AAAI 2024 论文列表

The prompt-based method has been proven effective in improving the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on sentence-level few-shot tasks. However, when applying prompting to token-level tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), specific templates need to be designed, and all possible segments of the input text need to be enumerated. These methods have high computational complexity in both training and inference processes, making them difficult to apply in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we redefine the NER task as a Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task and incorporate prompting into the MRC framework. Specifically, we sequentially insert boundary markers for various entity types into the templates and use these markers as anchors during the inference process to differentiate entity types. In contrast to the traditional multi-turn question-answering extraction in the MRC framework, our method can extract all spans of entity types in one round. Furthermore, we propose word-based template and example-based template that enhance the MRC framework's perception of entity start and end positions while significantly reducing the manual effort required for template design. It is worth noting that in cross-domain scenarios, PMRC does not require redesigning the model architecture and can continue training by simply replacing the templates to recognize entity types in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in low-resource settings, achieving an average performance improvement of +5.2% in settings where access to source domain data is limited. Particularly, on the ATIS dataset with a large number of entity types and 10-shot setting, PMRC achieves a performance improvement of +15.7%. Moreover, our method achieves a decoding speed 40.56 times faster than the template-based cloze-style approach.

Model editing techniques modify a minor proportion of knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) at a relatively low cost, which have demonstrated notable success. Existing methods assume Transformer Layer (TL) hidden states are values of key-value memories of the Feed-Forward Network (FFN). They usually optimize the TL hidden states to memorize target knowledge and use it to update the weights of the FFN in LLMs. However, the information flow of TL hidden states comes from three parts: Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), FFN, and residual connections. Existing methods neglect the fact that the TL hidden states contains information not specifically required for FFN. Consequently, the performance of model editing decreases. To achieve more precise model editing, we analyze hidden states of MHSA and FFN, finding that MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns. This implies that MHSA weights do not require updating when new knowledge is introduced. Based on above findings, we introduce PMET, which simultaneously optimizes Transformer Component (TC, namely MHSA and FFN) hidden states, while only using the optimized TC hidden states of FFN to precisely update FFN weights. Our experiments demonstrate that PMET exhibits state-of-the-art performance on both the \textsc{counterfact} and zsRE datasets. Our ablation experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our enhancements, further reinforcing the finding that the MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns and indicating its storage of a small amount of factual knowledge. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/xpq-tech/PMET}.

Communication plays a crucial role in information sharing within the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, how to transmit information that meets individual needs remains a long-standing challenge. Some existing work focus on using a common channel for information transfer, which limits the capability for local communication. Meanwhile, other work attempt to establish peer-to-peer communication topologies but suffer from quadratic complexity. In this paper, we propose Personalized Multi-Agent Communication (PMAC), which enables the formation of peer-to-peer communication topologies, personalized message sending, and personalized message receiving. All these modules in PMAC are performed using only multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) with linear computational complexity. Empirically, we show the strength of personalized communication in a variety of cooperative scenarios. Our approach exhibits competitive performance compared to existing methods while maintaining notable computational efficiency.

Recent advancements in implicit neural representations have contributed to high-fidelity surface reconstruction and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, with the expansion of the scene scale, such as block or city level, existing methods will encounter challenges because traditional sampling cannot cope with the cubically growing sampling space. To alleviate the dependence on filling the sampling space, we explore using multi-modal priors to assist individual points to obtain more global semantic information and propose a priorrich multi-modal implicit neural representation network, Pm-INR, for the outdoor unbounded large-scale scene. The core of our method is multi-modal prior extraction and crossmodal prior fusion modules. The former encodes codebooks from different modality inputs and extracts valuable priors, while the latter fuses priors to maintain view consistency and preserve unique features among multi-modal priors. Finally, feature-rich cross-modal priors are injected into the sampling regions to allow each region to perceive global information without filling the sampling space. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our method for outdoor unbounded large-scale scene novel view synthesis, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Federated Learning is an effective approach for learning from data distributed across multiple institutions. While most existing studies are aimed at improving predictive accuracy of models, little work has been done to explain knowledge differences between institutions and the benefits of collaboration. Understanding these differences is critical in cross-silo federated learning domains, e.g., in healthcare or banking, where each institution or silo has a different underlying distribution and stakeholders want to understand how their institution compares to their partners. We introduce Prototype-Informed Cross-Silo Router (PICSR) which utilizes a mixture of experts approach to combine local models derived from multiple silos. Furthermore, by computing data similarity to prototypical samples from each silo, we are able to ground the router’s predictions in the underlying dataset distributions. Experiments on a real-world heart disease prediction dataset show that PICSR retains high performance while enabling further explanations on the differences among institutions compared to a single black-box model.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have exhibited great performance in discriminative feature learning for complex visual tasks. Besides discrimination power, interpretability is another important yet under-explored property for CNNs. One difficulty in the CNN interpretability is that filters and image classes are entangled. In this paper, we introduce a novel pathway to alleviate the entanglement between filters and image classes. The proposed pathway groups the filters in a late conv-layer of CNN into class-specific clusters. Clusters and classes are in a one-to-one relationship. Specifically, we use the Bernoulli sampling to generate the filter-cluster assignment matrix from a learnable filter-class correspondence matrix. To enable end-to-end optimization, we develop a novel reparameterization trick for handling the non-differentiable Bernoulli sampling. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on ten widely used network architectures (including nine CNNs and a ViT) and five benchmark datasets. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method PICNN (the combination of standard CNNs with our proposed pathway) exhibits greater interpretability than standard CNNs while achieving higher or comparable discrimination power.

Fragment assembly involves restoring broken objects to their original geometries, and has many applications, such as archaeological restoration. Existing learning based frameworks have shown potential for solving part assembly problems with semantic decomposition, but cannot handle such geometrical decomposition problems. In this work, we propose a novel assembly framework, proxy level hybrid Transformer, with the core idea of using a hybrid graph to model and reason complex structural relationships between patches of fragments, dubbed as proxies. To this end, we propose a hybrid attention module, composed of intra and inter attention layers, enabling capturing of crucial contextual information within fragments and relative structural knowledge across fragments. Furthermore, we propose an adjacency aware hierarchical pose estimator, exploiting a decompose and integrate strategy. It progressively predicts adjacent probability and relative poses between fragments, and then implicitly infers their absolute poses by dynamic information integration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively reduces assembly errors while maintaining fast inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/521piglet/PHFormer.

Variational Autoencoder based Bayesian Optimization (VAE-BO) has demonstrated its excellent performance in addressing high-dimensional structured optimization problems. However, current mainstream methods overlook the potential of utilizing a pool of unlabeled data to construct the latent space, while only concentrating on designing sophisticated models to leverage the labeled data. Despite their effective usage of labeled data, these methods often require extra network structures, additional procedure, resulting in computational inefficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to effectively utilize unlabeled data with the guidance of labeled data. Specifically, we tailor the pseudo-labeling technique from semi-supervised learning to explicitly reveal the relative magnitudes of optimization objective values hidden within the unlabeled data. Based on this technique, we assign appropriate training weights to unlabeled data to enhance the construction of a discriminative latent space. Furthermore, we treat the VAE encoder and the Gaussian Process (GP) in Bayesian optimization as a unified deep kernel learning process, allowing the direct utilization of labeled data, which we term as Gaussian Process guidance. This directly and effectively integrates the goal of improving GP accuracy into the VAE training, thereby guiding the construction of the latent space. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing VAE-BO algorithms in various optimization scenarios. Our code will be published at https://github.com/TaicaiChen/PG-LBO.

The generalization of neural networks is a central challenge in machine learning, especially concerning the performance under distributions that differ from training ones. Current methods, mainly based on the data-driven paradigm such as data augmentation, adversarial training, and noise injection, may encounter limited generalization due to model non-smoothness. In this paper, we propose to investigate generalization from a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) perspective, aiming to enhance it directly through the underlying function of neural networks, rather than focusing on adjusting input data. Specifically, we first establish the connection between neural network generalization and the smoothness of the solution to a specific PDE, namely transport equation. Building upon this, we propose a general framework that introduces adaptive distributional diffusion into transport equation to enhance the smoothness of its solution, thereby improving generalization. In the context of neural networks, we put this theoretical framework into practice as PDE+ (PDE with Adaptive Distributional Diffusion) which diffuses each sample into a distribution covering semantically similar inputs. This enables better coverage of potentially unobserved distributions in training, thus improving generalization beyond merely data-driven methods. The effectiveness of PDE+ is validated through extensive experimental settings, demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuanyige/pde-add.

The lack of large-scale data seriously hinders the development of palmprint recognition. Recent approaches address this issue by generating large-scale realistic pseudo palmprints from Bézier curves. However, the significant difference between Bézier curves and real palmprints limits their effectiveness. In this paper, we divide the Bézier-Real difference into creases and texture differences, thus reducing the generation difficulty. We introduce a new palm crease energy (PCE) domain as a bridge from Bézier curves to real palmprints and propose a two-stage generation model. The first stage generates PCE images (realistic creases) from Bézier curves, and the second stage outputs realistic palmprints (realistic texture) with PCE images as input. In addition, we also design a lightweight plug-and-play line feature enhancement block to facilitate domain transfer and improve recognition performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Under extremely few data settings like 40 IDs (only 2.5% of the total training set), our model achieves a 29% improvement over RPG-Palm and outperforms ArcFace with 100% training set by more than 6% in terms of TAR@FAR=1e-6.

Recently, many carefully designed graph representation learning methods have achieved impressive performance on either strong heterophilic or homophilic graphs, but not both. Therefore, they are incapable of generalizing well across real-world graphs with different levels of homophily. This is attributed to their neglect of homophily in heterophilic graphs, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a two-fold filtering mechanism to mine homophily in heterophilic graphs, and vice versa. In particular, we extend the graph heat equation to perform heterophilic aggregation of global information from a long distance. The resultant filter can be exactly approximated by the Possion-Charlier (PC) polynomials. To further exploit information at multiple orders, we introduce a powerful graph convolution PC-Conv and its instantiation PCNet for the node classification task. Compared to the state-of-the-art GNNs, PCNet shows competitive performance on well-known homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/uestclbh/PC-Conv.

We present a real-time method for robust estimation of multiple instances of geometric models from noisy data. Geometric models such as vanishing points, planar homographies or fundamental matrices are essential for 3D scene analysis. Previous approaches discover distinct model instances in an iterative manner, thus limiting their potential for speedup via parallel computation. In contrast, our method detects all model instances independently and in parallel. A neural network segments the input data into clusters representing potential model instances by predicting multiple sets of sample and inlier weights. Using the predicted weights, we determine the model parameters for each potential instance separately in a RANSAC-like fashion. We train the neural network via task-specific loss functions, i.e. we do not require a ground-truth segmentation of the input data. As suitable training data for homography and fundamental matrix fitting is scarce, we additionally present two new synthetic datasets. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on these as well as multiple established datasets, with inference times as small as five milliseconds per image.

In this paper, we derive a PAC-Bayes bound on the generalisation gap, in a supervised time-series setting for a special class of discrete-time non-linear dynamical systems. This class includes stable recurrent neural networks (RNN), and the motivation for this work was its application to RNNs. In order to achieve the results, we impose some stability constraints, on the allowed models. Here, stability is understood in the sense of dynamical systems. For RNNs, these stability conditions can be expressed in terms of conditions on the weights. We assume the processes involved are essentially bounded and the loss functions are Lipschitz. The proposed bound on the generalisation gap depends on the mixing coefficient of the data distribution, and the essential supremum of the data. Furthermore, the bound converges to zero as the dataset size increases. In this paper, we 1) formalize the learning problem, 2) derive a PAC-Bayesian error bound for such systems, 3) discuss various consequences of this error bound, and 4) show an illustrative example, with discussions on computing the proposed bound. Unlike other available bounds the derived bound holds for non i.i.d. data (time-series) and it does not grow with the number of steps of the RNN.

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) provides an effective solution for decision-making problems involving conflicting objectives. However, achieving high-quality approximations to the Pareto policy set remains challenging, especially in complex tasks with continuous or high-dimensional state-action space. In this paper, we propose the Pareto Ascent Directional Decomposition based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (PA2D-MORL) method, which constructs an efficient scheme for multi-objective problem decomposition and policy improvement, leading to a superior approximation of Pareto policy set. The proposed method leverages Pareto ascent direction to select the scalarization weights and computes the multi-objective policy gradient, which determines the policy optimization direction and ensures joint improvement on all objectives. Meanwhile, multiple policies are selectively optimized under an evolutionary framework to approximate the Pareto frontier from different directions. Additionally, a Pareto adaptive fine-tuning approach is applied to enhance the density and spread of the Pareto frontier approximation. Experiments on various multi-objective robot control tasks show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of both quality and stability of the outcomes.

Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) algorithms aim to learn a policy that maximizes the reward while satisfying the safety constraints. One of the challenges in SRL is that it is often difficult to balance the two objectives of reward maximization and safety constraint satisfaction. Existing algorithms utilize constraint optimization techniques like penalty-based, barrier penalty-based, and Lagrangian-based dual or primal policy optimizations methods. However, they suffer from training oscillations and approximation errors, which impact the overall learning objectives. This paper proposes the Permeable Penalty Barrier-based Policy Optimization (P2BPO) algorithm that addresses this issue by allowing a small fraction of penalty beyond the penalty barrier, and a parameter is used to control this permeability. In addition, an adaptive penalty parameter is used instead of a constant one, which is initialized with a low value and increased gradually as the agent violates the safety constraints. We have also provided a theoretical proof of the proposed method's performance guarantee bound, which ensures that P2BPO can learn a policy satisfying the safety constraints with high probability while achieving a higher expected reward. Furthermore, we compare P2BPO with other SRL algorithms on various SRL tasks and demonstrate that it achieves better rewards while adhering to the constraints.

Disease control experts inspect public health data streams daily for outliers worth investigating, like those corresponding to data quality issues or disease outbreaks. However, they can only examine a few of the thousands of maximally-tied outliers returned by univariate outlier detection methods applied to large-scale public health data streams. To help experts distinguish the most important outliers from these thousands of tied outliers, we propose a new task for algorithms to rank the outputs of any univariate method applied to each of many streams. Our novel algorithm for this task, which leverages hierarchical networks and extreme value analysis, performed the best across traditional outlier detection metrics in a human-expert evaluation using public health data streams. Most importantly, experts have used our open-source Python implementation since April 2023 and report identifying outliers worth investigating 9.1x faster than their prior baseline. Other organizations can readily adapt this implementation to create rankings from the outputs of their tailored univariate methods across large-scale streams.

Existing out-of-distribution (OOD) methods have shown great success on balanced datasets but become ineffective in long-tailed recognition (LTR) scenarios where 1) OOD samples are often wrongly classified into head classes and/or 2) tail-class samples are treated as OOD samples. To address these issues, current studies fit a prior distribution of auxiliary/pseudo OOD data to the long-tailed in-distribution (ID) data. However, it is difficult to obtain such an accurate prior distribution given the unknowingness of real OOD samples and heavy class imbalance in LTR. A straightforward solution to avoid the requirement of this prior is to learn an outlier class to encapsulate the OOD samples. The main challenge is then to tackle the aforementioned confusion between OOD samples and head/tail-class samples when learning the outlier class. To this end, we introduce a novel calibrated outlier class learning (COCL) approach, in which 1) a debiased large margin learning method is introduced in the outlier class learning to distinguish OOD samples from both head and tail classes in the representation space and 2) an outlier-class-aware logit calibration method is defined to enhance the long-tailed classification confidence. Extensive empirical results on three popular benchmarks CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT demonstrate that COCL substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in LTR while being able to improve the classification accuracy on ID data. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/COCL.

Adversarial Robustness Distillation (ARD) is a promising task to solve the issue of limited adversarial robustness of small capacity models while optimizing the expensive computational costs of Adversarial Training (AT). Despite the good robust performance, the existing ARD methods are still impractical to deploy in natural high-security scenes due to these methods rely entirely on original or publicly available data with a similar distribution. In fact, these data are almost always private, specific, and distinctive for scenes that require high robustness. To tackle these issues, we propose a challenging but significant task called Data-Free Adversarial Robustness Distillation (DFARD), which aims to train small, easily deployable, robust models without relying on data. We demonstrate that the challenge lies in the lower upper bound of knowledge transfer information, making it crucial to mining and transferring knowledge more efficiently. Inspired by human education, we design a plug-and-play Interactive Temperature Adjustment (ITA) strategy to improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer and propose an Adaptive Generator Balance (AGB) module to retain more data information. Our method uses adaptive hyperparameters to avoid a large number of parameter tuning, which significantly outperforms the combination of existing techniques. Meanwhile, our method achieves stable and reliable performance on multiple benchmarks.

Point cloud shape completion, which aims to reconstruct the missing regions of the incomplete point clouds with plausible shapes, is an ill-posed and challenging task that benefits many downstream 3D applications. Prior approaches achieve this goal by employing a two-stage completion framework, generating a coarse yet complete seed point cloud through an encoder-decoder network, followed by refinement and upsampling. However, the encoded features suffer from information loss of the missing portion, leading to an inability of the decoder to reconstruct seed points with detailed geometric clues. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel Orthogonal Dictionary Guided Shape Completion Network (ODGNet). The proposed ODGNet consists of a Seed Generation U-Net, which leverages multi-level feature extraction and concatenation to significantly enhance the representation capability of seed points, and Orthogonal Dictionaries that can learn shape priors from training samples and thus compensate for the information loss of the missing portions during inference. Our design is simple but to the point, extensive experiment results indicate that the proposed method can reconstruct point clouds with more details and outperform previous state-of-the-art counterparts. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/corecai163/ODGNet.