Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization: Local Structure Preserving Regularization for Improving Adversarial Robustness

It is broadly known that deep neural networks are susceptible to being fooled by adversarial examples with perturbations imperceptible by humans. Various defenses have been proposed to improve adversarial robustness, among which adversarial training methods are most effective. However, most of these methods treat the training samples independently and demand a tremendous amount of samples to train a robust network, while ignoring the latent structural information among these samples. In this work, we propose a novel Local Structure Preserving (LSP) regularization, which aims to preserve the local structure of the input space in the learned embedding space. In this manner, the attacking effect of adversarial samples lying in the vicinity of clean samples can be alleviated. We show strong empirical evidence that with or without adversarial training, our method consistently improves the performance of adversarial robustness on several image classification datasets compared to the baselines and some state-of-the-art approaches, thus providing promising direction for future research.

ALUM: Adversarial Data Uncertainty Modeling from Latent Model Uncertainty Compensation

It is critical that the models pay attention not only to accuracy but also to the certainty of prediction. Uncertain predictions of deep models caused by noisy data raise significant concerns in trustworthy AI areas. To explore and handle uncertainty due to intrinsic data noise, we propose a novel method called ALUM to simultaneously handle the model uncertainty and data uncertainty in a unified scheme. Rather than solely modeling data uncertainty in the ultimate layer of a deep model based on randomly selected training data, we propose to explore mined adversarial triplets to facilitate data uncertainty modeling and non-parametric uncertainty estimations to compensate for the insufficiently trained latent model layers. Thus, the critical data uncertainty and model uncertainty caused by noisy data can be readily quantified for improving model robustness. Our proposed ALUM is model-agnostic which can be easily implemented into any existing deep model with little extra computation overhead. Extensive experiments on various noisy learning tasks validate the superior robustness and generalization ability of our method. The code is released at https://github.com/wwzjer/ALUM.

Meta contrastive label correction for financial time series

Financial applications such as stock price forecasting, usually face an issue that under the predefined labeling rules, it is hard to accurately predict the directions of stock movement. This is because traditional ways of labeling, taking Triple Barrier Method, for example, usually gives us inaccurate or even corrupted labels. To address this issue, we focus on two main goals. One is that our proposed method can automatically generate correct labels for noisy time series patterns, while at the same time, the method is capable of boosting classification performance on this new labeled dataset. Based on the aforementioned goals, our approach has the following three novelties: First, we fuse a new contrastive learning algorithm into the meta-learning framework to estimate correct labels iteratively when updating the classification model inside. Moreover, we utilize images generated from time series data through Gramian angular field and representative learning. Most important of all, we adopt multi-task learning to forecast temporal-variant labels. In the experiments, we work on 6% clean data and the rest unlabeled data. It is shown that our method is competitive and outperforms a lot compared with benchmarks.

Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become powerful tools in modeling graph-structured data in recommender systems. However, real-life recommendation scenarios usually involve heterogeneous relationships (e.g., social-aware user influence, knowledge-aware item dependency) which contains fruitful information to enhance the user preference learning. In this paper, we study the problem of heterogeneous graph-enhanced relational learning for recommendation. Recently, contrastive self-supervised learning has become successful in recommendation. In light of this, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning (HGCL), which is able to incorporate heterogeneous relational semantics into the user-item interaction modeling with contrastive learning-enhanced knowledge transfer across different views. However, the influence of heterogeneous side information on interactions may vary by users and items. To move this idea forward, we enhance our heterogeneous graph contrastive learning with meta networks to allow the personalized knowledge transformer with adaptive contrastive augmentation. The experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of HGCL over state-of-the-art recommendation methods. Through ablation study, key components in HGCL method are validated to benefit the recommendation performance improvement. The source code of the model implementation is available at the link https://github.com/HKUDS/HGCL.

Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation

The online emergence of multi-modal sharing platforms (eg, TikTok, Youtube) is powering personalized recommender systems to incorporate various modalities (eg, visual, textual and acoustic) into the latent user representations. While existing works on multi-modal recommendation exploit multimedia content features in enhancing item embeddings, their model representation capability is limited by heavy label reliance and weak robustness on sparse user behavior data. Inspired by the recent progress of self-supervised learning in alleviating label scarcity issue, we explore deriving self-supervision signals with effectively learning of modality-aware user preference and cross-modal dependencies. To this end, we propose a new Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning (MMSSL) method which tackles two key challenges. Specifically, to characterize the inter-dependency between the user-item collaborative view and item multi-modal semantic view, we design a modality-aware interactive structure learning paradigm via adversarial perturbations for data augmentation. In addition, to capture the effects that user's modality-aware interaction pattern would interweave with each other, a cross-modal contrastive learning approach is introduced to jointly preserve the inter-modal semantic commonality and user preference diversity. Experiments on real-world datasets verify the superiority of our method in offering great potential for multimedia recommendation over various state-of-the-art baselines. The implementation is released at: https://github.com/HKUDS/MMSSL.

Learning Tri-mode Grasping for Ambidextrous Robot Picking

Object picking in cluttered scenes is a widely investigated field of robot manipulation, however, ambidextrous robot picking is still an important and challenging issue. We found the fusion of different prehensile actions (grasp and suction) can expand the range of objects that can be picked by robot, and the fusion of prehensile action and nonprehensile action (push) can expand the picking space of ambidextrous robot. In this paper, we propose a Push-Grasp-Suction (PGS) tri-mode grasping learning network for ambidextrous robot picking through the fusion of different prehensile actions and the fusion of prehensile action and nonprehensile aciton. The prehensile branch of PGS takes point clouds as input, and the 6-DoF picking configuration of grasp and suction in cluttered scenes are generated by multi-task point cloud learning. The nonprehensile branch with depth image input generates instance segmentation map and push configuration, cooperating with the prehensile actions to complete the picking of objects out of single-arm space. PGS generalizes well in real scene and achieves state-of-the-art picking performance.

STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) has become an emerging task in sentiment analysis research, aiming to extract triplets of the aspect term, its corresponding opinion term, and its associated sentiment polarity from a given sentence. Recently, many neural networks based models with different tagging schemes have been proposed, but almost all of them have their limitations: heavily relying on 1) prior assumption that each word is only associated with a single role (e.g., aspect term, or opinion term, etc. ) and 2) word-level interactions and treating each opinion/aspect as a set of independent words. Hence, they perform poorly on the complex ASTE task, such as a word associated with multiple roles or an aspect/opinion term with multiple words. Hence, we propose a novel approach, Span TAgging and Greedy infErence (STAGE), to extract sentiment triplets in span-level, where each span may consist of multiple words and play different roles simultaneously. To this end, this paper formulates the ASTE task as a multi-class span classification problem. Specifically, STAGE generates more accurate aspect sentiment triplet extractions via exploring span-level information and constraints, which consists of two components, namely, span tagging scheme and greedy inference strategy. The former tag all possible candidate spans based on a newly-defined tagging set. The latter retrieves the aspect/opinion term with the maximum length from the candidate sentiment snippet to output sentiment triplets. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective model based on the STAGE, which outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a large margin on four widely-used datasets. Moreover, our STAGE can be easily generalized to other pair/triplet extraction tasks, which also demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme STAGE.

DVGG: Deep Variational Grasp Generation for Dextrous Manipulation

Grasping with anthropomorphic robotic hands involves much more hand-object interactions compared to parallel-jaw grippers. Modeling hand-object interactions is essential to the study of multi-finger hand dextrous manipulation. This work presents DVGG, an efficient grasp generation network that takes single-view observation as input and predicts high-quality grasp configurations for unknown objects. In general, our generative model consists of three components: 1) Point cloud completion for the target object based on the partial observation; 2) Diverse sets of grasps generation given the complete point cloud; 3) Iterative grasp pose refinement for physically plausible grasp optimization. To train our model, we build a large-scale grasping dataset that contains about 300 common object models with 1.5M annotated grasps in simulation. Experiments in simulation show that our model can predict robust grasp poses with a wide variety and high success rate. Real robot platform experiments demonstrate that the model trained on our dataset performs well in the real world. Remarkably, our method achieves a grasp success rate of 70.7\% for novel objects in the real robot platform, which is a significant improvement over the baseline methods.

A Benchmark for Structured Extractions from Complex Documents

Understanding visually-rich business documents to extract structured data and automate business workflows has been receiving attention both in academia and industry. Although recent multi-modal language models have achieved impressive results, we find that existing benchmarks do not reflect the complexity of real documents seen in industry. In this work, we identify the desiderata for a more comprehensive benchmark and propose one we call Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU). VRDU contains two datasets that represent several challenges: rich schema including diverse data types as well as nested entities, complex templates including tables and multi-column layouts, and diversity of different layouts (templates) within a single document type. We design few-shot and conventional experiment settings along with a carefully designed matching algorithm to evaluate extraction results. We report the performance of strong baselines and three observations: (1) generalizing to new document templates is very challenging, (2) few-shot performance has a lot of headroom, and (3) models struggle with nested fields such as line-items in an invoice. We plan to open source the benchmark and the evaluation toolkit. We hope this helps the community make progress on these challenging tasks in extracting structured data from visually rich documents.

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Relation Extraction Datasets

Knowledge-enhanced methods that take advantage of auxiliary knowledge graphs recently emerged in relation extraction, and they surpass traditional text-based relation extraction methods. However, there are no unified public benchmarks that currently involve evidence sentences and knowledge graphs for knowledge-enhanced relation extraction. To combat these issues, we propose KGRED, a knowledge graph enhanced relation extraction dataset with features as follows: (1) the benchmarks are based on widely-used distantly supervised relation extraction datasets; (2) we refine these existing datasets to improve the data quality, and we also construct auxiliary knowledge graphs for these existing datasets through entity linking to support knowledge-enhanced relation extraction tasks; (3) with the new benchmarks we curated, we build baselines in two popular relation extraction settings including sentence-level and bag-level relation extraction, and we also make comparisons among the latest knowledge-enhanced relation extraction methods. KGRED provides high-quality relation extraction datasets with auxiliary knowledge graphs for evaluating the performance of knowledge-enhanced relation extraction methods. Meanwhile, our experiments on KGRED reveal the influence of knowledge graph information on relation extraction tasks.