Canada

Invariant representation learning (IRL) encourages the prediction from invariant causal features to labels deconfounded from the environments, advancing the technical roadmap of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite spotlights around, recent theoretical results verified that some causal features recovered by IRLs merely pretend domain-invariantly in the training environments but fail in unseen domains. The fake invariance severely endangers OOD generalization since the trustful objective can not be diagnosed and existing causal surgeries are invalid to rectify. In this paper, we review a IRL family (InvRat) under the Partially and Fully Informative Invariant Feature Structural Causal Models (PIIF SCM /FIIF SCM) respectively, to certify their weaknesses in representing fake invariant features, then, unify their causal diagrams to propose ReStructured SCM (RS-SCM). RS-SCM can ideally rebuild the spurious and the fake invariant features simultaneously. Given this, we further develop an approach based on conditional mutual information with respect to RS-SCM, then rigorously rectify the spurious and fake invariant effects. It can be easily implemented by a small feature selection subnet introduced in the IRL family, which is alternatively optimized to achieve our goal. Experiments verified the superiority of our approach to fight against the fake invariant issue across a variety of OOD generalization benchmarks.

AAAI 2024

Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

out-of-distribution generalizataion

invariant learning

causal inference

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. 

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract the cause-effect event pairs with their structured event information from plain texts. As far as we know, the existing ECE methods mainly focus on the correlation between arguments, without explicitly modeling the causal relationship between events, and usually design two independent frameworks to extract cause events and effect events, respectively, which cannot effectively capture the dependency between the subtasks. Therefore, we propose a joint multi-label extraction framework for ECE to alleviate the above limitations. In particular, 1) we design a heterogeneous-relation-aware graph module to learn the potential relationships between events and arguments, in which we construct the heterogeneous graph by taking the predefined event types and all the words in the sentence as nodes, and modeling three relationships of "event-event", "event-argument" and "argument-argument" as edges. 2) We also design a multi-channel label enhancing module to better learn the distributed representation of each label in the multi-label extraction framework, and further enhance the interaction between the subtasks by considering the preliminary results of cause-effect type identification and event argument extraction. The experimental results on the benchmark dataset ECE-CCKS show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, and that our model also performs well on the complex samples with multiple cause-effect event pairs.

A Joint Framework with Heterogeneous-Relation-Aware Graph and Multi-Channel Label Enhancing Strategy for Event Causality Extraction

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is a challenging task in computer vision due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Existing COD methods struggle with nuanced object boundaries and overconfident incorrect predictions. In response, we propose a new paradigm that treats COD as a conditional mask-generation task leveraging diffusion models. Our method, dubbed CamoDiffusion, employs the denoising process to progressively refine predictions while incorporating image conditions. Due to the stochastic sampling process of diffusion, our model is capable of sampling multiple possible predictions, avoiding the problem of overconfident point estimation. Moreover, we develop specialized network architecture, training, and sampling strategies, to enhance the model’s expressive power, refinement capabilities and suppress overconfident mis-segmentations, thus aptly tailoring the diffusion model to the demands of COD. Extensive experiments on three COD datasets attest to the superior performance of our model compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on the most challenging COD10K dataset, where our approach achieves 0.019 in terms of MAE. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Rapisurazurite/CamoDiffusion.

CamoDiffusion: Camouflaged Object Detection via Conditional Diffusion Models

One of the key factors in language productivity and human cognition is the ability of Systematic Compositionality, which refers to understanding composed, unseen examples of seen primitives. However, recent evidence reveals that the Transformers have difficulty in generalizing the composed context based on the seen primitives. To this end, we take the first step to propose a compositionality-aware Transformer called CAT and two novel pre-training tasks to facilitate the systematic compositionality. We tentatively provide a successful implementation of a multi-layer CAT on the basis of the especially popular BERT. The experimental results demonstrate that CAT outperforms baselines on compositionality-aware tasks with minimal impact on effectiveness on standardized language understanding tasks.

Towards Equipping Transformer with the Ability of Systematic Compositionality

As a fundamental and challenging task in the vision and language domain, Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) has shown impressive improvements recently. However, for a complex task that couples the comprehension of abstract concepts and the localization of concrete instances, one-stage approaches are bottlenecked by computing and data resources. To obtain a low-cost solution, the prevailing two-stage approaches decouple REC into localization (region proposal) and comprehension (region-expression matching) at region-level, but the solution based on isolated regions cannot sufficiently utilize the context and is usually limited by the quality of proposals. Therefore, it is necessary to rebuild an efficient two-stage solution system. In this paper, we propose a point-based two-stage framework for REC, in which the two stages are redefined as point-based cross-modal comprehension and point-based instance localization. Specifically, we reconstruct the raw bounding box and segmentation mask into center and mass scores as soft ground-truth for measuring point-level cross-modal correlations. With the soft ground-truth, REC can be approximated as a binary classification problem, which fundamentally avoids the impact of isolated regions on the optimization process. Remarkably, the consistent metrics between center and mass scores allow our system to directly optimize grounding and segmentation by utilizing the same architecture. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show the feasibility and potential of our point-based paradigm. Our code will be available soon.

Rethinking Two-Stage Referring Expression Comprehension: A Novel Grounding and Segmentation Method Modulated by Point

Cross-modal retrieval relies on well-matched large-scale datasets that are laborious in practice. Recently, to alleviate expensive data collection, co-occurring pairs from the Internet are automatically harvested for training. However, it inevitably includes mismatched pairs, \ie, noisy correspondences, undermining supervision reliability and degrading performance. Current methods leverage deep neural networks' memorization effect to address noisy correspondences, which overconfidently focus on \emph{similarity-guided training with hard negatives} and suffer from self-reinforcing errors. In light of above, we introduce a novel noisy correspondence learning framework, namely \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{R}einforcing \textbf{E}rrors \textbf{M}itigation (SREM). Specifically, by viewing sample matching as classification tasks within the batch, we generate classification logits for the given sample. Instead of a single similarity score, we refine sample filtration through energy uncertainty and estimate model's sensitivity of selected clean samples using swapped classification entropy, in view of the overall prediction distribution. Additionally, we propose cross-modal biased complementary learning to leverage negative matches overlooked in hard-negative training, further improving model optimization stability and curbing self-reinforcing errors.
Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks affirm the efficacy and efficiency of SREM.

Noisy Correspondence Learning with Self-Reinforcing Errors Mitigation

In this paper, we delve into the problem of using monetary incentives to encourage players to shift from an initial Nash equilibrium to a more favorable one within a game. Our main focus revolves around computing the minimum reward required to facilitate this equilibrium transition. The game involves a single row player who possesses m strategies and k column players, each endowed with n strategies. Our findings reveal that determining whether the minimum reward is zero is NP-complete, and computing the minimum reward becomes APX-hard. Nonetheless, we bring some positive news, as this problem can be efficiently handled if either k or n is a fixed constant. Furthermore, we have devised an approximation algorithm with an additive error that runs in polynomial time. Lastly, we explore a specific case wherein the utility functions exhibit single-peaked characteristics, and we successfully demonstrate that the optimal reward can be computed in polynomial time.

Cost Minimization for Equilibrium Transition

Monocular 3D lane detection is essential for a reliable autonomous driving system and has recently been rapidly developing. Existing popular methods mainly employ a predefined 3D anchor for lane detection based on front-viewed (FV) space, aiming to mitigate the effects of view transformations. However, the perspective geometric distortion between FV and 3D space in this FV-based approach introduces extremely dense anchor designs, which ultimately leads to confusing lane representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel prior-guided perspective on lane detection and propose an end-to-end framework named PVALane, which utilizes 2D prior knowledge to achieve precise and efficient 3D lane detection. Since 2D lane predictions can provide strong priors for lane existence, PVALane exploits FV features to generate sparse prior anchors with potential lanes in 2D space. These dynamic prior anchors help PVALane to achieve distinct lane representations and effectively improve the precision of PVALane due to the reduced lane search space. Additionally, by leveraging these prior anchors and representing lanes in both FV and bird-eye-viewed (BEV) spaces, we effectively align and merge semantic and geometric information from FV and BEV features. Extensive experiments conducted on the OpenLane and ONCE-3DLanes datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches and exhibit excellent robustness.

PVALane: Prior-Guided 3D Lane Detection with View-Agnostic Feature Alignment

How our brain encodes complex concepts has been a longstanding mystery in neuroscience. The answer to this problem can lead to new understandings about how the brain retrieves information in large-scale data with high efficiency and robustness. Neuroscience studies suggest the brain represents concepts in a locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) strategy, i.e., similar concepts will be represented by similar responses. This finding has inspired the design of similarity-based algorithms, especially in contrastive learning. Here, we hypothesize that the brain and large neural network models, both using similarity-based learning rules, could contain a similar semantic embedding space. To verify that, this paper proposes a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) semantic learning network named BrainSem, aimed at seeking a joint semantic latent space that bridges the brain and a Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Given that our perception is inherently cross-modal, we introduce a fuzzy (one-to-many) matching loss function to encourage the models to extract high-level semantic components from neural signals. Our results claimed that using only a small set of fMRI recordings for semantic space alignment, we could obtain shared embedding valid for unseen categories out of the training set, which provided potential evidence for the semantic representation similarity between the brain and large neural networks. In a zero-shot classification task, our BrainSem achieves an 11.6% improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Bridging the Semantic Latent Space between Brain and Machine: Similarity Is All You Need

Pre-trained vision-language(V-L) models such as CLIP have demonstrated impressive Zero-Shot performance in many downstream tasks. Since adopting contrastive video-text pairs methods like CLIP to video tasks is limited by its high cost and scale, recent approaches focus on efficiently transferring the image-based CLIP to the video domain. A major finding is that fine-tuning the pre-trained model to achieve strong fully supervised performance leads to low zero shot, few shot, and base to novel generalization. Instead, freezing the backbone network to maintain generalization ability weakens fully supervised performance. Otherwise, no single prompt tuning branch consistently performs optimally. In this work, we proposed a multimodal prompt learning scheme that balances supervised and generalized performance. Our prompting approach contains three sections: 1) Independent prompt on both the vision and text branches to learn the language and visual contexts. 2) Inter-modal prompt mapping to ensure mutual synergy. 3) Reducing the discrepancy between the hand-crafted prompt (\texttt{a video of a person doing [CLS]}) and the learnable prompt, to alleviate the forgetting about essential video scenarios. Extensive validation of fully supervised, zero-shot, few-shot, base-to-novel generalization settings for video recognition indicates that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance with less commute cost.

ViLT-CLIP: Video and Language Tuning CLIP with Multimodal Prompt Learning and Scenario-guided Optimization

Existing causal representation learning methods are based on the causal graph they build. However, due to the omission of bias within the causal graph, they essentially encourage models to learn biased causal effects in latent space. In this paper, we propose a novel causally disentangling framework that aims to learn unbiased causal effects. We first introduce inductive and dataset biases into traditional causal graph for the physical concepts of interest. Then, we eliminate the negative effects from these two biases by counterfactual intervention with reweighted loss function for learning unbiased causal effects. Finally, we employ the causal effects into the VAE to endow the latent representations with causality. In particular, we highlight that removing biases in this paper is regarded as a part of learning process for unbiased causal effects, which is crucial for causal disentanglement performance improvement. Through extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, we show that our method outperforms different baselines and obtains the state-of-the-art results for achieving causal representation learning.

Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

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A Joint Framework with Heterogeneous-Relation-Aware Graph and Multi-Channel Label Enhancing Strategy for Event Causality Extraction

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Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

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A Joint Framework with Heterogeneous-Relation-Aware Graph and Multi-Channel Label Enhancing Strategy for Event Causality Extraction

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