Canada

Sequential recommendation is a crucial task in understanding users&#39; evolving interests and predicting their future behaviors.  While existing approaches on sequence or graph modeling to learn interaction sequences of users have shown promising performance, how to effectively exploit temporal information and deal with the uncertainty noise in evolving user behaviors is still quite challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning method for Sequential Recommendation (TGCL4SR) which leverages not only local interaction sequences but also global temporal graphs to comprehend item correlations and analyze user behaviors from a temporal perspective. Specifically, we first devise a Temporal Item Transition Graph (TITG) to fully leverage global interactions to understand item correlations, and augment this graph by dual transformations based on neighbor sampling and time disturbance. Accordingly, we design a Temporal item Transition graph Convolutional network (TiTConv) to capture temporal item transition patterns in TITG. Then, a novel Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning (TGCL) mechanism is designed to enhance the uniformity of representations between augmented graphs from identical sequences. For local interaction sequences, we design a temporal sequence encoder to incorporate time interval embeddings into the architecture of Transformer. At the training stage, we take maximum mean discrepancy and TGCL losses as auxiliary objectives. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness of TGCL4SR against state-of-the-art baselines of sequential recommendation.

AAAI 2024

Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation

graph mining

temporal data

recommender systems

Sequential recommendation is a crucial task in understanding users' evolving interests and predicting their future behaviors.  While existing approaches on sequence or graph modeling to learn interaction sequences of users have shown promising performance, how to effectively exploit temporal information and deal with the uncertainty noise in evolving user behaviors is still quite challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning method for Sequential Recommendation (TGCL4SR) which leverages not only local interaction sequences but also global temporal graphs to comprehend item correlations and analyze user behaviors from a temporal perspective. Specifically, we first devise a Temporal Item Transition Graph (TITG) to fully leverage global interactions to understand item correlations, and augment this graph by dual transformations based on neighbor sampling and time disturbance. Accordingly, we design a Temporal item Transition graph Convolutional network (TiTConv) to capture temporal item transition patterns in TITG. Then, a novel Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning (TGCL) mechanism is designed to enhance the uniformity of representations between augmented graphs from identical sequences. For local interaction sequences, we design a temporal sequence encoder to incorporate time interval embeddings into the architecture of Transformer. At the training stage, we take maximum mean discrepancy and TGCL losses as auxiliary objectives. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness of TGCL4SR against state-of-the-art baselines of sequential recommendation.

technical paper

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. 

Animal visual perception is an important technique for automatically monitoring animal health, understanding animal behaviors, and assisting animal-related research. However, it is challenging to design a deep learning-based perception model that can freely adapt to different animals across various perception tasks, due to the varying poses of a large diversity of animals, lacking data on rare species, and the semantic inconsistency of different tasks. We introduce UniAP, a novel Universal Animal Perception model that leverages few-shot learning to enable cross-species perception among various visual tasks. Our proposed model takes support images and labels as prompt guidance for a query image. Images and labels are processed through a Transformer-based encoder and a lightweight label encoder, respectively. Then a matching module is designed for aggregating information between prompt guidance and the query image, followed by a multi-head label decoder to generate outputs for various tasks. By capitalizing on the shared visual characteristics among different animals and tasks, UniAP enables the transfer of knowledge from well-studied species to those with limited labeled data or even unseen species. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UniAP through comprehensive experiments in pose estimation, segmentation, and classification tasks on diverse animal species, showcasing its ability to generalize and adapt to new classes with minimal labeled examples.

UniAP: Towards Universal Animal Perception in Vision via Few-Shot Learning

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and thus contains various quality sentences. Therefore, Wikipedia includes some poor-quality edits, which are often marked up by other editors. While editors' reviews enhance the credibility of Wikipedia, it is hard to check all edited text. Assisting in this process is very important, but a large and comprehensive dataset for studying it does not currently exist. Here, we propose WikiSQE, the first large-scale dataset for sentence quality estimation in Wikipedia. Each sentence is extracted from the entire revision history of English Wikipedia, and the target quality labels were carefully investigated and selected. WikiSQE has about 3.4 M sentences with 153 quality labels. In the experiment with automatic classification using competitive machine learning models, sentences that had problems with citation, syntax/semantics, or propositions were found to be more difficult to detect. In addition, by performing human annotation, we found that the model we developed performed better than the crowdsourced workers. WikiSQE is expected to be a valuable resource for other tasks in NLP.

WikiSQE: A Large-Scale Dataset for Sentence Quality Estimation in Wikipedia

The tradeoff between performance and inference speed is critical for practical applications. Architecture reparameterization obtains better tradeoffs and it is becoming an increasingly popular ingredient in modern convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, its quantization performance is usually too poor to deploy (e.g. more than 20% top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet) when INT8 inference is desired. In this paper, we dive into the underlying mechanism of this failure, where the original design inevitably enlarges quantization error. We propose a simple, robust, and effective remedy to have a quantization-friendly structure that also enjoys reparameterization benefits. Our method greatly bridges the gap between INT8 and FP32 accuracy for RepVGG. Without bells and whistles, the top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet is reduced within 2% by standard post-training quantization. Extensive experiments on detection and semantic segmentation tasks verify its generalization.

Make RepVGG Greater Again: A Quantization-Aware Approach

Existing works on goal recognition design (GRD) consider the underlying domain as a classical planning domain and apply modifications to the domain to minimize the worst case distinctiveness. In this paper, we propose replacing existing modifications with \emph{blocks}, which group several closely related modifications together such that a block can modify a region in the search space with respect to some design constraints. Moreover, there could be blocks within blocks such that the design space becomes hierarchical for modifications at different levels of granularity. We present 1) a new version of pruned-reduce, a successful pruning rule for GRD, for block-level GRD, and 2) a new pruning rule for pruning some branches in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical design space. Our experiments show that searching in hierarchical design spaces greatly speeds up the redesign process.

Block-Level Goal Recognition Design

Cell type identification plays a vital role in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis. Although many deep embedded methods to cluster scRNA-seq data have been proposed, they still fail in elucidating the intrinsic properties of cells and genes. Here, we present a novel end-to-end deep graph clustering model for single-cell transcriptomics data based on unsupervised Gene-cell Collective representation learning and Optimal Transport (scGCOT) which integrates both cell and gene correlations. Specifically, scGCOT learns the latent embedding of cells and genes simultaneously and reconstructs the cell graph, the gene graph, and the gene expression count matrix. A zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model is estimated via the reconstructed count matrix to capture the essential properties of scRNA-seq data. By leveraging the optimal transport-based joint representation alignment, scGCOT learns the clustering process and the latent representations through a mutually supervised self optimization strategy. Extensive experiments with 14 competing methods on 15 real scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate the competitive edges of scGCOT.

Unsupervised Gene-Cell Collective Representation Learning with Optimal Transport | VIDEO

Quantization has emerged as a promising direction for model compression. Recently, data-free quantization has been widely studied as a promising method to avoid privacy concerns, which synthesizes images as an alternative to real training data. Existing methods use classification loss to ensure the reliability of the synthesized images. Unfortunately, even if these images are well-classified by the pre-trained model, they still suffer from low semantics and homogenization issues. Intuitively, these low-semantic images are sensitive to perturbations, and the pre-trained model tends to have inconsistent output when the generator synthesizes an image with low semantics. To this end, we propose Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis (RIS), a simple but effective method to enrich the semantics of synthetic images and improve image diversity, further boosting the performance of data-free compression tasks. Concretely, we first introduce perturbations on input and model weight, then define the inconsistency metrics at feature and prediction levels before and after perturbations. On the basis of inconsistency on two levels, we design a robustness optimization objective to eliminate low-semantic images. Moreover, we also make our approach diversity-aware by forcing the generator to synthesize images with small correlations. With RIS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for various settings on data-free quantization and can be extended to other data-free compression tasks.

Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis for Data-Free Quantization

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

GroundVLP: Harnessing Zero-Shot Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Pre-training and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) system is an effective manner for hyperspectral snapshot compressive imaging. The core issue of CASSI is to solve the inverse problem for the reconstruction of hyperspectral image (HSI). In recent years, Transformer-based methods achieve promising performance in HSI reconstruction. However, capturing both long-range dependencies and local information while ensuring reasonable computational costs remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based HSI reconstruction method called dual-window multiscale Transformer (DWMT), which is a coarse-to-fine process, reconstructing the global properties of HSI with the long-range dependencies. In our method, we propose a novel U-Net architecture using a dual-branch encoder to refine pixel information and full-scale skip connections to fuse different features, enhancing the extraction of fine-grained features. Meanwhile, we design a novel self-attention mechanism called dual-window multiscale multi-head self-attention (DWM-MSA), which utilizes two different-sized windows to compute self-attention, which can capture the long-term dependencies in a local region at different scales to improve the reconstruction performance. We also propose a novel position embedding method for Transformer, named con-abs position embedding (CAPE), which effectively enhance positional information of the HSIs. Extensive experiments on both the simulated and the real data are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance, stability, and generalization ability of our DWMT. Code of this project is at https://github.com/chenx2000/DWMT.

Dual-Window Multiscale Transformer for Hyperspectral Snapshot Compressive Imaging

We observe two phenomenons with respect to quantity and capacity: 1) more teacher is not always better for multi-teacher knowledge distillation, and 2) stronger teacher is not always better for single-teacher knowledge distillation. To trade off the quantity and capacity of teacher ensemble, in this paper, we propose a new distillation paradigm named Dynamic Knowledge Distillation (DynaKD) that learn an adaptive categorical distribution to stochastically employ a teacher from a teacher ensemble in each step, to transfer knowledge from teacher ensemble into student. DynaKD has three advantages: 1) it can preserve diversity of each teacher via one-to-one distillation manner instead of several-for-one, 2) it can make the best of powerful teacher via those multi-level assistant teachers in ensemble, and 3) it can also dynamically determine the importance of each teacher for various tasks. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments for BERT compression on GLUE benchmark. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art score compared to previous compression approaches on five out of seven downstream tasks, including pushing MRPC F1 and accuracy to 92.2 (1.4 point absolute improvement), RTE accuracy to 76.2 (2.8 point absolute improvement). Moreover, we conduct also extensive experiments for image classification on CIFAR-100. Similarly, DynaKD achieves also state-of-the-art performance.

How to Trade Off the Quantity and Capacity of Teacher Ensemble: Learning Categorical Distribution to Stochastically Employ a Teacher for Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important for machine learning applications. However, it can be challenging to align LLMs with our intent, particularly when we want to generate content that is preferable over others or when we want the LLM to respond in a certain style or tone that is hard to describe. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that uses contrastive examples to better describe our intent. This involves providing positive examples that illustrate the true intent, along with negative examples that show what characteristics we want LLMs to avoid. The negative examples can be retrieved from labeled data, written by a human, or generated by the LLM itself.
Before generating an answer, we ask the model to analyze the examples to teach itself what to avoid. This reasoning step provides the model with the appropriate articulation of the user's need and guides it towards generting a better answer. We tested our approach on both synthesized and real-world datasets, including StackExchange and Reddit, and found that it significantly improves performance compared to standard few-shot prompting.

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