Canada

Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer from bad local optima that could be arbitrarily worse than the optimal. To address the long-lasting bad-local-optima challenge, we draw inspiration from the recent ground-breaking foundation models and propose to leverage their underlying big learning principle to upgrade the EM. Specifically, we present the Big Learning EM (BigLearn-EM), an EM upgrade that simultaneously performs joint, marginal, and orthogonally transformed marginal matchings between data and model distributions. Through simulated experiments, we empirically show that the BigLearn-EM is capable of delivering the optimal with high probability; comparisons on benchmark clustering datasets further demonstrate its effectiveness and advantages over existing techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/YulaiCong/Big-Learning-Expectation-Maximization.

AAAI 2024

Big Learning Expectation Maximization

ml: deep neural architectures and foundation models

ml: clustering

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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. 

Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) enables the powerful cloud server to run its well-trained neural model upon the input from resource-limited client, with both of server's model parameters and client's input data protected. While computation efficiency is critical for the practical implementation of privacy-preserving MLaaS and it is inspiring to witness recent advances towards efficiency improvement, there still exists a significant performance gap to real-world applications. In general, state-of-the-art frameworks perform function-wise efficiency optimization based on specific cryptographic primitives. Although it is logical, such independent optimization for each function makes noticeable amount of expensive operations unremovable and misses the opportunity to further accelerate the performance by jointly considering privacy-preserving computation among adjacent functions. As such, we propose COIN: Conjunctive Optimization with Interleaved Nexus, which remodels mainstream computation for each function to conjunctive counterpart for composite function, with a series of united optimization strategies. Specifically, COIN jointly computes a pair of consecutive nonlinear-linear functions in the neural model by reconstructing the intermediates throughout the whole procedure, which not only eliminates the most expensive crypto operations without invoking extra encryption enabler, but also makes the online crypto complexity independent of filter size. Experimentally, COIN demonstrates 11.2x to 29.6x speedup over various function dimensions from modern networks, and 6.4x to 12x speedup on the total computation time when applied in networks with model input from small-scale CIFAR10 to large-scale ImageNet.

United We Stand: Accelerating Privacy-Preserving Neural Inference by Conjunctive Optimization with Interleaved Nexus

The goal of document-level relation extraction (RE) is to identify relations between entities that span multiple sentences. Recently, incomplete labeling in document-level RE has received increasing attention, and some studies have used methods such as positive-unlabeled learning to tackle this issue, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Motivated by this, we propose a positive-augmentation and positive-mixup positive-unlabeled metric learning framework (P3M). Specifically, we formulate document-level RE as a metric learning problem. We aim to pull the distance closer between entity pair embedding and their corresponding relation embedding, while pushing it farther away from the none-class relation embedding. Additionally, we adapt the positive-unlabeled learning to this loss objective. In order to improve the generalizability of the model, we use dropout to augment positive samples and propose a positive-none-class mixup method. Extensive experiments show that P3M improves the F1 score by approximately 4-10 points in document-level RE with incomplete labeling, and achieves state-of-the-art results in fully labeled scenarios. Furthermore, P3M has also demonstrated robustness to prior estimation bias in incomplete labeled scenarios.

A Positive-Unlabeled Metric Learning Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Incomplete Labeling

Recently, the task of Video Frame Prediction (VFP), which predicts future video frames from previous ones through extrapolation, has made remarkable progress. However, the performance of existing VFP methods is still far from satisfactory due to the fixed framerate video used: 1) they have difficulties in handling \emph{complex dynamic scenes}; 2) they cannot predict future frames with flexible prediction time intervals. The event cameras can record the intensity changes asynchronously with a very high temporal resolution, which provides rich dynamic information about the observed scenes. In this paper, we propose to predict video frames from a single image and the following events, which can not only handle complex dynamic scenes but also predict future frames with \emph{flexible prediction time intervals}. First, we introduce a symmetrical cross-modal attention augmentation module to enhance the complementary information between images and events. Second, we propose to jointly achieve optical flow estimation and frame generation by combining the motion information of events and the semantic information of the image, then inpainting the holes produced by forward warping to obtain an ideal prediction frame. Based on these, we propose a lightweight pyramidal coarse-to-fine model that can predict a 720P frame within 25 ms. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art frame-based and event-based VFP methods and has the fastest runtime. Code is available at https://npucvr.github.io/VFPSIE.

Video Frame Prediction from a Single Image and Events

Limited-supervised multi-label learning (LML) leverages weak or noisy supervision for multi-label classification model training over data with label noise, which contain missing labels and/or redundant labels. Existing studies usually solve LML problems by assuming that label noise is independent of the input features and class labels, while ignoring the fact that noisy labels may depend on the input features (instance-dependent) and the classes (label-dependent) in many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose limited-supervised Multi-label Learning with Dependency Noise (MLDN) to simultaneously identify the instance-dependent and label-dependent label noise by factorizing the noise matrix as the outputs of a mapping from the feature and label representations. Meanwhile, we regularize the problem with the manifold constraint on noise matrix to preserve local relationships and uncover the manifold structure. Theoretically, we bound noise recover error for the resulting problem. We solve the problem by using a first-order scheme based on proximal operator, and the convergence rate of it is at least sub-linear. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Limited-Supervised Multi-Label Learning with Dependency Noise

Multi-domain learning (MDL) aims to train a model with minimal average risk across multiple overlapping but non-identical domains. To tackle the challenges of dataset bias and domain domination, numerous MDL approaches have been proposed from the perspectives of seeking commonalities by aligning distributions to reduce domain gap or reserving differences by implementing domain-specific towers, gates, and even experts. MDL models are becoming more and more complex with sophisticated network architectures or loss functions, introducing extra parameters and enlarging computation costs. In this paper, we propose a frustratingly easy and hyperparameter-free multi-domain learning method named Decoupled Training (D-Train). D-Train is a tri-phase general-to-specific training strategy that first pre-trains on all domains to warm up a root model, then post-trains on each domain by splitting into multi-heads, and finally fine-tunes the heads by fixing the backbone, enabling decouple training to achieve domain independence. Despite its extraordinary simplicity and efficiency, D-Train performs remarkably well in extensive evaluations of various datasets from standard benchmarks to applications of satellite imagery and recommender systems.

Decoupled Training: Return of Frustratingly Easy Multi-Domain Learning

Vision Transformer(ViT) is one of the most widely used models in the computer vision field with its great performance on various tasks. In order to fully utilize the ViT-based architecture in various applications, proper visualization methods with a decent localization performance are necessary, but these methods employed in CNN-based models are still not available in ViT due to its unique structure. In this work, we propose an attention-guided visualization method applied to ViT that provides a high-level semantic explanation for its decision. Our method selectively aggregates the gradients directly propagated from the classification output to each self-attention, collecting the contribution of image features extracted from each location of the input image. These gradients are additionally guided by the normalized self-attention scores, which are the pairwise patch correlation scores. They are used to supplement the gradients on the patch-level context information efficiently detected by the self-attention mechanism. This approach of our method provides elaborate high-level semantic explanations with great localization performance only with the class labels. As a result, our method outperforms the previous leading explainability methods of ViT in the weakly-supervised localization task and presents great capability in capturing the full instances of the target class object. Meanwhile, our method provides a visualization that faithfully explains the model, which is demonstrated in the perturbation comparison test.

Attention Guided CAM: Visual Explanations of Vision Transformer Guided by Self-Attention | VIDEO

Scene text removal (STR) aims at replacing text strokes in natural scenes with visually coherent backgrounds. Recent STR approaches rely on iterative refinements or explicit text masks, resulting in high complexity and sensitivity to the accuracy of text localization. Moreover, most existing STR methods adopt convolutional architectures while the potential of vision Transformers (ViTs) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a simple-yet-effective ViT-based text eraser, dubbed ViTEraser. Following a concise encoder-decoder framework, ViTEraser can easily incorporate various ViTs to enhance long-range modeling. Specifically, the encoder hierarchically maps the input image into the hidden space through ViT blocks and patch embedding layers, while the decoder gradually upsamples the hidden features to the text-erased image with ViT blocks and patch splitting layers. As ViTEraser implicitly integrates text localization and inpainting, we propose a novel end-to-end pretraining method, termed SegMIM, which focuses the encoder and decoder on the text box segmentation and masked image modeling tasks, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that ViTEraser with SegMIM achieves state-of-the-art performance on STR by a substantial margin and exhibits strong generalization ability when extended to other tasks, e.g., tampered scene text detection. Furthermore, we comprehensively explore the architecture, pretraining, and scalability of the ViT-based encoder-decoder for STR, which provides deep insights into the application of ViT to the STR field. Code is available at https://github.com/shannanyinxiang/ViTEraser.

ViTEraser: Harnessing the Power of Vision Transformers for Scene Text Removal with SegMIM Pretraining

Continuously-observed event occurrences, often exhibit self- and mutually-exciting effects, which can be well modeled using temporal point processes. Beyond that, these event dynamics may also change over time, with certain \emph{periodic} trends. We propose a novel variational auto-encoder to capture such a mixture of temporal dynamics. More specifically, the whole time interval of the input sequence is partitioned into a set of sub-intervals. The event dynamics are assumed to be \emph{stationary} within each sub-interval, but could be changing across those sub-intervals. In particular, we use a sequential latent variable model to learn a dependency graph between the observed dimensions, for each sub-interval. The model predicts the future event times, by using the learned dependency graph to remove the non-contributing influences of past events. By doing so, the proposed model demonstrates its higher accuracy in predicting inter-event times and event types for several real-world event sequences, compared with existing state of the art neural point processes.

A Variational Autoencoder for Neural Temporal Point Processes with Dynamic Latent Graphs

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) aims to distill pretrained knowledge to a student model with the help of a generator without using original data. In such data-free scenarios, achieving stable performance of DFKD is essential due to the unavailability of validation data. Unfortunately, this paper has discovered that existing DFKD methods are quite sensitive to different teacher models, occasionally showing catastrophic failures of distillation, even when using well-trained teacher models. Our observation is that the generator in DFKD is not always guaranteed to produce precise yet diverse samples using the existing representative strategy of minimizing both class-prior and adversarial losses. Through our empirical study, we focus on the fact that class-prior not only decreases the diversity of generated samples, but also cannot completely address the problem of generating unexpectedly low-quality samples depending on teacher models. In this paper, we propose the teacher-agnostic data-free knowledge distillation (TA-DFKD) method, with the goal of more robust and stable performance regardless of teacher models. Our basic idea is to assign the teacher model a lenient expert role for evaluating samples, rather than a strict supervisor that enforces its class-prior on the generator. Specifically, we design a sample selection approach that takes only clean samples verified by the teacher model without imposing restrictions on the power of generating diverse samples. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method successfully achieves both robustness and training stability across various teacher models, while outperforming the existing DFKD methods.

Teacher as a Lenient Expert: Teacher-Agnostic Data-Free Knowledge Distillation | VIDEO

We introduce a language-grounded visual prompting method to adapt the visual encoder of vision-language models for downstream tasks. By capitalizing on language integration, we devise a parameter-efficient strategy to adjust the input of the visual encoder, eliminating the need to modify or add to the model's parameters. Due to this design choice, our algorithm can operate even in black-box scenarios, showcasing adaptability in situations where access to the model's parameters is constrained. We will empirically demonstrate that, compared to prior art, grounding visual prompts with language enhances both the accuracy and speed of adaptation. Moreover, our algorithm excels in base-to-novel class generalization, overcoming limitations of visual prompting and exhibiting the capacity to generalize beyond seen classes. We thoroughly assess and evaluate our method across a variety of image recognition datasets, such as EuroSAT, UCF101, DTD, and CLEVR, spanning different learning situations, including few-shot learning, base-to-novel class generalization, and transfer learning.

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United We Stand: Accelerating Privacy-Preserving Neural Inference by Conjunctive Optimization with Interleaved Nexus

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