Canada

Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has exhibited remarkable potential in improving graph-based clustering. To handle the general clustering scenario without a prior graph, these models estimate an initial graph beforehand to apply GCN. Throughout the literature, we have witnessed that 1) most models focus on the initial graph while neglecting the original features. Therefore, the discriminability of the learned representation may be corrupted by a low-quality initial graph; 2) the training procedure lacks effective clustering guidance, which may lead to the incorporation of clustering-irrelevant information into the learned graph. To tackle these problems, the Deep Contrastive Graph Learning (DCGL) model is proposed for general data clustering. Specifically, we establish a pseudo-siamese network, which incorporates auto-encoder with GCN to emphasize both the graph structure and the original features. On this basis, feature-level contrastive learning is introduced to enhance the discriminative capacity, and the relationship between samples and centroids is employed as the clustering-oriented guidance. Afterward, a two-branch graph learning mechanism is designed to extract the local and global structural relationships, which are further embedded into a unified graph under the cluster-level contrastive guidance. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of DCGL against state-of-the-art algorithms.

AAAI 2024

Deep Contrastive Graph Learning with Clustering-Oriented Guidance

deep neural network algorithms

graph-based machine learning

clustering

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. 

Many evaluation measures are used to evaluate social biases in masked language models (MLMs). However, we find that these previously proposed evaluation measures are lacking robustness in scenarios with limited datasets. This is because these measures are obtained by comparing the pseudo-log-likelihood (PLL) scores of the stereotypical and anti-stereotypical samples using an indicator function. The disadvantage is the limited mining of the PLL score sets without capturing its distributional information. In this paper, we represent a PLL score set as a Gaussian distribution and use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and Jensen–Shannon (JS) divergence to construct evaluation measures for the distributions of stereotypical and anti-stereotypical PLL scores. Experimental results on the publicly available datasets StereoSet (SS) and CrowS-Pairs (CP) show that our proposed measures are significantly more robust and interpretable than those proposed previously.

Robust Evaluation Measures for Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models

In recent years, Few-shot Object Detection (FSOD) has become an increasingly important research topic in computer vision. However, existing FSOD methods require strong annotations including category labels and bounding boxes, and their performance is heavily dependent on the quality of box annotations. However, acquiring strong annotations is both expensive and time-consuming. This inspires the study on weakly supervised FSOD (WS-FSOD in short), which realizes FSOD with only image-level annotations, i.e., category labels. In this paper, we propose a new and effective weakly supervised FSOD method named WFS-DETR. By a well-designed pretraining process, WFS-DETR first acquires general object localization and integrity judgment capabilities on large-scale pretraining data. Then, it introduces object integrity into multiple-instance learning to solve the common local optimum problem by comprehensively exploiting both semantic and visual information. Finally, with simple fine-tuning, it transfers the knowledge learned from the base classes to the novel classes, which enables accurate detection of novel objects. Benefiting from this ``pretraining-refinement'' mechanism, WSF-DETR can achieve good generalization on different datasets. Extensive experiments also show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the existing counterparts in the WS-FSOD task.

Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection with DETR

Retrieval models aim at selecting a small set of item candidates which match the preference of a given user. They play a vital role in large-scale recommender systems since subsequent models such as rankers highly depend on the quality of item candidates. However, most existing retrieval models employ a single-round inference paradigm, which may not adequately capture the dynamic nature of user preferences and stuck in one area in the item space. In this paper, we propose Ada-Retrieval, an adaptive multi-round retrieval paradigm for recommender systems that iteratively refines user representations to better capture potential candidates in the full item space. Ada-Retrieval comprises two key modules: the item representation adapter and the user representation adapter, designed to inject context information into items' and users' representations. The framework maintains a model-agnostic design, allowing seamless integration with various backbone models such as RNNs or Transformers. We perform experiments on three widely used public datasets, incorporating five powerful sequential recommenders as backbone models. Our results demonstrate that Ada-Retrieval significantly enhances the performance of various base models, with consistent improvements observed across different datasets. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/ll0ruc/Ada-Retrieval.

Ada-Retrieval: An Adaptive Multi-Round Retrieval Paradigm for Sequential Recommendations

Despite the great potential in capturing long-range dependency, one rarely-explored underlying issue of transformer in medical image segmentation is attention collapse, making it often degenerate into a bypass module in CNN-Transformer hybrid architectures. This is due to the high computational complexity of vision transformers requiring extensive training data while well-annotated medical image data is relatively limited, resulting in poor convergence. In this paper, we propose a plug-n-play transformer block with dynamic token merging, named DTMFormer, to avoid building long-range dependency on redundant and duplicated tokens and thus pursue better convergence. Specifically, DTMFormer consists of an attention-guided token merging (ATM) module to adaptively cluster tokens into fewer semantic tokens based on feature and dependency similarity and a light token reconstruction module to fuse ordinary and semantic tokens. In this way, as self-attention in ATM is calculated based on fewer tokens, DTMFormer is of lower complexity and more friendly to converge. Extensive experiments on publicly-available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DTMFormer working as a plug-n-play module for simultaneous complexity reduction and performance improvement. We believe it will inspire future work on rethinking transformers in medical image segmentation. Code: https://github.com/iam-nacl/DTMFormer.

DTMFormer: Dynamic Token Merging for Boosting Transformer-Based Medical Image Segmentation

With the flourishing of the Internet, sharing one's photos or automated processing of faces using computer vision technology has become an everyday occurrence. While enjoying the convenience, the concern for identity privacy is also emerging. Therefore, some efforts introduced the concept of ``password'' from traditional cryptography such as RSA into the face anonymization and deanonymization task to protect the facial identity without compromising the usability of the face image. However, these methods either suffer from the poor visual quality of the synthesis results or do not possess the full cryptographic properties, resulting in compromised security. In this paper, we present the first facial identity cryptography framework with full properties analogous to RSA. Our framework leverages the powerful generative capabilities of StyleGAN to achieve megapixel-level facial identity anonymization and deanonymization. Thanks to the great semantic decoupling of StyleGAN's latent space, the identity encryption and decryption process are performed in latent space by a well-designed password mapper in the manner of editing latent code. Meanwhile, the password-related information is imperceptibly hidden in the edited latent code owing to the redundant nature of the latent space. To make our cryptographic framework possesses all the properties analogous to RSA, we propose three types of loss functions: single anonymization loss, sequential anonymization loss, and associated anonymization loss. Extensive experiments and ablation analyses demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of the quality of synthesis results, identity-irrelevant attributes preservation, deanonymization accuracy, and completeness of properties analogous to RSA.

FaceRSA: RSA-Aware Facial Identity Cryptography Framework

The capability of video super-resolution (VSR) to synthesize high-resolution (HR) video from ideal datasets has been demonstrated in many works. However, applying the VSR model to real-world video with unknown and complex degradation remains a challenging task. First, existing degradation metrics in most VSR methods are not able to effectively simulate real-world noise and blur. On the contrary, simple combinations of classical degradation are used for real-world noise modeling, which led to the VSR model often being violated by out-of-distribution noise. Second, many SR models focus on noise simulation and transfer. Nevertheless, the sampled noise is monotonous and limited. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a Negatives augmentation strategy for generalized noise modeling in Video Super-Resolution (NegVSR) task. Specifically, we first propose sequential noise generation toward real-world data to extract practical noise sequences. Then, the degeneration domain is widely expanded by negative augmentation to build up various yet challenging real-world noise sets. We further propose the augmented negative guidance loss to learn robust features among augmented negatives effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets (e.g., VideoLQ and FLIR) show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with clear margins, especially in visual quality. Project page is available at: https://negvsr.github.io/.

NegVSR: Augmenting Negatives for Generalized Noise Modeling in Real-world Video Super-Resolution

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are potential competitors to artificial neural networks (ANNs) due to their high energy-efficiency on neuromorphic hardware. However, SNNs are unfolded over simulation time steps during the training process. Thus, SNNs require much more memory than ANNs, which impedes the training of deeper SNN models. In this paper, we propose the reversible spiking neural network to reduce the memory cost of intermediate activations and membrane potentials during training. Firstly, we extend the reversible architecture along temporal dimension and propose the reversible spiking block, which can reconstruct the computational graph and recompute all intermediate variables in forward pass with a reverse process. On this basis, we adopt the state-of-the-art SNN models to the reversible variants, namely reversible spiking ResNet (RevSResNet) and reversible spiking transformer (RevSFormer). Through experiments on static and neuromorphic datasets, we demonstrate that the memory cost per image of our reversible SNNs does not increase with the network depth. On CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, our RevSResNet37 and RevSFormer-4-384 achieve comparable accuracies and consume 3.79x and 3.00x lower GPU memory per image than their counterparts with roughly identical model complexity and parameters. We believe that this work can unleash the memory constraints in SNN training and pave the way for training extremely large and deep SNNs.

Memory-Efficient Reversible Spiking Neural Networks

Multi-Source cross-lingual transfer learning deals with the transfer of task knowledge from multiple labelled source languages to an unlabeled target language under the language shift. Existing methods typically focus on weighting the predictions produced by language-specific classifiers of different sources that follow a shared encoder. However, all source languages share the same encoder, which is updated by all these languages. The extracted representations inevitably contain different source languages' information, which may disturb the learning of the language-specific classifiers. Additionally, 
due to the language gap,  language-specific classifiers trained with source labels are unable to make accurate predictions for the target language. Both facts impair the model's performance. To address these challenges, we propose a Disentangled and Adaptive Network ~(DA-Net). Firstly, we devise a feedback-guided collaborative disentanglement method that seeks to purify input representations of classifiers, thereby mitigating mutual interference from multiple sources. Secondly, we propose a class-aware parallel adaptation method that aligns class-level distributions for each source-target language pair, thereby alleviating
the language pairs' language gap. Experimental results on three different tasks involving $38$  languages validate the effectiveness of our approach.

DA-Net: A Disentangled and Adaptive Network for Multi-Source Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning

This work presents a novel method called dense projection for unsupervised anomaly detection (DPAD). The main idea is maximizing the local density of (normal) training data and then determining whether a test data is anomalous or not by evaluating its density. Specifically, DPAD uses a deep neural network to learn locally dense representations of normal data. Since density estimation is computationally expensive, we minimize the local distances of the representations in an iteratively reweighting manner, where the weights are updated adaptively and the parameters are regularized to avoid model collapse (all representations collapse to a single point). Compared with many state-of-the-art methods of anomaly detection, our DPAD does not rely on any assumption about the distribution or spatial structure of the normal data and representations. Moreover, we provide theoretical guarantees for the effectiveness of DPAD. The experiments show that our method DPAD is effective not only in traditional one-class classification problems but also in scenarios with complex normal data composed of multiple classes.

Dense Projection for Anomaly Detection

Large language models (LLMs) show their powerful automatic reasoning and planning capability with a wealth of semantic knowledge about the human world. However, the grounding problem still hinders the applications of LLMs in the real-world environment. Existing studies try to fine-tune the LLM or utilize pre-defined behavior APIs to bridge the LLMs and the environment, which not only costs huge human efforts to customize for every single task but also weakens the generality strengths of LLMs. To autonomously ground the LLM onto the environment, we proposed the Hypothesis, Verification, and Induction (HYVIN) framework to automatically and progressively ground the LLM with self-driven skill learning. HYVIN first employs the LLM to propose the hypothesis of sub-goals to achieve tasks and then verify the feasibility of the hypothesis via interacting with the underlying environment. Once verified, HYVIN can then learn generalized skills with the guidance of these successfully grounded subgoals. These skills can be further utilized to accomplish more complex tasks that fail to pass the verification phase. Verified in the famous instruction following task set, BabyAI, HYVIN achieves comparable performance in the most challenging tasks compared with imitation learning methods that cost millions of demonstrations, proving the effectiveness of learned skills and showing the feasibility and efficiency of our framework.

Deep Contrastive Graph Learning with Clustering-Oriented Guidance

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Robust Evaluation Measures for Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models

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