Canada

Offline imitation learning (IL) refers to learning expert behavior solely from demonstrations, without any additional interaction with the environment. Despite significant advances in offline IL, existing techniques find it challenging to learn policies for long-horizon tasks and require significant re-training when task specifications change. Towards addressing these limitations, we present GO-DICE an offline IL technique for goal-conditioned long-horizon sequential tasks. GO-DICE discerns a hierarchy of sub-tasks from demonstrations and uses these to learn separate policies for sub-task transitions and action execution, respectively; this hierarchical policy learning facilitates long-horizon reasoning.Inspired by the expansive DICE-family of techniques, policy learning at both the levels transpires within the space of stationary distributions. Further, both policies are learnt with goal conditioning to minimize need for retraining when task goals change. Experimental results substantiate that GO-DICE outperforms recent baselines, as evidenced by a marked improvement in the completion rate of increasingly challenging pick-and-place Mujoco robotic tasks. GO-DICE is also capable of leveraging imperfect demonstration and partial task segmentation when available, both of which boost task performance relative to learning from expert demonstrations alone.

AAAI 2024

GO-DICE: Goal-Conditioned Option-Aware Offline Imitation Learning via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation

rob: learning & optimization for rob

hai: human-in-the-loop machine learning

ml: imitation learning & inverse reinforcement learning

ru: sequential decision making

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).

A ticket is required to attend this event, please register using the link below:

https://aamas2022-conference.auckland.ac.nz/attending/registration/

Registration Is Required

AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

technical paper

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.

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

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. 

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to reveal shared clustering structures within multi-view data, where only partial views of the samples are available. Existing IMVC methods primarily suffer from two issues: 1) Imputation-based methods inevitably introduce inaccurate imputations, which in turn degrade clustering performance; 2) Imputation-free methods are susceptible to unbalanced information among views and fail to fully exploit shared information. To address these issues, we propose a novel method based on variational autoencoders. Specifically, we adopt multiple view-specific encoders to extract information from each view and utilize the Product-of-Experts approach to efficiently aggregate information to obtain the common representation. To enhance the shared information in the common representation, we introduce a coherence objective to mitigate the influence of information imbalance. By incorporating the Mixture-of-Gaussians prior information into the latent representation, our proposed method is able to learn the common representation with clustering-friendly structures. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that our method achieves competitive clustering performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Variational Incomplete Multi-View Clustering: Exploring Shared Clustering Structures

Due to the widespread adoption of the cost-per-action(CPA) display strategy that demands a real-time conversion rate prediction(CVR), delayed feedback is becoming one of the major challenges in online advertising. As the true labels of a significant quantity of samples are only available after long delays, the observed training data are usually biased, harming the performance of models. Recent studies show integrating models with varying waiting windows to observe true labels is beneficial, but the aggregation framework remains far from reaching a consensus. In this work, we propose the Multi-Interval Screening and Synthesizing model (MISS for short) for online CVR prediction. We first design a multi-interval screening model with various output heads to produce accurate and distinctive estimates. Then a light-weight synthesizing model with an assembled training pipeline is applied to thoroughly exploit the knowledge and relationship among heads, obtaining reliable predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world advertising datasets validate the effectiveness of our model.

Online Conversion Rate Prediction via Multi-Interval Screening and Synthesizing under Delayed Feedback

Motion deblurring can be advanced by exploiting informative features from supplementary sensors such as event cameras, which can capture rich motion information asynchronously with high temporal resolution. Existing event-based motion deblurring methods neither consider the modality redundancy in spatial fusion nor temporal cooperation between events and frames. To tackle these limitations, a novel spatial-temporal collaboration network (STCNet) is proposed for event-based motion deblurring. Firstly, we propose a differential-modality based cross-modal calibration strategy to suppress redundancy for complementarity enhancement, and then bimodal spatial fusion is achieved with an elaborate cross-modal co-attention mechanism to weight the contributions of them for importance balance. Besides, we present a frame-event mutual spatio-temporal attention scheme to alleviate the errors of relying only on frames to compute cross-temporal similarities when the motion blur is significant, and then the spatio-temporal features from both frames and events are aggregated with the custom cross-temporal coordinate attention. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project website: https://github.com/wyang-vis/STCNet.

Motion Deblurring via Spatial-Temporal Collaboration of Frames and Events

Defect detection is a pivotal aspect ensuring product quality and production efficiency in industrial manufacturing. Existing studies on defect detection predominantly focus on locating defects through bounding boxes and classifying defect types. However, their methods can only provide limited information and fail to meet the requirements for further processing after detecting defects. To this end, we propose a novel task called defect detection report generation, which aims to provide more comprehensive and informative insights into detected defects in the form of text reports. For this task, we propose some new datasets, which contain 16 different materials and each defect contains a detailed report of human constructs. In addition, we propose a knowledge-aware report generation model as a baseline for future research, which aims to incorporate additional knowledge to generate detailed analysis and subsequent processing related to defect in images. By constructing defect report datasets and proposing corresponding baselines, we chart new directions for future research and practical applications of this task.

Automated Defect Report Generation for Enhanced Industrial Quality Control

Antibodies are crucial proteins produced by the immune system in response to foreign substances or antigens. The specificity of an antibody is determined by its complementarity-determining regions (CDRs), which are located in the variable domains of the antibody chains and form the antigen-binding site. Previous studies have utilized complex techniques to generate CDRs, but they suffer from inadequate geometric modeling. Moreover, the common iterative refinement strategies lead to an inefficient inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model that can co-design 1D sequences and 3D structures of CDRs in a one-shot manner. To achieve this, we decouple the antibody CDR design problem into two stages: (i) geometric modeling of protein complex structures and (ii) sequence-structure co-learning. We develop a novel macromolecular structure invariant embedding, typically for protein complexes, that captures both intra- and inter-component interactions among the backbone atoms, including Calpha, N, C, and O atoms, to achieve comprehensive geometric modeling. Then, we introduce a simple cross-gate MLP for sequence-structure co-learning, allowing sequence and structure representations to implicitly refine each other. This enables our model to design desired sequences and structures in a one-shot manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our results at both the sequence and structure level, which demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art antibody CDR design methods.

Cross-Gate MLP with Protein Complex Invariant Embedding Is a One-Shot Antibody Designer

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labelled source graph to an unlabelled target graph in order to address the distribution shifts between graph domains. Previous works have primarily focused on aligning data from the source and target graph in the representation space learned by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the inherent generalization capability of GNNs has been largely overlooked. Motivated by our empirical analysis, we reevaluate the role of GNNs in graph domain adaptation and uncover the pivotal role of the propagation process in GNNs for adapting to different graph domains. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of UGDA and derive a generalization bound for multi-layer GNNs. By formulating GNN Lipschitz for k-layer GNNs, we show that the target risk bound can be tighter by removing propagation layers in source graph and stacking multiple propagation layers in target graph. Based on the empirical and theoretical analysis mentioned above, we propose a simple yet effective approach called A2GNN for graph domain adaptation. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed A2GNN framework.

Rethinking Propagation for Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation

Deriving DSLR-quality sRGB images from smartphone RAW images has become a compelling challenge due to discernible detail disparity, color mapping instability, and spatial misalignment in RAW-sRGB data pairs. We present DiffRAW, a novel method that incorporates the diffusion model for the first time in learning RAW-to-sRGB mappings. By leveraging the diffusion model, our approach effectively learns the high-quality detail distribution of DSLR images, thereby enhancing the details of output images. Simultaneously, we use the RAW image as a diffusion condition to maintain image structure information such as contours and textures. To mitigate the interference caused by the color and spatial misalignment in training data pairs, we embed a color-position preserving condition within DiffRAW, ensuring that the output images do not exhibit color biases and pixel shift issues. To accelerate the inference process of DiffRAW, we designed the Domain Transform Diffusion Method, an efficient diffusion process with its corresponding reverse process. The Domain Transform Diffusion Method can reduce the required inference steps for diffusion model-based image restoration/enhancement algorithms while enhancing the quality of the generated images. Through evaluations on the ZRR dataset, DiffRAW consistently demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across all perceptual quality metrics (e.g., LPIPS, FID, MUSIQ), while achieving comparable results in PSNR and SSIM.

DiffRAW: Leveraging Diffusion Model to Generate DSLR-Comparable Perceptual Quality sRGB from Smartphone RAW Images

As an up-and-coming area, CLIP-based pre-trained vision-language models can readily facilitate downstream tasks through the zero-shot or few-shot fine-tuning manners. However, they still face critical challenges in test-time generalization due to the shifts between the training and test data distributions, hindering the further improvement of the performance. To address this crucial problem, the latest works have introduced Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) techniques to CLIP which dynamically learn text prompts using only test samples. However, their limited learning capacity due to the overlook of visual modality information, and the underutilization of knowledge in previously seen test samples result in reduced performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-modal Adaptive online prompting and knowledge ReTention method called DART to overcome these challenges. To increase the learning capacity, DART captures knowledge from each test sample by learning class-specific text prompts and instance-level image prompts. Additionally, to fully leverage the knowledge from previously seen test samples, DART utilizes dual-modal knowledge retention prompts to adaptively retain the acquired knowledge, thereby enhancing the predictions on subsequent test samples. Extensive experiments on various large-scale benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DART against state-of-the-art methods.

DART: Dual-Modal Adaptive Online Prompting and Knowledge Retention for Test-Time Adaptation | VIDEO

Weight quantization is an effective technique to compress deep neural networks for their deployment on edge devices with limited resources. Traditional loss-aware quantization methods commonly use the quantized gradient to replace the full-precision gradient. However, we discover that the gradient error will lead to an unexpected zig-zagging-like issue in the gradient descent learning procedures, where the gradient directions rapidly oscillate or zig-zag, and such issue seriously slows down the model convergence. Accordingly, this paper proposes a one-step forward and backtrack way for loss-aware quantization to get more accurate and stable gradient direction to defy this issue. During the gradient descent learning, a one-step forward search is designed to find the trial gradient of the next-step, which is adopted to adjust the gradient of current step towards the direction of fast convergence. After that, we backtrack the current step to update the full-precision and quantized weights through the current-step gradient and the trial gradient. A series of theoretical analysis and experiments on benchmark deep models have demonstrated the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method, and our method especially outperforms others on the convergence performance.

One-Step Forward and Backtrack: Overcoming Zig-Zagging in Loss-Aware Quantization Training | VIDEO

Multi-task reinforcement learning endeavors to accomplish a set of different tasks with a single policy. To enhance data efficiency by sharing parameters across multiple tasks, a common practice segments the network into distinct modules and trains a routing network to recombine these modules into task-specific policies. However, existing routing approaches employ a fixed number of modules for all tasks, neglecting that tasks with varying difficulties commonly require varying amounts of knowledge. This work presents a Dynamic Depth Routing (D2R) framework, which learns strategic skipping of certain intermediate modules, thereby flexibly choosing different numbers of modules for each task. Under this framework, we further introduce a ResRouting method to address the issue of disparate routing paths between behavior and target policies during off-policy training. In addition, we design an automatic route-balancing mechanism to encourage continued routing exploration for unmastered tasks without disturbing the routing of mastered ones. We conduct extensive experiments on various robotics manipulation tasks in the Meta-World benchmark, where D2R achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved learning efficiency.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2024

Deep Variational Incomplete Multi-View Clustering: Exploring Shared Clustering Structures

Similar lecture

Robust Learning from Observation with Model Misspecification