AAAI 2024 Papers

Infants see a selective view of the world: they see some objects with high frequency and from a wide range of viewpoints (e.g., their toys during playing) while a much larger set of objects are seen much more rarely and from limited viewpoints (e.g., objects they see outdoors). Extensive, repeated visual experiences with a small number of objects during infancy plays a big role in the development of human visual skills. Internet-style datasets that are commonly used in computer vision research do not contain the regularities that result from such repeated, structured experiences with a few objects. This has led to a dearth of models that learn by exploiting these regularities. In my PhD dissertation, I use deep learning models to investigate how regularities in an infant's visual experience can be leveraged for visual representation learning.

In the hydrology field, time series forecasting is crucial for efficient water resource management, improving flood and drought control and increasing the safety and quality of life for the general population. However, predicting long-term streamflow is a complex task due to the presence of extreme events. It requires the capture of long-range dependencies and the modeling of rare but important extreme values. Existing approaches often struggle to tackle these dual challenges simultaneously. In this paper, we specifically delve into these issues and propose Distance-weighted Auto-regularized Neural network (DAN), a novel extreme-adaptive model for long-range forecasting of stremflow enhanced by polar representation learning. DAN utilizes a distance-weighted multi-loss mechanism and stackable blocks to dynamically refine indicator sequences from exogenous data, while also being able to handle uni-variate time-series by employing Gaussian Mixture probability modeling to improve robustness to severe events. We also introduce Kruskal-Wallis sampling and gate control vectors to handle imbalanced extreme data. On four real-life hydrologic streamflow datasets, we demonstrate that DAN significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art hydrologic time series prediction methods and general methods designed for long-term time series prediction.

Contrastive learning has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for high-level vision tasks, which, by introducing properly negative samples, has also been exploited for low-level vision tasks to achieve a compact optimization space to account for their ill-posed nature. However, existing methods rely on manually predefined and task-oriented negatives, which often exhibit pronounced task-specific biases. To address this challenge, our paper introduces an innovative method termed 'learning from history', which dynamically generates negative samples from the target model itself. Our approach, named Model Contrastive Learning for Image Restoration (MCLIR), rejuvenates latency models as negative models, making it compatible with diverse image restoration tasks. We propose the Self-Prior guided Negative loss (SPN) to enable it. This approach significantly enhances existing models when retrained with the proposed model contrastive paradigm. The results show significant improvements in image restoration across various tasks and architectures. For example, models retrained with SPN outperform the original FFANet and DehazeFormer by 3.41 and 0.57 dB on the RESIDE indoor dataset for image dehazing. Similarly, they achieve notable improvements of 0.47 dB on SPA-Data over IDT for image deraining and 0.12 dB on Manga109 for a 4x scale super-resolution over lightweight SwinIR, respectively. Code and retrained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/MCLIR.

Existing methods aligning language models with various human needs are reliant heavily on high-quality and task-specific data. However, industrial deployment of task-specific language models often encounter challenges in the availability of appropriate training samples. Taking meeting summarization for instance, public datasets are scarce, and private corpora are also hard to obtain due to privacy issues or resource-demanding annotation. To improve meeting summarization in the absence of positively-rated (i.e., ``good'') samples, we propose Score Tuning, a cold start tuning framework that leverages bad samples of distinguishable degrees to incrementally enhance the performance of summary generation without an initial presence of good samples. Our method utilizes asynchronous and numerical human feedback that measure the quality of generated summaries. Formulating data into triplets of (transcript, summary, score), our approach instructs a pre-trained model to learn the association between summary qualities and human-rated scores and hence to generate better summaries corresponding to higher scores. The experiment results show that our method is effective in improving meeting summarization on both English and Chinese corpora while requiring less annotated data and training resources compared to existing alignment methods. Additionally, we also preliminarily explore the transferability of our approach in machine translation tasks and demonstrate its potential for future development and usage in other domains.

Our work aims at efficiently leveraging ambiguous demonstrations for the training of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent. An ambiguous demonstration can usually be interpreted in multiple ways, which severely hinders the RL agent from learning stably and efficiently. Since an optimal demonstration may also suffer from being ambiguous, previous works that combine RL and learning from demonstration (RLfD works) may not work well. Inspired by how humans handle such situations, we propose to use self-explanation (an agent generates explanations for itself) to recognize valuable high-level relational features as an interpretation of why a successful trajectory is successful. This way, the agent can leverage the explained important relations as guidance for its RL learning. Our main contribution is to propose the Self-Explanation for RL from Demonstrations (SERLfD) framework, which can overcome the limitations of existing RLfD works. Our experimental results show that an RLfD model can be improved by using our SERLfD framework in terms of training stability and performance. To foster further research in self-explanation-guided robot learning, we have made our demonstrations and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/YantianZha/SERLfD. For a deeper understanding of our work, interested readers can refer to our arXiv version at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.05286.pdf, including an accompanying appendix.

Detecting OOD inputs is crucial to deploy machine learning models to the real world safely. However, existing OOD detection methods require an in-distribution (ID) dataset to retrain the models. In this paper, we propose a Deep Generative Models (DGMs) based transferable OOD detection that does not require retraining on the new ID dataset. We first establish and substantiate two hypotheses on DGMs: DGMs exhibit a predisposition towards acquiring low-level features, in preference to semantic information; the lower bound of DGM's log-likelihoods is tied to the conditional entropy between the model input and target output. Drawing on the aforementioned hypotheses, we present an innovative image-erasing strategy, which is designed to create distinct conditional entropy distributions for each individual ID dataset. By training a DGM on a complex dataset with the proposed image-erasing strategy, the DGM could capture the discrepancy of conditional entropy distribution for varying ID datasets, without re-training. We validate the proposed method on the five datasets and show that, without retraining, our method achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art group-based OOD detection methods. The project codes will be open-sourced on our project website.

Visual abstract reasoning tasks present challenges for deep neural networks, exposing limitations in their capabilities. In this work, we present a neural network model that addresses the challenges posed by Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM). Inspired by the two-stream hypothesis of visual processing, we introduce the Dual-stream Reasoning Network (DRNet), which utilizes two parallel branches to capture image features. On top of the two streams, a reasoning module first learns to merge the high-level features of the same image. Then, it employs a rule extractor to handle combinations involving the eight context images and each candidate image, extracting discrete abstract rules and utilizing an multilayer perceptron (MLP) to make predictions. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed DRNet achieves state-of-the-art average performance across multiple RPM benchmarks. Furthermore, DRNet demonstrates robust generalization capabilities, even extending to various out-of-distribution scenarios. The dual streams within DRNet serve distinct functions by addressing local or spatial information. They are then integrated into the reasoning module, leveraging abstract rules to facilitate the execution of visual reasoning tasks. These findings indicate that the dual-stream architecture could play a crucial role in visual abstract reasoning.

In reinforcement learning, temporal abstraction in the action space, exemplified by action repetition, is a technique to facilitate policy learning through extended actions. However, a primary limitation in previous studies of action repetition is its potential to degrade performance, particularly when sub-optimal actions are repeated. This issue often negates the advantages of action repetition. To address this, we propose a novel algorithm named Uncertainty-aware Temporal Extension (UTE). UTE employs ensemble methods to accurately measure uncertainty during action extension. This feature allows policies to strategically choose between emphasizing exploration or adopting an uncertainty-averse approach, tailored to their specific needs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UTE through experiments in Gridworld and Atari 2600 environments. Our findings show that UTE outperforms existing action repetition algorithms, effectively mitigating their inherent limitations and significantly enhancing policy learning efficiency.

Optimal transport provides a metric which quantifies the dissimilarity between probability measures. For measures supported in discrete metric spaces, finding the optimal transport distance has cubic time complexity in the size of the space. However, measures supported on trees admit a closed-form optimal transport that can be computed in linear time. In this paper, we aim to find an optimal tree structure for a given discrete metric space so that the tree-Wasserstein distance approximates the optimal transport distance in the original space. One of our key ideas is to cast the problem in ultrametric spaces. This helps us optimize over the space of ultrametric trees --- a mixed-discrete and continuous optimization problem --- via projected gradient decent over the space of ultrametric matrices. During optimization, we project the parameters to the ultrametric space via a hierarchical minimum spanning tree algorithm, equivalent to the closest projection to ultrametrics under the supremum norm. Experimental results on real datasets show that our approach outperforms previous approaches (e.g. Flowtree, Quadtree) in approximating optimal transport distances. Finally, experiments on synthetic data generated on ground truth trees show that our algorithm can accurately uncover the underlying trees.

Next Point-of-Interests (POIs) recommendation task aims to provide a dynamic ranking of POIs based on users' current check-in trajectories. The recommendation performance of this task is contingent upon a comprehensive understanding of users' personalized behavioral patterns through Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) data. While prior studies have adeptly captured sequential patterns and transitional relationships within users' check-in trajectories, a noticeable gap persists in devising a mechanism for discerning specialized behavioral patterns during distinct time slots, such as noon, afternoon, or evening. In this paper, we introduce an innovative data structure termed the ``Mobility Tree'', tailored for hierarchically describing users' check-in records. The Mobility Tree encompasses multi-granularity time slot nodes to learn user preferences across varying temporal periods. Meanwhile, we propose the Mobility Tree Network (MTNet), a multitask framework for personalized preference learning based on Mobility Trees. We develop a four-step node interaction operation to propagate feature information from the leaf nodes to the root node. Additionally, we adopt a multitask training strategy to push the model towards learning a robust representation. The comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MTNet over eleven state-of-the-art next POI recommendation models across three real-world LBSN datasets, substantiating the efficacy of time slot preference learning facilitated by Mobility Tree.

The audio spectrogram is a time-frequency representation that has been widely used for audio classification. One of the key attributes of the audio spectrogram is the temporal resolution, which depends on the hop size used in the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT). Previous works generally assume the hop size should be a constant value (e.g., 10 ms). However, a fixed temporal resolution is not always optimal for different types of sound. The temporal resolution affects not only classification accuracy but also computational cost. This paper proposes a novel method, DiffRes, that enables differentiable temporal resolution modeling for audio classification. Given a spectrogram calculated with a fixed hop size, DiffRes merges non-essential time frames while preserving important frames. DiffRes acts as a "drop-in" module between an audio spectrogram and a classifier and can be jointly optimized with the classification task. We evaluate DiffRes on five audio classification tasks, using mel-spectrograms as the acoustic features, followed by off-the-shelf classifier backbones. Compared with previous methods using the fixed temporal resolution, the DiffRes-based method can achieve the equivalent or better classification accuracy with at least 25% computational cost reduction. We further show that DiffRes can improve classification accuracy by increasing the temporal resolution of input acoustic features, without adding to the computational cost.

Class-incremental object detection (CIOD) is a real-world desired capability, requiring an object detector to continuously adapt to new tasks without forgetting learned ones, with the main challenge being catastrophic forgetting. Many methods based on distillation and replay have been proposed to alleviate this problem. However, they typically learn on a pure visual backbone, neglecting the powerful representation capabilities of textual cues, which to some extent limits their performance. In this paper, we propose task-aware language-image representation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, introducing a new paradigm for language-image-based CIOD. First of all, we demonstrate the significant advantage of language-image detectors in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Secondly, we propose a learning task-aware language-image representation method that overcomes the existing drawback of directly utilizing the language-image detector for CIOD. More specifically, we learn the language-image representation of different tasks through an insulating approach in the training stage, while using the alignment scores produced by task-specific language-image representation in the inference stage. Through our proposed method, language-image detectors can be more practical for CIOD. We conduct extensive experiments on COCO 2017 and Pascal VOC 2007 and demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results under the various CIOD settings.

How to frame (or crop) a photo often depends on the image subject and its context; e.g., a human portrait. Recent works have defined the subject-aware image cropping task as a nuanced and practical version of image cropping. We propose a weakly-supervised approach (GenCrop) to learn what makes a high-quality, subject-aware crop from professional stock images. Unlike supervised prior work, GenCrop requires no new manual annotations beyond the existing stock image collection. The key challenge in learning from this data, however, is that the images are already cropped and we do not know what regions were removed. Our insight is to combine a library of stock images with a modern, pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. The stock image collection provides diversity, and its images serve as pseudo-labels for a good crop. The text-image diffusion model is used to out-paint (i.e., outward inpainting) realistic uncropped images. Using this procedure, we are able to automatically generate a large dataset of cropped-uncropped training pairs to train a cropping model. Despite being weakly-supervised, GenCrop is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised methods and significantly better than comparable weakly-supervised baselines on quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.

Existing approaches to Implicit Neural Representation (INR) can be interpreted as a global scene representation via a linear combination of Fourier bases of different frequencies. However, such universal basis functions can limit the representation capability in local regions where a specific component is unnecessary, resulting in unpleasant artifacts. To this end, we introduce a learnable spatial mask that effectively dispatches distinct Fourier bases into respective regions. This translates into collaging Fourier patches, thus enabling an accurate representation of complex signals. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior reconstruction quality of the proposed approach over existing baselines across various INR tasks, including image fitting, video representation, and 3D shape representation. Our method outperforms all other baselines, improving the image fitting PSNR by over 3dB and 3D reconstruction to 98.81 IoU and 0.0011 Chamfer Distance.

Decision trees is a fundamental tool in machine learning for representing, classifying, and generalizing data. It is desirable to construct ``small'' decision trees, by minimizing either the size (s) or the depth (d) of the decision tree (DT). Recently, the parameterized complexity of Decision Tree Learning has attracted a lot of attention. We consider a generalization of Decision Tree Learning where given a classification instance E and an integer t, the task is to find a ``small'' DT that disagrees with E in at most t examples. We consider two problems: DTSO and DTDO, where the goal is to construct a DT minimizing s and d, respectively. We first establish that both DTSO and DTDO are W[1]-hard when parameterized by s+y and d+y, respectively, where y is the maximum number of features in which two differently labeled examples can differ. We complement this result by showing that these problems become FPT if we include the parameter t. We also consider the kernelization complexity of these problems and establish several positive and negative results for both DTSO and DTDO.

We consider the NP-hard problem of finding a smallest decision tree representing a classification instance in terms of a partially defined Boolean function. Small decision trees are desirable to provide an interpretable model for the given data. We show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the rank-width of the incidence graph of the given classification instance. Our algorithm proceeds by dynamic programming using an NLC decomposition obtained from a rank-width decomposition. The key to the algorithm is a succinct representation of partial solutions. This allows us to limit the space and time requirements for each dynamic programming step in terms of the parameter.

A common approach for solving planning problems is to model them in a formal language such as the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), and then use an appropriate PDDL planner. Several algorithms for learning PDDL models from observations have been proposed but plans created with these learned models may not be sound. We propose two algorithms for learning PDDL models that are guaranteed to be safe to use even when given observations that include partially observable states. We analyze these algorithms theoretically, characterizing the sample complexity each algorithm requires to guarantee probabilistic completeness. We also show experimentally that our algorithms are often better than FAMA, a state-of-the-art PDDL learning algorithm.

Selective rationalization can be regarded as a straightforward self-explaining approach for enhancing model explainability in natural language processing tasks. It aims to provide explanations that are more accessible and understandable to non-technical users by first selecting subsets of input texts as rationales and then predicting based on chosen subsets. However, existing methods that follow this select-then-predict framework may suffer from the rationalization degeneration problem, resulting in sub-optimal or unsatisfactory rationales that do not align with human judgments. This problem may further lead to rationalization failure, resulting in meaningless rationales that ultimately undermine people's trust in the rationalization model. To address these challenges, we propose a Guidance-based Rationalization method (G-RAT) that effectively improves robustness against failure situations and the quality of rationales by using a guidance module to regularize selections and distributions. Experimental results on two synthetic settings prove that our method is robust to the rationalization degeneration and failure problems, while the results on two real datasets show its effectiveness in providing rationales in line with human judgments. The source code is available at https://github.com/shuaibo919/g-rat.

We use the maximum a posteriori estimation principle for learning representations distributed on the unit sphere. We propose to use the angular Gaussian distribution, which corresponds to a Gaussian projected on the unit-sphere and derive the associated loss function. We also consider the von Mises-Fisher distribution, which is the conditional of a Gaussian in the unit-sphere. The learned representations are pushed toward fixed directions, which are the prior means of the Gaussians; allowing for a learning strategy that is resilient to data drift. This makes it suitable for online continual learning, which is the problem of training neural networks on a continuous data stream, where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially so that data from past tasks are no longer accessible, and data from the current task can be seen only once. To address this challenging scenario, we propose a memory-based representation learning technique equipped with our new loss functions. Our approach does not require negative data or knowledge of task boundaries and performs well with smaller batch sizes while being computationally efficient. We demonstrate with extensive experiments that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on both standard evaluation scenarios and realistic scenarios with blurry task boundaries. For reproducibility, we use the same training pipeline for every compared method and share the code at https://github.com/Nicolas1203/ocl-fd.