Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been not only widespread but also achieved noticeable results on numerous applications including image classification, restoration, and generation. Although the weight-sharing property of convolutions makes them widely adopted in various tasks, its content-agnostic characteristic can also be considered a major drawback. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel operation, called pixel adaptive kernel attention (PAKA). PAKA provides directivity to the filter weights by multiplying spatially varying attention from learnable features. The proposed method infers pixel-adaptive attention maps along the channel and spatial directions separately to address the decomposed model with fewer parameters. Our method is trainable in an end-to-end manner and applicable to any CNN-based models. In addition, we propose an improved information aggregation module with PAKA, called the hierarchical PAKA module (HPM). We demonstrate the superiority of our HPM by presenting state-of-the-art performance on semantic segmentation compared to the conventional information aggregation modules. We validate the proposed method through additional ablation studies and visualizing the effect of PAKA providing directivity to the weights of convolutions. We also show the generalizability of the proposed method by applying it to multi-modal tasks especially color-guided depth map super-resolution.
Deep neural networks have shown excellent prospects in speech separation tasks. However, obtaining good results while keeping a low model complexity remains challenging in real-world applications. In this paper, we provide a bio-inspired efficient encoder-decoder architecture by mimicking the brain's top-down attention, called TDANet, with decreased model complexity without sacrificing performance. The top-down attention in TDANet is extracted by the global attention (GA) module and the cascaded local attention (LA) layers. The GA module takes multi-scale acoustic features as input to extract global attention signal, which then modulates features of different scales by direct top-down connections. The LA layers use features of adjacent layers as input to extract the local attention signal, which is used to modulate the lateral input in a top-down manner. On three benchmark datasets, TDANet consistently achieved competitive separation performance to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with higher efficiency. Specifically, TDANet's multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) are only 5\% of Sepformer, one of the previous SOTA models, and CPU inference time is only 10\% of Sepformer. In addition, a large-size version of TDANet obtained SOTA results on three datasets, with MACs still only 10\% of Sepformer and the CPU inference time only 24\% of Sepformer. Our study suggests that top-down attention can be a more efficient strategy for speech separation.
The current success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) usually relies on loading the entire attributed graph for processing, which may not be satisfied with limited memory resources, especially when the attributed graph is large. This paper pioneers to propose a Binary Graph Convolutional Network (Bi-GCN), which binarizes both the network parameters and input node attributes and exploits binary operations instead of floating-point matrix multiplications for network compression and acceleration. Meanwhile, we also propose a new gradient approximation based back-propagation method to properly train our Bi-GCN. According to the theoretical analysis, our Bi-GCN can reduce the memory consumption by an average of ~31x for both the network parameters and input data, and accelerate the inference speed by an average of ~51x, on three citation networks, i.e., Cora, PubMed, and CiteSeer. Besides, we introduce a general approach to generalize our binarization method to other variants of GNNs, and achieve similar efficiencies. Although the proposed Bi-GCN and Bi-GNNs are simple yet efficient, these compressed networks may also possess a potential capacity problem, i.e., they may not have enough storage capacity to learn adequate representations for specific tasks. To tackle this capacity problem, an Entropy Cover Hypothesis is proposed to predict the lower bound of the width of Bi-GNN hidden layers. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our Bi-GCN and Bi-GNNs can give comparable performances to the corresponding full-precision baselines on seven node classification datasets and verified the effectiveness of our Entropy Cover Hypothesis for solving the capacity problem.
In domains where sample sizes are limited, efficient learning algorithms are critical. Learning using privileged information (LuPI) offers increased sample efficiency by allowing prediction models access to auxiliary information at training time which is unavailable when the models are used. In recent work, it was shown that for prediction in linear-Gaussian dynamical systems, a LuPI learner with access to intermediate time series data is never worse and often better in expectation than any unbiased classical learner. We provide new insights into this analysis and generalize it to nonlinear prediction tasks in latent dynamical systems, extending theoretical guarantees to the case where the map connecting latent variables and observations is known up to a linear transform. In addition, we propose algorithms based on random features and representation learning for the case when this map is unknown. A suite of empirical results confirm theoretical findings and show the potential of using privileged time-series information in nonlinear prediction.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
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.
Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.
The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a classifier that generalizes well even when trained with a limited number of training instances per class. The recently introduced meta-learning approaches tackle this problem by learning a generic classifier across a large number of multiclass classification tasks and generalizing the model to a new task. Yet, even with such meta-learning, the low-data problem in the novel classification task still remains. In this paper, we propose Transductive Propagation Network (TPN), a novel meta-learning framework for transductive inference that classifies the entire test set at once to alleviate the low-data problem. Specifically, we propose to learn to propagate labels from labeled instances to unlabeled test instances, by learning a graph construction module that exploits the manifold structure in the data. TPN jointly learns both the parameters of feature embedding and the graph construction in an end-to-end manner. We validate TPN on multiple benchmark datasets, on which it largely outperforms existing few-shot learning approaches and achieves the state-of-the-art results.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.