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Offline meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods, which adapt to unseen target tasks with prior experience, are essential in robot control tasks. Current methods typically utilize task contexts and skills as prior experience, where task contexts are related to the information within each task and skills represent a set of temporally extended actions for solving subtasks. However, these methods still suffer from limited performance when adapting to unseen target tasks, mainly because the learned prior experience lacks generalization, i.e., they are unable to extract effective prior experience from meta-training tasks by exploration and learning of continuous latent spaces. We propose a framework called decoupled meta-reinforcement learning (DCMRL), which (1) contrastively restricts the learning of task contexts through pulling in similar task contexts within the same task and pushing away different task contexts of different tasks, and (2) utilizes a Gaussian quantization variational autoencoder (GQ-VAE) for clustering the Gaussian distributions of the task contexts and skills respectively, and decoupling the exploration and learning processes of their spaces. These cluster centers which serve as representative and discrete distributions of task context and skill are stored in task context codebook and skill codebook, respectively. DCMRL can acquire generalizable prior experience and achieve effective adaptation to unseen target tasks during the meta-testing phase. Experiments in the navigation and robot manipulation continuous control tasks show that DCMRL is more effective than previous meta-RL methods with more generalizable prior experience.

AAAI 2024

Decoupling Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Task Contexts and Skills | VIDEO

skill-based.

context-based

offline reinforcement learning

meta-reinforcement learning

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. 

Lightweight creation of 3D digital avatars is a highly desirable but challenging task. With only sparse videos of a person under unknown illumination, we propose a method to create relightable and animatable neural avatars, which can be used to synthesize photorealistic images of humans under novel viewpoints, body poses, and lighting. The key challenge here is to disentangle the geometry, material of the clothed body, and lighting, which becomes more difficult due to the complex geometry and shadow changes caused by body motions.  To solve this ill-posed problem, we propose novel techniques to better model the geometry and shadow changes.  For geometry change modeling, we propose an invertible deformation field, which helps to solve the inverse skinning problem and leads to better geometry quality. To model the spatial and temporal varying shading cues, we propose a pose-aware part-wise light visibility network to estimate light occlusion. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our approach reconstructs high-quality geometry and generates realistic shadows under different body poses. Code and data are available at https://wenbin-lin.github.io/RelightableAvatar-page.

Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatars from Videos

Image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing onto a specific person. A significant challenge is arbitrarily matched clothing and person lack corresponding ground truth to supervised learning. A recent pioneering work leveraged an improved cycleGAN to enable one network to generate the desired image for another network during training. However, there is no difference in the result distribution before and after the clothing changes. Therefore, using two different networks is unnecessary and may even increase the difficulty of convergence. Furthermore, the introduced human parsing used to provide body structure information in the input will also have a negative impact on the try-on result. How to employ a single network for supervised learning while eliminating human parsing? To tackle these issues, we present a Cycle mapping Virtual Try-On Network (CycleVTON), which can produce photo-realistic try-on results by using a cycle mapping framework without the parser. In particular, we introduce a flow constraint loss to achieve supervised learning of arbitrarily matched clothing and person as inputs to the deformer, thus naturally mimicking the interaction between clothing and the human body. Additionally, we design a skin generation strategy that can adapt to the shape of the target clothing by dynamically adjusting the skin region, i.e., by first removing and then filling skin areas. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

CycleVTON: A Cycle Mapping Framework for Parser-Free Virtual Try-On

Recently, the cross-modal pretraining model has been employed to produce meaningful pseudo-labels to supervise the training of an image clustering model. However, numerous erroneous alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model could produce poor-quality pseudo labels and degrade clustering performance. To solve the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel Multi-level Cross-modal Alignment method to improve the alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model for downstream tasks, by building a smaller but better semantic space and aligning the images and texts in three levels, i.e., instance-level, prototype-level, and semantic-level. Theoretical results show that our proposed method converges, and suggests effective means to reduce the expected clustering risk of our method. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets clearly show the superiority of our new method.

Multi-Level Cross-Modal Alignment for Image Clustering

Many real-world scenarios including fleet management and Ad auctions can be modeled as Stackelberg mean-field games (SMFGs) where a leader aims to incentivize a large number of homogeneous self-interested followers to maximize her utility. Existing works focus on cases with a small number of heterogeneous followers, e.g., 5-10, and suffer from scalability issue when the number of followers increases. There are three major challenges in solving large-scale SMFGs: i) classical methods based on solving differential equations fail as they require exact dynamics parameters, ii) learning by interacting with environment is data-inefficient, and iii) complex interaction between the leader and followers makes the learning performance unstable. We address these challenges through transition-informed reinforcement learning. Our main contributions are threefold: i) we first propose an RL framework, the Stackelberg mean-field update, to learn the leader's policy without priors of the environment, ii) to improve the data efficiency and accelerate the learning process, we then propose the Transition-Informed Reinforcement Learning (TIRL) by leveraging the instantiated empirical Fokker-Planck equation, and iii) we develop a regularized TIRL by employing various regularizers to alleviate the sensitivity of the learning performance to the initialization of the leader's policy. Extensive experiments on fleet management and food gathering demonstrate that our approach can scale up to 100,000 followers and significantly outperform existing baselines.

Transition-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Stackelberg Mean-Field Games | VIDEO

Transformer's recent integration into style transfer leverages its proficiency in establishing long-range dependencies, albeit at the expense of attenuated local modeling. This paper introduces Strips Window Attention Transformer (S2WAT), a novel hierarchical vision transformer designed for style transfer. S2WAT employs attention computation in diverse window shapes to capture both short- and long-range dependencies. The merged dependencies utilize the "Attn Merge" strategy, which adaptively determines spatial weights based on their relevance to the target. Extensive experiments on representative datasets show the proposed method's effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) transformer-based and other approaches. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlienZhang1996/S2WAT.

S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer Using Strips Window Attention

Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first E-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.

EcomGPT: Instruction-Tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerce

Existing out-of-distribution (OOD) methods have shown great success on balanced datasets but become ineffective in long-tailed recognition (LTR) scenarios where 1) OOD samples are often wrongly classified into head classes and/or 2) tail-class samples are treated as OOD samples. To address these issues, current studies fit a prior distribution of auxiliary/pseudo OOD data to the long-tailed in-distribution (ID) data. However, it is difficult to obtain such an accurate prior distribution given the unknowingness of real OOD samples and heavy class imbalance in LTR. A straightforward solution to avoid the requirement of this prior is to learn an outlier class to encapsulate the OOD samples. The main challenge is then to tackle the aforementioned confusion between OOD samples and head/tail-class samples when learning the outlier class. To this end, we introduce a novel calibrated outlier class learning (COCL) approach, in which 1) a debiased large margin learning method is introduced in the outlier class learning to distinguish OOD samples from both head and tail classes in the representation space and 2) an outlier-class-aware logit calibration method is defined to enhance the long-tailed classification confidence. Extensive empirical results on three popular benchmarks CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT demonstrate that COCL substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in LTR while being able to improve the classification accuracy on ID data.  Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/COCL.

Out-of-Distribution Detection in Long-Tailed Recognition with Calibrated Outlier Class Learning

While deep learning models have shown significant performance across various domains, their deployment needs extensive resources and advanced computing infrastructure. As a solution, Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has emerged, lowering the barriers for users to release or productize their deep learning models. However, previous studies have highlighted potential privacy and security concerns associated with MLaaS, and one primary threat is model extraction attacks. To address this, there are many defense solutions but they suffer from unrealistic assumptions and generalization issues, making them less practical for reliable protection. Driven by these limitations, we introduce a novel defense mechanism, SAME, based on the concept of sample reconstruction. This strategy imposes minimal prerequisites on the defender's capabilities, eliminating the need for auxiliary Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets, user query history, white-box model access, and additional intervention during model training. It is compatible with existing active defense methods. Our extensive experiments corroborate the superior efficacy of SAME over state-of-the-art solutions.

SAME: Sample Reconstruction against Model Extraction Attacks

Style transfer for out-of-domain (OOD) singing voice synthesis (SVS) focuses on generating high-quality singing voices with unseen styles (such as timbre, emotion, pronunciation, and articulation skills) derived from reference singing voice samples. However, the endeavor to model the intricate nuances of singing voice styles is an arduous task, as singing voices possess a remarkable degree of expressiveness. Moreover, existing SVS methods encounter a decline in the quality of synthesized singing voices in OOD scenarios, as they rest upon the assumption that the target vocal attributes are discernible during the training phase. To overcome these challenges, we propose StyleSinger, the first singing voice synthesis model for zero-shot style transfer of out-of-domain reference singing voice samples. StyleSinger incorporates two critical approaches for enhanced effectiveness: 1) the Residual Style Adaptor (RSA) which employs a residual quantization module to capture diverse style characteristics in singing voices, and 2) the Uncertainty Modeling Layer Normalization (UMLN) to perturb the style attributes within the content representation during the training phase and thus improve the model generalization. Our extensive evaluations in zero-shot style transfer undeniably establish that StyleSinger outperforms baseline models in both audio quality and similarity to the reference singing voice samples. Access to singing voice samples can be found at https://stylesinger.github.io/.

StyleSinger: Style Transfer for Out-of-Domain Singing Voice Synthesis | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) can understand human instructions, showing their potential for pragmatic applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. However, they still struggle with complex instructions, which can be either complex task descriptions that require multiple tasks and constraints, or complex input that contains long context, noise, heterogeneous information and multi-turn format. Due to these features, LLMs often ignore semantic constraints from task descriptions, generate incorrect formats, violate length or sample count constraints, and be unfaithful to the input text. Existing benchmarks are insufficient to assess LLMs’ ability to understand complex instructions, as they are close-ended and simple. To bridge this gap, we propose CELLO, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions systematically. We design eight features for complex instructions and construct a comprehensive evaluation dataset from real-world scenarios. We also establish four criteria and develop corresponding metrics, as current ones are inadequate, biased or too strict and coarse-grained. We compare the performance of representative Chinese-oriented and English-oriented models in following complex instructions through extensive experiments. We will publish all the data and code.

Decoupling Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Task Contexts and Skills | VIDEO

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Decoupling Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Task Contexts and Skills | VIDEO

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Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatars from Videos

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