FAN-Trans: Online Knowledge Distillation for Facial Action Unit Detection

Due to its importance in facial behaviour analysis, facial action unit (AU) detection has attracted increasing attention from the research community. Leveraging the online knowledge distillation framework, we propose the ``FANTrans" method for AU detection. Our model consists of a hybrid network of convolution and transformer blocks to learn per-AU features and to model AU co-occurrences. The model uses a pre-trained face alignment network as the feature extractor. After further transformation by a small learnable add-on convolutional subnet, the per-AU features are fed into transformer blocks to enhance their representation. As multiple AUs often appear together, we propose a learnable attention drop mechanism in the transformer block to learn the correlation between the features for different AUs. We also design a classifier that predicts AU presence by considering all AUs' features, to explicitly capture label dependencies. Finally, we make the attempt of adapting online knowledge distillation in the training stage for this task, further improving the model's performance. Experiments on the BP4D and DISFA datasets demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed method.

Span-based joint entity and relation extraction augmented with sequence tagging mechanism

Span-based joint extraction simultaneously conducts named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) in text span form. However, since previous span-based models rely on span-level classifications, they cannot benefit from token-level label information, which has been proven advantageous for the task. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Tagging augmented Span-based Network (STSN), a span-based joint model that can make use of token-level label information. In STSN, we construct a core neural architecture by deep stacking multiple attention layers, each of which consists of three basic attention units. On the one hand, the core architecture enables our model to learn token-level label information via the sequence tagging mechanism and then uses the information in the span-based joint extraction; on the other hand, it establishes a bi-directional information interaction between NER and RE. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that STSN consistently outperforms the strongest baselines in terms of F1, creating new state-of-the-art results.

Random Orthogonalization for Federated Learning in Massive MIMO Systems

We propose a novel communication design, termed random orthogonalization, for federated learning (FL) in a massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. The key novelty of random orthogonalization comes from the tight coupling of FL and two unique characteristics of massive MIMO -- channel hardening and favorable propagation. As a result, random orthogonalization can achieve natural over-the-air model aggregation without requiring transmitter side channel state information (CSI) for the uplink phase of FL, while significantly reducing the channel estimation overhead at the receiver. We extend this principle to the downlink communication phase and develop a simple but highly effective model broadcast method for FL. We also relax the massive MIMO assumption by proposing an enhanced random orthogonalization design for both uplink and downlink FL communications, that does not rely on channel hardening or favorable propagation. Theoretical analyses with respect to both communication and machine learning performance are carried out. In particular, an explicit relationship among the convergence rate, the number of clients, and the number of antennas is established. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of random orthogonalization for FL in massive MIMO.

Safe Exploration Incurs Nearly No Additional Sample Complexity for Reward-free RL

While the primary goal of the exploration phase in reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL) is to reduce the uncertainty in the estimated model with minimum number of trajectories, in practice, the agent often needs to abide by certain safety constraint at the same time. It remains unclear how such safe exploration requirement would affect the corresponding sample complexity to achieve the desired optimality of the obtained policy in planning. In this work, we make a first attempt to answer this question. In particular, we consider the scenario where a safe baseline policy is known beforehand, and propose a unified Safe reWard-frEe ExploraTion (SWEET) framework. We then particularize the SWEET framework to the tabular and the low-rank MDP settings, and develop algorithms coined Tabular-SWEET and Low-rank-SWEET, respectively. Both algorithms leverage the concavity and continuity of the newly introduced truncated value functions, and are guaranteed to achieve zero constraint violation during exploration with high probability. Furthermore, both algorithms can provably find a near-optimal policy subject to any constraint in the planning phase. Remarkably, the sample complexities under both algorithms match or even outperform the state of the art in their constraint-free counterparts up to some constant factors, proving that safety constraint hardly increases the sample complexity for RF-RL.

Unified BERT for Few-shot Natural Language Understanding

Even as pre-trained language models share a semantic encoder, natural language understanding suffers from a diversity of output schemas. In this paper, we propose UBERT, a unified bidirectional language understanding model based on BERT framework, which can universally model the training objects of different NLU tasks through a biaffine network. Specifically, UBERT encodes prior knowledge from various aspects, uniformly constructing learning representations across multiple NLU tasks, which is conducive to enhancing the ability to capture common semantic understanding. Using the biaffine to model scores pair of the start and end position of the original text, various classification and extraction structures can be converted into a universal, span-decoding approach. Experiments show that UBERT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on 7 NLU tasks, 14 datasets on few-shot and zero-shot setting, and realizes the unification of extensive information extraction and linguistic reasoning tasks.

Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Density Guided Adaptive Selection CNN and Transformer Estimation

In real-world crowd counting applications, the crowd densities in an image vary greatly. When facing with density variation, human tend to locate and count the target in low-density regions, and reason the number in high-density regions. We observe that CNN focus on the local information correlation using a fixed-size convolution kernel and the Transformer could effectively extract the semantic crowd information by using the global self-attention mechanism. Thus, CNN could locate and estimate crowd accurately in low-density regions, while it is hard to properly perceive density in high-density regions. On the contrary, Transformer, has a high reliability in high-density regions, but fails to locate the target in sparse regions. Neither CNN or Transformer can well deal with this kind of density variations. To address this problem, we propose a CNN and Transformer Adaptive Selection Network (CTASNet) which can adaptively select the appropriate counting branch for different density regions. Firstly, CTASNet generates the prediction results of CNN and Transformer. Then, considering that CNN/Transformer are appropriate for low/high-density regions, a density guided Adaptive Selection Module is designed to automatically combine the predictions of CNN and Transformer. Moreover, to reduce the influences of annotation noise, we introduce a Correntropy based Optimal Transport loss. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets have validated the proposed method.

Provable Benefit of Multitask Representation Learning in Reinforcement Learning

As representation learning becomes a powerful technique to reduce sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) in practice, theoretical understanding of its advantage is still limited. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the benefit of representation learning under the low-rank Markov decision process (MDP) model. We first study multitask low-rank RL (as upstream training), where all tasks share a common representation, and propose a new multitask reward-free algorithm called REFUEL. REFUEL learns both the transition kernel and the near-optimal policy for each task, and outputs a well-learned representation for downstream tasks. Our result demonstrates that multitask representation learning is provably more sample-efficient than learning each task individually, as long as the total number of tasks is above a certain threshold. We then study the downstream RL in both online and offline settings, where the agent is assigned with a new task sharing the same representation as the upstream tasks. For both online and offline settings, we develop a sample-efficient algorithm, and show that it finds a near-optimal policy with the suboptimality gap bounded by the sum of the estimation error of the learned representation in upstream and a vanishing term as the number of downstream samples becomes large. Our downstream results of online and offline RL further capture the benefit of employing the learned representation from upstream as opposed to learning the representation of the low-rank model directly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical study that characterizes the benefit of representation learning in exploration-based reward-free multitask RL for both upstream and downstream tasks.

Knowledge Distillation Meets Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning

Existing knowledge distillation methods mostly focus on distillation of teacher's prediction and intermediate activation. However, the structured representation, which arguably is one of the most critical ingredients of deep models, is largely overlooked. In this work, we propose a novel {\em \modelname{}} ({\bf\em \shortname{})} method dedicated for distilling representational knowledge semantically from a pretrained teacher to a target student. The key idea is that we leverage the teacher's classifier as a semantic critic for evaluating the representations of both teacher and student and distilling the semantic knowledge with high-order structured information over all feature dimensions. This is accomplished by introducing a notion of cross-network logit computed through passing student's representation into teacher's classifier. Further, considering the set of seen classes as a basis for the semantic space in a combinatorial perspective, we scale \shortname{} to unseen classes for enabling effective exploitation of largely available, arbitrary unlabeled training data. At the problem level, this establishes an interesting connection between knowledge distillation with open-set semi-supervised learning (SSL). Extensive experiments show that our \shortname{} outperforms significantly previous state-of-the-art knowledge distillation methods on both coarse object classification and fine face recognition tasks, as well as less studied yet practically crucial binary network distillation. Under more realistic open-set SSL settings we introduce, we reveal that knowledge distillation is generally more effective than existing Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) sample detection, and our proposed \shortname{} is superior over both previous distillation and SSL competitors. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/jingyang2017/SRD\_ossl}.

Transformer-based Cross-Modal Recipe Embeddings with Large Batch Training

In this paper, we present a cross-modal recipe retrieval framework, Transformer-based Network for Large Batch Training (TNLBT), which is inspired by ACME~(Adversarial Cross-Modal Embedding) and H-T~(Hierarchical Transformer). TNLBT aims to accomplish retrieval tasks while generating images from recipe embeddings. We apply the Hierarchical Transformer-based recipe text encoder, the Vision Transformer~(ViT)-based recipe image encoder, and an adversarial network architecture to enable better cross-modal embedding learning for recipe texts and images. In addition, we use self-supervised learning to exploit the rich information in the recipe texts having no corresponding images. Since contrastive learning could benefit from a larger batch size according to the recent literature on self-supervised learning, we adopt a large batch size during training and have validated its effectiveness. In the experiments, the proposed framework significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art frameworks in both cross-modal recipe retrieval and image generation tasks on the benchmark Recipe1M. This is the first work which confirmed the effectiveness of large batch training on cross-modal recipe embeddings.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone:Efficient and Robust Training of Face Recognition CNNs by Partial FC

Learning discriminative deep feature embeddings by using million-scale in-the-wild datasets and margin-based softmax loss is the current state-of-the-art approach for face recognition. However, the memory and computing cost of the Fully Connected (FC) layer linearly scales up to the number of identities in the training set. Besides, the large-scale training data inevitably suffers from inter-class conflict and long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we propose a sparsely updating variant of the FC layer, named Partial FC (PFC). In each iteration, positive class centers and a random subset of negative class centers are selected to compute the margin-based softmax loss. All class centers are still maintained throughout the whole training process, but only a subset is selected and updated in each iteration. Therefore, the computing requirement, the probability of inter-class conflict, and the frequency of passive update on tail class centers, are dramatically reduced. Extensive experiments across different training data and backbones (e.g. CNN and ViT) confirm the effectiveness, robustness and efficiency of the proposed PFC. The source code is available at \https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition.