Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) represents a quintessential control strategy for orchestrating vehicular platoon movement within Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) systems, significantly enhancing traffic efficiency and reducing energy consumption. In recent years, the data-driven methods, such as reinforcement learning (RL), have been employed to address this task due to their significant advantages in terms of efficiency and flexibility. However, the delay issue, which often arises in real-world CACC systems, is rarely taken into account by current RL-based approaches. To tackle this problem, we propose a Delay-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (DAMARL) framework aimed at achieving safe and stable control for CACC. We model the entire decision-making process using a Multi-Agent Delay-Aware Markov Decision Process (MADA-MDP) and develop a centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) MARL framework for distributed control of CACC platoons. An attention mechanism-integrated policy network is introduced to enhance the performance of CAV communication and decision-making. Additionally, a velocity optimization model-based action filter is incorporated to further ensure the stability of the platoon. Experimental results across various delay conditions and platoon sizes demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods in terms of platoon safety, stability and overall performance.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) merges retrieval methods with deep learning advancements to address the static limitations of large language models (LLMs) by enabling the dynamic integration of up-to-date external information. This methodology, focusing primarily on the text domain, provides a cost-effective solution to the generation of plausible but incorrect responses by LLMs, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of their outputs through the use of real-world data. As RAG grows in complexity and incorporates multiple concepts that can influence its performance, this paper organizes the RAG paradigm into four categories: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation, offering a detailed perspective from the retrieval viewpoint. It outlines RAG's evolution and discusses the field's progression through the analysis of significant studies. Additionally, the paper introduces evaluation methods for RAG, addressing the challenges faced and proposing future research directions. By offering an organized framework and categorization, the study aims to consolidate existing research on RAG, clarify its technological underpinnings, and highlight its potential to broaden the adaptability and applications of LLMs.
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely-used technology to inherit information from cumbersome teacher models to compact student models, consequently realizing model compression and acceleration. Compared with image classification, object detection is a more complex task, and designing specific KD methods for object detection is non-trivial. In this work, we elaborately study the behaviour difference between the teacher and student detection models, and obtain two intriguing observations: First, the teacher and student rank their detected candidate boxes quite differently, which results in their precision discrepancy. Second, there is a considerable gap between the feature response differences and prediction differences between teacher and student, indicating that equally imitating all the feature maps of the teacher is the sub-optimal choice for improving the student's accuracy. Based on the two observations, we propose Rank Mimicking (RM) and Prediction-guided Feature Imitation (PFI) for distilling one-stage detectors, respectively. RM takes the rank of candidate boxes from teachers as a new form of knowledge to distill, which consistently outperforms the traditional soft label distillation. PFI attempts to correlate feature differences with prediction differences, making feature imitation directly help to improve the student's accuracy. On MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks, extensive experiments are conducted on various detectors with different backbones to validate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet50 achieves 40.4% mAP in MS COCO, which is 3.5% higher than its baseline, and also outperforms previous KD methods.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.
Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, was proposed. It showed good performance with various data by using forward and backward directional information in a sentence. But in their study, not considered at all was the distance between words, an important feature when learning the local dependency to help understand the context of input text. We propose Distance-based Self-Attention Network, which considers the word distance by using a simple distance mask in order to model the local dependency without losing the ability of modeling global dependency which attention has inherent. Our model shows good performance with NLI data, and it records the new state-of-the-art result with SNLI data. Additionally, we show that our model has a strength in long sentences or documents.