the state-of-the-art on the REVERIE benchmark.

Augmented Commonsense Knowledge for Remote Object Grounding

Standard approaches for global optimization of non-convex functions, such as branch-and-bound, maintain partition trees to systematically prune the domain. The tree size grows exponentially in the number of dimensions. We propose new sampling-based methods for non-convex optimization that adapts Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to improve efficiency. Instead of the standard use of visitation count in Upper Confidence Bounds, we utilize numerical overapproximations of the objective as an uncertainty metric, and also take into account of sampled estimates of first-order and second-order information. The Monte Carlo tree in our approach avoids the usual fixed combinatorial patterns in growing the tree, and aggressively zooms into the promising regions, while still balancing exploration and exploitation. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on high-dimensional non-convex optimization benchmarks against competitive baselines and analyze the effects of the hyper parameters.

Sample-and-Bound for Non-convex Optimization

Deep learning-based video super-resolution (VSR) networks have gained significant performance improvements in recent years. However, existing VSR networks can only support a fixed integer scale super-resolution task, and when we want to perform VSR at multiple scales, we need to train several models. This implementation certainly increases the consumption of computational and storage resources, which limits the application scenarios of VSR techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{Scale-adaptive Arbitrary-scale Video Super-Resolution network (SAVSR)}, which is the first work focusing on spatial VSR at arbitrary scales including both non-integer and asymmetric scales. We also present an omni-dimensional scale-attention convolution, which dynamically adapts according to the scale of the input to extract inter-frame features with stronger representational power. Moreover, the proposed spatio-temporal adaptive arbitrary-scale upsampling performs VSR tasks using both temporal features and scale information. And we design an iterative bi-directional architecture for implicit feature alignment. Experiments at various scales on the benchmark datasets show that the proposed SAVSR outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods at non-integer and asymmetric scales. The source code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/Weepingchestnut/SAVSR}.

SAVSR: Arbitrary-Scale Video Super-resolution via a Learned Scale-Adaptive Network

Current methods for solving Stochastic Shortest Path Problems (SSPs) find states’ costs-to-go by applying Bellman backups, where state-of-the-art methods employ heuristics to select states to back up and prune. A fundamental limitation of these algorithms is their need to compute the cost-to-go for every applicable action during each state backup, leading to unnecessary computation for actions identified as sub-optimal. We present new connections between planning and operations research and, using this framework, we address this issue of unnecessary computation by introducing an efficient version of constraint generation for SSPs. This technique allows algorithms to ignore sub-optimal actions and avoid computing their costs-to-go. We also apply our novel technique to iLAO* resulting in a new algorithm, CG-iLAO*. Our experiments show that CG-iLAO* ignores up to 57% of iLAO*’s actions and it solves problems up to 8x and 3x faster than LRTDP and iLAO*.

Efficient Constraint Generation for Stochastic Shortest Path Problems

Earth vision research typically focuses on extracting geospatial object locations and categories but neglects the exploration of relations between objects and comprehensive reasoning. Based on city planning needs, we develop a multi-modal multi-task VQA dataset (EarthVQA) to advance relational reasoning-based judging, counting, and comprehensive analysis. The EarthVQA dataset contains 6000 images, corresponding semantic masks, and 208,593 QA pairs with urban and rural governance requirements embedded. As objects are the basis for complex relational reasoning, we propose a Semantic OBject Awareness framework (SOBA) to advance VQA in an object-centric way. To preserve refined spatial locations and semantics, SOBA leverages a segmentation network for object semantics generation. The object-guided attention aggregates object interior features via pseudo masks, and bidirectional cross-attention further models object external relations hierarchically. To optimize object counting, we propose a numerical difference loss that dynamically adds difference penalties, unifying the classification and regression tasks. Experimental results show that SOBA outperforms both advanced general and remote sensing methods. We believe this dataset and framework provide a strong benchmark for Earth vision's complex analysis. The project page is at https://Junjue-Wang.github.io/homepage/EarthVQA.

EarthVQA: Towards Queryable Earth via Relational Reasoning-Based Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

Machine learning techniques, such as deep learning and ensemble methods, are widely used in various domains due to their ability to handle complex real-world tasks. However, their black-box nature has raised multiple concerns about the fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency of computer-assisted decision-making. This has led to the emergence of local post-hoc explainability methods, which offer explanations for individual decisions made by black-box algorithms. Among these methods, Kernel SHAP is widely used due to its model-agnostic nature and its well-founded theoretical framework. Despite these strengths, Kernel SHAP suffers from high instability: different executions of the method with the same inputs can lead to significantly different explanations, which diminishes the relevance of the explanations. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, we show that Kernel SHAP's instability is caused by its stochastic neighbor selection procedure, which we adapt to achieve full stability without compromising explanation fidelity. On the other hand, we show that by restricting the neighbors generation to perturbations of size 1 -- which we call the coalitions of Layer 1 -- we obtain a novel feature-attribution method that is fully stable, computationally efficient, and still meaningful.

Shaping Up SHAP: Enhancing Stability through Layer-Wise Neighbor Selection

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, whist they still need updates after deployment to fix errors or keep pace with the changing knowledge in the world. Researchers formulate such problem as Model Editing and have developed various editors focusing on different axes of editing properties. However, current editors can hardly support all properties and rely on heavy computational resources. In this paper, we propose a plug-in Model Editing method based on neuron-indexed dynamic LoRA (MELO), which alters the behavior of language models by dynamically activating certain LoRA blocks according to the index built in an inner vector database. Our method satisfies various editing properties with high efficiency and can be easily integrated into multiple LLM backbones. Experimental results show that our proposed MELO achieves state-of-the-art editing performance on three sequential editing tasks (document classification, question answering and hallucination correction), while requires the least trainable parameters and computational cost.

MELO: Enhancing Model Editing with Neuron-Indexed Dynamic LoRA

The learnware paradigm aims to establish a market of numerous well-performed machine learning models, enabling users to leverage existing helpful models for their tasks instead of starting from scratch. Each learnware in the market is a model submitted by its developer, associated with a specification generated with the help of learnware market, representing the model's specialty and utility and enabling it to be identified for new user tasks. As the market continuously scales up, accommodating an ever-increasing number of learnwares, the critical challenge of the learnware paradigm is to effectively and efficiently identify the most helpful learnware(s) for a new user task without accessing the user's raw data. In this paper, to achieve increasingly accurate learnware characterization and identification along with a growing number of learnwares in the market, we propose an approach called Evolvable Learnware Specification with Index (ELSI). Specifically, based on the key idea of leveraging the task information within learnware specifications, we tackle the challenge of ascertaining the capabilities of models beyond their original training tasks, thereby enabling learnware specifications and the entire market to evolve continuously. Furthermore, through organizing learnwares and constructing specification indexes, we design a practical procedure to accurately and efficiently identify helpful learnwares without examining the entire market. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on a learnware market prototype encompassing thousands of models and covering six real-world scenarios validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Towards Making Learnware Specification and Market Evolvable

Due to the recent success of diffusion models, text-to-image generation is becoming increasingly popular and achieves a wide range of applications. Among them, text-to-image editing, or continuous text-to-image generation, attracts lots of attention and can potentially improve the quality of generated images. It's common to see that users may want to slightly edit the generated image by making minor modifications to their input textual descriptions for several rounds of diffusion inference. However, such an image editing process suffers from the low inference efficiency of many existing diffusion models even using GPU accelerators.

To solve this problem, we introduce Fast Image Semantically Edit (FISEdit), a cached-enabled sparse diffusion model inference engine for efficient text-to-image editing. The key intuition behind our approach is to utilize the semantic mapping between the minor modifications on the input text and the affected regions on the output image. For each text editing step, FISEdit can 1) automatically identify the affected image regions and 2) utilize the cached unchanged regions' feature map to accelerate the inference process. For the former, we measure the differences between cached and ad hoc feature maps given the modified textual description, extract the region with significant differences, and capture the affected region by masks. For the latter, we develop an efficient sparse diffusion inference engine that only computes the feature maps for the affected region while reusing the cached statistics for the rest of the image. Finally, extensive empirical results show that FISEdit can be 3.4 times and 4.4 times faster than existing methods on NVIDIA TITAN RTX and A100 GPUs respectively, and even generates more satisfactory images.

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Constrained Bayesian Optimization under Partial Observations: Balanced Improvements and Provable Convergence

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