Contextual Transformer for Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning

The pretrain-finetuning paradigm in large-scale sequence models has made significant progress in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. However, such a paradigm is still hindered by several challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), including the lack of self-supervised pretraining algorithms based on offline data and efficient fine-tuning/prompt-tuning over unseen downstream tasks. In this work, we explore how prompts can improve sequence modeling-based offline reinforcement learning (offline-RL) algorithms. Firstly, we propose prompt tuning for offline RL, where a context vector sequence is concatenated with the input to guide the conditional policy generation. As such, we can pretrain a model on the offline dataset with self-supervised loss and learn a prompt to guide the policy towards desired actions. Secondly, we extend our framework to Meta-RL settings and propose Contextual Meta Transformer (CMT); CMT leverages the context among different tasks as the prompt to improve generalization on unseen tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across three different offline-RL settings: offline single-agent RL on the D4RL dataset, offline Meta-RL on the MuJoCo benchmark, and offline MARL on the SMAC benchmark. Superior results validate the strong performance, and generality of our methods.

CAMANet: Class Activation Map Guided Attention Network for Radiology Report Generation

Radiology report generation (RRG) has gained increasing research attention because of its huge potential to mitigate medical resource shortages and aid the process of disease decision making by radiologists. Recent advancements in Radiology Report Generation (RRG) are largely driven by improving models' capabilities in encoding single-modal feature representations, while few studies explore explicitly the cross-modal alignment between image regions and words. Radiologists typically focus first on abnormal image regions before they compose the corresponding text descriptions, thus cross-modal alignment is of great importance to learn an abnormality-aware RRG model. Motivated by this, we propose a Class Activation Map guided Attention Network (CAMANet) which explicitly promotes cross-modal alignment by employing the aggregated class activation maps to supervise the cross-modal attention learning, and simultaneously enriches the discriminative information. Experimental results demonstrate that CAMANet outperforms previous SOTA methods on two commonly used RRG benchmarks.

Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is one of the fundamental tasks for 3D scene understanding and has been widely used in the metaverse applications. Many recent 3D semantic segmentation methods learn a single prototype (classifier weights) for each semantic class, and classify 3D points according to their nearest prototype. However, learning only one prototype for each class limits the model's ability to describe the high variance patterns within a class. Instead of learning a single prototype for each class, in this paper, we propose to use an adaptive number of prototypes to dynamically describe the different point patterns within a semantic class. With the powerful capability of vision transformer, we design a Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning (NAPL) model for point cloud semantic segmentation. To train our NAPL model, we propose a simple yet effective prototype dropout training strategy, which enables our model to adaptively produce prototypes for each class. The experimental results on SemanticKITTI dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 2.3% mIoU improvement over the baseline model based on the point-wise classification paradigm.

AMD-DBSCAN: An Adaptive Multi-density DBSCAN for datasets of extremely variable density

DBSCAN has been widely used in density-based clustering algorithms. However, with the increasing demand for Multi-density clustering, previous traditional DSBCAN can not have good clustering results on Multi-density datasets. In order to address this problem, an adaptive Multi-density DBSCAN algorithm (AMD-DBSCAN) is proposed in this paper. An improved parameter adaptation method is proposed in AMD-DBSCAN to search for multiple parameter pairs (i.e., Eps and MinPts), which are the key parameters to determine the clustering results and performance, therefore allowing the model to be applied to Multi-density datasets. Moreover, only one hyperparameter is required for AMD-DBSCAN to avoid the complicated repetitive initialization operations. Furthermore, the variance of the number of neighbors (VNN) is proposed to measure the difference in density between each cluster. The experimental results show that our AMD-DBSCAN reduces execution time by an average of 75% due to lower algorithm complexity compared with the traditional adaptive algorithm. In addition, AMD-DBSCAN improves accuracy by 24.7% on average over the state-of-the-art design on Multi-density datasets of extremely variable density, while having no performance loss in Single-density scenarios.

DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

Question answering over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to answer natural language questions with factual information such as entities and relations in KBs. Previous methods either generate logical forms that can be executed over KBs to obtain final answers or predict answers directly. Empirical results show that the former often produces more accurate answers, but it suffers from non-execution issues due to potential syntactic and semantic errors in the generated logical forms. In this work, we propose a novel framework DecAF that jointly generates both logical forms and direct answers, and then combines the merits of them to get the final answers. Moreover, different from most of the previous methods, DecAF is based on simple free-text retrieval without relying on any entity linking tools -- this simplification eases its adaptation to different datasets. DecAF achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy on WebQSP, FreebaseQA, and GrailQA benchmarks, while getting competitive results on the ComplexWebQuestions benchmark.

Improving Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Fine-grained Query Understanding

Most recent research on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing relies on either parser itself or simple heuristic based approach to understand natural language query (NLQ). When synthesizing a SQL query, there is no explicit semantic information of NLQ available to the parser which leads to undesirable generalization performance. In addition, without lexical-level fine-grained query understanding, linking between query and database can only rely on fuzzy string match which leads to suboptimal performance in real applications. In view of this, in this paper we present a general-purpose, modular neural semantic parsing framework that is based on token-level fine-grained query understanding. Our framework consists of three modules: named entity recognizer (NER), neural entity linker (NEL) and neural semantic parser (NSP). By jointly modeling query and database, NER model analyzes user intents and identifies entities in the query. NEL model links typed entities to schema and cell values in database. Parser model leverages available semantic information and linking results and synthesizes tree-structured SQL queries based on dynamically generated grammar. Experiments on SQUALL, a newly released semantic parsing dataset, show that we can achieve 56.8% execution accuracy on WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) test set, which outperforms the state-of-the-art model by 2.7%.

A Spatial-channel-temporal-fused Attention for Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) mimic brain computational strategies, and exhibit substantial capabilities in spatiotemporal information processing. As an essential factor for human perception, visual attention refers to the dynamic selection process of salient regions in biological vision systems. Although mechanisms of visual attention have achieved great success in computer vision, they are rarely introduced into SNNs. Inspired by experimental observations on predictive attentional remapping, we here propose a new spatial-channel-temporal-fused attention (SCTFA) module that can guide SNNs to efficiently capture underlying target regions by utilizing historically accumulated spatial-channel information. Through a systematic evaluation on three event stream datasets (DVS Gesture, SL-Animals-DVS and MNIST-DVS), we demonstrate that the SNN with the SCTFA module (SCTFA-SNN) not only significantly outperforms the baseline SNN (BL-SNN) and other two SNN models with degenerated attention modules, but also achieves competitive accuracy with existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our detailed analysis shows that the proposed SCTFA-SNN model has strong robustness to noise and outstanding stability to incomplete data, while maintaining acceptable complexity and efficiency. Overall, these findings indicate that appropriately incorporating cognitive mechanisms of the brain may provide a promising approach to elevate the capability of SNNs.

FR: Folded Rationalization with a Unified Encoder

Conventional works generally employ a two-phase model in which a generator selects the most important pieces, followed by a predictor that makes predictions based on the selected pieces. However, such a two-phase model may incur the degeneration problem where the predictor overfits to the noise generated by a not yet well-trained generator and in turn, leads the generator to converge to a sub-optimal model that tends to select senseless pieces. To tackle this challenge, we propose Folded Rationalization (FR) that folds the two phases of the rationale model into one from the perspective of text semantic extraction. The key idea of FR is to employ a unified encoder between the generator and predictor, based on which FR can facilitate a better predictor by access to valuable information blocked by the generator in the traditional two-phase model and thus bring a better generator. Empirically, we show that FR improves the F1 score by up to 10.3% as compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Scale Attention for Learning Deep Face Representation: A Study Against Visual Scale Variation

Human face images usually appear with wide range of visual scales. The existing face representations pursue the bandwidth of handling scale variation via multi-scale scheme that assembles a finite series of predefined scales. Such multi-shot scheme brings inference burden, and the predefined scales inevitably have gap from real data. Instead, learning scale parameters from data, and using them for one-shot feature inference, is a decent solution. To this end, we reform the conv layer by resorting to the scale-space theory, and achieve two-fold facilities: 1) the conv layer learns a set of scales from real data distribution, each of which is fulfilled by a conv kernel; 2) the layer automatically highlights the feature at the proper channel and location corresponding to the input pattern scale and its presence. Then, we accomplish the hierarchical scale attention by stacking the reformed layers, building a novel style named SCale AttentioN Conv Neural Network (\textbf{SCAN-CNN}). We apply SCAN-CNN to the face recognition task and push the frontier of SOTA performance. The accuracy gain is more evident when the face images are blurry. Meanwhile, as a single-shot scheme, the inference is more efficient than multi-shot fusion. A set of tools are made to ensure the fast training of SCAN-CNN and zero increase of inference cost compared with the plain CNN.

ESSumm: Extractive Speech Summarization from Untranscribed Meeting

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for direct extractive speech-to-speech summarization, ESSumm, which is an unsupervised model without dependence on intermediate transcribed text. Different from previous methods with text presentation, we are aimed at generating a summary directly from speech without transcription. First, a set of smaller speech segments are extracted based on speech signal's acoustic features. For each candidate speech segment, a distance-based summarization confidence score is designed for latent speech representation measure. Specifically, we leverage the off-the-shelf self-supervised convolutional neural network to extract the deep speech features from raw audio. Our approach automatically predicts the optimal sequence of speech segments that capture the key information with a target summary length. Extensive results on two well-known meeting datasets (AMI and ICSI corpora) show the effectiveness of our direct speech-based method to improve the summarization quality with untranscribed data. We also observe that our unsupervised speech-based method even performs on par with recent transcript-based summarization approaches, where extra speech recognition is required.