Given two $n$-element structures, $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$, which can be distinguished by a sentence of $k$-variable first-order logic ($\mathcal{L}^k$), what is the minimum $f(n)$ such that there is guaranteed to be a sentence $\phi \in \mathcal{L}^k$ with at most $f(n)$ quantifiers, such that $\mathcal{A} \models \phi$ but $\mathcal{B} \not \models \phi$? We present various results related to this question obtained by using the recently introduced QVT games. In particular, we show that when we limit the number of variables, there can be an exponential gap between the quantifier depth and the quantifier number needed to separate two structures. Through the lens of this question, we will highlight some difficulties that arise in analysing the QVT game and some techniques which can help to overcome them. As a consequence, we show that $\mathcal{L}^{k+1}$ is exponentially more succinct than $\mathcal{L}^{k}$. We also show, in the setting of the existential-positive fragment, how to lift quantifier depth lower bounds to quantifier number lower bounds. This leads to almost tight bounds.
Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number of surveys have focused on transformers in computer vision in general, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a systematic review of recent advances based on transformers in remote sensing. Our survey covers more than 60 recent transformers-based methods for different remote sensing problems in sub-areas of remote sensing: very high-resolution (VHR), hyperspectral (HSI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We conclude the survey by discussing different challenges and open issues of transformers in remote sensing. Additionally, we intend to frequently update and maintain the latest transformers in remote sensing papers with their respective code at: //github.com/VIROBO-15/Transformer-in-Remote-Sensing
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throughput to support effective and efficient data generation. Recently, the advancement of deep learning induces expressive methods that can learn the underlying representation and properties of data. Such capability provides new opportunities in figuring out the mutual relationship between the structural patterns and functional properties of the data and leveraging such relationship to generate structural data given the desired properties. This article provides a systematic review of this promising research area, commonly known as controllable deep data generation. Firstly, the potential challenges are raised and preliminaries are provided. Then the controllable deep data generation is formally defined, a taxonomy on various techniques is proposed and the evaluation metrics in this specific domain are summarized. After that, exciting applications of controllable deep data generation are introduced and existing works are experimentally analyzed and compared. Finally, the promising future directions of controllable deep data generation are highlighted and five potential challenges are identified.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
In multi-turn dialog, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences \cite{Carbonell1983DiscoursePA}, which naturally makes understanding the dialog context more difficult. However, it is essential to fully grasp the dialog context to generate a reasonable response. Hence, in this paper, we propose to improve the response generation performance by examining the model's ability to answer a reading comprehension question, where the question is focused on the omitted information in the dialog. Enlightened by the multi-task learning scheme, we propose a joint framework that unifies these two tasks, sharing the same encoder to extract the common and task-invariant features with different decoders to learn task-specific features. To better fusing information from the question and the dialog history in the encoding part, we propose to augment the Transformer architecture with a memory updater, which is designed to selectively store and update the history dialog information so as to support downstream tasks. For the experiment, we employ human annotators to write and examine a large-scale dialog reading comprehension dataset. Extensive experiments are conducted on this dataset, and the results show that the proposed model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines on both tasks. In this way, we demonstrate that reasoning can indeed help better response generation and vice versa. We release our large-scale dataset for further research.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
Deep Learning (DL) is vulnerable to out-of-distribution and adversarial examples resulting in incorrect outputs. To make DL more robust, several posthoc anomaly detection techniques to detect (and discard) these anomalous samples have been proposed in the recent past. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection for DL based applications. We provide a taxonomy for existing techniques based on their underlying assumptions and adopted approaches. We discuss various techniques in each of the categories and provide the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Our goal in this survey is to provide an easier yet better understanding of the techniques belonging to different categories in which research has been done on this topic. Finally, we highlight the unsolved research challenges while applying anomaly detection techniques in DL systems and present some high-impact future research directions.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.
We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.