pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
First Go, then Post-Explore: the Benefits of Post-Exploration in Intrinsic Motivation
Authors: Zhao Yang, Thomas M. Moerland, Mike Preuss, Aske Plaat
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Go-Explore achieved breakthrough performance on challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with sparse rewards. The key insight of Go-Explore was that successful exploration requires an agent to first return to an interesting state ('Go'), and only then explore into unknown terrain ('Explore'). We refer to such exploration after a goal is reached as 'post-exploration'. In this paper, we present a clear ablation study of post-exploration in a general intrinsically motivated goal exploration process (IMGEP) framework, that the Go-Explore paper did not show. We study the isolated potential of post-exploration, by turning it on and off within the same algorithm under both tabular and deep RL settings on both discrete navigation and continuous control tasks. Experiments on a range of MiniGrid and Mujoco environments show that post-exploration indeed helps IMGEP agents reach more diverse states and boosts their performance. In short, our work suggests that RL researchers should consider to use post-exploration in IMGEP when possible since it is effective, method-agnostic and easy to implement.
Reinforcement Learning for UAV control with Policy and Reward Shaping
Authors: Cristian Millán-Arias, Ruben Contreras, Francisco Cruz, Bruno Fernandes
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) related technology has expanded knowledge in the area, bringing to light new problems and challenges that require solutions. Furthermore, because the technology allows processes usually carried out by people to be automated, it is in great demand in industrial sectors. The automation of these vehicles has been addressed in the literature, applying different machine learning strategies. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an automation framework that is frequently used to train autonomous agents. RL is a machine learning paradigm wherein an agent interacts with an environment to solve a given task. However, learning autonomously can be time consuming, computationally expensive, and may not be practical in highly-complex scenarios. Interactive reinforcement learning allows an external trainer to provide advice to an agent while it is learning a task. In this study, we set out to teach an RL agent to control a drone using reward-shaping and policy-shaping techniques simultaneously. Two simulated scenarios were proposed for the training; one without obstacles and one with obstacles. We also studied the influence of each technique. The results show that an agent trained simultaneously with both techniques obtains a lower reward than an agent trained using only a policy-based approach. Nevertheless, the agent achieves lower execution times and less dispersion during training.
Enhanced Multi-Objective A* with Partial Expansion
Authors: Valmiki Kothare, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00

The Multi-Objective Shortest Path Problem (MO-SPP), typically posed on a graph, determines a set of paths from a start vertex to a destination vertex while optimizing multiple objectives. In general, there does not exist a single solution path that can simultaneously optimize all the objectives and the problem thus seeks to find a set of so-called Pareto-optimal solutions. To address this problem, several Multi-Objective A* (MOA*) algorithms were recently developed to quickly compute solutions with quality guarantees. However, these MOA* algorithms often suffer from high memory usage, especially when the branching factor (i.e. the number of neighbors of any vertex) of the graph is large. This work thus aims at reducing the high memory consumption of MOA* with little increase in the runtime. By generalizing and unifying several single- and multi-objective search algorithms, we develop the Runtime and Memory Efficient MOA* (RME-MOA*) approach, which can balance between runtime and memory efficiency by tuning two user-defined hyper-parameters.
MobileTL: On-device Transfer Learning with Inverted Residual Blocks
Authors: Hung-Yueh Chiang, Natalia Frumkin, Feng Liang, Diana Marculescu
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Transfer learning on edge is challenging due to on-device limited resources. Existing work addresses this issue by training a subset of parameters or adding model patches. Developed with inference in mind, Inverted Residual Blocks (IRBs) split a convolutional layer into depthwise and pointwise convolutions, leading to more stacking layers, e.g., convolution, normalization, and activation layers. Though they are efficient for inference, IRBs require that additional activation maps are stored in memory for training weights for convolution layers and scales for normalization layers. As a result, their high memory cost prohibits training IRBs on resource-limited edge devices, and making them unsuitable in the context of transfer learning. To address this issue, we present MobileTL, a memory and computationally efficient on-device transfer learning method for models built with IRBs. MobileTL trains the shifts for internal normalization layers to avoid storing activation maps for the backward pass. Also, MobileTL approximates the backward computation of the activation layer (e.g., Hard-Swish and ReLU6) as a signed function which enables storing a binary mask instead of activation maps for the backward pass. MobileTL fine-tunes a few top blocks (close to output) rather than propagating the gradient through the whole network to reduce the computation cost. Our method reduces memory usage by 46% and 53% for MobileNetV2 and V3 IRBs, respectively. For MobileNetV3, we observe a 36% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) when fine-tuning 5 blocks, while only incurring a 0.6% accuracy reduction on CIFAR10. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method is Pareto-optimal (best accuracy under given hardware constraints) compared to prior work in transfer learning for edge devices.
A Transformer-Based User Satisfaction Prediction for Proactive Interaction Mechanism in DuerOS
Authors: Wei Shen, Xiaonan He, Chuheng Zhang, Xuyun Zhang, Jian Xie
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Spoken Dialogue Systems

Recently, spoken dialogue systems have been widely deployed in a variety of applications, serving a huge number of end-users. A common issue is that the errors resulting from noisy utterances, semantic misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge make it hard for a real system to respond properly, possibly leading to an unsatisfactory user experience. To avoid such a case, we consider a proactive interaction mechanism where the system predicts the user satisfaction with the candidate response before giving it to the user. If the user is not likely to be satisfied according to the prediction, the system will ask the user a suitable question to determine the real intent of the user instead of providing the response directly. With such an interaction with the user, the system can give a better response to the user. Previous models that predict the user satisfaction are not applicable to DuerOS which is a large-scale commercial dialogue system. They are based on hand-crafted features and thus can hardly learn the complex patterns lying behind millions of conversations and temporal dependency in multiple turns of the conversation. Moreover, they are trained and evaluated on the benchmark datasets with adequate labels, which are expensive to obtain in a commercial dialogue system. To face these challenges, we propose a pipeline to predict the user satisfaction to help DuerOS decide whether to ask for clarification in each turn. Specifically, we propose to first generate a large number of weak labels and then train a transformer-based model to predict the user satisfaction with these weak labels. Empirically, we deploy and evaluate our model on DuerOS, and observe a 19% relative improvement on the accuracy of user satisfaction prediction and 2.3% relative improvement on user experience.
A Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for 6-DOF UCAV Air-to-Air Combat
Authors: Jiajun Chai, Wenzhang Chen, Yuanheng Zhu, Zong-xin Yao, Dongbin Zhao
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) combat is a challenging scenario with continuous action space. In this paper, we propose a general hierarchical framework to resolve the within-vision-range (WVR) air-to-air combat problem under 6 dimensions of degree (6-DOF) dynamics. The core idea is to divide the whole decision process into two loops and use reinforcement learning (RL) to solve them separately. The outer loop takes into account the current combat situation and decides the expected macro behavior of the aircraft according to a combat strategy. Then the inner loop tracks the macro behavior with a flight controller by calculating the actual input signals for the aircraft. We design the Markov decision process for both the outer loop strategy and inner loop controller, and train them by proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. For the inner loop controller, we design an effective reward function to accurately track various macro behavior. For the outer loop strategy, we further adopt a fictitious self-play mechanism to improve the combat performance by constantly combating against the historical strategies. Experiment results show that the inner loop controller can achieve better tracking performance than fine-tuned PID controller, and the outer loop strategy can perform complex maneuvers to get higher and higher winning rate, with the generation evolves.
Persona-Based Conversational AI: State of the Art and Challenges
Authors: Junfeng Liu, Christopher Symons, Ranga Raju Vatsavai
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

Conversational AI has become an increasingly prominent and practical application of machine learning. However, existing conversational AI techniques still suffer from various limitations. One such limitation is a lack of well-developed methods for incorporating auxiliary information that could help a model understand conversational context better. In this paper, we explore how persona-based information could help improve the quality of response generation in conversations. First, we provide a literature review focusing on the current state-of-the-art methods that utilize persona information. We evaluate two strong baseline methods, the Ranking Profile Memory Network and the Poly-Encoder, on the NeurIPS ConvAI2 benchmark dataset. Our analysis elucidates the importance of incorporating persona information into conversational systems. Additionally, our study highlights several limitations with current state-of-the-art methods and outlines challenges and future research directions for advancing personalized conversational AI technology.
X-Paste: Revisiting Scalable Copy-Paste for Instance Segmentation using CLIP and StableDiffusion
Authors: Hanqing Zhao, Dianmo Sheng, Jianmin Bao, Dongdong Chen, Dong Chen, Fang Wen, Lu Yuan, Ce Liu, Wenbo Zhou, Qi Chu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Instance Segmentation, Object, Object Detection, Open Vocabulary Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Learning

Copy-Paste is a simple and effective data augmentation strategy for instance segmentation. By randomly pasting object instances onto new background images, it creates new training data for free and significantly boosts the segmentation performance, especially for rare object categories. Although diverse, high-quality object instances used in Copy-Paste result in more performance gain, previous works utilize object instances either from human-annotated instance segmentation datasets or rendered from 3D object models, and both approaches are too expensive to scale up to obtain good diversity. In this paper, we revisit Copy-Paste at scale with the power of newly emerged zero-shot recognition models (e.g., CLIP) and text2image models (e.g., StableDiffusion). We demonstrate for the first time that using a text2image model to generate images or zero-shot recognition model to filter noisily crawled images for different object categories is a feasible way to make Copy-Paste truly scalable. To make such success happen, we design a data acquisition and processing framework, dubbed ``X-Paste", upon which a systematic study is conducted. On the LVIS dataset, X-Paste provides impressive improvements over the strong baseline CenterNet2 with Swin-L as the backbone. Specifically, it archives +2.6 box AP and +2.1 mask AP gains on all classes and even more significant gains with +6.8 box AP, +6.5 mask AP on long-tail classes. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/yoctta/XPaste.
Teaching Matters: Investigating the Role of Supervision in Vision Transformers
Authors: Matthew Walmer, Saksham Suri, Kamal Gupta, Abhinav Shrivastava
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years and have proliferated into many applications. However, their behavior under different learning paradigms is not well explored. We compare ViTs trained through different methods of supervision, and show that they learn a diverse range of behaviors in terms of their attention, representations, and downstream performance. We also discover ViT behaviors that are consistent across supervision, including the emergence of Offset Local Attention Heads. These are self-attention heads that attend to a token adjacent to the current token with a fixed directional offset, a phenomenon that to the best of our knowledge has not been highlighted in any prior work. Our analysis shows that ViTs are highly flexible and learn to process local and global information in different orders depending on their training method. We find that contrastive self-supervised methods learn features that are competitive with explicitly supervised features, and they can even be superior for part-level tasks. We also find that the representations of reconstruction-based models show non-trivial similarity to contrastive self-supervised models. Project website (https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/vit_analysis) and code (https://www.github.com/mwalmer-umd/vit_analysis) are publicly available.
Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models
Authors: Gowthami Somepalli, Vasu Singla, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Cutting-edge diffusion models produce images with high quality and customizability, enabling them to be used for commercial art and graphic design purposes. But do diffusion models create unique works of art, or are they replicating content directly from their training sets? In this work, we study image retrieval frameworks that enable us to compare generated images with training samples and detect when content has been replicated. Applying our frameworks to diffusion models trained on multiple datasets including Oxford flowers, Celeb-A, ImageNet, and LAION, we discuss how factors such as training set size impact rates of content replication. We also identify cases where diffusion models, including the popular Stable Diffusion model, blatantly copy from their training data.
See, Hear, and Feel: Smart Sensory Fusion for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Hao Li, Yizhi Zhang, Junzhe Zhu, Shaoxiong Wang, Michelle A Lee, Huazhe Xu, Edward Adelson, Li Fei-Fei, Ruohan Gao, Jiajun Wu
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we systematically study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception can jointly help robots to solve complex manipulation tasks. We build a robot system that can see with a camera, hear with a contact microphone, and feel with a vision-based tactile sensor, with all three sensory modalities fused with a self-attention model. Results on two challenging tasks, dense packing and pouring, demonstrate the necessity and power of multisensory perception for robotic manipulation: vision displays the global status of the robot but can often suffer from occlusion, audio provides immediate feedback of key moments that are even invisible, and touch offers precise local geometry for decision making. Leveraging all three modalities, our robotic system significantly outperforms prior methods.
NeRFEditor: Differentiable Style Decomposition for Full 3D Scene Editing
Authors: Chunyi Sun, Yanbin Liu, Junlin Han, Stephen Gould
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D scene Editing, NeRF, Self-Supervised Learning

We present NeRFEditor, an efficient learning framework for 3D scene editing, which takes a video captured over 360{\deg} as input and outputs a high-quality, identity-preserving stylized 3D scene. Our method supports diverse types of editing such as guided by reference images, text prompts, and user interactions. We achieve this by encouraging a pre-trained StyleGAN model and a NeRF model to learn from each other mutually. Specifically, we use a NeRF model to generate numerous image-angle pairs to train an adjustor, which can adjust the StyleGAN latent code to generate high-fidelity stylized images for any given angle. To extrapolate editing to GAN out-of-domain views, we devise another module that is trained in a self-supervised learning manner. This module maps novel-view images to the hidden space of StyleGAN that allows StyleGAN to generate stylized images on novel views. These two modules together produce guided images in 360{\deg}views to finetune a NeRF to make stylization effects, where a stable fine-tuning strategy is proposed to achieve this. Experiments show that NeRFEditor outperforms prior work on benchmark and real-world scenes with better editability, fidelity, and identity preservation.
PaDPaF: Partial Disentanglement with Partially-Federated GANs
Authors: Abdulla Jasem Almansoori, Samuel Horváth, Martin Takáč
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Federated Learning, Recommendation Systems, Self-Driving Cars

Federated learning has become a popular machine learning paradigm with many potential real-life applications, including recommendation systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, and self-driving cars. Though most current applications focus on classification-based tasks, learning personalized generative models remains largely unexplored, and their benefits in the heterogeneous setting still need to be better understood. This work proposes a novel architecture combining global client-agnostic and local client-specific generative models. We show that using standard techniques for training federated models, our proposed model achieves privacy and personalization by implicitly disentangling the globally consistent representation (i.e. content) from the client-dependent variations (i.e. style). Using such decomposition, personalized models can generate locally unseen labels while preserving the given style of the client and can predict the labels for all clients with high accuracy by training a simple linear classifier on the global content features. Furthermore, disentanglement enables other essential applications, such as data anonymization, by sharing only the content. Extensive experimental evaluation corroborates our findings, and we also discuss a theoretical motivation for the proposed approach.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation using One-shot Image-to-Image Translation via Latent Representation Mixing
Authors: Sarmad F. Ismael, Koray Kayabol, Erchan Aptoula
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation is one of the prominent strategies for handling both domain shift, that is widely encountered in large-scale land use/land cover map calculation, and the scarcity of pixel-level ground truth that is crucial for supervised semantic segmentation. Studies focusing on adversarial domain adaptation via re-styling source domain samples, commonly through generative adversarial networks, have reported varying levels of success, yet they suffer from semantic inconsistencies, visual corruptions, and often require a large number of target domain samples. In this letter, we propose a new unsupervised domain adaptation method for the semantic segmentation of very high resolution images, that i) leads to semantically consistent and noise-free images, ii) operates with a single target domain sample (i.e. one-shot) and iii) at a fraction of the number of parameters required from state-of-the-art methods. More specifically an image-to-image translation paradigm is proposed, based on an encoder-decoder principle where latent content representations are mixed across domains, and a perceptual network module and loss function is further introduced to enforce semantic consistency. Cross-city comparative experiments have shown that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. Our source code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Sarmadfismael/LRM_I2I}.
iQuery: Instruments as Queries for Audio-Visual Sound Separation
Authors: Jiaben Chen, Renrui Zhang, Dongze Lian, Jiaqi Yang, Ziyao Zeng, Jianbo Shi
Date: 2022-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Decoder, Disentanglement

Current audio-visual separation methods share a standard architecture design where an audio encoder-decoder network is fused with visual encoding features at the encoder bottleneck. This design confounds the learning of multi-modal feature encoding with robust sound decoding for audio separation. To generalize to a new instrument: one must finetune the entire visual and audio network for all musical instruments. We re-formulate visual-sound separation task and propose Instrument as Query (iQuery) with a flexible query expansion mechanism. Our approach ensures cross-modal consistency and cross-instrument disentanglement. We utilize "visually named" queries to initiate the learning of audio queries and use cross-modal attention to remove potential sound source interference at the estimated waveforms. To generalize to a new instrument or event class, drawing inspiration from the text-prompt design, we insert an additional query as an audio prompt while freezing the attention mechanism. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate that our iQuery improves audio-visual sound source separation performance.