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While decentralized training is attractive in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for its excellent scalability and robustness, its inherent coordination challenges in collaborative tasks result in numerous interactions for agents to learn good policies. To alleviate this problem, action advising methods make experienced agents share their knowledge about what to do, while less experienced agents strictly follow the received advice. However, this method of sharing and utilizing knowledge may hinder the team&#39;s exploration of better states, as agents can be unduly influenced by suboptimal or even adverse advice, especially in the early stages of learning. Inspired by the fact that humans can learn not only from the success but also from the failure of others, this paper proposes a novel knowledge sharing framework called Cautiously-Optimistic kNowledge Sharing (CONS). CONS enables each agent to share both positive and negative knowledge and cautiously assimilate knowledge from others, thereby enhancing the efficiency of early-stage exploration and the agents&#39; robustness to adverse advice. Moreover, considering the continuous improvement of policies, agents value negative knowledge more in the early stages of learning and shift their focus to positive knowledge in the later stages. Our framework can be easily integrated into existing Q-learning based methods without introducing additional training costs. We evaluate CONS in several challenging multi-agent tasks and find it excels in environments where optimal behavioral patterns are difficult to discover, surpassing the baselines in terms of convergence rate and final performance.

AAAI 2024

Cautiously-Optimistic Knowledge Sharing for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

mas: multiagent learning

mas: coordination and collaboration

ml: reinforcement learning algorithms

While decentralized training is attractive in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for its excellent scalability and robustness, its inherent coordination challenges in collaborative tasks result in numerous interactions for agents to learn good policies. To alleviate this problem, action advising methods make experienced agents share their knowledge about what to do, while less experienced agents strictly follow the received advice. However, this method of sharing and utilizing knowledge may hinder the team's exploration of better states, as agents can be unduly influenced by suboptimal or even adverse advice, especially in the early stages of learning. Inspired by the fact that humans can learn not only from the success but also from the failure of others, this paper proposes a novel knowledge sharing framework called Cautiously-Optimistic kNowledge Sharing (CONS). CONS enables each agent to share both positive and negative knowledge and cautiously assimilate knowledge from others, thereby enhancing the efficiency of early-stage exploration and the agents' robustness to adverse advice. Moreover, considering the continuous improvement of policies, agents value negative knowledge more in the early stages of learning and shift their focus to positive knowledge in the later stages. Our framework can be easily integrated into existing Q-learning based methods without introducing additional training costs. We evaluate CONS in several challenging multi-agent tasks and find it excels in environments where optimal behavioral patterns are difficult to discover, surpassing the baselines in terms of convergence rate and final performance.

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. 

In recent years, Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have achieved considerable success by manually designing architectures, which are capable of extracting effective patterns with high-order interactions from non-Euclidean data. However, such mechanism is extremely inefficient, demanding tremendous human efforts to tune diverse model parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel Hypergraph Neural Architecture Search (HyperNAS) to automatically design the optimal HGNNs. The proposed model constructs a search space suitable for hypergraphs, and derives hypergraph architectures through differentiable search strategies. A hypergraph structure-aware distance criterion is introduced as a guideline for obtaining an optimal hypergraph architecture via the leave-one-out method. Experimental results for node classification on benchmark Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed citation networks and hypergraph datasets show that HyperNAS outperforms existing HGNNs models and graph NAS methods.

Hypergraph Neural Architecture Search

Few-shot learning (FSL) based on manifold regularization aims to improve the recognition capacity of novel objects with limited training samples by mixing two samples from different categories. However, this mixing operation  weakens the feature representation 
due to the linear aggregation and neglecting specific channels.
To solve these issues, this paper proposes attentive feature regularization (AFR). In our approach, we first calculate the relations between different categories of semantic labels to pick out the related feature used for regularization. Then, we design two attention-based calculations at both the instance and channel levels. These calculations enable the regularization procedure to focus on two crucial aspects: feature complementarity through adaptive aggregation in related categories and channel discriminability of regularized features. Finally, we combine these regularization strategies to significantly improve the classifier performance. Empirical studies on several popular FSL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of AFR, which improves the recognition accuracy of novel categories without the need to retrain any feature extractor, especially in 1-shot training setting (63.17\%$\to$69.78\% on the Mini-ImageNet dataset). Furthermore, the proposed AFR can seamlessly integrate into other FSL methods to improve classification performance.

Boosting Few-Shot Learning via Attentive Feature Regularization

Domain generalization aims to learn a well-performed classifier on multiple source domains for unseen target domains under domain shift. Domain-invariant representation (DIR) is an intuitive approach and has been of great concern. In practice, since the targets are variant and agnostic, only a few sources are not sufficient to reflect the entire domain population, leading to biased DIR. Derived from PAC-Bayes framework, we provide a novel generalization bound involving the number of domains sampled from the environment (N) and the radius of the Wasserstein ball centred on the target (r), which have rarely been considered before. Herein, we can obtain two natural and significant findings: when N increases, 1) the gap between the source and target sampling environments can be gradually mitigated; 2) the target can be better approximated within the Wasserstein ball. These findings prompt us to collect adequate domains against domain shift. For seeking convenience, we design a novel yet simple Extrapolation Domain strategy induced by the Mixup scheme, namely EDM. Through a reverse Mixup scheme to generate the extrapolated domains, combined with the interpolated domains, we expand the interpolation space spanned by the sources, providing more abundant domains to increase sampling intersections to shorten r. Moreover, EDM is easy to implement and be plugged-and-played. In experiments, EDM has been plugged into several methods in both closed and open set settings, achieving up to 5.73% improvement.

Mixup-Induced Domain Extrapolation for Domain Generalization

Clustering is one of the most fundamental tools in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. In this paper, we follow one of the recent mainstream topics of clustering, Sum of Radii (SoR), which naturally arises as a balance between the folklore $k$-center and $k$-median. SoR aims to determine a set of k balls, each centered at a point in a given dataset, such that their union covers the entire dataset, while minimizing sum of radii of k balls. 
We propose a general technical framework to overcome the challenge posed by varying radii in SoR, which yields fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms with respect to k (i.e., algorithms with running time  f(k) n^{O(1)} for some f). 
Our framework is versatile that obtains the following results for SoR as well as its variants in general metrics: a (2+$\varepsilon$)-approximation for SoR with running time $2^{O(k \log (k/\varepsilon))}  n^3 $, which matches the results of (Bandyapadhya, Lochet and Saket SoCG'23) in uncapacitated case; a (3+$\varepsilon$)-approximation for Fair SoR with running time $2^{O(k \log (k/\varepsilon))}  n^3$, which is the first approximation result with a constant approximation ratio for this problem; a (3+$\varepsilon$)-approximation for Matroid SoR with running time $2^{O (k \log (k/\varepsilon))} n^{O(1)}$, which generally improves the FPT 9-approximation of (Inamdar and Varadarajan ESA'20). 
\end{itemize}

Parameterized Approximation Algorithms for Sum of Radii Clustering and Variants | VIDEO

Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to train a unified model from diverse data sources step by step. The severe domain gaps between different training steps result in catastrophic forgetting in LReID, and existing methods mainly rely on data replay and knowledge distillation techniques to handle this issue. However, the former solution needs to store historical exemplars which inevitably impedes data privacy. The existing knowledge distillation-based models usually retain all the knowledge of the learned old models without any selections, which will inevitably include erroneous and detrimental knowledge that severely impacts the learning performance of the new model. To address these issues, we propose an exemplar-free LReID method named Long-Short Term Knowledge Consolidation (LSTKC) that contains a Rectification-based Short-Term Knowledge Transfer module~(R-STKT) and an Estimation-based Long-Term Knowledge Consolidation module~(E-LTKC). For each learning iteration within one training step, R-STKT aims to filter and rectify the erroneous knowledge contained in the old model and transfer the rectified knowledge to facilitate the short-term learning of the new model. Meanwhile, once one training step is finished, E-LTKC proposes to further consolidate the learned long-term knowledge via adaptively fusing the parameters of models from different steps. Consequently, experimental results show that our LSTKC exceeds the state-of-the-art methods by 6.3%/9.4% \& 7.9%/4.5%, 6.4%/8.0% \& 9.0%/5.5% average mAP/R@1 on seen \& unseen domains under two different training orders of the challenging LReID benchmark respectively.

LSTKC: Long Short-Term Knowledge Consolidation for Lifelong Person Re-identification | VIDEO

In recent few years, DeepFakes are posing serve threats and concerns to both individuals and celebrities, as realistic DeepFakes facilitate the spread of disinformation. Model attribution techniques aim at attributing the adopted forgery models of DeepFakes for provenance purposes and providing explainable results to DeepFake forensics. However, the existing model attribution techniques rely on the trace left in the DeepFake creation, which can become futile if such traces were disrupted. Motivated by our observation that certain traces served for model attribution appeared in both the high-frequency and low-frequency domains and play a divergent role in model attribution. In this work, for the first time, we propose a novel \textbf{training-free} evasion attack, {\sf TraceEvader}, in the most practical \textbf{non-box} setting.  Specifically, {\sf TraceEvader} injects a \textbf{universal} imitated traces learned from wild DeepFakes into the high-frequency component and introduces adversarial blur into the domain of the low-frequency component, where the added distortion confuses the extraction of certain traces for model attribution. The comprehensive evaluation on \textbf{4} state-of-the-art (SOTA) model attribution techniques and fake images generated by \textbf{8} generative models including generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models (DMs) demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Overall, our {\sf TraceEvader} achieves the highest average attack success rate of \textbf{79\%} and is robust against image transformations and dedicated denoising techniques as well where the average attack success rate is still around \textbf{75\%}. Our {\sf TraceEvader} confirms the limitations of current model attribution techniques and calls the attention of DeepFake researchers and practitioners for more robust-purpose model attribution techniques.

TraceEvader: Making DeepFakes More Untraceable via Evading the Forgery Model Attribution

Pose diversity is an inherent representative characteristic of 2D images. Due to the 3D to 2D projection mechanism, there is evident content discrepancy among distinct pose images. This is the main obstacle bothering pose transformation related researches. To deal with this challenge, we propose a fine-grained incremental evolution centered pose generation framework, rather than traditional direct one-to-one in a rush. Since proposed approach actually bypasses the theoretical difficulty of directly modeling dramatic non-linear variation, the incurred content distortion and blurring could be effectively constrained, at the same time the various individual pose details, especially clothes texture, could be precisely maintained. In order to systematically guide the evolution course, both global and incremental evolution constraints are elaborately designed and merged into the overall framework. And a novel triple-path knowledge fusion structure is worked out to take full advantage of all available valuable knowledge to conduct high-quality pose synthesis. In addition, our framework could generate a series of valuable by-products, namely the various intermediate poses. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofei-CN/Incremental-Evolution-Pose-Generation.

Direct May Not Be the Best: An Incremental Evolution View of Pose Generation

Deep incremental hashing has become a subject of considerable interest due to its capability to learn hash codes in an incremental manner, eliminating the need to generate codes for classes that have already been learned. However, accommodating more classes requires longer hash codes, and regenerating database codes becomes inevitable when code expansion is required.
In this paper, we present a unified deep hash framework that can simultaneously learn new classes and increase hash code capacity. Specifically, we design a triple-channel asymmetric framework to optimize a new CNN model with a target code length and a code projection matrix. This enables us to directly generate hash codes for new images, and efficiently generate expanded hash codes for original database images from the old ones with the learned projection matrix.
Meanwhile, we propose a pairwise-label-based incremental similarity-preserving loss to optimize the new CNN model, which can incrementally preserve new similarities while maintaining the old ones. Additionally, we design a double-end quantization loss to reduce the quantization error from new and original query images. As a result, our method efficiently embeds both new and original similarities into the expanded hash codes, while keeping the original database codes unchanged.
We conduct extensive experiments on three widely-used image retrieval benchmarks, demonstrating that our method can significantly reduce the time required to expand existing database codes, while maintaining state-of-the-art retrieval performance.

Pairwise-Label-Based Deep Incremental Hashing with Simultaneous Code Expansion

Accurate segmentation of prostate tumors from multi-modal magnetic resonance (MR) images is crucial for diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer. However, the robustness of existing segmentation methods is limited, mainly because these methods 1) fail to adaptively assess subject-specific information of each MR modality for accurate tumor delineation, and 2) lack effective utilization of inter-slice information across thick slices in MR images to segment tumor as a whole 3D volume. In this work, we propose a two-stage neighbor-aware multi-modal adaptive learning network (NaMa) for accurate prostate tumor segmentation from multi-modal anisotropic MR images. In particular, in the first stage, we apply subject-specific multi-modal fusion in each slice by developing a novel modality-informativeness adaptive learning (MIAL) module for selecting and adaptively fusing informative representation of each modality based on inter-modality correlations. In the second stage, we exploit inter-slice feature correlations to derive volumetric tumor segmentation. Specifically, we first use a Unet variant with sequence layers to coarsely capture slice relationship at a global scale, and further generate an activation map for each slice. Then, we introduce an activation mapping guidance (AMG) module to refine slice-wise representation (via information from adjacent slices) for consistent tumor segmentation across neighboring slices. Besides, during the network training, we further apply a random mask strategy to each MR modality to improve feature representation efficiency. Experiments on both in-house and public (PICAI) multi-modal prostate tumor datasets show that our proposed NaMa performs better than state-of-the-art methods.

NaMa: Neighbor-Aware Multi-Modal Adaptive Learning for Prostate Tumor Segmentation on Anisotropic MR Images

Adversarial training (AT) is an effective defense method against gradient-based attacks to enhance the robustness of neural networks. Among them, single-step AT has emerged as a hotspot topic due to its simplicity and efficiency, requiring only one gradient propagation in generating adversarial examples. Nonetheless, the problem of catastrophic overfitting (CO) that causes training collapse remains poorly understood, and there exists a gap between the robust accuracy achieved through single- and multi-step AT. In this paper, we present a surprising finding that the taxonomy of adversarial examples reveals the truth of CO. Based on this conclusion, we propose taxonomy driven fast adversarial training (TDAT) which jointly optimizes learning objective, loss function, and initialization method, thereby can be regarded as a new paradigm of single-step AT. Compared with other fast AT methods, TDAT can boost the robustness of neural networks, alleviate the influence of misclassified examples, and prevent CO during the training process while requiring almost no additional computational and memory resources. Our method achieves robust accuracy improvement of $1.59\%$, $1.62\%$, $0.71\%$, and $1.26\%$ on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet-100 datasets, when against projected gradient descent (PGD)-10 attack with perturbation budget 8/255. Furthermore, our proposed method also achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy against other attacks.

Cautiously-Optimistic Knowledge Sharing for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

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