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Affinity Propagation (AP) is a fundamental algorithm to identify clusters included in data objects.
Given a similarities among objects, it iteratively performs message updates between all data object pairs until convergence.
Although AP yields a higher clustering quality compared with other methods, it is computationally expensive.
Hence, it has difficulty handling massive datasets that include numerous data objects.
This is because the message updates require a quadratic cost of the number of data objects.
Here, we propose a novel fast algorithm, ScaleAP, which outputs the same clusters as AP but within a shorter computation time.
ScaleAP dynamically excludes unnecessary message updates without sacrificing its clustering accuracy.
Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that ScaleAP outperforms existing AP algorithms in terms of running time by up to two orders of magnitude.

AAAI 2021

Scalable Affinity Propagation for Massive Datasets

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Visual saliency has emerged as a major visualization tool for interpreting deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents. However, much of the existing research uses it as an analyzing tool rather than an inductive bias for policy learning. In this work, we use visual attention as an inductive bias for RL agents. We propose a novel self-supervised attention learning approach which can 1. learn to select regions of interest without explicit annotations, and 2. act as a plug for existing deep RL methods to improve the learning performance. We empirically show that the self-supervised attention-aware deep RL methods outperform the baselines in the context of both the rate of convergence and performance. Furthermore, the proposed self-supervised attention is not tied with specific policies, nor restricted to a specific scene. We posit that the proposed approach is a general self-supervised attention module for multi-task learning and transfer learning, and empirically validate the generalization ability of the proposed method. Finally, we show that our method learns meaningful object keypoints highlighting improvements both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Self-Supervised Attention-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Resource constrained path finding is a well studied topic in AI, with real-world applications in different areas such as transportation and robotics. This paper introduces several heuristics in the resource constrained path finding context that significantly improve the algorithmic performance of the initialisation phase and the core search. We implement our heuristics on top of a bidirectional A* algorithm and evaluate them on a set of large instances. The experimental results show that, for the first time in the context of constrained path finding, our fast and enhanced algorithm can solve all of the benchmark instances to optimality, and compared to the state of the art algorithms, it can improve existing runtimes by up to four orders of magnitude on large-size network graphs.

A Fast Exact Algorithm for the Resource Constrained Shortest Path Problem

Due to its robust and precise distance measurements, LiDAR plays an important role in scene understanding for autonomous driving. Training deep neural networks (DNNs) on LiDAR data requires large-scale point-wise annotations, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. Instead, simulation-to-real domain adaptation (SRDA) trains a DNN using unlimited synthetic data with automatically generated labels and transfers the learned model to real scenarios. Existing SRDA methods for LiDAR point cloud segmentation mainly employ a multi-stage pipeline and focus on feature-level alignment. They require prior knowledge of real-world statistics and ignore the pixel-level dropout noise gap and the spatial feature gap between different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, named ePointDA, to address the above issues. Specifically, ePointDA consists of three modules: self-supervised dropout noise rendering, statistics-invariant and spatially-adaptive feature alignment, and transferable segmentation learning. The joint optimization enables ePointDA to bridge the domain shift at the pixel-level by explicitly rendering dropout noise for synthetic LiDAR and at the feature-level by spatially aligning the features between different domains, without requiring the real-world statistics. Extensive experiments adapting from synthetic GTA-LiDAR to real KITTI and SemanticKITTI demonstrate the superiority of ePointDA for LiDAR point cloud segmentation.

ePointDA: An End-to-End Simulation-to-Real Domain Adaptation Framework for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation

Video instance segmentation is a complex task in which we need to detect, segment, and track each object for any given video. Previous approaches only utilize single-frame features for the detection, segmentation, and tracking of objects and they suffer in the video scenario due to several distinct challenges such as motion blur and drastic appearance change. To eliminate ambiguities introduced by only using single-frame features, we propose a novel comprehensive feature aggregation approach (CompFeat) to refine features atboth frame-level and object-level with temporal and spatial context information. The aggregation process is carefully designed with a new attention mechanism which significantly increases the discriminative power of the learned features. We further improve the tracking capability of our model through a siamese design by incorporating both feature similarities and spatial similarities. Experiments conducted on the YouTube-VIS dataset validate the effectiveness of proposed CompFeat.

CompFeat: Comprehensive Feature Aggregation for Video Instance Segmentation

Many measurements or observations in computer vision and machine learning manifest as non-Euclidean data. While recent proposals (like spherical CNN) have extended a number of deep neural network architectures to manifold-valued data, and this has often provided strong improvements in performance, the literature on generative models for manifold data is quite sparse. Partly due to this gap, there are also no modality transfer/translation models for manifold-valued data whereas numerous such methods based on generative models are available for natural images. This paper addresses this gap, motivated by a need in brain imaging -- in doing so, we expand the operating range of certain generative models (as well as generative models for modality transfer) from natural images to images with manifold-valued measurements. Our main result is the design of a two-stream version of GLOW (flow-based invertible generative models) that can synthesize information of a field of one type of manifold-valued measurements given another. On the theoretical side, we introduce three kinds of invertible layers for manifold-valued data, which are not only analogous to their functionality in flow-based generative models (e.g., GLOW) but also preserve the key benefits (determinants of the Jacobian are easy to calculate). For experiments, on a large dataset from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we show promising results where we can reliably and accurately reconstruct brain images of a field of orientation distribution functions (ODF) from diffusion tensor images (DTI), where the latter has a 5Ã— faster acquisition time but at the expense of worse angular resolution.

Flow-Based Generative Models for Learning Manifold to Manifold Mappings

Point cloud provides a compact and flexible representation for 3D shapes and recently attracts more and more attention due to the increasing demands in practical applications. The major challenge of handling such irregular data is how to achieve the permutation invariance of points in the input. Most of existing methods extract local descriptors that encode the geometry of local structure, followed by a symmetric function to form a global representation. The max pooling usually serves as the symmetric function and shows slight superiority compared to the average pooling. We argue that some discrimination information is inevitably missing when applying the max pooling across all local descriptors. In this paper, we propose the BoW pooling, a plug-and-play unit to substitute the max pooling. Our BoW pooling analyzes the set of local descriptors statistically and generates a histogram that reflects how the primitives in the dictionary constitute the overall geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Bow pooling is efficient to improve the performance in point cloud classification, shape retrieval and segmentation tasks and outperforms other existing symmetric functions.

BoW Pooling: A Plug-and-Play Unit for Feature Aggregation of Point Clouds

Integrated recommendation aims to jointly recommend heterogeneous items in the main feed from different sources via multiple channels, which needs to capture user preferences on both item and channel levels. It has been widely used in practical systems by billions of users, while few works concentrate on the integrated recommendation systematically. In this work, we propose a novel Hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for integrated recommendation (HRL-Rec), which divides the integrated recommendation into two tasks to recommend channels and items sequentially. The low-level agent is a channel selector, which generates a personalized channel list. The high-level agent is an item recommender, which recommends specific items from heterogeneous channels under the channel constraints. We design various rewards for both recommendation accuracy and diversity,  and propose four losses for fast and stable model convergence. We also conduct an online exploration for sufficient training. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online experiments on a billion-level real-world dataset to show the effectiveness of HRL-Rec. HRL-Rec has also been deployed on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/modriczhang/HRL-Rec.

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Recommendation

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently achieved remarkable performance in image retrieval, yet posing great threats to data privacy. On the one hand, one may misuse a deployed DNNs based system to look up data without consent. On the other hand, organizations or individuals would legally or illegally collect data to train high-performance models outside the scope of legitimate purposes. Unfortunately, less effort has been made to safeguard data privacy against malicious uses of DNNs. In this paper, we propose a data-centric Proactive Privacy-preserving Learning (PPL) algorithm for hashing based retrieval, which achieves the protection purpose by employing a generator to transfer the original data into the adversarial data with quasi-imperceptible perturbations before releasing them. When the data source is infiltrated, the adversarial data can confuse menacing retrieval models to make erroneous predictions. Given that the prior knowledge of malicious models is not available, a surrogate retrieval model is instead introduced acting as a fooling target. The framework is trained by a two-player game conducted between the generator and the surrogate model. More
specifically, the generator is updated to enlarge the gap between the adversarial data and the original data, aiming to lower the search accuracy of the surrogate model. On the contrary, the surrogate model is trained with the opposing objective that is to maintain the search performance. As a result, an effective and robust adversarial generator is encouraged. Furthermore, to facilitate an effective optimization, a Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL) module is inserted to connect two models, enabling the two-player game in a one-step learning. Extensive experiments on three widely-used realistic datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Proactive Privacy-Preserving Learning for Retrieval

Existing methods for large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation require expensive, tedious and error-prone manual point-wise annotation. Intuitively, weakly supervised training is a direct solution to reduce the labeling costs. However, for weakly supervised large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation, too few annotations will inevitably lead to ineffective learning of network. We propose an effective weakly supervised method containing two components to solve the above problem. Firstly, we construct a pretext task, \textit{i.e.,} point cloud colorization, with a self-supervised training manner to transfer the learned prior knowledge from a large amount of unlabeled point cloud to a weakly supervised network. In this way, the representation capability of the weakly supervised network can be improved by knowledge from a heterogeneous task. Besides, to generative pseudo label for unlabeled data, a sparse label propagation mechanism is proposed with the help of generated class prototypes, which is used to measure the classification confidence of unlabeled point. Our method is evaluated on large-scale point cloud datasets with different scenarios including indoor and outdoor. The experimental results show the large gain against existing weakly supervised methods and comparable results to fully supervised methods.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Large-Scale Point Cloud

Event-based corporate profiling aims to assess the evolving operational status of the corresponding corporate from its event sequence. Existing studies on corporate profiling have partially addressed the problem via (i) case-by-case empirical analysis by leveraging traditional financial methods, or (ii) the automatic profile inference by reformulating the problem into a supervised learning task. However, both approaches heavily rely on domain knowledge and are labor-intensive. More importantly, the task-specific nature of both approaches prevents the obtained corporate profiles from being applied to diversified downstream applications. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Self-Supervised Prototype Representation Learning (SePaL) framework for dynamic corporate profiling. By exploiting the topological information of an event graph and exploring self-supervised learning techniques, SePaL can obtain unified corporate representations that are robust to event noises and can be easily fine-tuned to benefit various down-stream applications with only a few annotated data. Specifically, we first infer the initial cluster distribution of noise-resistant event prototypes based on latent representations of events. Then, we construct four permutation-invariant self-supervision signals to guide the representation learning of the event prototype. In terms of applications, we exploit the learned time-evolving corporate representations for both stock price spike prediction and corporate default risk evaluation. Experimental results on two real-world corporate event datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SePaL for these two applications.

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Self-Supervised Attention-Aware Reinforcement Learning

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