Canada

Negative sampling stands as a pivotal technique in dense retrieval, essential for training effective retrieval models and significantly impacting retrieval performance. While existing negative sampling methods have made commendable progress by leveraging hard negatives, a comprehensive guiding principle for constructing negative candidates and designing negative sampling distributions is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we embark on a theoretical analysis of negative sampling in dense retrieval. This exploration culminates in the unveiling of the quasi-triangular principle, a novel framework that elucidates the triangular-like interplay between query, positive document, and negative document. Fueled by this guiding principle, we introduce TriSampler, a straightforward yet highly effective negative sampling method. The keypoint of TriSampler lies in its ability to selectively sample more informative negatives within a prescribed constrained region. Experimental evaluation show that TriSampler consistently attains superior retrieval performance across a diverse of representative retrieval models.

AAAI 2024

TriSampler: A Better Negative Sampling Principle for Dense Retrieval

the quasi-triangular principle

trisampler

dense retrieval

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

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

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

technical paper

The training problem of neural networks (NNs) is known to be ER-complete with respect to ReLU and linear activation functions. We show that the training problem for NNs equipped with arbitrary activation functions is polynomial-time bireducible to the existential theory of the reals extended with the corresponding activation functions. For effectively continuous activation functions (e.g., the sigmoid function), we obtain an inclusion to low levels of the arithmetical hierarchy. Consequently, the sigmoid activation function leads to the existential theory of the reals with the exponential function, and hence the decidability of training NNs using the sigmoid activation function is equivalent to the decidability of the existential theory of the reals with the exponential function, a long-standing open problem. In contrast, we obtain that the training problem is undecidable if sinusoidal activation functions are considered.

Complexity of Neural Network Training and ETR: Extensions with Effectively Continuous Functions

This paper studies the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for aggregating preferences over combinatorial domains, represented using Conditional Preference Networks (CP-nets). Its focus is on aggregating preferences over so-called \emph{swaps}, for which optimal solutions in general are already known to be of exponential size. We first analyze a trivial 2-approximation algorithm that simply outputs the best of the given input preferences, and establish a structural condition under which the approximation ratio of this algorithm is improved to $4/3$. We then propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm whose outputs are provably no worse than those of the trivial algorithm, but often substantially better. A family of problem instances is presented for which our improved algorithm produces optimal solutions, while, for any $\varepsilon$, the trivial algorithm can\emph{not}\/ attain a $(2-\varepsilon)$-approximation. These results may lead to the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm that solves the CP-net aggregation problem for swaps with an approximation ratio substantially better than $2$.

Approximation Algorithms for Preference Aggregation Using CP-Nets

Current parametric models have made notable progress in 3D hand pose and shape estimation. However, due to the fixed hand topology and complex hand poses, current models are hard to generate meshes that are aligned with the image well. To tackle this issue, we introduce a dual noise estimation method in this paper. Given a single-view image as input, we first adopt a baseline parametric regressor to obtain the coarse hand meshes. We assume the mesh vertices and their image-plane projections are noisy, and can be associated in a unified probabilistic model. We then learn the distributions of noise to refine mesh vertices and their projections. The refined vertices are further utilized to refine camera parameters in a closed-form manner. Consequently, our method obtains well-aligned and high-quality 3D hand meshes. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Interhand2.6M dataset demonstrate that the proposed method not only improves the performance of its baseline by more than 10% but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://github.com/hanhuili/DNE4Hand.

Monocular 3D Hand Mesh Recovery via Dual Noise Estimation

Leveraging wearable devices for motion reconstruction has emerged as an economical and viable technique. Certain methodologies employ sparse Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) on the human body and harness data-driven strategies to model human poses. However, the reconstruction of motion based solely on sparse IMUs data is inherently fraught with ambiguity, a consequence of numerous identical IMU readings corresponding to different poses. In this paper, we explore the spatial importance of multiple sensors, supervised by text that describes specific actions. Specifically, uncertainty is introduced to derive weighted features for each IMU. We also design a Hierarchical Temporal Transformer (HTT) and apply contrastive learning to achieve precise temporal and feature alignment of sensor data with textual semantics. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed approach achieves significant improvements in multiple metrics compared to existing methods. Notably, with textual supervision, our method not only differentiates between ambiguous actions such as sitting and standing but also produces more precise and natural motion.

Spatial-Related Sensors Matters: 3D Human Motion Reconstruction Assisted with Textual Semantics

In this paper, we focus on a realistic yet challenging task, Single Domain Generalization Object Detection (S-DGOD), where only one source domain's data can be used for training object detectors, but have to generalize multiple distinct target domains. In S-DGOD, both high-capacity fitting and generalization abilities are needed due to the task's complexity. Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is known for its high capacity for complex data fitting and we propose to leverage Differentiable NAS to solve S-DGOD. However, it may confront severe over-fitting issues due to the feature imbalance phenomenon, where parameters optimized by gradient descent are biased to learn from the easy-to-learn features, which are usually non-causal and spuriously correlated to ground truth labels, such as the features of background in object detection data. Consequently, this leads to serious performance degradation, especially in generalizing to unseen target domains with huge domain gaps between the source domain and target domains. To address this issue, we propose the Generalizable loss (G-loss), which is an OoD-aware objective, preventing NAS from over-fitting by using gradient descent to optimize parameters not only on a subset of easy-to-learn features but also the remaining predictive features for generalization, and the overall framework is named G-NAS. Experimental results on the S-DGOD urban-scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed G-NAS achieves SOTA performance compared to baseline methods.

G-NAS: Generalizable Neural Architecture Search for Single Domain Generalization Object Detection

Remote physiology, which involves monitoring vital signs without the need for physical contact, has great potential for various applications. Current remote physiology methods rely only on a single camera or radio frequency (RF) sensor to capture the microscopic signatures from vital movements. However, our study shows that fusing deep RGB and RF features from both sensor streams can further improve performance. Because these multimodal features are defined in distinct dimensions and have varying contextual importance, the main challenge in the fusion process lies in the effective alignment of them and adaptive integration of features under dynamic scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel vital sensing model, named Fusion-Vital, that combines the RGB and RF modalities through the new introduction of pairwise input formats and transformer-based fusion strategies. We also perform comprehensive experiments based on a newly collected and released remote vital dataset comprising synchronized video-RF sensors, showing the superiority of the fusion approach over the previous single-sensor baselines in various aspects.

Fusion-Vital: Video-RF Fusion Transformer for Advanced Remote Physiological Measurement

Online dense mapping of urban scenes is of paramount importance for scene understanding of autonomous navigation. Traditional online dense mapping methods fuse sensor measurements (vision, lidar, etc.) across time and space via explicit geometric correspondence. Recently, NeRF-based methods have proved the superiority of neural implicit representations by high-fidelity reconstruction of large-scale city scenes. However, it remains an open problem how to integrate powerful neural implicit representations into online dense mapping. Existing methods are restricted to constrained indoor environments and are too computationally expensive to meet online requirements. To this end, we propose Swift-Mapping, an online neural implicit dense mapping framework in urban scenes. We introduce a novel neural implicit octomap (NIO) structure that provides efficient neural representation for large and dynamic urban scenes while retaining online update capability. Based on that, we propose an online neural dense mapping framework that effectively manages and updates neural octree voxel features. Our approach achieves SOTA reconstruction accuracy while being more than 10x faster in reconstruction speed, demonstrating the superior performance of our method in both accuracy and efficiency.

Swift-Mapping: Online Neural Implicit Dense Mapping in Urban Scenes | VIDEO

Due to unaffordable computational costs, the regularized disparity in iterative stereo matching is typically maintained at a lower resolution than the input. To regress the full resolution disparity, most stereo methods resort to convolutions to decode a fixed-scale output. However, they are inadequate for recovering vital high-frequency information lost during downsampling, limiting their performance on full-resolution prediction. In this paper, we introduce AnyStereo, an accurate and efficient disparity upsampling module with implicit neural representation for the iterative stereo pipeline. By modeling the disparity as a continuous representation over 2D spatial coordinates, subtle details can emerge from the latent space at arbitrary resolution. To further complement the missing information and details in the latent code, we propose two strategies: intra-scale similarity unfolding and cross-scale feature alignment. The former unfolds the neighbor relationships, while the latter introduces the context in high-resolution feature maps. The proposed AnyStereo can seamlessly replace the upsampling module in most iterative stereo models, improving their ability to capture fine details and generate arbitrary-scale disparities even with fewer parameters. With our method, the iterative stereo pipeline establishes a new state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaohuai-L/Any-Stereo.

Any-Stereo: Arbitrary Scale Disparity Estimation for Iterative Stereo Matching

Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown considerable promise, especially in solving long-horizon tasks via hierarchical structures. These skills, learned task-agnostically from offline datasets, can accelerate the policy learning process for new tasks. Yet, the application of these skills in different domains remains restricted due to their inherent dependency on the datasets, which poses a challenge when attempting to learn a skill-based policy via RL for a target domain different from the datasets' domains. In this paper, we present a novel offline skill learning framework DuSkill which employs a guided Diffusion model to generate versatile skills extended from the limited skills in datasets, thereby enhancing the robustness of policy learning for tasks in different domains. Specifically, we devise a guided diffusion-based skill decoder in conjunction with the hierarchical encoding to disentangle the skill embedding space into two distinct representations, one for encapsulating domain-invariant behaviors and the other for delineating the factors that induce domain variations in the behaviors. Our DuSkill framework enhances the diversity of skills learned offline, thus enabling to accelerate the learning procedure of high-level policies for different domains.
Through experiments, we show that DuSkill outperforms other skill-based imitation learning and RL algorithms for several long-horizon tasks, demonstrating its benefits in few-shot imitation and online RL.

Robust Policy Learning via Offline Skill Diffusion | VIDEO

Quantitative stock selection is one of the most challenging FinTech tasks due to the non-stationary dynamics and complex market dependencies. Existing studies rely on channel mixing methods, exacerbating the issue of distribution shift in financial time series. Additionally, complex model structures they build make it difficult to handle very long sequences. Furthermore, most of them are based on predefined stock relationships thus making it difficult to capture the dynamic and highly volatile stock markets. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose Channel-Independent based Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Pre-trained Attention Networks (CI-STHPAN), a two-stage framework for stock selection, involving Transformer and HGAT based stock time series self-supervised pre-training and stock-ranking based downstream task fine-tuning. We calculate the similarity of stock time series of different channel in dynamic intervals based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and further construct channel-independent stock dynamic hypergraph based on the similarity. Experiments with NASDAQ and NYSE markets data over five years show that our framework outperforms SOTA approaches in terms of investment return ratio (IRR) and Sharpe ratio (SR). Additionally, we find that even without introducing graph information, self-supervised learning based on the vanilla Transformer Encoder also surpasses SOTA results. Notable improvements are gained on the NYSE market. It is mainly attributed to the improvement of fine-tuning approach on Information Coefficient (IC) and Information Ratio based IC (ICIR), indicating that the fine-tuning method enhances the accuracy and stability of the model prediction.

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Next from AAAI 2024

Complexity of Neural Network Training and ETR: Extensions with Effectively Continuous Functions

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