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This paper investigates the problem of exploiting existing solution models of previous tasks to address a related target task with limited training data. Existing approaches addressing this problem often require access to the internal parameterization of the existing solution models and possibly their training data, which is not possible in many practical settings. To relax this requirement, We approach this problem from a new perspective of black-box re-purposing, which augments the target inputs and leverages their corresponding outputs generated by existing black-box APIs into a feature ensemble. We hypothesize that such feature ensemble can be learned to incorporate and encode relevant black-box knowledge into the feature representation of target data, which will compensate for their scarcity. This hypothesis is confirmed via the reported successes of our proposed black-box ensemble in solving multiple few-shot learning tasks derived from various benchmark datasets. All reported results show consistently that the set of heterogeneous black-box solutions of previous tasks can indeed be reused and combined effectively to solve a reasonably related target task without requiring access to a large training dataset. This is the first step towards enabling new possibilities to further supplement existing techniques in transfer or meta learning with black-box knowledge.

AAAI 2024

Repurposing Ensemble of Black-Box Models to New Task Domains

model fusion

model repurposing

few-shot 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. 

Factual error correction (FEC) aims to revise factual errors in false claims with minimal editing, making them faithful to the provided evidence. This task is crucial for alleviating the hallucination problem encountered by large language models. Given the lack of paired data (i.e., false claims and their corresponding correct claims), existing methods typically adopt the ‘mask-then-correct’ paradigm. This paradigm relies solely on unpaired false claims and correct claims, thus being referred to as distantly supervised methods. These methods require a masker to explicitly identify factual errors within false claims before revising with a corrector. However, the absence of paired data to train the masker makes accurately pinpointing factual errors within claims challenging. To mitigate this, we propose to improve FEC by Learning to Inject Factual Errors (LIFE), a three-step distantly supervised method: ‘mask-corrupt-correct’. Specifically, we first train a corruptor using the ‘mask-then-corrupt’ procedure, allowing it to deliberately introduce factual errors into correct text. The corruptor is then applied to correct claims, generating a substantial amount of paired data. After that, we filter out low-quality data, and use the remaining data to train a corrector. Notably, our corrector does not require a masker, thus circumventing the bottleneck associated with explicit factual error identification. Our experiments on a public dataset verify the effectiveness of LIFE in two key aspects: Firstly, it outperforms the previous best-performing distantly supervised method by a notable margin of 10.59 points in SARI Final (19.3% improvement). Secondly, even compared to ChatGPT prompted with in-context examples, LIFE achieves a superiority of 7.16 points in SARI Final.

Improving Factual Error Correction by Learning to Inject Factual Errors | VIDEO

There are a lot of real-world black-box optimization problems that need to optimize multiple criteria simultaneously. However, in a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem, identifying the whole Pareto front requires the prohibitive search cost, while in many practical scenarios, the decision maker (DM) only needs a specific solution among the set of the Pareto optimal solutions. We propose a Bayesian optimization (BO) approach to identifying the most preferred solution in the MOO with expensive objective functions, in which a Bayesian preference model of the DM is adaptively estimated by an interactive manner based on the two types of supervisions called the pairwise preference and improvement request. To explore the most preferred solution, we define an acquisition function in which the uncertainty both in the objective function and the DM preference is incorporated. Further, to minimize the interaction cost with the DM, we also propose an active learning strategy for the preference estimation. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method through the benchmark function optimization and the hyper-parameter optimization problems for machine learning models.

Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Active Preference Learning | VIDEO

8 years after the visual question answering (VQA) task was proposed, accuracy remains the primary metric for automatic evaluation. VQA Accuracy has been effective so far in the IID evaluation setting. However, our community is undergoing a shift towards open-ended generative models and OOD evaluation. In this new paradigm, the existing VQA Accuracy metric is overly stringent and underestimates the performance of VQA systems. Thus, there is a need to develop more robust automatic VQA metrics that serve as a proxy for human judgment. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to build a better VQA metric. We formulate VQA evaluation as an answer-rating task where the LLM is instructed to score the accuracy of a candidate answer given a set of reference answers. We demonstrate the proposed metric better correlates with human judgment compared to existing metrics across several VQA models and benchmarks. We hope wide adoption of our metric will contribute to better estimating the research progress on the VQA task. We plan to release the evaluation code and collected human judgments.

Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models | VIDEO

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) methods, like Masked Autoencoders (MAE), efficiently learn a rich representation of the input. However, for adapting to downstream tasks, they require a sufficient amount of labeled data since their rich features code not only objects but also less relevant image background. In contrast, Instance Discrimination (ID) methods focus on objects. In this work, we study how to combine the efficiency and scalability of MIM with the ability of ID to perform downstream classification in the absence of large amounts of labeled data. To this end, we introduce Masked Autoencoder Contrastive Tuning (MAE-CT), a sequential approach that utilizes the implicit clustering of the Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning (NNCLR) objective to induce abstraction in the topmost layers of a pre-trained MAE. MAE-CT tunes the rich features such that they form semantic clusters of objects without using any labels. Notably, MAE-CT does not rely on hand-crafted augmentations and frequently achieves its best performances while using only minimal augmentations (crop & flip). Further, MAE-CT is compute efficient as it requires at most 10% overhead compared to MAE re-training. Applied to large and huge Vision Transformer (ViT) models, MAE-CT excels over previous self-supervised methods trained on ImageNet in linear probing, k-NN and low-shot classification accuracy as well as in unsupervised clustering accuracy. With ViT-H/16 MAE-CT achieves a new state-of-the-art in linear probing of 82.2%.
Project page: github.com/ml-jku/MAE-CT.

Contrastive Tuning: A Little Help to Make Masked Autoencoders Forget

The k-SERVER problem is one of the most prominent problems in online algorithms with several variants and extensions. However, simplifying assumptions like instantaneous server movements and zero service time has hitherto limited its applicability to real-world problems. In this paper, we introduce a realistic generalization of k-SERVER without such assumptions – the k-FOOD problem, where requests with source-destination locations and an associated pickup time window arrive in an online fashion, and each has to be served by exactly one of the available k servers. The k-FOOD problem offers the versatility to model a variety of real-world use cases such as food delivery, ride sharing, and quick commerce. Moreover, motivated by the need for fairness in online platforms, we introduce the FAIR k-FOOD problem with the max-min objective. We establish that both k-FOOD and FAIR k-FOOD problems are strongly NP-hard and develop an optimal offline algorithm that arises naturally from a time-expanded flow network. Subsequently, we propose an online algorithm DOC4FOOD involving virtual movements of servers to the nearest request location. Experiments on a real-world food-delivery dataset, alongside synthetic datasets, establish the efficacy of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art fair food delivery algorithms.

Towards Fairness in Online Service with K Servers and Its Applicaitons in Fair Food Delivery

The demand for 4D ( 3D+time ) SLAM system is increasingly urgent, especially for decision-making and scene understanding. However, most of the existing simultaneous localization and mapping ( SLAM ) systems primarily assume static environments. They fail to represent dynamic scenarios due to the challenge of establishing robust long-term spatiotemporal associations in dynamic object tracking. We address this limitation and propose CTO-SLAM, a monocular and RGB-D object-level 4D SLAM system to track moving objects and estimate their motion simultaneously. In this paper, we propose contour tracking, which introduces contour features to enhance the keypoint representation of dynamic objects and coupled with pixel tracking to achieve long-term robust object tracking. Based on contour tracking, we propose a novel sampling-based object pose initialization algorithm and the following adapted bundle adjustment ( BA ) optimization algorithm to estimate dynamic object poses with high accuracy. The CTO-SLAM system is verified on both KITTI and VKITTI datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our system effectively addresses cumulative errors in long-term spatiotemporal association and hence obtains substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/realXiaohan/CTO-SLAM.

CTO-SLAM: Contour Tracking for Object-Level Robust 4D SLAM

This paper studies an approach to planning with PDDL3 constraints involving mixed propositional and numeric conditions, as well as metric time constraints.  
We show how the whole PDDL3 with instantaneous actions can be compiled away into a numeric planning problem without PDDL3 constraints, enabling the use of any state-of-the-art numeric planner that is agnostic to the existence of PDDL3. Our solution exploits the concept of regression. In addition to a basic compilation, we present an optimized variant based on the observation that it is possible to make the compilation sensitive to the structure of the problem to solve; this can be done by reasoning on the interactions between the problem actions and the constraints. The resulting optimization substantially reduces the size of the planning task. We experimentally observe that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art planners supporting the same class of constraints over known benchmark domains, settling a new state-of-the-art planning system for PDDL3.

Dealing with Numeric and Metric Time Constraints in PDDL3 via Compilation to Numeric Planning

Cross-domain few-shot learning presents a formidable challenge, as models must be trained on base classes and then tested on novel classes from various domains with only a few samples at hand. While prior approaches have primarily focused on parameter-efficient methods of using adapters, they often overlook two critical issues: shifts in batch statistics and noisy sample statistics arising from domain discrepancy variations. In this paper, we introduce Leveraging Normalization Layer in Adapters with Progressive Learning and Adaptive Distillation (ProLAD), marking two principal contributions. First, our methodology utilizes two separate adapters: one devoid of a normalization layer, which is more effective for similar domains, and another embedded with a normalization layer, designed to leverage the batch statistics of the target domain, thus proving effective for dissimilar domains. Second, to address the pitfalls of noisy statistics, we deploy two strategies: a progressive training of the two adapters and an adaptive distillation technique derived from features determined by the model solely with the adapter devoid of a normalization layer. Through this adaptive distillation, our approach functions as a modulator, controlling the primary adapter for adaptation, based on each domain. Evaluations on standard cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks confirm that our technique outperforms existing state-of-the-art methodologies.

Leveraging Normalization Layer in Adapters with Progressive Learning and Adaptive Distillation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Fine-tuning pre-trained neural network models has become a widely adopted approach across various domains. However, it can lead to the distortion of pre-trained feature extractors that already possess strong generalization capabilities. Mitigating feature distortion during adaptation to new target domains is crucial. Recent studies have shown promising results in handling feature distortion by aligning the head layer on in-distribution datasets before performing fine-tuning. Nonetheless, a significant limitation arises from the treatment of batch normalization layers during fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose Domain-Aware Fine-Tuning (DAFT), a novel approach that incorporates batch normalization conversion and the integration of linear probing and fine-tuning. Our batch normalization conversion method effectively mitigates feature distortion by reducing modifications to the neural network during fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce the integration of linear probing and fine-tuning to optimize the head layer with gradual adaptation of the feature extractor. By leveraging batch normalization layers and integrating linear probing and fine-tuning, our DAFT significantly mitigates feature distortion and achieves improved model performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in not only improving performance but also mitigating feature distortion.

Domain-Aware Fine-Tuning: Enhancing Neural Network Adaptability | VIDEO

We address the problem of improving the worst-case efficiency of pure Nash equilibria (aka, the price of anarchy) in affine congestion games, through a novel use of signalling. We assume that, for each player in the game, a most preferred strategy is publicly signalled. This can be done either distributedly by the players themselves, or be the outcome of some centralized algorithm. We apply this signalling scheme to two well-studied scenarios: games with partially altruistic players and games with resource taxation. We show a significant improvement in the price of anarchy of these games, whenever the aggregate signalled strategy profile is a good approximation of the game social optimum.

Repurposing Ensemble of Black-Box Models to New Task Domains

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Improving Factual Error Correction by Learning to Inject Factual Errors | VIDEO

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