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The remarkable success of modern machine learning models on large datasets often demands extensive training time and resource consumption. To save cost, a prevalent research line, known as online batch selection, explores selecting informative subsets during the training process. Although recent efforts achieve advancements by measuring the impact of each sample on generalization, their reliance on additional reference models inherently limits their practical applications, when there are no such ideal models available. On the other hand, the vanilla reference-model-free methods involve independently scoring and selecting data in a sample-wise manner, which sacrifices the diversity and induces the redundancy. To tackle this dilemma, we propose Diversified Batch Selection (DivBS), which is reference-model-free and can efficiently select diverse and representative samples. Specifically, we define a novel selection objective that measures the group-wise orthogonalized representativeness to combat the redundancy issue of previous sample-wise criteria, and provide a principled selection-efficient realization. Extensive experiments across various tasks demonstrate the significant superiority of DivBS in the performance-speedup trade-off. The code is publicly available., Comment: ICML 2024

Diffusion models have demonstrated great potential in generating high-quality content for images, natural language, protein domains, etc. However, how to perform user-preferred targeted generation via diffusion models with only black-box target scores of users remains challenging. To address this issue, we first formulate the fine-tuning of the targeted reserve-time stochastic differential equation (SDE) associated with a pre-trained diffusion model as a sequential black-box optimization problem. Furthermore, we propose a novel covariance-adaptive sequential optimization algorithm to optimize cumulative black-box scores under unknown transition dynamics. Theoretically, we prove a $O(\frac{d^2}{\sqrt{T}})$ convergence rate for cumulative convex functions without smooth and strongly convex assumptions. Empirically, experiments on both numerical test problems and target-guided 3D-molecule generation tasks show the superior performance of our method in achieving better target scores.

Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods encounter an additional variance called the coordinate-wise variance, which stems from the random gradient estimation. To reduce this variance, prior works require estimating all partial derivatives, essentially approximating FO information. This approach demands O(d) function evaluations (d is the dimension size), which incurs substantial computational costs and is prohibitive in high-dimensional scenarios. This paper proposes the Zeroth-order Proximal Double Variance Reduction (ZPDVR) method, which utilizes the averaging trick to reduce both sampling and coordinate-wise variances. Compared to prior methods, ZPDVR relies solely on random gradient estimates, calls the stochastic zeroth-order oracle (SZO) in expectation $\mathcal{O}(1)$ times per iteration, and achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}(d(n + \kappa)\log (\frac{1}{\epsilon}))$ SZO query complexity in the strongly convex and smooth setting, where $\kappa$ represents the condition number and $\epsilon$ is the desired accuracy. Empirical results validate ZPDVR's linear convergence and demonstrate its superior performance over other related methods.

State-of-the-art model for zero-shot cross-lingual spoken language understanding performs cross-lingual unsupervised contrastive learning to achieve the label-agnostic semantic alignment between each utterance and its code-switched data. However, it ignores the precious intent/slot labels, whose label information is promising to help capture the label-aware semantics structure and then leverage supervised contrastive learning to improve both source and target languages' semantics. In this paper, we propose Hybrid and Cooperative Contrastive Learning to address this problem. Apart from cross-lingual unsupervised contrastive learning, we design a holistic approach that exploits source language supervised contrastive learning, cross-lingual supervised contrastive learning and multilingual supervised contrastive learning to perform label-aware semantics alignments in a comprehensive manner. Each kind of supervised contrastive learning mechanism includes both single-task and joint-task scenarios. In our model, one contrastive learning mechanism's input is enhanced by others. Thus the total four contrastive learning mechanisms are cooperative to learn more consistent and discriminative representations in the virtuous cycle during the training process. Experiments show that our model obtains consistent improvements over 9 languages, achieving new state-of-the-art performance., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2312.03716

Stance detection is the view towards a specific target by a given context (\textit{e.g.} tweets, commercial reviews). Target-related knowledge is often needed to assist stance detection models in understanding the target well and making detection correctly. However, prevailing works for knowledge-infused stance detection predominantly incorporate target knowledge from a singular source that lacks knowledge verification in limited domain knowledge. The low-resource training data further increases the challenge for the data-driven large models in this task. To address those challenges, we propose a collaborative knowledge infusion approach for low-resource stance detection tasks, employing a combination of aligned knowledge enhancement and efficient parameter learning techniques. Specifically, our stance detection approach leverages target background knowledge collaboratively from different knowledge sources with the help of knowledge alignment. Additionally, we also introduce the parameter-efficient collaborative adaptor with a staged optimization algorithm, which collaboratively addresses the challenges associated with low-resource stance detection tasks from both network structure and learning perspectives. To assess the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three public stance detection datasets, including low-resource and cross-target settings. The results demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to the existing stance detection approaches., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Big Data Mining and Analysis

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with classic first-order optimizers entails prohibitive GPU memory due to the backpropagation process. Recent works have turned to zeroth-order optimizers for fine-tuning, which save substantial memory by using two forward passes. However, these optimizers are plagued by the heterogeneity of parameter curvatures across different dimensions. In this work, we propose HiZOO, a diagonal Hessian informed zeroth-order optimizer which is the first work to leverage the diagonal Hessian to enhance zeroth-order optimizer for fine-tuning LLMs. What's more, HiZOO avoids the expensive memory cost and only increases one forward pass per step. Extensive experiments on various models (350M~66B parameters) indicate that HiZOO improves model convergence, significantly reducing training steps and effectively enhancing model accuracy. Moreover, we visualize the optimization trajectories of HiZOO on test functions, illustrating its effectiveness in handling heterogeneous curvatures. Lastly, we provide theoretical proofs of convergence for HiZOO. Code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HiZOO27F8.

In this study, we present a transductive inference approach on that reward information propagation graph, which enables the effective estimation of rewards for unlabelled data in offline reinforcement learning. Reward inference is the key to learning effective policies in practical scenarios, while direct environmental interactions are either too costly or unethical and the reward functions are rarely accessible, such as in healthcare and robotics. Our research focuses on developing a reward inference method based on the contextual properties of information propagation on graphs that capitalizes on a constrained number of human reward annotations to infer rewards for unlabelled data. We leverage both the available data and limited reward annotations to construct a reward propagation graph, wherein the edge weights incorporate various influential factors pertaining to the rewards. Subsequently, we employ the constructed graph for transductive reward inference, thereby estimating rewards for unlabelled data. Furthermore, we establish the existence of a fixed point during several iterations of the transductive inference process and demonstrate its at least convergence to a local optimum. Empirical evaluations on locomotion and robotic manipulation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. The application of our inferred rewards improves the performance in offline reinforcement learning tasks.

Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) represents a critical frontier in time series analysis, characterized by extensive input sequences, as opposed to the shorter spans typical of traditional approaches. While longer sequences inherently offer richer information for enhanced predictive precision, prevailing studies often respond by escalating model complexity. These intricate models can inflate into millions of parameters, resulting in prohibitive parameter scales. Our study demonstrates, through both analytical and empirical evidence, that decomposition is key to containing excessive model inflation while achieving uniformly superior and robust results across various datasets. Remarkably, by tailoring decomposition to the intrinsic dynamics of time series data, our proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks, using over 99 \% fewer parameters than the majority of competing methods. Through this work, we aim to unleash the power of a restricted set of parameters by capitalizing on domain characteristics--a timely reminder that in the realm of LTSF, bigger is not invariably better.

Text-to-image diffusion techniques have shown exceptional capability of producing high-quality images from text descriptions. This indicates that there exists a strong correlation between the visual and textual domains. In addition, text-image discriminative models such as CLIP excel in image labelling from text prompts, thanks to the rich and diverse information available from open concepts. In this paper, we leverage these technical advances to solve a challenging problem in computer vision: camouflaged instance segmentation. Specifically, we propose a method built upon a state-of-the-art diffusion model, empowered by open-vocabulary to learn multi-scale textual-visual features for camouflaged object representations. Such cross-domain representations are desirable in segmenting camouflaged objects where visual cues are subtle to distinguish the objects from the background, especially in segmenting novel objects which are not seen in training. We also develop technically supportive components to effectively fuse cross-domain features and engage relevant features towards respective foreground objects. We validate our method and compare it with existing ones on several benchmark datasets of camouflaged instance segmentation and generic open-vocabulary instance segmentation. Experimental results confirm the advances of our method over existing ones. We will publish our code and pre-trained models to support future research., Comment: This work is under review

Existing PTLM-based models for TSC can be categorized into two groups: 1) fine-tuning-based models that adopt PTLM as the context encoder; 2) prompting-based models that transfer the classification task to the text/word generation task. In this paper, we present a new perspective of leveraging PTLM for TSC: simultaneously leveraging the merits of both language modeling and explicit target-context interactions via contextual target attributes. Specifically, we design the domain- and target-constrained cloze test, which can leverage the PTLMs' strong language modeling ability to generate the given target's attributes pertaining to the review context. The attributes contain the background and property information of the target, which can help to enrich the semantics of the review context and the target. To exploit the attributes for tackling TSC, we first construct a heterogeneous information graph by treating the attributes as nodes and combining them with (1) the syntax graph automatically produced by the off-the-shelf dependency parser and (2) the semantics graph of the review context, which is derived from the self-attention mechanism. Then we propose a heterogeneous information gated graph convolutional network to model the interactions among the attribute information, the syntactic information, and the contextual information. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance., Comment: Accepted by Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)

Recent graph-based models for multi-intent SLU have obtained promising results through modeling the guidance from the prediction of intents to the decoding of slot filling. However, existing methods (1) only model the unidirectional guidance from intent to slot, while there are bidirectional inter-correlations between intent and slot; (2) adopt homogeneous graphs to model the interactions between the slot semantics nodes and intent label nodes, which limit the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed Co-guiding Net, which implements a two-stage framework achieving the mutual guidances between the two tasks. In the first stage, the initial estimated labels of both tasks are produced, and then they are leveraged in the second stage to model the mutual guidances. Specifically, we propose two heterogeneous graph attention networks working on the proposed two heterogeneous semantics label graphs, which effectively represent the relations among the semantics nodes and label nodes. Besides, we further propose Co-guiding-SCL Net, which exploits the single-task and dual-task semantics contrastive relations. For the first stage, we propose single-task supervised contrastive learning, and for the second stage, we propose co-guiding supervised contrastive learning, which considers the two tasks' mutual guidances in the contrastive learning procedure. Experiment results on multi-intent SLU show that our model outperforms existing models by a large margin, obtaining a relative improvement of 21.3% over the previous best model on MixATIS dataset in overall accuracy. We also evaluate our model on the zero-shot cross-lingual scenario and the results show that our model can relatively improve the state-of-the-art model by 33.5% on average in terms of overall accuracy for the total 9 languages., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2210.10375

Federated Learning (FL) typically aggregates client model parameters using a weighting approach determined by sample proportions. However, this naive weighting method may lead to unfairness and degradation in model performance due to statistical heterogeneity and the inclusion of noisy data among clients. Theoretically, distributional robustness analysis has shown that the generalization performance of a learning model with respect to any shifted distribution is bounded. This motivates us to reconsider the weighting approach in federated learning. In this paper, we replace the aforementioned weighting method with a new strategy that considers the generalization bounds of each local model. Specifically, we estimate the upper and lower bounds of the second-order origin moment of the shifted distribution for the current local model, and then use these bounds disagreements as the aggregation proportions for weightings in each communication round. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed weighting strategy significantly improves the performance of several representative FL algorithms on benchmark datasets.

Real-world datasets inevitably contain biases that arise from different sources or conditions during data collection. Consequently, such inconsistency itself acts as a confounding factor that disturbs the cluster analysis. Existing methods eliminate the biases by projecting data onto the orthogonal complement of the subspace expanded by the confounding factor before clustering. Therein, the interested clustering factor and the confounding factor are coarsely considered in the raw feature space, where the correlation between the data and the confounding factor is ideally assumed to be linear for convenient solutions. These approaches are thus limited in scope as the data in real applications is usually complex and non-linearly correlated with the confounding factor. This paper presents a new clustering framework named Sanitized Clustering Against confounding Bias (SCAB), which removes the confounding factor in the semantic latent space of complex data through a non-linear dependence measure. To be specific, we eliminate the bias information in the latent space by minimizing the mutual information between the confounding factor and the latent representation delivered by Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). Meanwhile, a clustering module is introduced to cluster over the purified latent representations. Extensive experiments on complex datasets demonstrate that our SCAB achieves a significant gain in clustering performance by removing the confounding bias. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/EvaFlower/SCAB}., Comment: Machine Learning, in press

Stance detection aims to identify the attitude expressed in a document towards a given target. Techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have advanced this task, enhancing a model's reasoning capabilities through the derivation of intermediate rationales. However, CoT relies primarily on a model's pre-trained internal knowledge during reasoning, thereby neglecting the valuable external information that is previously unknown to the model. This omission, especially within the unsupervised reasoning process, can affect the model's overall performance. Moreover, while CoT enhances Large Language Models (LLMs), smaller LMs, though efficient operationally, face challenges in delivering nuanced reasoning. In response to these identified gaps, we introduce the Ladder-of-Thought (LoT) for the stance detection task. Constructed through a dual-phase Progressive Optimization Framework, LoT directs the small LMs to assimilate high-quality external knowledge, refining the intermediate rationales produced. These bolstered rationales subsequently serve as the foundation for more precise predictions - akin to how a ladder facilitates reaching elevated goals. LoT achieves a balance between efficiency and performance. Our empirical evaluations underscore LoT's efficacy, marking a 16% improvement over GPT-3.5 and a 10% enhancement compared to GPT-3.5 with CoT on stance detection task., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold.

Dual-task dialog language understanding aims to tackle two correlative dialog language understanding tasks simultaneously via leveraging their inherent correlations. In this paper, we put forward a new framework, whose core is relational temporal graph reasoning.We propose a speaker-aware temporal graph (SATG) and a dual-task relational temporal graph (DRTG) to facilitate relational temporal modeling in dialog understanding and dual-task reasoning. Besides, different from previous works that only achieve implicit semantics-level interactions, we propose to model the explicit dependencies via integrating prediction-level interactions. To implement our framework, we first propose a novel model Dual-tAsk temporal Relational rEcurrent Reasoning network (DARER), which first generates the context-, speaker- and temporal-sensitive utterance representations through relational temporal modeling of SATG, then conducts recurrent dual-task relational temporal graph reasoning on DRTG, in which process the estimated label distributions act as key clues in prediction-level interactions. And the relational temporal modeling in DARER is achieved by relational convolutional networks (RGCNs). Then we further propose Relational Temporal Transformer (ReTeFormer), which achieves fine-grained relational temporal modeling via Relation- and Structure-aware Disentangled Multi-head Attention. Accordingly, we propose DARER with ReTeFormer (DARER2), which adopts two variants of ReTeFormer to achieve the relational temporal modeling of SATG and DTRG, respectively. The extensive experiments on different scenarios verify that our models outperform state-of-the-art models by a large margin. Remarkably, on the dialog sentiment classification task in the Mastodon dataset, DARER and DARER2 gain relative improvements of about 28% and 34% over the previous best model in terms of F1., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE TPAMI). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2203.03856

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to extract all emotion clauses and their corresponding cause clauses from a document. Existing approaches tackle this task through multi-task learning (MTL) framework in which the two subtasks provide indicative clues for ECPE. However, the previous MTL framework considers only one round of multi-task reasoning and ignores the reverse feedbacks from ECPE to the subtasks. Besides, its multi-task reasoning only relies on semantics-level interactions, which cannot capture the explicit dependencies, and both the encoder sharing and multi-task hidden states concatenations can hardly capture the causalities. To solve these issues, we first put forward a new MTL framework based on Co-evolving Reasoning. It (1) models the bidirectional feedbacks between ECPE and its subtasks; (2) allows the three tasks to evolve together and prompt each other recurrently; (3) integrates prediction-level interactions to capture explicit dependencies. Then we propose a novel multi-task relational graph (MRG) to sufficiently exploit the causal relations. Finally, we propose a Co-evolving Graph Reasoning Network (CGR-Net) that implements our MTL framework and conducts Co-evolving Reasoning on MRG. Experimental results show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance, and further analysis confirms the advantages of our method., Comment: Accepted by ECML-PKDD 2023

Segment anything model (SAM) has presented impressive objectness identification capability with the idea of prompt learning and a new collected large-scale dataset. Given a prompt (e.g., points, bounding boxes, or masks) and an input image, SAM is able to generate valid segment masks for all objects indicated by the prompts, presenting high generalization across diverse scenarios and being a general method for zero-shot transfer to downstream vision tasks. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether SAM may introduce errors in certain threatening scenarios. Clarifying this is of significant importance for applications that require robustness, such as autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we aim to study the testing-time robustness of SAM under adversarial scenarios and common corruptions. To this end, we first build a testing-time robustness evaluation benchmark for SAM by integrating existing public datasets. Second, we extend representative adversarial attacks against SAM and study the influence of different prompts on robustness. Third, we study the robustness of SAM under diverse corruption types by evaluating SAM on corrupted datasets with different prompts. With experiments conducted on SA-1B and KITTI datasets, we find that SAM exhibits remarkable robustness against various corruptions, except for blur-related corruption. Furthermore, SAM remains susceptible to adversarial attacks, particularly when subjected to PGD and BIM attacks. We think such a comprehensive study could highlight the importance of the robustness issues of SAM and trigger a series of new tasks for SAM as well as downstream vision tasks., Comment: 22 pages

Multivariate time-series (MTS) forecasting is a paramount and fundamental problem in many real-world applications. The core issue in MTS forecasting is how to effectively model complex spatial-temporal patterns. In this paper, we develop a adaptive, interpretable and scalable forecasting framework, which seeks to individually model each component of the spatial-temporal patterns. We name this framework SCNN, as an acronym of Structured Component-based Neural Network. SCNN works with a pre-defined generative process of MTS, which arithmetically characterizes the latent structure of the spatial-temporal patterns. In line with its reverse process, SCNN decouples MTS data into structured and heterogeneous components and then respectively extrapolates the evolution of these components, the dynamics of which are more traceable and predictable than the original MTS. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that SCNN can achieve superior performance over state-of-the-art models on three real-world datasets. Additionally, we examine SCNN with different configurations and perform in-depth analyses of the properties of SCNN.

Many machine learning applications encounter a situation where model providers are required to further refine the previously trained model so as to gratify the specific need of local users. This problem is reduced to the standard model tuning paradigm if the target data is permissibly fed to the model. However, it is rather difficult in a wide range of practical cases where target data is not shared with model providers but commonly some evaluations about the model are accessible. In this paper, we formally set up a challenge named \emph{Earning eXtra PerformancE from restriCTive feEDdbacks} (EXPECTED) to describe this form of model tuning problems. Concretely, EXPECTED admits a model provider to access the operational performance of the candidate model multiple times via feedback from a local user (or a group of users). The goal of the model provider is to eventually deliver a satisfactory model to the local user(s) by utilizing the feedbacks. Unlike existing model tuning methods where the target data is always ready for calculating model gradients, the model providers in EXPECTED only see some feedbacks which could be as simple as scalars, such as inference accuracy or usage rate. To enable tuning in this restrictive circumstance, we propose to characterize the geometry of the model performance with regard to model parameters through exploring the parameters' distribution. In particular, for the deep models whose parameters distribute across multiple layers, a more query-efficient algorithm is further tailor-designed that conducts layerwise tuning with more attention to those layers which pay off better. Extensive experiments on different applications demonstrate that our work forges a sound solution to the EXPECTED problem. Code is available via https://github.com/kylejingli/EXPECTED., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TPAMI in April 2023

In the field of Image-to-Image (I2I) translation, ensuring consistency between input images and their translated results is a key requirement for producing high-quality and desirable outputs. Previous I2I methods have relied on result consistency, which enforces consistency between the translated results and the ground truth output, to achieve this goal. However, result consistency is limited in its ability to handle complex and unseen attribute changes in translation tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a transition-aware approach to I2I translation, where the data translation mapping is explicitly parameterized with a transition variable, allowing for the modelling of unobserved translations triggered by unseen transitions. Furthermore, we propose the use of transition consistency, defined on the transition variable, to enable regularization of consistency on unobserved translations, which is omitted in previous works. Based on these insights, we present Unseen Transition Suss GAN (UTSGAN), a generative framework that constructs a manifold for the transition with a stochastic transition encoder and coherently regularizes and generalizes result consistency and transition consistency on both training and unobserved translations with tailor-designed constraints. Extensive experiments on four different I2I tasks performed on five different datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed UTSGAN in performing consistent translations., Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures

Approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) search is an essential component of search engines, recommendation systems, etc. Many recent works focus on learning-based data-distribution-dependent hashing and achieve good retrieval performance. However, due to increasing demand for users' privacy and security, we often need to remove users' data information from Machine Learning (ML) models to satisfy specific privacy and security requirements. This need requires the ANN search algorithm to support fast online data deletion and insertion. Current learning-based hashing methods need retraining the hash function, which is prohibitable due to the vast time-cost of large-scale data. To address this problem, we propose a novel data-dependent hashing method named unfolded self-reconstruction locality-sensitive hashing (USR-LSH). Our USR-LSH unfolded the optimization update for instance-wise data reconstruction, which is better for preserving data information than data-independent LSH. Moreover, our USR-LSH supports fast online data deletion and insertion without retraining. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address the machine unlearning of retrieval problems. Empirically, we demonstrate that USR-LSH outperforms the state-of-the-art data-distribution-independent LSH in ANN tasks in terms of precision and recall. We also show that USR-LSH has significantly faster data deletion and insertion time than learning-based data-dependent hashing., Comment: correct author's name typo

To ensure that the data collected from human subjects is entrusted with a secret, rival labels are introduced to conceal the information provided by the participants on purpose. The corresponding learning task can be formulated as a noisy partial-label learning problem. However, conventional partial-label learning (PLL) methods are still vulnerable to the high ratio of noisy partial labels, especially in a large labelling space. To learn a more robust model, we present Adversary-Aware Partial Label Learning and introduce the $\textit{rival}$, a set of noisy labels, to the collection of candidate labels for each instance. By introducing the rival label, the predictive distribution of PLL is factorised such that a handy predictive label is achieved with less uncertainty coming from the transition matrix, assuming the rival generation process is known. Nonetheless, the predictive accuracy is still insufficient to produce an sufficiently accurate positive sample set to leverage the clustering effect of the contrastive loss function. Moreover, the inclusion of rivals also brings an inconsistency issue for the classifier and risk function due to the intractability of the transition matrix. Consequently, an adversarial teacher within momentum (ATM) disambiguation algorithm is proposed to cope with the situation, allowing us to obtain a provably consistent classifier and risk function. In addition, our method has shown high resiliency to the choice of the label noise transition matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves promising results on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and CUB200 datasets.

Markov Decision Process (MDP) presents a mathematical framework to formulate the learning processes of agents in reinforcement learning. MDP is limited by the Markovian assumption that a reward only depends on the immediate state and action. However, a reward sometimes depends on the history of states and actions, which may result in the decision process in a non-Markovian environment. In such environments, agents receive rewards via temporally-extended behaviors sparsely, and the learned policies may be similar. This leads the agents acquired with similar policies generally overfit to the given task and can not quickly adapt to perturbations of environments. To resolve this problem, this paper tries to learn the diverse policies from the history of state-action pairs under a non-Markovian environment, in which a policy dispersion scheme is designed for seeking diverse policy representation. Specifically, we first adopt a transformer-based method to learn policy embeddings. Then, we stack the policy embeddings to construct a dispersion matrix to induce a set of diverse policies. Finally, we prove that if the dispersion matrix is positive definite, the dispersed embeddings can effectively enlarge the disagreements across policies, yielding a diverse expression for the original policy embedding distribution. Experimental results show that this dispersion scheme can obtain more expressive diverse policies, which then derive more robust performance than recent learning baselines under various learning environments., Comment: In further research, we found that the core content of the paper requires significant modification and that the entire paper needs to be restructured. To enhance the scientific quality and contributions of the paper, we have decided to resubmit it after completing the necessary revisions and improvements

Learning with noisy labels has become imperative in the Big Data era, which saves expensive human labors on accurate annotations. Previous noise-transition-based methods have achieved theoretically-grounded performance under the Class-Conditional Noise model (CCN). However, these approaches builds upon an ideal but impractical anchor set available to pre-estimate the noise transition. Even though subsequent works adapt the estimation as a neural layer, the ill-posed stochastic learning of its parameters in back-propagation easily falls into undesired local minimums. We solve this problem by introducing a Latent Class-Conditional Noise model (LCCN) to parameterize the noise transition under a Bayesian framework. By projecting the noise transition into the Dirichlet space, the learning is constrained on a simplex characterized by the complete dataset, instead of some ad-hoc parametric space wrapped by the neural layer. We then deduce a dynamic label regression method for LCCN, whose Gibbs sampler allows us efficiently infer the latent true labels to train the classifier and to model the noise. Our approach safeguards the stable update of the noise transition, which avoids previous arbitrarily tuning from a mini-batch of samples. We further generalize LCCN to different counterparts compatible with open-set noisy labels, semi-supervised learning as well as cross-model training. A range of experiments demonstrate the advantages of LCCN and its variants over the current state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by TPAMI. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.02152

In this paper, we study Discretized Neural Networks (DNNs) composed of low-precision weights and activations, which suffer from either infinite or zero gradients due to the non-differentiable discrete function during training. Most training-based DNNs in such scenarios employ the standard Straight-Through Estimator (STE) to approximate the gradient w.r.t. discrete values. However, the use of STE introduces the problem of gradient mismatch, arising from perturbations in the approximated gradient. To address this problem, this paper reveals that this mismatch can be interpreted as a metric perturbation in a Riemannian manifold, viewed through the lens of duality theory. Building on information geometry, we construct the Linearly Nearly Euclidean (LNE) manifold for DNNs, providing a background for addressing perturbations. By introducing a partial differential equation on metrics, i.e., the Ricci flow, we establish the dynamical stability and convergence of the LNE metric with the $L^2$-norm perturbation. In contrast to previous perturbation theories with convergence rates in fractional powers, the metric perturbation under the Ricci flow exhibits exponential decay in the LNE manifold. Experimental results across various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior and more stable performance for DNNs compared to other representative training-based methods.

Existing deep learning-based shadow removal methods still produce images with shadow remnants. These shadow remnants typically exist in homogeneous regions with low-intensity values, making them untraceable in the existing image-to-image mapping paradigm. We observe that shadows mainly degrade images at the image-structure level (in which humans perceive object shapes and continuous colors). Hence, in this paper, we propose to remove shadows at the image structure level. Based on this idea, we propose a novel structure-informed shadow removal network (StructNet) to leverage the image-structure information to address the shadow remnant problem. Specifically, StructNet first reconstructs the structure information of the input image without shadows and then uses the restored shadow-free structure prior to guiding the image-level shadow removal. StructNet contains two main novel modules: (1) a mask-guided shadow-free extraction (MSFE) module to extract image structural features in a non-shadow-to-shadow directional manner, and (2) a multi-scale feature & residual aggregation (MFRA) module to leverage the shadow-free structure information to regularize feature consistency. In addition, we also propose to extend StructNet to exploit multi-level structure information (MStructNet), to further boost the shadow removal performance with minimum computational overheads. Extensive experiments on three shadow removal benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing shadow removal methods, and our StructNet can be integrated with existing methods to improve them further., Comment: IEEE TIP

Inspired by the impressive success of contrastive learning (CL), a variety of graph augmentation strategies have been employed to learn node representations in a self-supervised manner. Existing methods construct the contrastive samples by adding perturbations to the graph structure or node attributes. Although impressive results are achieved, it is rather blind to the wealth of prior information assumed: with the increase of the perturbation degree applied on the original graph, 1) the similarity between the original graph and the generated augmented graph gradually decreases; 2) the discrimination between all nodes within each augmented view gradually increases. In this paper, we argue that both such prior information can be incorporated (differently) into the contrastive learning paradigm following our general ranking framework. In particular, we first interpret CL as a special case of learning to rank (L2R), which inspires us to leverage the ranking order among positive augmented views. Meanwhile, we introduce a self-ranking paradigm to ensure that the discriminative information among different nodes can be maintained and also be less altered to the perturbations of different degrees. Experiment results on various benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with the supervised and unsupervised models.

Artificial intelligence is to teach machines to take actions like humans. To achieve intelligent teaching, the machine learning community becomes to think about a promising topic named machine teaching where the teacher is to design the optimal (usually minimal) teaching set given a target model and a specific learner. However, previous works usually require numerous teaching examples along with large iterations to guide learners to converge, which is costly. In this paper, we consider a more intelligent teaching paradigm named one-shot machine teaching which costs fewer examples to converge faster. Different from typical teaching, this advanced paradigm establishes a tractable mapping from the teaching set to the model parameter. Theoretically, we prove that this mapping is surjective, which serves to an existence guarantee of the optimal teaching set. Then, relying on the surjective mapping from the teaching set to the parameter, we develop a design strategy of the optimal teaching set under appropriate settings, of which two popular efficiency metrics, teaching dimension and iterative teaching dimension are one. Extensive experiments verify the efficiency of our strategy and further demonstrate the intelligence of this new teaching paradigm.

Recent graph-based models for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling have obtained promising results through modeling the guidance from the prediction of intents to the decoding of slot filling. However, existing methods (1) only model the \textit{unidirectional guidance} from intent to slot; (2) adopt \textit{homogeneous graphs} to model the interactions between the slot semantics nodes and intent label nodes, which limit the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed Co-guiding Net, which implements a two-stage framework achieving the \textit{mutual guidances} between the two tasks. In the first stage, the initial estimated labels of both tasks are produced, and then they are leveraged in the second stage to model the mutual guidances. Specifically, we propose two \textit{heterogeneous graph attention networks} working on the proposed two \textit{heterogeneous semantics-label graphs}, which effectively represent the relations among the semantics nodes and label nodes. Experiment results show that our model outperforms existing models by a large margin, obtaining a relative improvement of 19.3\% over the previous best model on MixATIS dataset in overall accuracy., Comment: Accepted as Oral Presentation at EMNLP 2022

Recent joint multiple intent detection and slot filling models employ label embeddings to achieve the semantics-label interactions. However, they treat all labels and label embeddings as uncorrelated individuals, ignoring the dependencies among them. Besides, they conduct the decoding for the two tasks independently, without leveraging the correlations between them. Therefore, in this paper, we first construct a Heterogeneous Label Graph (HLG) containing two kinds of topologies: (1) statistical dependencies based on labels' co-occurrence patterns and hierarchies in slot labels; (2) rich relations among the label nodes. Then we propose a novel model termed ReLa-Net. It can capture beneficial correlations among the labels from HLG. The label correlations are leveraged to enhance semantic-label interactions. Moreover, we also propose the label-aware inter-dependent decoding mechanism to further exploit the label correlations for decoding. Experiment results show that our ReLa-Net significantly outperforms previous models. Remarkably, ReLa-Net surpasses the previous best model by over 20\% in terms of overall accuracy on MixATIS dataset., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2022 Main Conference

Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data that approximates the generalization ability of big data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of learning topics is going on this way such as active learning and few-shot learning. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by finite training resources from known distributions. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling theory under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data in model-agnostic supervised and unsupervised fashion. Considering multiple learning communities could produce small data representation and related topics have been well surveyed, we thus subjoin novel geometric representation perspectives for small data: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean, where the optimization solutions including the Euclidean gradients, non-Euclidean gradients, and Stein gradient are presented and discussed. Later, multiple learning communities that may be improved by learning on small data are summarized, which yield data-efficient representations, such as transfer learning, contrastive learning, graph representation learning. Meanwhile, we find that the meta-learning may provide effective parameter update policies for learning on small data. Then, we explore multiple challenging scenarios for small data, such as the weak supervision and multi-label. Finally, multiple data applications that may benefit from efficient small data representation are surveyed.

Hypothesis-pruning maximizes the hypothesis updates for active learning to find those desired unlabeled data. An inherent assumption is that this learning manner can derive those updates into the optimal hypothesis. However, its convergence may not be guaranteed well if those incremental updates are negative and disordered. In this paper, we introduce a black-box teaching hypothesis $h^\mathcal{T}$ employing a tighter slack term $\left(1+\mathcal{F}^{\mathcal{T}}(\widehat{h}_t)\right)\Delta_t$ to replace the typical $2\Delta_t$ for pruning. Theoretically, we prove that, under the guidance of this teaching hypothesis, the learner can converge into a tighter generalization error and label complexity bound than those non-educated learners who do not receive any guidance from a teacher:1) the generalization error upper bound can be reduced from $R(h^*)+4\Delta_{T-1}$ to approximately $R(h^{\mathcal{T}})+2\Delta_{T-1}$, and 2) the label complexity upper bound can be decreased from $4 \theta\left(TR(h^{*})+2O(\sqrt{T})\right)$ to approximately $2\theta\left(2TR(h^{\mathcal{T}})+3 O(\sqrt{T})\right)$. To be strict with our assumption, self-improvement of teaching is firstly proposed when $h^\mathcal{T}$ loosely approximates $h^*$. Against learning, we further consider two teaching scenarios: teaching a white-box and black-box learner. Experiments verify this idea and show better generalization performance than the fundamental active learning strategies, such as IWAL, IWAL-D, etc.

Deep learning on large-scale data is dominant nowadays. The unprecedented scale of data has been arguably one of the most important driving forces for the success of deep learning. However, there still exist scenarios where collecting data or labels could be extremely expensive, e.g., medical imaging and robotics. To fill up this gap, this paper considers the problem of data-efficient learning from scratch using a small amount of representative data. First, we characterize this problem by active learning on homeomorphic tubes of spherical manifolds. This naturally generates feasible hypothesis class. With homologous topological properties, we identify an important connection -- finding tube manifolds is equivalent to minimizing hyperspherical energy (MHE) in physical geometry. Inspired by this connection, we propose a MHE-based active learning (MHEAL) algorithm, and provide comprehensive theoretical guarantees for MHEAL, covering convergence and generalization analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of MHEAL in a wide range of applications on data-efficient learning, including deep clustering, distribution matching, version space sampling and deep active learning.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently achieved great success in many classification tasks. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that generate adversarial examples with a small perturbation to fool DNN models, especially in model sharing scenarios. Adversarial training is proved to be the most effective strategy that injects adversarial examples into model training to improve the robustness of DNN models against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial training based on the existing adversarial examples fails to generalize well to standard, unperturbed test data. To achieve a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness, we propose a novel adversarial training framework called LAtent bounDary-guided aDvErsarial tRaining (LADDER) that adversarially trains DNN models on latent boundary-guided adversarial examples. As opposed to most of the existing methods that generate adversarial examples in the input space, LADDER generates a myriad of high-quality adversarial examples through adding perturbations to latent features. The perturbations are made along the normal of the decision boundary constructed by an SVM with an attention mechanism. We analyze the merits of our generated boundary-guided adversarial examples from a boundary field perspective and visualization view. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on MNIST, SVHN, CelebA, and CIFAR-10 validate the effectiveness of LADDER in achieving a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness as compared with vanilla DNNs and competitive baselines., Comment: To appear in Machine Learning

Recent years have witnessed the emerging success of leveraging syntax graphs for the target sentiment classification task. However, we discover that existing syntax-based models suffer from two issues: noisy information aggregation and loss of distant correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed Neural Subgraph Explorer, which (1) reduces the noisy information via pruning target-irrelevant nodes on the syntax graph; (2) introduces beneficial first-order connections between the target and its related words into the obtained graph. Specifically, we design a multi-hop actions score estimator to evaluate the value of each word regarding the specific target. The discrete action sequence is sampled through Gumble-Softmax and then used for both of the syntax graph and the self-attention graph. To introduce the first-order connections between the target and its relevant words, the two pruned graphs are merged. Finally, graph convolution is conducted on the obtained unified graph to update the hidden states. And this process is stacked with multiple layers. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt of target-oriented syntax graph pruning in this task. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance., Comment: To appear in IJCAI 2022

Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid overfitting and shown good performance on new tasks. Motivated by the idea of meta-augmentation, in this paper, by treating a user's preference over items as a task, we propose a so-called Diverse Preference Augmentation framework with multiple source domains based on meta-learning (referred to as MetaDPA) to i) generate diverse ratings in a new domain of interest (known as target domain) to handle overfitting on the case of sparse interactions, and to ii) learn a preference model in the target domain via a meta-learning scheme to alleviate cold-start issues. Specifically, we first conduct multi-source domain adaptation by dual conditional variational autoencoders and impose a Multi-domain InfoMax (MDI) constraint on the latent representations to learn domain-shared and domain-specific preference properties. To avoid overfitting, we add a Mutually-Exclusive (ME) constraint on the output of decoders to generate diverse ratings given content data. Finally, these generated diverse ratings and the original ratings are introduced into the meta-training procedure to learn a preference meta-learner, which produces good generalization ability on cold-start recommendation tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets show our proposed MetaDPA clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baselines.

The task of joint dialog sentiment classification (DSC) and act recognition (DAR) aims to simultaneously predict the sentiment label and act label for each utterance in a dialog. In this paper, we put forward a new framework which models the explicit dependencies via integrating \textit{prediction-level interactions} other than semantics-level interactions, more consistent with human intuition. Besides, we propose a speaker-aware temporal graph (SATG) and a dual-task relational temporal graph (DRTG) to introduce \textit{temporal relations} into dialog understanding and dual-task reasoning. To implement our framework, we propose a novel model dubbed DARER, which first generates the context-, speaker- and temporal-sensitive utterance representations via modeling SATG, then conducts recurrent dual-task relational reasoning on DRTG, in which process the estimated label distributions act as key clues in prediction-level interactions. Experiment results show that DARER outperforms existing models by large margins while requiring much less computation resource and costing less training time. Remarkably, on DSC task in Mastodon, DARER gains a relative improvement of about 25% over previous best model in terms of F1, with less than 50% parameters and about only 60% required GPU memory., Comment: Long paper; ACL 2022 (Findings)

Minimizing prediction uncertainty on unlabeled data is a key factor to achieve good performance in semi-supervised learning (SSL). The prediction uncertainty is typically expressed as the \emph{entropy} computed by the transformed probabilities in output space. Most existing works distill low-entropy prediction by either accepting the determining class (with the largest probability) as the true label or suppressing subtle predictions (with the smaller probabilities). Unarguably, these distillation strategies are usually heuristic and less informative for model training. From this discernment, this paper proposes a dual mechanism, named ADaptive Sharpening (\ADS), which first applies a soft-threshold to adaptively mask out determinate and negligible predictions, and then seamlessly sharpens the informed predictions, distilling certain predictions with the informed ones only. More importantly, we theoretically analyze the traits of \ADS by comparing with various distillation strategies. Numerous experiments verify that \ADS significantly improves the state-of-the-art SSL methods by making it a plug-in. Our proposed \ADS forges a cornerstone for future distillation-based SSL research.

Relative attribute (RA), referring to the preference over two images on the strength of a specific attribute, can enable fine-grained image-to-image translation due to its rich semantic information. Existing work based on RAs however failed to reconcile the goal for fine-grained translation and the goal for high-quality generation. We propose a new model TRIP to coordinate these two goals for high-quality fine-grained translation. In particular, we simultaneously train two modules: a generator that translates an input image to the desired image with smooth subtle changes with respect to the interested attributes; and a ranker that ranks rival preferences consisting of the input image and the desired image. Rival preferences refer to the adversarial ranking process: (1) the ranker thinks no difference between the desired image and the input image in terms of the desired attributes; (2) the generator fools the ranker to believe that the desired image changes the attributes over the input image as desired. RAs over pairs of real images are introduced to guide the ranker to rank image pairs regarding the interested attributes only. With an effective ranker, the generator would "win" the adversarial game by producing high-quality images that present desired changes over the attributes compared to the input image. The experiments on two face image datasets and one shoe image dataset demonstrate that our TRIP achieves state-of-art results in generating high-fidelity images which exhibit smooth changes over the interested attributes.

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has achieved success in various fields. However, how to balance different tasks to achieve good performance is a key problem. To achieve the task balancing, there are many works to carefully design dynamical loss/gradient weighting strategies but the basic random experiments are ignored to examine their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose the Random Weighting (RW) methods, including Random Loss Weighting (RLW) and Random Gradient Weighting (RGW), where an MTL model is trained with random loss/gradient weights sampled from a distribution. To show the effectiveness and necessity of RW methods, theoretically we analyze the convergence of RW and reveal that RW has a higher probability to escape local minima, resulting in better generalization ability. Empirically, we extensively evaluate the proposed RW methods to compare with twelve state-of-the-art methods on five image datasets and two multilingual problems from the XTREME benchmark to show RW methods can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art baselines. Therefore, we think that the RW methods are important baselines for MTL and should attract more attentions.

In recent years, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has attracted much attention due to its good performance in many applications. However, many existing MTL models cannot guarantee that their performance is no worse than their single-task counterparts on each task. Though some works have empirically observed this phenomenon, little work aims to handle the resulting problem. In this paper, we formally define this phenomenon as negative sharing and define safe multi-task learning where no negative sharing occurs. To achieve safe multi-task learning, we propose a Deep Safe Multi-Task Learning (DSMTL) model with two learning strategies: individual learning and joint learning. We theoretically study the safeness of both learning strategies in the DSMTL model to show that the proposed methods can achieve some versions of safe multi-task learning. Moreover, to improve the scalability of the DSMTL model, we propose an extension, which automatically learns a compact architecture and empirically achieves safe multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the safeness of the proposed methods.

Graph neural networks have emerged as a powerful model for graph representation learning to undertake graph-level prediction tasks. Various graph pooling methods have been developed to coarsen an input graph into a succinct graph-level representation through aggregating node embeddings obtained via graph convolution. However, most graph pooling methods are heavily node-centric and are unable to fully leverage the crucial information contained in global graph structure. This paper presents a cross-view graph pooling (Co-Pooling) method to better exploit crucial graph structure information. The proposed Co-Pooling fuses pooled representations learnt from both node view and edge view. Through cross-view interaction, edge-view pooling and node-view pooling seamlessly reinforce each other to learn more informative graph-level representations. Co-Pooling has the advantage of handling various graphs with different types of node attributes. Extensive experiments on a total of 15 graph benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art pooling methods on both graph classification and graph regression tasks., Comment: 9 pages

Multi-variate time series (MTS) data is a ubiquitous class of data abstraction in the real world. Any instance of MTS is generated from a hybrid dynamical system and their specific dynamics are usually unknown. The hybrid nature of such a dynamical system is a result of complex external attributes, such as geographic location and time of day, each of which can be categorized into either spatial attributes or temporal attributes. Therefore, there are two fundamental views which can be used to analyze MTS data, namely the spatial view and the temporal view. Moreover, from each of these two views, we can partition the set of data samples of MTS into disjoint forecasting tasks in accordance with their associated attribute values. Then, samples of the same task will manifest similar forthcoming pattern, which is less sophisticated to be predicted in comparison with the original single-view setting. Considering this insight, we propose a novel multi-view multi-task (MVMT) learning framework for MTS forecasting. Instead of being explicitly presented in most scenarios, MVMT information is deeply concealed in the MTS data, which severely hinders the model from capturing it naturally. To this end, we develop two kinds of basic operations, namely task-wise affine transformation and task-wise normalization, respectively. Applying these two operations with prior knowledge on the spatial and temporal view allows the model to adaptively extract MVMT information while predicting. Extensive experiments on three datasets are conducted to illustrate that canonical architectures can be greatly enhanced by the MVMT learning framework in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, we design rich case studies to reveal the properties of representations produced at different phases in the entire prediction procedure., Comment: 14 pages

Aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC) aims to predict the fine-grained sentiment polarity towards a given aspect mentioned in a review. Despite recent advances in ASC, enabling machines to preciously infer aspect sentiments is still challenging. This paper tackles two challenges in ASC: (1) due to lack of aspect knowledge, aspect representation derived in prior works is inadequate to represent aspect's exact meaning and property information; (2) prior works only capture either local syntactic information or global relational information, thus missing either one of them leads to insufficient syntactic information. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel ASC model which not only end-to-end embeds and leverages aspect knowledge but also marries the two kinds of syntactic information and lets them compensate for each other. Our model includes three key components: (1) a knowledge-aware gated recurrent memory network recurrently integrates dynamically summarized aspect knowledge; (2) a dual syntax graph network combines both kinds of syntactic information to comprehensively capture sufficient syntactic information; (3) a knowledge integrating gate re-enhances the final representation with further needed aspect knowledge; (4) an aspect-to-context attention mechanism aggregates the aspect-related semantics from all hidden states into the final representation. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, which overpass previous state-of-the-art models by large margins in terms of both Accuracy and Macro-F1., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI) 2022