AAAI 2021 Papers

The increasing of pre-trained models has significantly facilitated the performance on limited data tasks with transfer learning. However, progress on transfer learning mainly focuses on optimizing the weights of pre-trained models, which ignores the structure mismatch between the model and the target task. This paper aims to improve the transfer performance from another angle - in addition to tuning the weights, we tune the structure of pre-trained models, in order to better match the target task. To this end, we propose TransTailor, targeting at pruning the pre-trained model for improved transfer learning. Different from traditional pruning pipelines, we prune and fine-tune the pre-trained model according to the target-aware weight importance, generating an optimal sub-model tailored for a specific target task. In this way, we transfer a more suitable sub-structure that can be applied during fine-tuning to benefit the final performance. Extensive experiments on multiple pre-trained models and datasets demonstrate that TransTailor outperforms the traditional pruning methods and achieves competitive or even better performance than other state-of-the-art transfer learning methods while using a smaller model. Notably, on the Stanford Dogs dataset, TransTailor can achieve 2.7% accuracy improvement over other transfer methods with 20% fewer FLOPs.

The fast development of neuromorphic hardwares promotes Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to a thrilling research avenue. Current SNNs, though much efficient, are less effective compared with leading Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) especially in supervised learning tasks. Recent efforts further demonstrate the potential of SNNs in supervised learning by introducing approximated backpropagation (BP) methods. To deal with the non-differentiable spike function in SNNs, these BP methods utilize information from the spatio-temporal domain to adjust the model parameters. With the increasing of time window and network size, the computational complexity of spatio-temporal backpropagation augments dramatically. In this paper, we propose a new backpropagation method for SNNs based on the accumulated spiking flow (ASF), i.e. ASF-BP. In the proposed ASF-BP method, updating parameters does not rely on the spike train of spiking neurons but leverage accumulated inputs and outputs of spiking neurons over the time window, which reduces the BP complexity significantly. We further present an adaptive linear estimation model to approach the dynamic characteristics of spiking neurons statistically. Experimental results demonstrate that with our proposed ASF-BP method, light-weight convolutional SNNs achieve superior performances compared with other spike-based BP methods on both non-neuromorphic (MNIST, CIFAR10) and neuromorphic (CIFAR10-DVS) datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/neural-lab/ASF-BP.

Recently, binary neural network (BNN) based super-resolution (SR) methods have enjoyed initial success in the SR field. However, there is a noticeable performance gap between the binarized model and the full-precision one. Furthermore, the batch normalization (BN) in binary SR networks introduces floating-point calculations, which is unfriendly to low-precision hardwares. Therefore, there is still room for improvement in terms of model performance and efficiency. Focusing on this issue, in this paper, we first explore a novel binary training mechanism based on the feature distribution, allowing us to replace all BN layers with a simple training method. Then, we construct a strong baseline by combining the highlights of recent binarization methods, which already surpasses the state-of-the-arts. Next, to train highly accurate binarized SR model, we also develop a lightweight network architecture and a multi-stage knowledge distillation strategy to enhance the model representation ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method not only presents advantages of lower computation as compared to conventional floating-point networks but outperforms the state-of-the-art binary methods on the standard SR networks.

This paper presents a simple unsupervised visual representation learning method with a pretext task of discriminating all images in a dataset using a parametric, instance-level classifier. The overall framework is a replica of a supervised classification model, where semantic classes (e.g., dog, bird, and ship) are replaced by instance IDs. However, scaling up the classification task from thousands of semantic labels to millions of instance labels brings specific challenges including 1) the large-scale softmax computation; 2) the slow convergence due to the infrequent visiting of instance samples; and 3) the massive number of negative classes that can be noisy. This work presents several novel techniques to handle these difficulties. First, we introduce a hybrid parallel training framework to make large-scale training feasible. Second, we present a raw-feature initialization mechanism for classification weights, which we assume offers a contrastive prior for instance discrimination and can clearly speed up converge in our experiments. Finally, we propose to smooth the labels of a few hardest classes to avoid optimizing over very similar negative pairs. While being conceptually simple, our framework achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches, i.e., SimCLR, MoCoV2, and PIC under ImageNet linear evaluation protocol and on several downstream visual tasks, verifying that full instance classification is a strong pretraining technique for many semantic visual tasks.

The e-commercial search engine is the primary gateway for customers to find desired products and engage in online shopping. Besides displaying items to optimize for a single objective (i.e., relevance), ranking items needs to satisfy some other business requirements in practice. Recently, traffic shaping was introduced to incorporate multiple objectives in a constrained optimization framework. However, many practical business requirements can not explicitly represented by linear constraints as in the existing work, and this may limit the scalablity of their framework. This paper presents a unified framework from the aspect of multi-objective welfare maximization where we regard all business requirements as objectives to optimize. Our framework can naturally incorporate a wide range of application-driven requirements. In addition to formulating the problem, we design an online traffic splitting algorithm that allows us to flexibly adjust the priorities of different objectives, and it has rigorous theoretical guarantees over the adversarial scenario. We also run experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate our algorithms.

This paper proposes a spatiotemporal deep learning framework, Trajectory-based Graph Neural Network (TrGNN), that mines the underlying causality of flows from historical vehicle trajectories and incorporates that into road traffic prediction. The vehicle trajectory transition patterns are studied to explicitly model the spatial traffic demand via graph propagation along the road network; an attention mechanism is designed to learn the temporal dependencies based on neighborhood traffic status; and finally, a fusion of multi-step prediction is integrated into the graph neural network design. The proposed approach is evaluated with a real-world trajectory dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed TrGNN model achieves over 5% error reduction when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches across all metrics for normal traffic, and up to 14% for atypical traffic during peak hours or abnormal events. The advantage of trajectory transitions especially manifest itself in inferring high fluctuation of flows as well as non-recurrent flow patterns.

The task of multi-turn text-to-SQL semantic parsing aims to translate natural language utterances in an interaction into SQL queries in order to answer them using a database which normally contains multiple table schemas. Previous studies on this task usually utilized contextual information to enrich utterance representations and to further influence the decoding process. While they ignored to describe and track the interaction states which are determined by history SQL queries and are related with the intent of current utterance. In this paper, two kinds of interaction states are defined based on schema items and SQL keywords separately. A relational graph neural network and a non-linear layer are designed to update the representations of these two states respectively. The dynamic schema-state and SQL-state representations are then utilized to decode the SQL query corresponding to current utterance. Experimental results on the challenging CoSQL dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves better performance than other published methods on the task leaderboard.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides new motivation for a classic problem in epidemiology: estimating the empirical rate of transmission during an outbreak (formally, the time-varying reproduction number) from case counts. While standard methods exist, they work best at coarse-grained national or state scales with abundant data, and struggle to accommodate the partial observability and sparse data common at finer scales (e.g., individual schools or towns). For example, case counts may be sparse when only a small fraction of infections are caught by a testing program. Or, whether an infected individual tests positive may depend on the kind of test and the point in time when they are tested. We propose a Bayesian framework which accommodates partial observability in a principled manner. Our model places a Gaussian process prior over the unknown reproduction number at each time step and models observations sampled from the distribution of a specific testing program. For example, our framework can accommodate a variety of kinds of tests (viral RNA, antibody, antigen, etc.) and sampling schemes (e.g., longitudinal or cross-sectional screening). Inference in this framework is complicated by the presence of tens or hundreds of thousands of discrete latent variables. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient stochastic variational inference method which relies on a novel gradient estimator for the variational objective. Experimental results for an example motivated by COVID-19 show that our method produces an accurate and well-calibrated posterior, while standard methods for estimating the reproduction number can fail badly.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant progress in both abstract and real-world domains, but the majority of state-of-the-art algorithms deal only with monotonic actions. However, some applications require agents to reason over different types of actions. Our application simulates reaction-based molecule generation, used as part of the drug discovery pipeline, and includes both uni-molecular and bi-molecular reactions. This paper introduces a novel framework, towered actor critic (TAC), to handle multiple action types. The TAC framework is general in that it is designed to be combined with any existing RL algorithms for continuous action space. We combine it with TD3 to empirically obtain significantly better results than existing methods in the drug discovery setting. TAC is also applied to RL benchmarks in OpenAI Gym and results show that our framework can improve, or at least does not hurt, performance relative to standard TD3.

We address the black-box issue of VR sickness assessment (VRSA) by evaluating the level of physical symptoms of VR sickness. For the VR contents inducing the similar VR sickness level, the physical symptoms can vary depending on the characteristics of the contents. Most of existing VRSA methods focused on assessing the overall VR sickness score. To make better understanding of VR sickness, it is required to predict and provide the level of major symptoms of VR sickness rather than overall degree of VR sickness. In this paper, we predict the degrees of main physical symptoms affecting the overall degree of VR sickness, which are disorientation, nausea, and oculomotor. In addition, we introduce a new large-scale dataset for VRSA including 360 videos with various frame rates, physiological signals, and subjective scores. On VRSA benchmark and our newly collected dataset, our approach shows a potential to not only achieve the highest correlation with subjective scores, but also to better understand which symptoms are the main causes of VR sickness.

Recent studies show that small perturbations in video frames could misguide single object trackers. However, such attacks have been mainly designed for digital-domain videos (i.e., perturbation on full images), which makes them practically infeasible to evaluate the adversarial vulnerability of trackers in real-world scenarios. Here we made the first step towards physically feasible adversarial attacks against visual tracking in real scenes with a universal patch to camouflage single object trackers. Fundamentally different from physical object detection, the essence of single object tracking lies in the feature matching between the search image and templates, and we therefore specially design the maximum textural discrepancy (MTD), a resolution-invariant and target location-independent feature de-matching loss. The MTD distills global textural information of the template and search images at hierarchical feature scales prior to performing feature attacks. Moreover, we evaluate two shape attacks, the regression dilation and shrinking, to generate stronger and more controllable attacks. Further, we employ a set of transformations to simulate diverse visual tracking scenes in the wild. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the physically feasible attacks on SiamMask and SiamRPN++ visual trackers both in digital and physical scenes.

To facilitate a wide-spread acceptance of AI systems guiding decision making in real-world applications, trustworthiness of deployed models is key. That is, it is crucial for predictive models to be uncertainty-aware and yield well-calibrated (and thus trustworthy) predictions for both in-domain samples as well as under domain shift. Recent efforts to account for predictive uncertainty include post-processing steps for trained neural networks, Bayesian neural networks as well as alternative non-Bayesian approaches such as ensemble approaches and evidential deep learning. Here, we propose an efficient yet general modelling approach for obtaining well-calibrated, trustworthy probabilities for samples obtained after a domain shift. We introduce a new training strategy combining an entropy-encouraging loss term with an adversarial calibration loss term and demonstrate that this results in well-calibrated and technically trustworthy predictions for a wide range of domain drifts. We comprehensively evaluate previously proposed approaches on different data modalities, a large range of data sets including sequence data, network architectures and perturbation strategies. We observe that our modelling approach substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, yielding well-calibrated predictions under domain drift.

Slides are commonly used to present information and tell stories. In academic and research communities, slides are typically used to summarize findings in accepted papers for presentation in meetings and conferences. These slides for academic papers usually contain common and essential topics such as major contributions, model design, experiment details and future work. In this paper, we aim to automatically generate slides for academic papers. We first conducted an in-depth analysis of how humans create slides. We then mined frequently used slide topics. Given a topic, our approach extracts relevant sentences in the paper to provide the draft slides. Due to the lack of labeling data, we integrate prior knowledge of ground truth sentences into a log-linear model to create an initial pseudo-target distribution. Two sentence extractors are learned collaboratively and bootstrap the performance of each other. Evaluation results on a labeled test set show that our model can extract more relevant sentences than baseline methods. Human evaluation also shows slides generated by our model can serve as a good basis for preparing the final presentations.

Self-supervised pre-training techniques, albeit relying on large amounts of text, have enabled rapid growth in learning language representations for natural language understanding. However, as radically empirical models on sentences, they are subject to the input data distribution, inevitably incorporating data bias and reporting bias, which may lead to inaccurate understanding of sentences. To address this problem, we propose to adopt a human learner's approach: when we cannot make sense of a word in a sentence, we often consult the dictionary for specific meanings; but can the same work for empirical models? In this work, we try to inform the pre-trained masked language models of word meanings for semantics-enhanced pre-training. To achieve a contrastive and holistic view of word meanings, a definition pair of two related words is presented to the masked language model such that the model can better associate a word with its crucial semantic features. Both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations validate the proposed approach on semantics-orientated tasks, with an almost negligible increase of training data.

Visual Information Extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust Visual Information Extraction System (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is an unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (https://github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.

This paper proposes to make a first step towards compatible and hence reusable network components. Rather than training networks for different tasks independently, we adapt the training process to produce network components that are compatible across tasks. In particular, we split a network into two components, a features extractor and a target task head, and propose various approaches to accomplish compatibility between them. We systematically analyse these approaches on the task of image classification on standard datasets. We demonstrate that we can produce components which are directly compatible without any fine-tuning or compromising accuracy on the original tasks. Afterwards, we demonstrate the use of compatible components on three applications: Unsupervised domain adaptation, transferring classifiers across feature extractors with different architectures, and increasing the computational efficiency of transfer learning.

Dominance breaking is shown to be an effective technique to improve the solving speed of Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs). The paper proposes separate techniques to generalize and make more efficient the nogood generation phase of an automated dominance breaking framework by Lee and Zhong's. The first contribution is in giving conditions that allow skipping the checking of non-efficiently checkable constraints and yet still produce sufficient useful nogoods, thus opening up possibilities to apply the technique on COPs that were previously impractical. The second contribution identifies and avoids the generation of dominance breaking nogoods that are both logically and propagation redundant. The nogood generation model is strengthened using the notion of Common Assignment Elimination to avoid generation of nogoods that are subsumed by other nogoods, thus reducing the search space substantially. Extensive experimentation confirms the benefits of the new proposals.

Wasserstein GANs (WGANs), built upon the Kantorovich-Rubinstein (KR) duality of Wasserstein distance, is one of the most theoretically sound GAN models. However, in practice it does not always outperform other variants of GANs. This is mostly due to the imperfect implementation of the Lipschitz condition required by the KR duality. Extensive work has been done in the community with different implementations of the Lipschitz constraint, which, however, is still hard to satisfy the restriction perfectly in practice. In this paper, we argue that the strong Lipschitz constraint might be unnecessary for optimization. Instead, we take a step back and try to relax the Lipschitz constraint. Theoretically, we first demonstrate a more general dual form of the Wasserstein distance called the Sobolev duality, which relaxes the Lipschitz constraint but still maintains the favorable gradient property of the Wasserstein distance. Moreover, we show that the KR duality is actually a special case of the Sobolev duality. Based on the relaxed duality, we further propose a generalized WGAN training scheme named Sobolev Wasserstein GAN, and empirically demonstrate the improvement over existing methods with extensive experiments.

We tackle the problem of machine translation of manga, Japanese comics. Manga translation involves two important problems in machine translation: context-aware and multimodal translation. Since text and images are mixed up in an unstructured fashion in Manga, obtaining context from the image is essential for manga translation. However, it is still an open problem how to extract context from image and integrate into MT models. In addition, corpus and benchmarks to train and evaluate such model is currently unavailable. In this paper, we make the following four contributions that establishes the foundation of manga translation research. First, we propose multimodal context-aware translation framework. We are the first to incorporate context information obtained from manga image. It enables us to translate texts in speech bubbles that cannot be translated without using context information (e.g., texts in other speech bubbles, gender of speakers, etc.). Second, for training the model, we propose the approach to automatic corpus construction from pairs of original manga and their translations, by which large parallel corpus can be constructed without any manual labeling. Third, we created a new benchmark to evaluate manga translation. Finally, on top of our proposed methods, we devised a first compleheisive system for fully automated manga translation.