United States

A steady momentum of innovations and breakthroughs has convincingly pushed the limits of unsupervised image representation learning. Compared to static 2D images, video has one more dimension (time). The inherent supervision existing in such sequential structure offers a fertile ground for building unsupervised learning models. In this paper, we compose a trilogy of exploring the basic and generic supervision in the sequence from spatial, spatiotemporal and sequential perspectives. We materialize the supervisory signals through determining whether a pair of samples is from one frame or from one video, and whether a triplet of samples is in the correct temporal order. We uniquely regard the signals as the foundation in contrastive learning and derive a particular form named Sequence Contrastive Learning (SeCo). SeCo shows superior results under the linear protocol on action recognition (Kinetics), untrimmed activity recognition (ActivityNet) and object tracking (OTB-100). More remarkably, SeCo demonstrates considerable improvements over recent unsupervised pre-training techniques, and leads the accuracy by 2.96% and 6.47% against fully-supervised ImageNet pre-training in action recognition task on UCF101 and HMDB51, respectively. Source code is available at https://github.com/YihengZhang-CV/SeCo-Sequence-Contrastive-Learning.

AAAI 2021

SeCo: Exploring Sequence Supervision for Unsupervised Representation Learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

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. 

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) aims to annotate documents with the most relevant labels from a number of candidate labels. In real applications, the distribution of label frequency often exhibits a long tail, i.e., a few labels are associated with a large number of  documents (a.k.a. head labels), while a large fraction of labels are associated with a  small number of documents (a.k.a. tail labels). To address the challenge of insufficient training data on tail label classification, we propose a Head-to-Tail Network (HTTN) to transfer the meta-knowledge from the data-rich head labels to data-poor tail labels. The meta-knowledge is the mapping from few-shot network parameters to many-shot network parameters, which aims to promote the generalizability of tail classifiers. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that HTTN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code and hyper-parameter settings are released for reproducibility.

Does Head Label Help for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Text Classification

Human motion prediction from historical pose sequence is at the core of many applications in machine intelligence. However, in current state-of-the-art methods, the predicted future motion is confined within the same activity. One can neither generate predictions that differ from the current activity, nor manipulate the body parts to explore various future possibilities. Undoubtedly, this greatly limits the usefulness and applicability of motion prediction. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the human motion prediction task in which control parameters can be readily incorporated to adjust the forecasted motion. Our method is compelling in that it enables manipulable motion prediction across activity types and allows customization of the human movement in a variety of fine-grained ways. To this aim, a simple yet effective composite GAN structure, consisting of local GANs for different body parts and aggregated via a global GAN is presented. The local GANs game in lower dimensions, while the global GAN adjusts in high dimensional space to avoid mode collapse. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art. The codes are available at https://github.com/herolvkd/AM-GAN.

Aggregated Multi-GANs for Controlled 3D Human Motion Prediction

Representing the true label as one-hot vector is the common practice in training text classification models. However, the one-hot representation may not adequately reflect the relation between the instance and labels, as labels are often not completely independent and instances may relate to multiple labels in practice. The inadequate one-hot representations tend to train the model to be over-confident, which may result in arbitrary prediction and model overfitting, especially for confused datasets (datasets with very similar labels) or noisy datasets (datasets with labeling errors). While training models with label smoothing can ease this problem in some degree, it still fails to capture the realistic relation among labels. In this paper, we propose a novel Label Confusion Model (LCM) as an enhancement component to current popular text classification models. LCM can learn label confusion to capture semantic overlap among labels by calculating the similarity between instance and labels during training and generate a better label distribution to replace the original one-hot label vector, thus improving the final classification performance. Extensive experiments on five text classification benchmark datasets reveal the effectiveness of LCM for several widely used deep learning classification models. Further experiments also verify that LCM is especially helpful for confused or noisy datasets and superior to the label smoothing method.

Label Confusion Learning to Enhance Text Classification Models

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are good at generating variant samples of complex data distributions. Generating a sample with certain properties is one of the major tasks in the real-world application of GANs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative adversarial network to generate 3D point clouds from random latent codes, named Controllable Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network(CPCGAN). A two-stage GAN framework is utilized in CPCGAN and a sparse point cloud containing major structural information is extracted as the middle-level information between the two stages. With their help, CPCGAN has the ability to control the generated structure and generate 3D point clouds with semantic labels for points. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CPCGAN outperforms state-of-the-art point cloud GANs.

CPCGAN: A Controllable 3D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network with Semantic Label Generating

Trojan (backdoor) attack is a form of adversarial attack on deep neural networks where the attacker provides victims with a model trained/retrained on malicious data. The backdoor can be activated when a normal input is stamped with a certain pattern called trigger, causing misclassification. Many existing trojan attacks have their triggers being input space patches/objects (e.g., a polygon with solid color) or simple input transformations such as Instagram filters. These simple triggers are susceptible to recent backdoor detection algorithms. We propose a novel deep feature space trojan attack with five characteristics: effectiveness, stealthiness, controllability, robustness and reliance on deep features. We conduct extensive experiments on 9 image classifiers on various datasets including ImageNet to demonstrate these properties and show that our attack can evade state-of-the-art defense.

Deep Feature Space Trojan Attack of Neural Networks by Controlled Detoxification

The clear transparency of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is hampered by complex internal structures and nonlinear transformations along deep hierarchies. In this paper, we propose a new attribution method, Relative Sectional Propagation (RSP), for fully decomposing the output predictions with the characteristics of class-discriminative attributions and clear objectness. We carefully revisit some shortcomings of backpropagation-based attribution methods, which are trade-off relations in decomposing DNNs. We define hostile factor as an element that interferes with finding the attributions of the target and propagate it in a distinguishable way to overcome the non-suppressed nature of activated neurons. As a result, it is possible to assign the bi-polar relevance scores of the target (positive) and hostile (negative) attributions while maintaining each attribution aligned with the importance. We also present the purging techniques to prevent the decrement of the gap between the relevance scores of the target and hostile attributions during backward propagation by eliminating the conflicting units to channel attribution map. Therefore, our method makes it possible to decompose the predictions of DNNs with clearer class-discriminativeness and detailed elucidations of activation neurons compared to the conventional attribution methods. In a verified experimental environment, we report the results of the assessments: (i) Pointing Game, (ii) mIoU, and (iii) Model Sensitivity with PASCAL VOC 2007, MS COCO 2014, and ImageNet datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing backward decomposition methods, including distinctive and intuitive visualizations.

Interpreting Deep Neural Networks with Relative Sectional Propagation by Analyzing Comparative Gradients and Hostile Activations

Recently, 3D medical image reconstruction (MIR) and segmentation (MIS) based on deep neural networks have been developed with promising results, and attention mechanism has been further designed for performance enhancement.
However, the large size of 3D volume images poses a great computational challenge to traditional attention methods. 
In this paper, we propose a folded attention (FA) approach to improve the computational efficiency of traditional attention methods on 3D medical images. 
The main idea is that we apply tensor folding and unfolding operations to construct four small sub-affinity matrices to approximate the original affinity matrix.
Through four consecutive sub-attention modules of FA, each element in the feature tensor can aggregate spatial-channel information from all other elements.
Compared to traditional attention methods, with the moderate improvement of accuracy, FA can substantially reduce the computational complexity and GPU memory consumption.
We demonstrate the superiority of our method on two challenging tasks for 3D MIR and MIS, which are quantitative susceptibility mapping and multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation.

Efficient Folded Attention for Medical Image Reconstruction and Segmentation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a generalization of neural networks to graph-structured data, are often implemented using message passes between entities of a graph. While GNNs are effective for node classification, link prediction and graph classification, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, i.e., a small perturbation to the structure can lead to a non-trivial performance degradation. In this work, we propose Uncertainty Matching GNN (UM-GNN), that is aimed at improving the robustness of GNN models, particularly against poisoning attacks to the graph structure, by leveraging epistemic uncertainties from the message passing framework. More specifically, we propose to build a surrogate predictor that does not directly access the graph structure, but systematically extracts reliable knowledge from a standard GNN through a novel uncertainty-matching strategy. Interestingly, this uncoupling makes UM-GNN immune to evasion attacks by design, and achieves significantly improved robustness against poisoning attacks. Using empirical studies with standard benchmarks and a suite of global and target attacks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of UM-GNN, when compared to existing baselines including the state-of-the-art robust GCN.

Uncertainty-Matching Graph Neural Networks to Defend against Poisoning Attacks

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads' revenue while ignoring the possible negative influence of ads on user experience of recommended items (products, articles and videos). Developing an optimal advertising algorithm in recommendations faces immense challenges because interpolating ads improperly or too frequently may decrease user experience, while interpolating fewer ads will reduce the advertising revenue. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel advertising strategy for the rec/ads trade-off. To be specific, we develop an RL-based framework that can continuously update its advertising strategies and maximize reward in the long run. Given a recommendation list, we design a novel Deep Q-network architecture that can determine three internally related tasks jointly, i.e., (i) whether to interpolate an ad or not in the recommendation list, and if yes, (ii) the optimal ad and (iii) the optimal location to interpolate. The experimental results based on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

DEAR: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising Impression in Recommender Systems

Entity linking (EL) for the rapidly growing short text (e.g. search queries and news titles) is critical to industrial applications. Most existing approaches relying on adequate context for long text EL are not effective for the concise and sparse short text. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Multi-turn Multiple-choice Machine reading comprehension (M3) to solve the short text EL from a new perspective: a query is generated for each ambiguous mention exploiting its surrounding context, and an option selection module is employed to identify the golden entity from candidates using the query. In this way, M3 framework sufficiently interacts limited context with candidate entities during the encoding process, as well as implicitly considers the dissimilarities inside the candidate bunch in the selection stage. In addition, we design a two-stage verifier incorporated into M3 to address the commonly existed unlinkable problem in short text. To further consider the topical coherence and interdependence among referred entities, M3 leverages a multi-turn fashion to deal with mentions in a sequence manner by retrospecting historical cues. Evaluation shows that our M3 framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five Chinese and English datasets for the real-world short text EL.

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