In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the collector acquires the items and is the only one who knows the items' factual quality. The appraiser performs her duties with impartiality, but her assessment may be subject to random noises, so it may not accurately reflect the factual quality of the items. The main challenge lies in devising mechanisms that prompt the owner to reveal accurate information, thereby optimizing the collector's expected reward. We consider the menu size of mechanisms as a measure of their practicability and study its impact on the attainable expected reward. For the single-item setting, we design optimal mechanisms with a monotone increasing menu size. Although the reward gap between the simplest and optimal mechanisms is bounded, we show that simple mechanisms with a small menu size cannot ensure any positive fraction of the optimal reward of mechanisms with a larger menu size. For the multi-item setting, we show that an ordinal mechanism that only takes the owner's ordering of the items as input is not incentive-compatible. We then propose a set of Union mechanisms that combine single-item mechanisms. Moreover, we run experiments to examine these mechanisms' robustness against the independent appraiser's assessment accuracy and the items' acquiring rate.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
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
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.
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.
For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most important tasks in E-commerce. Although extensive CTR prediction models have been proposed, learning good representation of items from multimodal features is still less investigated, considering an item in E-commerce usually contains multiple heterogeneous modalities. Previous works either concatenate the multiple modality features, that is equivalent to giving a fixed importance weight to each modality; or learn dynamic weights of different modalities for different items through technique like attention mechanism. However, a problem is that there usually exists common redundant information across multiple modalities. The dynamic weights of different modalities computed by using the redundant information may not correctly reflect the different importance of each modality. To address this, we explore the complementarity and redundancy of modalities by considering modality-specific and modality-invariant features differently. We propose a novel Multimodal Adversarial Representation Network (MARN) for the CTR prediction task. A multimodal attention network first calculates the weights of multiple modalities for each item according to its modality-specific features. Then a multimodal adversarial network learns modality-invariant representations where a double-discriminators strategy is introduced. Finally, we achieve the multimodal item representations by combining both modality-specific and modality-invariant representations. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, and the proposed method consistently achieves remarkable improvements to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the approach has been deployed in an operational E-commerce system and online A/B testing further demonstrates the effectiveness.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
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.