AAAI 2021 Papers

Understanding model performance on unlabeled data is a fundamental challenge of developing, deploying, and maintaining AI systems. Model performance is typically evaluated using test sets or periodic manual quality assessments, both of which require laborious manual data labeling. Automated performance prediction techniques aim to mitigate this burden, but potential inaccuracy and a lack of trust in their predictions has prevented their widespread adoption. We address this core problem of performance prediction uncertainty with a method to compute prediction intervals for model performance. Our methodology uses transfer learning to train an uncertainty model to estimate the uncertainty of model performance predictions. We evaluate our approach across a wide range of drift conditions and show substantial improvement over competitive baselines. We believe this result makes prediction intervals, and performance prediction in general, significantly more practical for real-world use.

This work addresses the problem of robustly learning precise temporal point event detection despite only having access to poorly aligned labels for training. While standard (cross entropy-based) methods work well in noise-free setting, they often fail when labels are unreliable since they attempt to strictly fit the annotations. A common solution to this drawback is to transform the point prediction problem into a distribution prediction problem. However, we show that this approach raises several issues that negatively affect the robust learning of temporal localization. Thus, in an attempt to overcome these shortcomings, we introduce a simple and versatile training paradigm combining soft localization learning with counting-based sparsity regularization. In fact, unlike its counterparts, our approach allows to directly infer clear-cut point predictions in an end-to-end fashion while relaxing the reliance of the training on the exact position of labels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance against standard benchmarks in a number of challenging experiments (e.g., detection of instantaneous events in videos and music transcription) by simply replacing the original loss function with our novel alternative---without any additional fine-tuning.

Traditional single image super-resolution (SISR) methods that focus on solving single and uniform degradation (i.e., bicubic down-sampling), typically suffer from poor performance when applied into real-world low-resolution (LR) images due to the complicated realistic degradations. The key to solving this more challenging real image super-resolution (RealSR) problem lies in learning feature representations that are both informative and content-aware. In this paper, we propose a Omni-frequency Region-adaptive Network (OR-Net) to address both challenges, here we call features of all low, middle and high frequencies omni-frequency features. Specifically, we start from the frequency perspective and design a Frequency Decomposition (FD) module to separate different frequency components to comprehensively compensate the information lost for real LR image. Then, considering the different regions of real LR image have different frequency information lost, we further design a Region-adaptive Frequency Aggregation (RFA) module by leveraging dynamic convolution and spatial attention to adaptively restore frequency components for different regions. The extensive experiments endorse the high-efficient, effective, and scenario-agnostic nature of our OR-Net for RealSR.

We present an end-to-end joint training framework that explicitly models 6-DoF motion of multiple dynamic objects, ego-motion, and depth in a monocular camera setup without supervision. Our technical contributions are three-fold. First, we highlight the fundamental difference between inverse and forward projection while modeling the individual motion of each rigid object, and propose a geometrically correct projection pipeline using a neural forward projection module. Second, we design a unified instance-aware photometric and geometric consistency loss that holistically imposes self-supervisory signals for every background and object region. Lastly, we introduce a general-purpose auto-annotation scheme using any off-the-shelf instance segmentation and optical flow models to produce video instance segmentation maps that will be utilized as input to our training pipeline. These proposed elements are validated in a detailed ablation study. Through extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI and Cityscapes dataset, our framework is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art depth and motion estimation methods. Our code, dataset, and models are publicly available.

Popular rotated detection methods usually use five parameters (coordinates of the central point, width, height, and rotation angle) or eight parameters (coordinates of four vertices) to describe the rotated bounding box and l1 loss as the loss function. In this paper, we argue that the aforementioned integration can cause training instability and performance degeneration. The main reason is the discontinuity of loss which is caused by the contradiction between the definition of the rotated bounding box and the loss function. We refer to the above issues as rotation sensitivity error (RSE) and propose a modulated rotation loss to dismiss the discontinuity of loss. The modulated rotation loss can achieve consistent improvement on the five parameter methods and the eight parameter methods. Experimental results using one stage and two stages detectors demonstrate the effectiveness of our loss. The integrated network achieves competitive performances on several benchmarks including DOTA and UCAS AOD. The code is available at https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.

Protecting privacy in gradient-based learning has become increasingly critical as more sensitive information is being used. Many existing solutions seek to protect the sensitive gradients by constraining the overall privacy cost within a constant budget, where the protection is hand-designed and empirically calibrated to boost the utility of the resulting model. However, it remains challenging to choose the proper protection adapted for specific constraints so that the utility is maximized. To this end, we propose a novel Learning-to-Protect algorithm that automatically learns a model-based protector from a set of non-private learning tasks. The learned protector can be applied to private learning tasks to improve utility within the specific privacy budget constraint. Our empirical studies on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve a superior utility with a given privacy constraint and generalize well to new private datasets distributed differently as compared to the hand-designed competitors.

Representation Learning is a significant and challenging task in multimodal learning. Effective modality representations should contain two parts of characteristics: the consistency and the difference. Due to the unified multimodal annota- tion, existing methods are restricted in capturing differenti- ated information. However, additional unimodal annotations are high time- and labor-cost. In this paper, we design a la- bel generation module based on the self-supervised learning strategy to acquire independent unimodal supervisions. Then, joint training the multimodal and uni-modal tasks to learn the consistency and difference, respectively. Moreover, dur- ing the training stage, we design a weight-adjustment strat- egy to balance the learning progress among different sub- tasks. That is to guide the subtasks to focus on samples with the larger difference between modality supervisions. Last, we conduct extensive experiments on three public multimodal baseline datasets. The experimental results validate the re- liability and stability of auto-generated unimodal supervi- sions. On MOSI and MOSEI datasets, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods. On the SIMS dataset, our method achieves comparable performance than human- annotated unimodal labels. The full codes are available at https://github.com/thuiar/Self-MM.

Mesh is a powerful data structure for 3D shapes. Representation learning for 3D meshes is important in many computer vision and graphics applications. The recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for structured data (e.g., images) suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN for 3D shapes. However, 3D shape data are irregular since each node's neighbors are unordered. Various graph neural networks for 3D shapes have been developed with isotropic filters or predefined local coordinate systems to overcome the node inconsistency on graphs. However, isotropic filters or predefined local coordinate systems limit the representation power. In this paper, we propose a local structure-aware anisotropic convolutional operation (LSA-Conv) that learns adaptive weighting matrices for each node according to the local neighboring structure and performs shared anisotropic filters. In fact, the learnable weighting matrix is similar to the attention matrix in random synthesizer -- a new Transformer model for natural language processing (NLP). Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model produces significant improvement in 3D shape reconstruction compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, deep models have shown tremendous improvements in neural machine translation (NMT). However, systems of this kind are computationally expensive and memory intensive. In this paper, we take a natural step towards learning strong but light-weight NMT systems. We proposed a novel group-permutation based knowledge distillation approach to compressing the deep Transformer model into a shallow model. The experimental results on several benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Our compressed model is 8 times shallower than the deep model, with almost no loss in BLEU. To further enhance the teacher model, we present a Skipping Sub-Layer method to randomly omit sub-layers to introduce perturbation into training, which achieves a BLEU score of 30.63 on English-German newstest2014. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/libeineu/GPKD.

Learning invariant representations is a critical first step in a number of machine learning tasks. A common approach is given by the so-called information bottleneck principle in which an application dependent function of mutual information is carefully chosen and optimized. Unfortunately, in practice, these functions are not suitable for optimization purposes since these losses are agnostic of the metric structure of the parameters of the model. In our paper, we introduce a class of losses for learning representations that are invariant to some extraneous variable of interest by inverting the class of contrastive losses, i.e., inverse contrastive loss (ICL). We show that if the extraneous variable is binary, then optimizing ICL is equivalent to optimizing a regularized MMD divergence. More generally, we also show that if we are provided a metric on the sample space, our formulation of ICL can be decomposed into a sum of convex functions of the given distance metric. Our experimental results indicate that models obtained by optimizing ICL achieve significantly better invariance to the extraneous variable for a fixed desired level of accuracy. In a variety of experimental settings, we show applicability of ICL for learning invariant representations for both continuous and discrete protected/extraneous variables. The project page with code is available at https://github.com/adityakumarakash/ICL

Predicting the future interaction of objects when they come into contact with their environment is key for autonomous agents to take intelligent and anticipatory actions. This paper presents a perception framework that fuses visual and tactile feedback to make predictions about the expected motion of objects in dynamic scenes. Visual information captures object properties such as 3D shape and location, while tactile information provides critical cues about interaction forces and resulting object motion when it makes contact with the environment. Utilizing a novel See-Through-your-Skin (STS) sensor that provides high resolution multimodal sensing of contact surfaces, our system captures both the visual appearance and the tactile properties of objects. We interpret the dual stream signals from the sensor using a Multimodal Variational Autoencoder (MVAE), allowing us to capture both modalities of contacting objects and to develop a mapping from visual to tactile interaction and vice-versa. Additionally, the perceptual system can be used to infer the outcome of future physical interactions, which we validate through simulated and real-world experiments in which the resting state of an object is predicted from given initial conditions.

Modeling the behavior of coupled networks is challenging due to their intricate dynamics. For example in neuroscience, it is of critical importance to understand the relationship between the functional neural processes and the anatomical connectivities. Modern neuroimaging techniques allow us to separately measure functional connectivities through fMRI imaging and measure underlying white matter wirings through diffusion imaging. Previous studies have shown that structural edges in brain networks improve the inference of functional edges and vice versa. In this paper, we investigate the idea of coupled networks through an optimization framework by focusing on interactions between structural edges and functional edges of brain networks. We consider both types of edges as observed instances of random variables that represent different underlying network processes. The proposed framework does not depend on the Gaussian functional form and achieves a more robust selection on non-Gaussian data compared with existing approaches. To incorporate existing domain knowledge into such studies, we propose a novel formulation to place hard network constraints on the noise term while estimating interactions. This not only leads to a cleaner way of applying network constraints but also brings a more scalable solution when the network connectivity is sparse. We validate our method on multishell diffusion and task-evoked fMRI datasets from Human Connectome Project, leading to both important insights on structural backbones that support various types of task activities performed during the scanning sessions as well as general solutions to the study of coupled networks.

Few-shot classification aims to categorize the samples from unseen classes with only few labeled samples. To address such a challenge, many methods exploit a base set consisting of massive labeled samples to learn an instance embedding function, i.e., image feature extractor, and it is expected to possess good transferability among different tasks. Such characteristics of few-shot learning are essentially different from that of traditional image classification only pursuing to get discriminative image representations. In this paper, we propose to learn intact features by erasing-inpainting for few-shot classification. Specifically, we argue that extracting intact features of target objects is more transferable, and then propose a novel cross-set erasing-inpainting (CSEI) method. CSEI processes the images in the support set using erasing and inpainting, and then uses them to augment the query set of the same task. Consequently, the feature embedding produced by our proposed method can contain more complete information of target objects. In addition, we propose task-specific feature modulation to make the features adaptive to the current task. The extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks well demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, which can consistently get considerable performance gains for different baseline methods.

Recently, the relationship among individual pedestrian images and the relationship among pairwise pedestrian images have become attractive for person re-identification (re-ID) as they effectively improve the ability of feature representation. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Hybrid Relationship Network (HRNet) to learn the two types of relationships in a unified framework that makes use of their own advantages. Specifically, for the relationship among individual pedestrian images, we take the features of pedestrian images as the nodes to construct a locally-connected graph, so as to improve the discriminative ability of nodes. Meanwhile, we propose the consistent node constraint to inject the identity information into the graph learning process and guide the information to propagate accurately. As for the relationship among pairwise pedestrian images, we treat the feature differences of pedestrian images as the nodes to construct a fully-connected graph so as to estimate robust similarity of nodes. Furthermore, we propose the inter-graph propagation to alleviate the information loss for the fully-connected graph. Extensive experiments on Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, CUHK03 and MSMT17 demonstrate that the proposed HRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

We propose a novel and principled method to learn a nonparametric graph model called graphon, which is defined in an infinite-dimensional space and represents arbitrary-size graphs. Based on the weak regularity lemma from the theory of graphons, we leverage a step function to approximate a graphon. We show that the cut distance of graphons can be relaxed to the Gromov-Wasserstein distance of their step functions. Accordingly, given a set of graphs generated by an underlying graphon, we learn the corresponding step function as the Gromov-Wasserstein barycenter of the given graphs. Furthermore, we develop several enhancements and extensions of the basic algorithm, e.g., the smoothed Gromov-Wasserstein barycenter for guaranteeing the continuity of the learned graphons and the mixed Gromov-Wasserstein barycenters for learning multiple structured graphons. The proposed approach overcomes drawbacks of prior state-of-the-art methods, and outperforms them on both synthetic and real-world data. The code is available at https://github.com/HongtengXu/SGWB-Graphon.

The first provably efficient algorithm for learning graph neural networks (GNNs) with one hidden layer for node information convolution is provided in this paper. Two types of GNNs are investigated, depending on whether labels are attached to nodes or graphs. A comprehensive framework for designing and analyzing convergence of GNN training algorithms is developed. The algorithm proposed is applicable to a wide range of activation functions including ReLU, Leaky ReLU, Sigmod, Softplus and Swish. It is shown that the proposed algorithm guarantees a linear convergence rate to the underlying true parameters of GNNs. For both types of GNNs, sample complexity in terms of the number of nodes or the number of graphs is characterized. The impact of feature dimension and GNN structure on the convergence rate is also theoretically characterized. Numerical experiments are further provided to validate our theoretical analysis.

In 2D image processing, some attempts decompose images into high and low frequency components for describing edge and smooth parts respectively. Similarly, the contour and flat area of 3D objects, such as the boundary and seat area of a chair, describe different but also complementary geometries. However, such investigation is lost in previous deep networks that understand point clouds by directly treating all points or local patches equally. To solve this problem, we propose Geometry-Disentangled Attention Network (GDANet). GDANet introduces Geometry-Disentangle Module to dynamically disentangle point clouds into the contour and flat part of 3D objects, respectively denoted by sharp and gentle variation components. Then GDANet exploits Sharp-Gentle Complementary Attention Module that regards the features from sharp and gentle variation components as two holistic representations, and pays different attentions to them while fusing them respectively with original point cloud features. In this way, our method captures and refines the holistic and complementary 3D geometric semantics from two distinct disentangled components to supplement the local information. Extensive experiments on 3D object classification and segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that GDANet achieves the state-of-the-arts with fewer parameters.

Computing goal-directed behavior is essential to designing efficient AI systems. Due to the computational complexity of planning, current approaches rely primarily upon hand-coded symbolic action models and hand-coded heuristic function generators for efficiency. Learned heuristics for such problems have been of limited utility as they are difficult to apply to problems with objects and object quantities that are significantly different from those in the training data. This paper develops a new approach for learning generalized heuristics in the absence of symbolic action models using deep neural networks that utilize an input predicate vocabulary but are agnostic to object names and quantities. It uses an abstract state representation to facilitate data-efficient, generalizable learning. Empirical evaluation on a range of benchmark domains shows that in contrast to prior approaches, generalized heuristics computed by this method can be transferred easily to problems with different objects and with object quantities much larger than those in the training data.

Generalized planning is concerned with the computation of general policies that solve multiple instances of a planning domain all at once. It has been recently shown that these policies can be computed in two steps: first, a suitable abstraction in the form of a qualitative numerical planning problem (QNP) is learned from sample plans, then the general policies are obtained from the learned QNP using a planner. In this work, we introduce an alternative approach for computing more expressive general policies which does not require sample plans or a QNP planner. The new formulation is very simple and can be cast in terms that are more standard in machine learning: a large but finite pool of features is defined from the predicates in the planning examples using a general grammar, and a small subset of features is sought for separating “good” from “bad” state transitions, and goals from non-goals. The problems of finding such a “separating surface” while labeling the transitions as “good” or “bad” are jointly addressed as a single combinatorial optimization problem expressed as a Weighted Max-SAT problem. The advantage of looking for the simplest policy in the given feature space that solves the given examples, possibly non-optimally, is that many domains have no general, compact policies that are optimal. The approach yields general policies for a number of benchmark domains.