This paper explores scene affinity (AIScene), namely intra-scene consistency and inter-scene correlation, for semi-supervised LiDAR semantic segmentation in driving scenes. Adopting teacher-student training, AIScene employs a teacher network to generate pseudo-labeled scenes from unlabeled data, which then supervise the student network's learning. Unlike most methods that include all points in pseudo-labeled scenes for forward propagation but only pseudo-labeled points for backpropagation, AIScene removes points without pseudo-labels, ensuring consistency in both forward and backward propagation within the scene. This simple point erasure strategy effectively prevents unsupervised, semantically ambiguous points (excluded in backpropagation) from affecting the learning of pseudo-labeled points. Moreover, AIScene incorporates patch-based data augmentation, mixing multiple scenes at both scene and instance levels. Compared to existing augmentation techniques that typically perform scene-level mixing between two scenes, our method enhances the semantic diversity of labeled (or pseudo-labeled) scenes, thereby improving the semi-supervised performance of segmentation models. Experiments show that AIScene outperforms previous methods on two popular benchmarks across four settings, achieving notable improvements of 1.9% and 2.1% in the most challenging 1% labeled data.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
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.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
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.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.
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.