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Selective rationalization can be regarded as a straightforward self-explaining approach for enhancing model explainability in natural language processing tasks. It aims to provide explanations that are more accessible and understandable to non-technical users by first selecting subsets of input texts as rationales and then predicting based on chosen subsets. However, existing methods that follow this select-then-predict framework may suffer from the rationalization degeneration problem, resulting in sub-optimal or unsatisfactory rationales that do not align with human judgments. This problem may further lead to rationalization failure, resulting in meaningless rationales that ultimately undermine people&#39;s trust in the rationalization model. To address these challenges, we propose a Guidance-based Rationalization method (G-RAT) that effectively improves robustness against failure situations and the quality of rationales by using a guidance module to regularize selections and distributions. Experimental results on two synthetic settings prove that our method is robust to the rationalization degeneration and failure problems, while the results on two real datasets show its effectiveness in providing rationales in line with human judgments.

AAAI 2024

Learning Robust Rationales for Model Explainability: A Guidance-Based Approach | VIDEO

interpretability & analysis of nlp models

text classification

information extraction

Selective rationalization can be regarded as a straightforward self-explaining approach for enhancing model explainability in natural language processing tasks. It aims to provide explanations that are more accessible and understandable to non-technical users by first selecting subsets of input texts as rationales and then predicting based on chosen subsets. However, existing methods that follow this select-then-predict framework may suffer from the rationalization degeneration problem, resulting in sub-optimal or unsatisfactory rationales that do not align with human judgments. This problem may further lead to rationalization failure, resulting in meaningless rationales that ultimately undermine people's trust in the rationalization model. To address these challenges, we propose a Guidance-based Rationalization method (G-RAT) that effectively improves robustness against failure situations and the quality of rationales by using a guidance module to regularize selections and distributions. Experimental results on two synthetic settings prove that our method is robust to the rationalization degeneration and failure problems, while the results on two real datasets show its effectiveness in providing rationales in line with human judgments.

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>

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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. 

In an unpaired setting, lacking sufficient content constraints for image-to-image translation (I2I) tasks, GAN-based approaches are usually prone to model collapse. Current solutions can be divided into two categories, reconstruction-based and Siamese network-based. The former requires that the transformed or transforming image can be perfectly converted back to the original image, which is sometimes too strict and limits the generative performance. The latter involves feeding the original and generated images into a feature extractor and then matching their outputs. This is not efficient enough, and a universal feature extractor is not easily available. In this paper, we propose EnCo, a simple but efficient way to maintain the content by constraining the representational similarity in the latent space of patch-level features from the same stage of the \textbf{En}coder and de\textbf{Co}der of the generator. For the similarity function, we use a simple MSE loss instead of contrastive loss, which is currently widely used in I2I tasks. Benefits from the design, EnCo training is extremely efficient, while the features from the encoder produce a more positive effect on the decoding, leading to more satisfying generations. In addition, we rethink the role played by discriminators in sampling patches and propose a discriminative attention-guided patch sampling strategy (DAG) to replace random sampling. DAG is parameter-free and only requires negligible computational overhead, while significantly improving the performance of the model. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of EnCo, and we achieve multiple state-of-the-art compared to previous methods.

Rethinking the Paradigm of Content Constraints in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy using only pre-collected and fixed data. Although avoiding the time-consuming online interactions in RL, it poses challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) state actions and often suffers from data inefficiency for training. Despite many efforts being devoted to addressing OOD state actions, the latter (data inefficiency) receives little attention in offline RL. To address this, this paper proposes the cross-domain offline RL, which assumes offline data incorporate additional source-domain data from varying transition dynamics (environments), and expects it to contribute to the offline data efficiency. To do so, we identify a new challenge of OOD transition dynamics, beyond the common OOD state actions issue, when utilizing cross-domain offline data. Then, we propose our method BOSA, which employs two support-constrained objectives to address the above OOD issues. Through extensive experiments in the cross-domain offline RL setting, we demonstrate BOSA can greatly improve offline data efficiency: using only 10% of the target data, BOSA could achieve 74.4% of the SOTA offline RL performance that uses 100% of the target data. Additionally, we also show BOSA can be effortlessly plugged into model-based offline RL and noising data augmentation techniques (used for generating source-domain data), which naturally avoids the potential dynamics mismatch between target-domain data and newly generated source-domain data.

Beyond OOD State Actions: Supported Cross-Domain Offline Reinforcement Learning

Despite recent advancements in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, most current studies assume a class-balanced in-distribution training dataset, which is rarely the case in real-world scenarios. This paper addresses the challenging task of long-tailed OOD detection, where the in-distribution data follows a long-tailed class distribution. The main difficulty lies in distinguishing OOD data from samples belonging to the tail classes, as the ability of a classifier to detect OOD instances is not strongly correlated with its accuracy on the in-distribution classes. To overcome this issue, we propose two simple ideas: (1) Expanding the in-distribution class space by introducing multiple abstention classes. This approach allows us to build a detector with clear decision boundaries by training on OOD data using virtual labels. (2) Augmenting the context-limited tail classes by overlaying images onto the context-rich OOD data. This technique encourages the model to pay more attention to the discriminative features of the tail classes. We provide a clue for separating in-distribution and OOD data by analyzing gradient noise. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art on various benchmark datasets. Moreover, our method can be used as an add-on for existing long-tail learning approaches, significantly enhancing their OOD detection performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Stomach-ache/Long-Tailed-OOD-Detection.

EAT: Towards Long-Tailed Out-of-Distribution Detection | VIDEO

Due to the inability to receive signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) in extreme conditions, achieving accurate and robust navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging task. Recently emerged, vision-based navigation has been a promising and feasible alternative to GNSS-based navigation. However, existing vision-based techniques are inadequate in addressing flight deviation caused by environmental disturbances and inaccurate position predictions in practical settings. In this paper, we present a novel angle robustness navigation paradigm to deal with flight deviation in point-to-point navigation tasks. Additionally, we propose a model that includes the Adaptive Feature Enhance Module, Cross-knowledge Attention-guided Module and Robust Task-oriented Head Module to accurately predict direction angles for high-precision navigation. To evaluate the vision-based navigation methods, we collect a new dataset termed as UAV\_AR368. Furthermore, we design the Simulation Flight Testing Instrument (SFTI) using Google Earth to simulate different flight environments, thereby reducing the expenses associated with real flight testing. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art by achieving improvements of 26.0\% and 45.6\% in the success rate of arrival under ideal and disturbed circumstances, respectively.

Angle Robustness Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation in GNSS-Denied Scenarios

Contrastive-learning-based methods have dominated sentence representation learning. These methods regularize the representation space by pulling similar sentence representations closer and pushing away the dissimilar ones and have been proven effective in various NLP tasks, e.g., semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. However, it is challenging for these methods to learn fine-grained semantics as they only learn from the inter-sentence perspective, i.e., their supervision signal comes from the relationship between data samples. In this work, we propose a novel denoising objective that inherits from another perspective, i.e., the intra-sentence perspective. By introducing both discrete and continuous noise, we generate noisy sentences and then train our model to restore them to their original form. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that this approach delivers competitive results on both semantic textual similarity (STS) and a wide range of transfer tasks, standing up well in comparison to contrastive-learning-based methods. Notably, the proposed intra-sentence denoising objective complements existing inter-sentence contrastive methodologies and can be integrated with them to further enhance performance.  Our code is available at https://github.com/xinghaow99/DenoSent.

DenoSent: A Denoising Objective for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning

In recent years, vision language pre-training frameworks have made significant progress in natural language processing and computer vision, achieving remarkable performance improvement on various downstream tasks. However, when extended to point cloud data, existing works mainly focus on building task-specific models, and fail to extract universal 3D vision-language embedding that generalize well. We carefully investigate three common tasks in semantic 3D scene understanding, and derive key insights into the development of a pre-training model. Motivated by these observations, we propose a vision-language pre-training framework 3DVLP (3D vision-language pre-training with object contrastive learning), which transfers flexibly on 3D vision-language downstream tasks. 3DVLP takes visual grounding as the proxy task and introduces Object-level IoU-guided Detection (OID) loss to obtain high-quality proposals in the scene. Moreover, we design Object-level Cross-Contrastive alignment (OCC) task and Object-level Self-Contrastive learning (OSC) task to align the objects with descriptions and distinguish different objects in the scene, respectively. Extensive experiments verify the excellent performance of 3DVLP on three 3D vision-language tasks, reflecting its superiority in semantic 3D scene understanding.

Vision-Language Pre-training with Object Contrastive Learning for 3D Scene Understanding

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) aims to simulate human assessment of image quality. It has a great demand for labeled data, which is often insufficient in practice. Some researchers employ unsupervised methods to address this issue, which is challenging to emulate the human subjective system. To this end, we introduce a unified framework that combines semi-supervised and incremental learning to address the mentioned issue. Specifically, when training data is limited, semi-supervised learning is necessary to infer extensive unlabeled data. To facilitate semi-supervised learning, we use knowledge distillation to assign pseudo-labels to unlabeled data, preserving analytical capability. To gradually improve the quality of pseudo labels, we introduce incremental learning. However, incremental learning can lead to catastrophic forgetting. We employ Experience Replay by selecting representative samples during multiple rounds of semi-supervised learning, to alleviate forgetting and ensure model stability. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmark datasets. After being trained on the LIVE dataset, our method can be directly transferred to the CSIQ dataset. Compared with other methods, it significantly outperforms unsupervised methods on the CSIQ dataset with a marginal performance drop (-0.002) on the LIVE dataset. In conclusion, our proposed method demonstrates its potential to tackle the challenges in real-world production processes.

Semi-supervised Blind Image Quality Assessment through Knowledge Distillation and Incremental Learning

Spatiotemporal social behavior analysis is a technique that studies the social behavior patterns of objects and estimates their risks based on their trajectories. In social public scenarios such as train stations, hidden following behavior has become one of the most challenging issues due to its probability of evolving into violent events, which is more than 25\%. In recent years, research on hidden following detection (HFD) has focused on differences in time series between hidden followers and normal pedestrians under two temporal characteristics: gaze and spatial distance. However, the time-domain representation for time series is irreversible and usually causes the loss of critical information. In this paper, we deeply study the expression efficiency of time/frequency domain features of time series, by exploring the recovery mechanism of features to source time series, we establish a fidelity estimation method for feature expression and a selection model for frequency-domain features based on the signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR). Experimental results demonstrate the feature fidelity of time series and HFD performance are positively correlated, and the fidelity of frequency-domain features and HFD performance are significantly better than the time-domain features. On both real and simulated datasets, the $F_1$ score of the proposed method is increased by 3\%, and the gaze-only module is improved by 10\%. Related research has explored new methods for optimal feature selection based on fidelity, new patterns for efficient feature expression of hidden following behavior, and explored the mechanism of multimodal collaborative identification.

Hidden Follower Detection: How Is the Gaze-Spacing Pattern Embodied in Frequency Domain?

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims at extending a generic detector for novel object detection with only a few training examples. It attracts great concerns recently due to the practical meanings. Meta-learning has been demonstrated to be an effective paradigm for this task. In general, methods based on meta-learning employ an additional support branch to encode novel examples (a.k.a. support images) into class prototypes, which are then fused with query branch to facilitate the model prediction. However, the class-level prototypes are difficult to precisely generate, and they also lack detailed information, leading to instability in performance. New methods are required to capture the distinctive local context for more robust novel object detection. To this end, we propose to distill the most representative support features into fine-grained prototypes. These prototypes are then assigned into query feature maps based on the matching results, modeling the detailed feature relations between two branches. This process is realized by our Fine-Grained Feature Aggregation (FFA) module. Moreover, in terms of high-level feature fusion, we propose Balanced Class-Agnostic Sampling (B-CAS) strategy and Non-Linear Fusion (NLF) module from differenct perspectives. They are complementary to each other and depict the high-level feature relations more effectively. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks show that our method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in most settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangchen1801/FPD.

Fine-Grained Prototypes Distillation for Few-Shot Object Detection

Learning from noisy data has attracted much attention, where most methods focus on closed-set label noise. However, a more common scenario in the real world is the presence of both open-set and closed-set noise. Existing methods typically identify and handle these two types of label noise separately by designing a specific strategy for each type. However, in many real-world scenarios, it would be challenging to identify open-set examples, especially when the dataset has been severely corrupted. Unlike the previous works, we explore how models behave when faced with open-set examples, and find that a part of open-set examples gradually get integrated into certain known classes, which is beneficial for the separation among known classes. Motivated by the phenomenon, we propose a novel two-step contrastive learning method CECL (Class Expansion Contrastive Learning) which aims to deal with both types of label noise by exploiting the useful information of open-set examples. Specifically, we incorporate some open-set examples into closed-set classes to enhance performance while treating others as delimiters to improve representative ability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets with diverse label noise demonstrate the effectiveness of CECL.

Learning Robust Rationales for Model Explainability: A Guidance-Based Approach | VIDEO

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Rethinking the Paradigm of Content Constraints in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

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Learning Robust Rationales for Model Explainability: A Guidance-Based Approach | VIDEO

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Rethinking the Paradigm of Content Constraints in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

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