Canada

Sequential Recommendation plays a significant role in daily recommendation systems, such as e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Taobao. However, even with the advent of large models, these platforms often face sparse issues in the historical browsing records of individual users due to new users joining or the introduction of new products. As a result, existing sequence recommendation algorithms may not perform well. To address this, sequence-based data augmentation methods have garnered attention.

Existing sequence enhancement methods typically rely on augmenting existing data, employing techniques like cropping, masking prediction, random reordering, and random replacement of the original sequence. While these methods have shown improvements, they often overlook the exploration of the deep embedding space of the sequence. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Sparse Enhanced Network (SparseEnNet), which is a robust adversarial generation method. SparseEnNet aims to fully explore the hidden space in sequence recommendation, generating more robust enhanced items. Additionally, we adopt an adversarial generation method, allowing the model to differentiate between data augmentation categories and achieve better prediction performance for the next item in the sequence. Experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves a remarkable 4-14% improvement over existing methods when evaluated on the real-world datasets. (https://github.com/junyachen/SparseEnNet)

AAAI 2024

Sparse Enhanced Network: An Adversarial Generation Method for Robust Augmentation in Sequential Recommendation

robust augmentation

adversarial generation

sequential recommendation

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. 

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to improve the generalization ability of models trained on a specific group of source domains, enabling them to perform well on new, unseen target domains. Recent studies have shown that methods that converge to smooth optima can enhance the generalization performance of supervised learning tasks such as classification. In this study, we examine the impact of smoothness-enhancing formulations on domain adversarial training, which combines task loss and adversarial loss objectives. Our approach leverages the fact that converging to a smooth minimum with respect to task loss can stabilize the task loss and lead to better performance on unseen domains.
Furthermore, we recognize that the distribution of objects in the real world often follows a long-tailed class distribution, resulting in a mismatch between machine learning models and our expectations of their performance on all classes of datasets with long-tailed class distributions. To address this issue, we consider the domain generalization problem from the perspective of the long-tail distribution and propose using the maximum square loss to balance different classes which can improve model generalizability. Our method's effectiveness is demonstrated through comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on various domain generalization datasets.

Sharpness-Aware Model-Agnostic Long-Tailed Domain Generalization

Video Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) is a task of retrieving persons from multi-camera surveillance systems. Despite the progress made in leveraging spatio-temporal information in videos, occlusion in dense crowds still hinders further progress. To address this issue, we propose a Temporal Correlation Vision Transformer (TCViT) for video person Re-ID. TCViT consists of a Temporal Correlation Attention (TCA) module and a Learnable Temporal Aggregation (LTA) module. The TCA module is designed to reduce the impact of non-target persons by relative state, while the LTA module is used to aggregate frame-level features based on their completeness. Specifically, TCA is a parameter-free module that first aligns frame-level features to restore semantic coherence in videos and then enhances the features of the target person according to temporal correlation. Additionally, unlike previous methods that treat each frame equally with a pooling layer, LTA introduces a lightweight learnable module to weigh and aggregate frame-level features under the guidance of a classification score. Extensive experiments on four prevalent benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in video Re-ID.

Temporal Correlation Vision Transformer for Video Person Re-Identification

Point cloud completion is an indispensable task for recovering complete point clouds due to incompleteness caused by occlusion, limited sensor resolution, etc. The family of coarse-to-fine generation architectures has recently exhibited great success in point cloud completion and gradually became mainstream. In this work, we unveil one of the key ingredients behind these methods: meticulously devised feature extraction operations with explicit cross-resolution aggregation. We present Cross-Resolution Transformer that efficiently performs cross-resolution aggregation with local attention mechanisms. With the help of our recursive designs, the proposed operation can capture more scales of features than common aggregation operations, which is beneficial for capturing fine geometric characteristics. While prior methodologies have ventured into various manifestations of inter-level cross-resolution aggregation, the effectiveness of intra-level one and their combination has not been analyzed. With unified designs, Cross-Resolution Transformer can perform intra- or inter-level cross-resolution aggregation by switching inputs. We integrate two forms of Cross-Resolution Transformers into one up-sampling block for point generation, and following the coarse-to-fine manner, we construct CRA-PCN to incrementally predict complete shapes with stacked up-sampling blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on several widely used benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/EasyRy/CRA-PCN.

CRA-PCN: Point Cloud Completion with Intra- and Inter-level Cross-Resolution Transformers

Research on emergent communication has recently gained significant traction as a promising avenue for the linguistic community to unravel human language's origins and explore artificial intelligence's generalization capabilities. Current research has predominantly concentrated on recognizing qualitative patterns of object attributes(e.g., shape and color) and paid little attention to the quantitative relationship among object quantities which is known as the part of numerical concepts. The ability to generalize numerical concepts, i.e., counting and calculations with unseen quantities, is essential, as it mirrors humans' foundational abstract reasoning abilities. In this work, we introduce the NumGame, leveraging the referential game framework, forcing agents to communicate and generalize the numerical concepts effectively. Inspired by the human learning process of numbers, we present a two-stage training approach that sequentially fosters a rudimentary numerical sense followed by the ability of arithmetic calculation, ultimately aiding agents in generating semantically stable and unambiguous language for numerical concepts. The experimental results indicate the impressive generalization capabilities to unseen quantities and regularity of the language emergence from communication.

Emergent Communication for Numerical Concepts Generalization

While coresets have been growing in terms of their application, barring few exceptions, they have mostly been limited to unsupervised settings. We consider supervised classification problems, and non-decomposable evaluation measures in such settings. We show that stratified uniform sampling based coresets have excellent empirical performance that are backed by theoretical guarantees too. We focus on the F1 score and Matthews Correlation Coefficient, two widely used non-decomposable objective functions that are nontrivial to optimize for and show that uniform coresets attain a lower bound for coreset size, and have good empirical performance, comparable with ``smarter'' coreset construction strategies.

Simple Weak Coresets for Non-decomposable Classification Measures | VIDEO

Recently, instance contrastive learning achieves good results in unsupervised domain adaptation. It reduces the distances between positive samples and the anchor, increases the distances between negative samples and the anchor, and learns discriminative feature representations for target samples. However, most recent methods for identifying positive and negative samples are based on whether the pseudo-labels of samples and the pseudo-label of the anchor correspond to the same class. Due to the lack of target labels, many uncertain data are mistakenly labeled during the training process, and many low training potential data are also utilized. To address these problems, we propose Low Category Uncertainty and High Training Potential Instance Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (LUHP). We first propose a weight to measure the category uncertainty of the target sample. We can effectively filter the samples near the decision boundary through category uncertainty thresholds which are calculated by weights. Then we propose a new loss to focus on samples with high training potential. Finally, for anchors with low category uncertainty, we propose a sample reuse strategy to make the model more robust. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LUHP by showing the results of four datasets widely used in unsupervised domain adaptation.

Low Category Uncertainty and High Training Potential Instance Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The knowledge distillation-based approaches have recently yielded state-of-the-art (SOTA) results for cross-lingual NER tasks in zero-shot scenarios. 
These approaches typically employ a teacher network trained with the rich-resource (labelled source) language to infer pseudo-soft labels for the zero-shot (unlabelled  target) language, and force a student network to approximate these pseudo labels to achieve knowledge transfer.
However, previous works have rarely discussed the issue of pseudo-label noise caused by the source-target language gap, which can mislead the training of the student network and result in negative knowledge transfer. 
This paper proposes an discrepancy and uncertainty aware Denoising Knowledge Distillation model (DenKD) to tackle this issue. 
Specifically, DenKD presents a discrepancy-aware denoising representation learning method to optimize the class representations of the target language produced by the teacher network, thus enhancing the quality of pseudo labels and reducing noisy predictions. Further, DenKD employs an uncertainty-aware denoising method to quantify the pseudo-label noise and adjust the focus of the student network on different samples during knowledge distillation, thereby mitigating the noise's adverse effects. We conduct extensive experiments on $28$  languages including not covered by the pre-trained models, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our   DenKD.

Discrepancy and Uncertainty Aware Denoising Knowledge Distillation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition

Benefiting from instrumental global dependency modeling of self-attention (SA), transformer-based approaches have become the pivotal choices for numerous downstream visual reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering (VQA)
and referring expression comprehension (REC). However, some studies have recently suggested that SA tends to suffer from rank-collapse thereby inevitably leads to representation degradation as the transformer layer goes deeper. Inspired by social network theory, we attempt to make an analogy between social behavior and regional information interaction in SA, and harness two crucial phenomenon of structural hole and degree centrality in social network to explore the possible optimization on SA learning, which naturaly deduces two plug-and-play social-like modules. Based on structural hole, the former module allows to make information interaction in SA more structured, which effectively avoids redundant information aggregation and global feature homogenization for better rank remedy, followed by latter module to comprehensively characterize and refine the representation discrimination via considering degree centrality of regions and transitivity of relations. Without bells and whistles, our model outperforms a bunch of baselines by a noticeable margin when considering our social-like prior on five benchmarks in VQA and REC tasks, and a series of explanatory results are showcased to sufficiently reveal the social-like behaviors in SA.

Exploiting the Social-Like Prior in Transformer for Visual Reasoning

Most of existing correspondence pruning methods only concentrate on gathering the context information as much as possible while neglecting effective ways to utilize such information. In order to tackle this dilemma, in this paper we propose a novel Graph Context Transformation Network (GCT-Net) enhancing context information to conduct consensus guidance for progressive correspondence pruning. Specifically, we design the Graph Context Enhance Transformer which first generates the graph network and then transforms it into multi-branch graph contexts. Moreover, it employs self-attention and cross-attention to magnify characteristics of each graph context for emphasizing the unique as well as shared essential information. To further apply the recalibrated graph contexts to the global domain, we propose the Graph Context Guidance Transformer. This module adopts a confident-based sampling strategy to temporarily screen high-confidence vertices for guiding accurate classification by searching global consensus between screened vertices and remaining ones. The extensive experimental results on outlier removal and relative pose estimation clearly demonstrate the superior performance of GCT-Net compared to state-of-the-art methods across outdoor and indoor datasets. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/guobaoxiao/GCT-Net.

Graph Context Transformation Learning for Progressive Correspondence Pruning

Referring 3D instance segmentation is a challenging task aimed at accurately segmenting a target instance within a 3D scene based on a given referring expression. However, previous methods have overlooked the distinct roles played by different words in referring expressions. Additionally, they have failed to incorporate the positional relationship within referring expressions with the spatial correlations in 3D scenes. To alleviate these issues, we present a novel model called X-RefSeg3D, which constructs a cross-modal graph for the input 3D scene and unites textual and spatial relationships for reasoning via graph neural networks. Our approach begins by capturing object-specific text features, which are then fused with the instance features to construct a comprehensive cross-modal scene graph. Subsequently, we integrate the obtained cross-modal features into graph neural networks, leveraging the K-nearest algorithm to derive explicit instructions from expressions and factual relationships in scenes. This enables the effective capture of higher-order relationships among instances, thereby enhancing feature fusion and facilitating reasoning. Finally, the refined feature undergoes a matching module to compute the ultimate matching score. Experimental results on ScanRefer demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing previous approaches by a substantial margin of +3.67% in terms of mIOU.

Sparse Enhanced Network: An Adversarial Generation Method for Robust Augmentation in Sequential Recommendation

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Sharpness-Aware Model-Agnostic Long-Tailed Domain Generalization

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Sparse Enhanced Network: An Adversarial Generation Method for Robust Augmentation in Sequential Recommendation

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Next from AAAI 2024

Sharpness-Aware Model-Agnostic Long-Tailed Domain Generalization

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