GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
T-distributed Spherical Feature Representation for Imbalanced Classification
Authors: Xiaoyu Yang; Yufei Chen; Xiaodong Yue; Shaoxun Xu; Chao Ma
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Real-world classification tasks often show an extremely imbalanced problem. The extreme imbalance will cause a strong bias that the decision boundary of the classifier is completely dominated by the categories with abundant samples, which are also called the head categories. Current methods have alleviated the imbalanced impact from mainly three aspects: class re-balance, decoupling and domain adaptation. However, the existing criterion with the winner-take-all strategy still leads to the crowding problem in the eigenspace. The head categories with many samples can extract features more accurately, but occupy most of the eigenspace. The tail categories sharing the rest of the narrow eigenspace are too crowded together to accurately extract features. Above these issues, we propose a novel T-distributed spherical metric for equalized eigenspace in the imbalanced classification, which has the following innovations: 1) We design the T-distributed spherical metric, which has the characteristics of high kurtosis. Instead of the winner-take-all strategy, the T-distributed spherical metric produces a high logit only when the extracted feature is close enough to the category center, without a strong bias against other categories. 2) The T-distributed spherical metric is integrated into the classifier, which is able to equalize the eigenspace for alleviating the crowding issue in the imbalanced problem. The equalized eigenspace by the T-distributed spherical classifier is capable of improving the accuracy of the tail categories while maintaining the accuracy of the head, which significantly promotes the intraclass compactness and interclass separability of features. Extensive experiments on large-scale imbalanced datasets verify our method, which shows superior results in the long-tailed CIFAR-100/-10 with the imbalanced ratio IR = 100/50. Our method also achieves excellent results on the large-scale ImageNet-LT dataset and the iNaturalist dataset with various backbones. In addition, we provide a case study of the real clinical classification of pancreatic tumor subtypes with 6 categories. Among them, the largest number of PDAC accounts for 315 cases, and the least CP has only 8 cases. After 4-fold cross-validation, we achieved a top-1 accuracy of 69.04%.
Cluster-Guided Contrastive Graph Clustering Network
Authors: Xihong Yang; Yue Liu; Sihang Zhou; Siwei Wang; Wenxuan Tu; Qun Zheng; Xinwang Liu; Liming Fang; En Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Benefiting from the intrinsic supervision information exploitation capability, contrastive learning has achieved promising performance in the field of deep graph clustering recently. However, we observe that two drawbacks of the positive and negative sample construction mechanisms limit the performance of existing algorithms from further improvement. 1) The quality of positive samples heavily depends on the carefully designed data augmentations, while inappropriate data augmentations would easily lead to the semantic drift and indiscriminative positive samples. 2) The constructed negative samples are not reliable for ignoring important clustering information. To solve these problems, we propose a Cluster-guided Contrastive deep Graph Clustering network (CCGC) by mining the intrinsic supervision information in the high-confidence clustering results. Specifically, instead of conducting complex node or edge perturbation, we construct two views of the graph by designing special Siamese encoders whose weights are not shared between the sibling sub-networks. Then, guided by the high-confidence clustering information, we carefully select and construct the positive samples from the same high-confidence cluster in two views. Moreover, to construct semantic meaningful negative sample pairs, we regard the centers of different high-confidence clusters as negative samples, thus improving the discriminative capability and reliability of the constructed sample pairs. Lastly, we design an objective function to pull close the samples from the same cluster while pushing away those from other clusters by maximizing and minimizing the cross-view cosine similarity between positive and negative samples. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCGC compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms. The code of CCGC is available at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/CCGC on Github.
Flow to Control: Offline Reinforcement Learning with Lossless Primitive Discovery
Authors: Yiqin Yang; Hao Hu; Wenzhe Li; Siyuan Li; Jun Yang; Qianchuan Zhao; Chongjie Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables the agent to effectively learn from logged data, which significantly extends the applicability of RL algorithms in real-world scenarios where exploration can be expensive or unsafe. Previous works have shown that extracting primitive skills from the recurring and temporally extended structures in the logged data yields better learning. However, these methods suffer greatly when the primitives have limited representation ability to recover the original policy space, especially in offline settings. In this paper, we give a quantitative characterization of the performance of offline hierarchical learning and highlight the importance of learning lossless primitives. To this end, we propose to use a flow-based structure as the representation for low-level policies. This allows us to represent the behaviors in the dataset faithfully while keeping the expression ability to recover the whole policy space. We show that such lossless primitives can drastically improve the performance of hierarchical policies. The experimental results and extensive ablation studies on the standard D4RL benchmark show that our method has a good representation ability for policies and achieves superior performance in most tasks.
Prototypical Partial Optimal Transport for Universal Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yucheng Yang; Xiang Gu; Jian Sun
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without requiring the same label sets of both domains. The existence of domain and category shift makes the task challenging and requires us to distinguish “known” samples (i.e., samples whose labels exist in both domains) and “unknown” samples (i.e., samples whose labels exist in only one domain) in both domains before reducing the domain gap. In this paper, we consider the problem from the point of view of distribution matching which we only need to align two distributions partially. A novel approach, dubbed mini-batch Prototypical Partial Optimal Transport (m-PPOT), is proposed to conduct partial distribution alignment for UniDA. In training phase, besides minimizing m-PPOT, we also leverage the transport plan of m-PPOT to reweight source prototypes and target samples, and design reweighted entropy loss and reweighted cross-entropy loss to distinguish “known” and “unknown” samples. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art UniDA methods.
DeCOM: Decomposed Policy for Constrained Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhaoxing Yang; Haiming Jin; Rong Ding; Haoyi You; Guiyun Fan; Xinbing Wang; Chenghu Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: In recent years, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has presented impressive performance in various applications. However, physical limitations, budget restrictions, and many other factors usually impose constraints on a multi-agent system (MAS), which cannot be handled by traditional MARL frameworks. Specifically, this paper focuses on constrained MASes where agents work cooperatively to maximize the expected team-average return under various constraints on expected team-average costs, and develops a constrained cooperative MARL framework, named DeCOM, for such MASes. In particular, DeCOM decomposes the policy of each agent into two modules, which empowers information sharing among agents to achieve better cooperation. In addition, with such modularization, the training algorithm of DeCOM separates the original constrained optimization into an unconstrained optimization on reward and a constraints satisfaction problem on costs. DeCOM then iteratively solves these problems in a computationally efficient manner, which makes DeCOM highly scalable. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the convergence of DeCOM's policy update algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of DeCOM with various types of costs in both moderate-scale and large-scale (with 500 agents) environments that originate from real-world applications.
Purifier: Defending Data Inference Attacks via Transforming Confidence Scores
Authors: Ziqi Yang; Lijin Wang; Da Yang; Jie Wan; Ziming Zhao; Ee-Chien Chang; Fan Zhang; Kui Ren
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Neural networks are susceptible to data inference attacks such as the membership inference attack, the adversarial model inversion attack and the attribute inference attack, where the attacker could infer useful information such as the membership, the reconstruction or the sensitive attributes of a data sample from the confidence scores predicted by the target classifier. In this paper, we propose a method, namely PURIFIER, to defend against membership inference attacks. It transforms the confidence score vectors predicted by the target classifier and makes purified confidence scores indistinguishable in individual shape, statistical distribution and prediction label between members and non-members. The experimental results show that PURIFIER helps defend membership inference attacks with high effectiveness and efficiency, outperforming previous defense methods, and also incurs negligible utility loss. Besides, our further experiments show that PURIFIER is also effective in defending adversarial model inversion attacks and attribute inference attacks. For example, the inversion error is raised about 4+ times on the Facescrub530 classifier, and the attribute inference accuracy drops significantly when PURIFIER is deployed in our experiment.
i-Code: An Integrative and Composable Multimodal Learning Framework
Authors: Ziyi Yang; Yuwei Fang; Chenguang Zhu; Reid Pryzant; DongDong Chen; Yu Shi; Yichong Xu; Yao Qian; Mei Gao; Yi-Ling Chen; Liyang Lu; Yujia Xie; Robert Gmyr; Noel Codella; Naoyuki Kanda; Bin Xiao; Lu Yuan; Takuya Yoshioka; Michael Zeng; Xuedong Huang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Human intelligence is multimodal; we integrate visual, linguistic, and acoustic signals to maintain a holistic worldview. Most current pretraining methods, however, are limited to one or two modalities. We present i-Code, a self-supervised pretraining framework where users may flexibly combine the modalities of vision, speech, and language into unified and general-purpose vector representations. In this framework, data from each modality are first given to pretrained single-modality encoders. The encoder outputs are then integrated with a multimodal fusion network, which uses novel merge- and co-attention mechanisms to effectively combine information from the different modalities. The entire system is pretrained end-to-end with new objectives including masked modality unit modeling and cross-modality contrastive learning. Unlike previous research using only video for pretraining, the i-Code framework can dynamically process single, dual, and triple-modality data during training and inference, flexibly projecting different combinations of modalities into a single representation space. Experimental results demonstrate how i-Code can outperform state-of-the-art techniques on five multimodal understanding tasks and single-modality benchmarks, improving by as much as 11% and demonstrating the power of integrative multimodal pretraining.
Learning Dynamic Latent Spaces for Lifelong Generative Modelling
Authors: Fei Ye; Adrian G. Bors
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Task Free Continual Learning (TFCL) aims to capture novel concepts from non-stationary data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Mixture models, which add new components when certain conditions are met, have shown promising results in TFCL tasks. However, such approaches do not make use of the knowledge already accumulated for positive knowledge transfer. In this paper, we develop a new model, namely the Online Recursive Variational Autoencoder (ORVAE). ORVAE utilizes the prior knowledge by selectively incorporating the newly learnt information, by adding new components, according to the knowledge already known from the past learnt data. We introduce a new attention mechanism to regularize the structural latent space in which the most important information is reused while the information that interferes with novel samples is inactivated. The proposed attention mechanism can maximize the benefit from the forward transfer for learning novel information without forgetting previously learnt knowledge. We perform several experiments which show that ORVAE achieves state-of-the-art results under TFCL.
Lifelong Compression Mixture Model via Knowledge Relationship Graph
Authors: Fei Ye; Adrian G. Bors
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) represents a challenging scenario for lifelong learning because the model, under this paradigm, does not access any task information. The Dynamic Expansion Model (DEM) has shown promising results in this scenario due to its scalability and generalisation power. However, DEM focuses only on addressing forgetting and ignores minimizing  the model size, which limits its deployment in practical systems. In this work, we aim to simultaneously address network forgetting and model size optimization by developing the Lifelong Compression Mixture Model (LGMM) equipped with the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) based expansion criterion for model expansion. A diversity-aware sample selection approach is proposed to selectively store a variety of samples to promote information diversity among the components of the LGMM, which allows more knowledge to be captured with an appropriate model size. In order to avoid having multiple components with similar knowledge in the LGMM, we propose a data-free component discarding mechanism that evaluates a knowledge relation graph matrix describing the relevance between each pair of components. A greedy selection procedure is proposed to identify and remove the redundant    components from the LGMM. The proposed discarding mechanism can be performed during or after the training. Experiments on different datasets show that LGMM achieves the best performance for TFCL.
Lifelong Variational Autoencoder via Online Adversarial Expansion Strategy
Authors: Fei Ye; Adrian G. Bors
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) suffers from a significant loss of information when trained  on a non-stationary data distribution. This loss in VAE models, called catastrophic forgetting, has not been studied theoretically before. We analyse the forgetting behaviour of a VAE in continual generative modelling by developing a new lower bound on the data likelihood, which interprets the forgetting process as an increase in the probability distance between the generator's distribution and the evolved data distribution. The proposed bound shows that a VAE-based dynamic expansion model can achieve better performance if its capacity increases appropriately considering the shift in the data distribution. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel expansion criterion that aims to preserve the information diversity among the VAE components, while ensuring that it acquires more knowledge with fewer parameters. Specifically, we implement this expansion criterion from the perspective of a multi-player game and propose the Online Adversarial Expansion Strategy (OAES), which considers all previously learned components as well as the currently updated component as multiple players in a game, while an adversary model evaluates their performance. The proposed OAES can dynamically estimate the discrepancy between each player and the adversary without accessing task information. This leads to the gradual addition of new components while ensuring the knowledge diversity among all of them. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed extension strategy can enable a VAE model to achieve the best performance given an appropriate model size.
Continual Variational Autoencoder via Continual Generative Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Fei Ye; Adrian G. Bors
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Humans and other living beings have the ability of short and long-term memorization during their entire lifespan. However, most existing Continual Learning (CL) methods can only account for short-term information when training on infinite streams of data. In this paper, we develop a new unsupervised continual learning framework consisting of two memory systems using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). We develop a Short-Term Memory (STM), and a parameterised scalable memory implemented by a Teacher model aiming to preserve the long-term information. To incrementally enrich the Teacher's knowledge during training, we propose the Knowledge Incremental Assimilation Mechanism (KIAM), which evaluates the knowledge similarity between the STM and the already accumulated information as signals to expand the Teacher's capacity. Then we train a VAE as a Student module and propose a new Knowledge Distillation (KD) approach that gradually transfers generative knowledge from the Teacher to the Student module. To ensure the quality and diversity of knowledge in KD, we propose a new expert pruning approach that selectively removes the Teacher's redundant parameters, associated with unnecessary experts which have learnt overlapping information with other experts. This mechanism further reduces the complexity of the Teacher's module while ensuring the diversity of knowledge for the KD procedure. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed framework can train a statistically diversified Teacher module for continual VAE learning which is applicable to learning infinite data streams.
Certifiable Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Authors: Nanyang Ye; Lin Zhu; Jia Wang; Zhaoyu Zeng; Jiayao Shao; Chensheng Peng; Bikang Pan; Kaican Li; Jun Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Machine learning methods suffer from test-time performance degeneration when faced with out-of-distribution (OoD) data whose distribution is not necessarily the same as training data distribution. Although a plethora of algorithms have been proposed to mitigate this issue, it has been demonstrated that achieving better performance than ERM simultaneously on different types of distributional shift datasets is challenging for existing approaches. Besides, it is unknown how and to what extent these methods work on any OoD datum without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a certifiable out-of-distribution generalization method that provides provable OoD generalization performance guarantees via a functional optimization framework leveraging random distributions and max-margin learning for each input datum. With this approach, the proposed algorithmic scheme can provide certified accuracy for each input datum's prediction on the semantic space and achieves better performance simultaneously on OoD datasets dominated by correlation shifts or diversity shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZlatanWilliams/StochasticDisturbanceLearning.
Random Walk Conformer: Learning Graph Representation from Long and Short Range
Authors: Pei-Kai Yeh; Hsi-Wen Chen; Ming-Syan Chen
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: While graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved notable success in various graph mining tasks, conventional GNNs only model the pairwise correlation in 1-hop neighbors without considering the long-term relations and the high-order patterns, thus limiting their performances. Recently, several works have addressed these issues by exploring the motif, i.e., frequent subgraphs. However, these methods usually require an unacceptable computational time to enumerate all possible combinations of motifs. In this paper, we introduce a new GNN framework, namely Random Walk Conformer (RWC), to exploit global correlations and local patterns based on the random walk, which is a promising method to discover the graph structure. Besides, we propose random walk encoding to help RWC capture topological information, which is proven more expressive than conventional spatial encoding. Extensive experiment results manifest that RWC achieves state-of-the-art performance on graph classification and regression tasks. The source code of RWC is available at https://github.com/b05901024/RandomWalkConformer.
Lottery Pools: Winning More by Interpolating Tickets without Increasing Training or Inference Cost
Authors: Lu Yin; Shiwei Liu; Meng Fang; Tianjin Huang; Vlado Menkovski; Mykola Pechenizkiy
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Lottery tickets (LTs) is able to discover accurate and sparse subnetworks that could be trained in isolation to match the performance of dense networks. Ensemble, in parallel, is one of the oldest time-proven tricks in machine learning to improve performance by combining the output of multiple independent models. However, the benefits of ensemble in the context of LTs will be diluted since ensemble does not directly lead to stronger sparse subnetworks, but leverages their predictions for a better decision. In this work, we first observe that directly averaging the weights of the adjacent learned subnetworks significantly boosts the performance of LTs. Encouraged by this observation, we further propose an alternative way to perform an "ensemble'' over the subnetworks identified by iterative magnitude pruning via a simple interpolating strategy. We call our method Lottery Pools. In contrast to the naive ensemble which brings no performance gains to each single subnetwork, Lottery Pools yields much stronger sparse subnetworks than the original LTs without requiring any extra training or inference cost. Across various modern architectures on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, we show that our method achieves significant performance gains in both, in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Impressively, evaluated with VGG-16 and ResNet-18, the produced sparse subnetworks outperform the original LTs by up to 1.88% on CIFAR-100 and 2.36% on CIFAR-100-C; the resulting dense network surpasses the pre-trained dense-model up to 
 2.22% on CIFAR-100 and 2.38% on CIFAR-100-C. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/luuyin/Lottery-pools.