Story Visualization (SV) is a challenging generative vision task, that requires both visual quality and consistency between different frames in generated image sequences. Previous approaches either employ some kind of memory mechanism to maintain context throughout an auto-regressive generation of the image sequence, or model the generation of the characters and their background separately, to improve the rendering of characters. On the contrary, we embrace a completely parallel transformer-based approach, exclusively relying on Cross-Attention with past and future captions to achieve consistency. Additionally, we propose a Character Guidance technique to focus on the generation of characters in an implicit manner, by forming a combination of text-conditional and character-conditional logits in the logit space. We also employ a caption-augmentation technique, carried out by a Large Language Model (LLM), to enhance the robustness of our approach. The combination of these methods culminates into state-of-the-art (SOTA) results over various metrics in the most prominent SV benchmark (Pororo-SV), attained with constraint resources while achieving superior computational complexity compared to previous arts. The validity of our quantitative results is supported by a human survey.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Control Regularization (RL-ACR) that ensures RL safety by combining the RL policy with a control regularizer that hard-codes safety constraints over forecasted system behaviors. The adaptability is achieved by using a learnable "focus" weight trained to maximize the cumulative reward of the policy combination. As the RL policy improves through off-policy learning, the focus weight improves the initial sub-optimum strategy by gradually relying more on the RL policy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RL-ACR in a critical medical control application and further investigate its performance in four classic control environments.
Recent advances in deep learning have greatly facilitated the automated segmentation of ultrasound images, which is essential for nodule morphological analysis. Nevertheless, most existing methods depend on extensive and precise annotations by domain experts, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, we suggest using simple aspect ratio annotations directly from ultrasound clinical diagnoses for automated nodule segmentation. Especially, an asymmetric learning framework is developed by extending the aspect ratio annotations with two types of pseudo labels, i.e., conservative labels and radical labels, to train two asymmetric segmentation networks simultaneously. Subsequently, a conservative-radical-balance strategy (CRBS) strategy is proposed to complementally combine radical and conservative labels. An inconsistency-aware dynamically mixed pseudo-labels supervision (IDMPS) module is introduced to address the challenges of over-segmentation and under-segmentation caused by the two types of labels. To further leverage the spatial prior knowledge provided by clinical annotations, we also present a novel loss function namely the clinical anatomy prior loss. Extensive experiments on two clinically collected ultrasound datasets (thyroid and breast) demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method, which can achieve comparable and even better performance than fully supervised methods using ground truth annotations.
We introduce a novel modeling approach for time series imputation and forecasting, tailored to address the challenges often encountered in real-world data, such as irregular samples, missing data, or unaligned measurements from multiple sensors. Our method relies on a continuous-time-dependent model of the series' evolution dynamics. It leverages adaptations of conditional, implicit neural representations for sequential data. A modulation mechanism, driven by a meta-learning algorithm, allows adaptation to unseen samples and extrapolation beyond observed time-windows for long-term predictions. The model provides a highly flexible and unified framework for imputation and forecasting tasks across a wide range of challenging scenarios. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on classical benchmarks and outperforms alternative time-continuous models.
Autonomous and intelligent systems (AIS) facilitate a wide range of beneficial applications across a variety of different domains. However, technical characteristics such as unpredictability and lack of transparency, as well as potential unintended consequences, pose considerable challenges to the current governance infrastructure. Furthermore, the speed of development and deployment of applications outpaces the ability of existing governance institutions to put in place effective ethical-legal oversight. New approaches for agile, distributed and multilevel governance are needed. This work presents a practical framework for multilevel governance of AIS. The framework enables mapping actors onto six levels of decision-making including the international, national and organizational levels. Furthermore, it offers the ability to identify and evolve existing tools or create new tools for guiding the behavior of actors within the levels. Governance mechanisms enable actors to shape and enforce regulations and other tools, which when complemented with good practices contribute to effective and comprehensive governance.
A pressing issue in the adoption of AI models is the increasing demand for more human-centric explanations of their predictions. To advance towards more human-centric explanations, understanding how humans produce and select explanations has been beneficial. In this work, inspired by insights of human cognition we propose and test the incorporation of two novel biases to enhance the search for effective counterfactual explanations. Central to our methodology is the application of diffusion distance, which emphasizes data connectivity and actionability in the search for feasible counterfactual explanations. In particular, diffusion distance effectively weights more those points that are more interconnected by numerous short-length paths. This approach brings closely connected points nearer to each other, identifying a feasible path between them. We also introduce a directional coherence term that allows the expression of a preference for the alignment between the joint and marginal directional changes in feature space to reach a counterfactual. This term enables the generation of counterfactual explanations that align with a set of marginal predictions based on expectations of how the outcome of the model varies by changing one feature at a time. We evaluate our method, named Coherent Directional Counterfactual Explainer (CoDiCE), and the impact of the two novel biases against existing methods such as DiCE, FACE, Prototypes, and Growing Spheres. Through a series of ablation experiments on both synthetic and real datasets with continuous and mixed-type features, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.
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.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.