Graph contrastive learning (GCL) shows great potential in unsupervised graph representation learning. Data augmentation plays a vital role in GCL, and its optimal choice heavily depends on the downstream task. Many GCL methods with automated data augmentation face the risk of insufficient information as they fail to preserve the essential information necessary for the downstream task. To solve this problem, we propose InfoMin-Max for automated Graph contrastive learning (GIMM), which prevents GCL from encoding redundant information and losing essential information. GIMM consists of two major modules: (1) automated graph view generator, which acquires the approximation of InfoMin's optimal views through adversarial training without requiring task-relevant information; (2) view comparison, which learns an excellent encoder by applying InfoMax to view representations. To the best of our knowledge, GIMM is the first method that combines the InfoMin and InfoMax principles in GCL. Besides, GIMM introduces randomness to augmentation, thus stabilizing the model against perturbations. Extensive experiments on unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for node and graph classification demonstrate the superiority of our GIMM over state-of-the-art GCL methods with automated and manual data augmentation.
The 3rd Anti-UAV Workshop & Challenge aims to encourage research in developing novel and accurate methods for multi-scale object tracking. The Anti-UAV dataset used for the Anti-UAV Challenge has been publicly released. There are two main differences between this year's competition and the previous two. First, we have expanded the existing dataset, and for the first time, released a training set so that participants can focus on improving their models. Second, we set up two tracks for the first time, i.e., Anti-UAV Tracking and Anti-UAV Detection & Tracking. Around 76 participating teams from the globe competed in the 3rd Anti-UAV Challenge. In this paper, we provide a brief summary of the 3rd Anti-UAV Workshop & Challenge including brief introductions to the top three methods in each track. The submission leaderboard will be reopened for researchers that are interested in the Anti-UAV challenge. The benchmark dataset and other information can be found at: https://anti-uav.github.io/.
This work studies the multi-human parsing problem. Existing methods, either following top-down or bottom-up two-stage paradigms, usually involve expensive computational costs. We instead present a high-performance Single-stage Multi-human Parsing (SMP) deep architecture that decouples the multi-human parsing problem into two fine-grained sub-problems, i.e., locating the human body and parts. SMP leverages the point features in the barycenter positions to obtain their segmentation and then generates a series of offsets from the barycenter of the human body to the barycenters of parts, thus performing human body and parts matching without the grouping process. Within the SMP architecture, we propose a Refined Feature Retain module to extract the global feature of instances through generated mask attention and a Mask of Interest Reclassify module as a trainable plug-in module to refine the classification results with the predicted segmentation. Extensive experiments on the MHPv2.0 dataset demonstrate the best effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, surpassing the state-of-the-art method by 2.1% in AP50p, 1.0% in APvolp, and 1.2% in PCP50. In particular, the proposed method requires fewer training epochs and a less complex model architecture. We will release our source codes, pretrained models, and online demos to facilitate further studies.
Although face recognition has made impressive progress in recent years, we ignore the racial bias of the recognition system when we pursue a high level of accuracy. Previous work found that for different races, face recognition networks focus on different facial regions, and the sensitive regions of darker-skinned people are much smaller. Based on this discovery, we propose a new de-bias method based on gradient attention, called Gradient Attention Balance Network (GABN). Specifically, we use the gradient attention map (GAM) of the face recognition network to track the sensitive facial regions and make the GAMs of different races tend to be consistent through adversarial learning. This method mitigates the bias by making the network focus on similar facial regions. In addition, we also use masks to erase the Top-N sensitive facial regions, forcing the network to allocate its attention to a larger facial region. This method expands the sensitive region of darker-skinned people and further reduces the gap between GAM of darker-skinned people and GAM of Caucasians. Extensive experiments show that GABN successfully mitigates racial bias in face recognition and learns more balanced performance for people of different races.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been increasingly appealing to the society of object Re-Identification (ReID), for that task-specific architectures significantly improve the retrieval performance. Previous works explore new optimizing targets and search spaces for NAS ReID, yet they neglect the difference of training schemes between image classification and ReID. In this work, we propose a novel Twins Contrastive Mechanism (TCM) to provide more appropriate supervision for ReID architecture search. TCM reduces the category overlaps between the training and validation data, and assists NAS in simulating real-world ReID training schemes. We then design a Multi-Scale Interaction (MSI) search space to search for rational interaction operations between multi-scale features. In addition, we introduce a Spatial Alignment Module (SAM) to further enhance the attention consistency confronted with images from different sources. Under the proposed NAS scheme, a specific architecture is automatically searched, named as MSINet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art ReID methods on both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. Source code available in https://github.com/vimar-gu/MSINet.
AI is promising in assisting UX evaluators with analyzing usability tests, but its judgments are typically presented as non-interactive visualizations. Evaluators may have questions about test recordings, but have no way of asking them. Interactive conversational assistants provide a Q&A dynamic that may improve analysis efficiency and evaluator autonomy. To understand the full range of analysis-related questions, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz design probe study with 20 participants who interacted with simulated AI assistants via text or voice. We found that participants asked for five categories of information: user actions, user mental model, help from the AI assistant, product and task information, and user demographics. Those who used the text assistant asked more questions, but the question lengths were similar. The text assistant was perceived as significantly more efficient, but both were rated equally in satisfaction and trust. We also provide design considerations for future conversational AI assistants for UX evaluation.
Image manipulation on the latent space of the pre-trained StyleGAN can control the semantic attributes of the generated images. Recently, some studies have focused on detecting channels with specific properties to directly manipulate the latent code, which is limited by the entanglement of the latent space. To detect the attribute-specific channels, we propose a novel detection method in the context of pre-trained classifiers. We analyse the gradients layer by layer on the style space. The intensities of the gradients indicate the channel's responses to specific attributes. The latent style codes of channels control separate attributes in the layers. We choose channels with top-$k$ gradients to control specific attributes in the maximum response layer. We implement single-channel and multi-channel manipulations with a certain attribute. Our methods can accurately detect relevant channels for a large number of face attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art methods in generalization and scalability.
Data augmentation is a widely used technique for enhancing the generalization ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks. Occlusion is a critical factor that affects on the generalization ability of image classification models. In order to generate new samples, existing data augmentation methods based on information deletion simulate occluded samples by randomly removing some areas in the images. However, those methods cannot delete areas of the images according to their structural features of the images. To solve those problems, we propose a novel data augmentation method, AdvMask, for image classification tasks. Instead of randomly removing areas in the images, AdvMask obtains the key points that have the greatest influence on the classification results via an end-to-end sparse adversarial attack module. Therefore, we can find the most sensitive points of the classification results without considering the diversity of various image appearance and shapes of the object of interest. In addition, a data augmentation module is employed to generate structured masks based on the key points, thus forcing the CNN classification models to seek other relevant content when the most discriminative content is hidden. AdvMask can effectively improve the performance of classification models in the testing process. The experimental results on various datasets and CNN models verify that the proposed method outperforms other previous data augmentation methods in image classification tasks.
This work presents two astonishing findings on neural networks learned for large-scale image classification. 1) Given a well-trained model, the logits predicted for some category can be directly obtained by linearly combining the predictions of a few other categories, which we call \textbf{neural dependency}. 2) Neural dependencies exist not only within a single model, but even between two independently learned models, regardless of their architectures. Towards a theoretical analysis of such phenomena, we demonstrate that identifying neural dependencies is equivalent to solving the Covariance Lasso (CovLasso) regression problem proposed in this paper. Through investigating the properties of the problem solution, we confirm that neural dependency is guaranteed by a redundant logit covariance matrix, which condition is easily met given massive categories, and that neural dependency is highly sparse, implying that one category correlates to only a few others. We further empirically show the potential of neural dependencies in understanding internal data correlations, generalizing models to unseen categories, and improving model robustness with a dependency-derived regularizer. Code for this work will be made publicly available.
Card game AI has always been a hot topic in the research of artificial intelligence. In recent years, complex card games such as Mahjong, DouDizhu and Texas Hold'em have been solved and the corresponding AI programs have reached the level of human experts. In this paper, we are devoted to developing an AI program for a more complex card game, GuanDan, whose rules are similar to DouDizhu but much more complicated. To be specific, the characteristics of large state and action space, long length of one episode and the unsure number of players in the GuanDan pose great challenges for the development of the AI program. To address these issues, we propose the first AI program DanZero for GuanDan using reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, we utilize a distributed framework to train our AI system. In the actor processes, we carefully design the state features and agents generate samples by self-play. In the learner process, the model is updated by Deep Monte-Carlo Method. After training for 30 days using 160 CPUs and 1 GPU, we get our DanZero bot. We compare it with 8 baseline AI programs which are based on heuristic rules and the results reveal the outstanding performance of DanZero. We also test DanZero with human players and demonstrate its human-level performance.