The practical use of Bayesian Optimization (BO) in engineering applications imposes special requirements: high sampling efficiency on the one hand and finding a robust solution on the other hand. We address the case of adversarial robustness, where all parameters are controllable during the optimization process, but a subset of them is uncontrollable or even adversely perturbed at the time of application. To this end, we develop an efficient information-based acquisition function that we call Robust Entropy Search (RES). We empirically demonstrate its benefits in experiments on synthetic and real-life data. The results showthat RES reliably finds robust optima, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms.
Motion modeling is critical in flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). Existing paradigms either consider linear combinations of bidirectional flows or directly predict bilateral flows for given timestamps without exploring favorable motion priors, thus lacking the capability of effectively modeling spatiotemporal dynamics in real-world videos. To address this limitation, in this study, we introduce Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling (GIMM), a novel and effective approach to motion modeling for VFI. Specifically, to enable GIMM as an effective motion modeling paradigm, we design a motion encoding pipeline to model spatiotemporal motion latent from bidirectional flows extracted from pre-trained flow estimators, effectively representing input-specific motion priors. Then, we implicitly predict arbitrary-timestep optical flows within two adjacent input frames via an adaptive coordinate-based neural network, with spatiotemporal coordinates and motion latent as inputs. Our GIMM can be smoothly integrated with existing flow-based VFI works without further modifications. We show that GIMM performs better than the current state of the art on the VFI benchmarks.
Determining the approximate degree composition for Boolean functions remains a significant unsolved problem in Boolean function complexity. In recent decades, researchers have concentrated on proving that approximate degree composes for special types of inner and outer functions. An important and extensively studied class of functions are the recursive functions, i.e.~functions obtained by composing a base function with itself a number of times. Let $h^d$ denote the standard $d$-fold composition of the base function $h$. The main result of this work is to show that the approximate degree composes if either of the following conditions holds: \begin{itemize} \item The outer function $f:\{0,1\}^n\to \{0,1\}$ is a recursive function of the form $h^d$, with $h$ being any base function and $d= \Omega(\log\log n)$. \item The inner function is a recursive function of the form $h^d$, with $h$ being any constant arity base function (other than AND and OR) and $d= \Omega(\log\log n)$, where $n$ is the arity of the outer function. \end{itemize} In terms of proof techniques, we first observe that the lower bound for composition can be obtained by introducing majority in between the inner and the outer functions. We then show that majority can be \emph{efficiently eliminated} if the inner or outer function is a recursive function.
Advancements in LiDAR technology have led to more cost-effective production while simultaneously improving precision and resolution. As a result, LiDAR has become integral to vehicle localization, achieving centimeter-level accuracy through techniques like Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) and other advanced 3D registration algorithms. Nonetheless, these approaches are reliant on high-definition 3D point cloud maps, the creation of which involves significant expenditure. When such maps are unavailable or lack sufficient features for 3D registration algorithms, localization accuracy diminishes, posing a risk to road safety. To address this, we proposed to use LiDAR-equipped roadside unit and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication to accurately estimate the connected autonomous vehicle's position and help the vehicle when its self-localization is not accurate enough. Our simulation results indicate that this method outperforms traditional NDT scan matching-based approaches in terms of localization accuracy.
Revenue-optimal auction design is a challenging problem with significant theoretical and practical implications. Sequential auction mechanisms, known for their simplicity and strong strategyproofness guarantees, are often limited by theoretical results that are largely existential, except for certain restrictive settings. Although traditional reinforcement learning methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) are applicable in this domain, they struggle with computational demands and convergence issues when dealing with large and continuous action spaces. In light of this and recognizing that we can model transitions differentiable for our settings, we propose using a new reinforcement learning framework tailored for sequential combinatorial auctions that leverages first-order gradients. Our extensive evaluations show that our approach achieves significant improvement in revenue over both analytical baselines and standard reinforcement learning algorithms. Furthermore, we scale our approach to scenarios involving up to 50 agents and 50 items, demonstrating its applicability in complex, real-world auction settings. As such, this work advances the computational tools available for auction design and contributes to bridging the gap between theoretical results and practical implementations in sequential auction design.
Multimodal Knowledge Graph Construction (MMKC) refers to the process of creating a structured representation of entities and relationships through multiple modalities such as text, images, videos, etc. However, existing MMKC models have limitations in handling the introduction of new entities and relations due to the dynamic nature of the real world. Moreover, most state-of-the-art studies in MMKC only consider entity and relation extraction from text data while neglecting other multi-modal sources. Meanwhile, the current continual setting for knowledge graph construction only consider entity and relation extraction from text data while neglecting other multi-modal sources. Therefore, there arises the need to explore the challenge of continuous multimodal knowledge graph construction to address the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting and ensure the retention of past knowledge extracted from different forms of data. This research focuses on investigating this complex topic by developing lifelong multimodal benchmark datasets. Based on the empirical findings that several state-of-the-art MMKC models, when trained on multimedia data, might unexpectedly underperform compared to those solely utilizing textual resources in a continual setting, we propose a Lifelong MultiModal Consistent Transformer Framework (LMC) for continuous multimodal knowledge graph construction. By combining the advantages of consistent KGC strategies within the context of continual learning, we achieve greater balance between stability and plasticity. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method over prevailing continual learning techniques or multimodal approaches in dynamic scenarios. Code and datasets can be found at //github.com/zjunlp/ContinueMKGC.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.