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Representation learning algorithms offer the opportunity to learn invariant representations of the input data with regard to nuisance factors. Many authors have leveraged such strategies to learn fair representations, i.e., vectors where information about sensitive attributes is removed. These methods are attractive as they may be interpreted as minimizing the mutual information between a neural layer&#39;s activations and a sensitive attribute. However, the theoretical grounding of such methods relies either on the computation of infinitely accurate adversaries or on minimizing a variational upper bound of a mutual information estimate. In this paper, we propose a methodology for direct computation of the mutual information between a neural layer and a sensitive attribute. We employ stochastically-activated binary neural networks, which lets us treat neurons as random variables. We are then able to compute (not bound) the mutual information between a layer and a sensitive attribute and use this information as a regularization factor during gradient descent. We show that this method compares favorably with the state of the art in fair representation learning and that the learned representations display a higher level of invariance compared to full-precision neural networks. 

AAAI 2023

Invariant Representations with Stochastically Quantized Neural Networks

mutual information

deep learning

fairness

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Representation learning algorithms offer the opportunity to learn invariant representations of the input data with regard to nuisance factors. Many authors have leveraged such strategies to learn fair representations, i.e., vectors where information about sensitive attributes is removed. These methods are attractive as they may be interpreted as minimizing the mutual information between a neural layer's activations and a sensitive attribute. However, the theoretical grounding of such methods relies either on the computation of infinitely accurate adversaries or on minimizing a variational upper bound of a mutual information estimate. In this paper, we propose a methodology for direct computation of the mutual information between a neural layer and a sensitive attribute. We employ stochastically-activated binary neural networks, which lets us treat neurons as random variables. We are then able to compute (not bound) the mutual information between a layer and a sensitive attribute and use this information as a regularization factor during gradient descent. We show that this method compares favorably with the state of the art in fair representation learning and that the learned representations display a higher level of invariance compared to full-precision neural networks. 

poster

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Scene text editing (STE) aims to replace text with the desired one while preserving background and styles of the original text. However, due to the complicated background textures and various text styles, existing methods fall short in generating clear and legible edited text images. In this study, we attribute the poor editing performance to two problems: 1) Implicit decoupling structure. Previous methods of editing the whole image have to learn different translation rules of background and text regions simultaneously. 2) Domain gap. Due to the lack of edited real scene text images, the network can only be well trained on synthetic pairs and performs poorly on real-world images. To handle the above problems, we propose a novel network by MOdifying Scene Text image at strokE Level (MOSTEL). Firstly, we generate stroke guidance maps to explicitly indicate regions to be edited. Different from the implicit one by directly modifying all the pixels at image level, such explicit instructions filter out the distractions from background and guide the network to focus on editing rules of text regions. Secondly, we propose a Semi-supervised Hybrid Learning to train the network with both labeled synthetic images and unpaired real scene text images. Thus, the STE model is adapted to real-world datasets distributions. Moreover, two new datasets (Tamper-Syn2k and Tamper-Scene) are proposed to fill the blank of public evaluation datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MOSTEL outperforms previous methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Datasets and code will be available at https://github.com/qqqyd/MOSTEL.

Exploring Stroke-Level Modifications for Scene Text Editing

Recent studies show that task distribution plays a vital role in the meta-learner's performance. Conventional wisdom is that task diversity should improve the performance of meta-learning. In this work, we find evidence to the contrary; (i) our experiments draw into question the efficacy of our learned models: similar manifolds can be learned with a subset of the data (lower task diversity). This finding questions the advantage of providing more data to the model, and (ii) adding diversity to the task distribution (higher task diversity) sometimes hinders the model and does not lead to a significant improvement in performance as previously believed. To strengthen our findings, we provide both empirical and theoretical evidence.

The Effect of Diversity in Meta-Learning

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are effective tools towards seizure analysis where one of the most important challenges is accurate detection of seizure events and brain regions in which seizure happens or initiates. However, all existing machine learning-based algorithms for seizure analysis require access to the labeled seizure data while acquiring labeled data is very labor intensive, expensive, as well as clinicians dependent given the subjective nature of the visual qualitative interpretation of EEG signals. In this paper, we propose to detect seizure channels and clips in a self-supervised manner where no access to the seizure data is needed. The proposed method considers local structural and contextual information embedded in EEG graphs by employing positive and negative sub-graphs. We train our method through minimizing contrastive and generative losses. The employ of local EEG sub-graphs makes the algorithm an appropriate choice when accessing to the all EEG channels is impossible due to complications such as skull fractures. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on the largest seizure dataset and demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the EEG-based seizure study. The proposed method is the only study that requires no access to the seizure data in its training phase, yet establishes a new state-of-the-art to the field, and outperforms all related supervised methods.

Self-Supervised Learning for Anomalous Channel Detection in EEG Graphs: Application to Seizure Analysis

Depth estimation is usually ill-posed and ambiguous for monocular camera-based 3D multi-person pose estimation. Since LiDAR can capture accurate depth information in long-range scenes, it can benefit both the global localization of individuals and the 3D pose estimation by providing rich geometry features. Motivated by this, we propose a monocular camera and single LiDAR-based method for 3D multi-person pose estimation in large-scale scenes, which is easy to deploy and insensitive to light. Specifically, we design an effective fusion strategy to take advantage of multi-modal input data, including images and point cloud, and make full use of temporal information to guide the network to learn natural and coherent human motions. Without relying on any 3D pose annotations, our method exploits the inherent geometry constraints of point cloud for self-supervision and utilizes 2D keypoints on images for weak supervision. Extensive experiments on public datasets and our newly collected dataset demonstrate the superiority and generalization capability of our proposed method.

Weakly Supervised 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation for Large-scale Scenes based on Monocular Camera and Single LiDAR

The ability to efficiently solve hard combinatorial optimization problems is a key prerequisite to various applications of declarative programming paradigms. Symmetries in solution candidates pose a significant challenge to modern optimization algorithms since the enumeration of such candidates might substantially reduce their performance.

This paper proposes a novel approach using Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to lift symmetry-breaking constraints for optimization problems modeled in Answer Set Programming (ASP). Given an ASP encoding with optimization statements and a set of small representative instances, our method augments ground ASP programs with auxiliary normal rules enabling the identification of symmetries using existing tools, like SBASS. Then, the obtained symmetries are lifted to first-order constraints with ILP. 
We prove the correctness of our method and evaluate it on real-world optimization problems from the domain of automated configuration. Our experiments show significant improvements of optimization performance due to the learned first-order constraints.


Learning to Break Symmetries for Efficient Optimization in Answer Set Programming

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to alleviate the data sparsity by transferring knowledge from an informative source domain to the target domain, which inevitably proposes the stern challenges to data privacy and transferability during the transfer process. A small amount of recent CDR works have investigated the privacy protection, while they still suffer from satisfying practical requirements (e.g., limited privacy-preserving ability) and preventing the potential risk of negative transfer. To address above challenging problems, we propose a novel and unified privacy-preserving federated framework for dual-target CDR, namely P2FCDR. We design P2FCDR as peer-to-peer federated network architecture to ensure the local data storage and privacy protection of business partners. Specifically, for the special knowledge transfer process in CDR under federated settings, we initialize an optimizable orthogonal mapping matrix to learn the embedding transformation across domains and adopt the local differential privacy technique on the transformed embedding before exchanging across domains, which provides the more reliable privacy protection. Furthermore, we exploit the similarity between in-domain and cross-domain embedding, and develop a gated selecting vector to refine the information fusion for more accurate dual-transfer. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that P2FCDR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and effectively protects data privacy.

Win-Win: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Framework for Dual-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation

We introduce the multi-agent transportation (MAT) problem, where agents have to transport containers from their starting positions to their designated goal positions.  Movement takes place in a common environment where collisions between agents and between containers must be avoided.
In contrast to other frameworks such as multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) or multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD), the agents are allowed to separate from the containers at any time, which can reduce the makespan and also allows for plans in scenarios that are unsolvable otherwise.
We present a complexity analysis establishing the problem's NP-completeness and show how the problem can be reduced to a sequence of SAT problems when optimizing for makespan.
A MAT solver is empirically evaluated with regard to varying input characteristics and movement constraints and compared to a MAPD solver that utilizes conflict-based search (CBS).

The Multi-Agent Transportation Problem

Few-shot learning has received increasing attention and witnessed significant advances in recent years. However, most of the few-shot learning methods focus on the optimization of training process, and the learning of metric and sample generating networks. They ignore the importance of learning the ground-truth feature distributions of few-shot classes. This paper proposes a direction-driven weighting method to make the feature distributions of few-shot classes precisely fit the ground-truth distributions. The learned feature distributions can generate an unlimited number of training samples for the few-shot classes to avoid overfitting. Specifically, the proposed method consists of two optimization strategies. The direction-driven strategy is for capturing more complete direction information that can describe the feature distributions. The similarity-weighting strategy is proposed to estimate the impact of different classes in the fitting procedure and assign corresponding weights. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art performance by an average of 3% for 1-shot on standard few-shot learning benchmarks like miniImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and CUB. The excellent performance and compelling visualization show that our method can more accurately estimate the ground-truth distributions.

Feature Distribution Fitting with Direction-Driven Weighting for Few-shot Images Classification

The Shapley value (SV) is adopted in various scenarios in machine learning (ML), including data valuation, agent valuation, and feature attribution, as it satisfies their fairness requirements. However, as exact SVs are infeasible to compute in practice, SV estimates are approximated instead. This approximation step raises an important question: do the SV estimates preserve the fairness guarantees of exact SVs? We observe that the fairness guarantees of exact SVs are too restrictive for SV estimates. Thus, we generalise Shapley fairness to probably approximate Shapley fairness and propose fidelity score, a metric to measure the variation of SV estimates, that determines how probable the fairness guarantees hold. Our last theoretical contribution is a novel greedy active estimation (GAE) algorithm that will maximise the lowest fidelity score and achieve a better fairness guarantee than the de facto Monte-Carlo estimation. We empirically verify GAE outperforms several existing methods in guaranteeing fairness while remaining competitive in estimation accuracy in various ML scenarios using real-world datasets.

Probably Approximate Shapley Fairness with Applications in Machine Learning

Change detection (CD) aims to find the difference between two images at different times and output a change map to represent whether the region has changed or not. To achieve a better result in generating the change map, many State-of-The-Art (SoTA) methods design a deep learning model that has a powerful discriminative ability. However, these methods still get lower performance because they ignore spatial information and scaling changes between objects, giving rise to blurry boundaries. In addition to these, they also neglect the interactive information of two different images. To alleviate these problems, we propose our network, the Scale and Relation-Aware Siamese Network (SARAS-Net) to deal with this issue. In this paper, three modules are proposed that include relation-aware, scale-aware, and cross-transformer to tackle the problem of scene change detection more effectively.  To verify our model, we tested three public datasets, including LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSFIN, and obtained SoTA accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/f64051041/SARAS-Net.

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