FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration

Most existing monocular 3D pose estimation approaches only focus on a single body part, neglecting the fact that the essential nuance of human motion is conveyed through a concert of subtle movements of face, hands, and body. In this paper, we present FrankMocap, a fast and accurate whole-body 3D pose estimation system that can produce 3D face, hands, and body simultaneously from in-the-wild monocular images. The core idea of FrankMocap is its modular design: We first run 3D pose regression methods for face, hands, and body independently, followed by composing the regression outputs via an integration module. The separate regression modules allow us to take full advantage of their state-of-the-art performances without compromising the original accuracy and reliability in practice. We develop three different integration modules that trade off between latency and accuracy. All of them are capable of providing simple yet effective solutions to unify the separate outputs into seamless whole-body pose estimation results. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that our modularized system outperforms both the optimization-based and end-to-end methods of estimating whole-body pose.

Frustratingly Easy Transferability Estimation

Transferability estimation has been an essential tool in selecting a pre-trained model and the layers of it to transfer, so as to maximize the performance on a target task and prevent negative transfer. Existing estimation algorithms either require intensive training on target tasks or have difficulties in evaluating the transferability between layers. We propose a simple, efficient, and effective transferability measure named TransRate. With single pass through the target data, TransRate measures the transferability as the mutual information between the features of target examples extracted by a pre-trained model and labels of them. We overcome the challenge of efficient mutual information estimation by resorting to coding rate that serves as an effective alternative to entropy. TransRate is theoretically analyzed to be closely related to the performance after transfer learning. Despite its extraordinary simplicity in 10 lines of codes, TransRate performs remarkably well in extensive evaluations on 22 pre-trained models and 16 downstream tasks.

PI-GNN: A Novel Perspective on Semi-Supervised Node Classification against Noisy Labels

Semi-supervised node classification, as a fundamental problem in graph learning, leverages unlabeled nodes along with a small portion of labeled nodes for training. Existing methods rely heavily on high-quality labels, which, however, are expensive to obtain in real-world applications since certain noises are inevitably involved during the labeling process. It hence poses an unavoidable challenge for the learning algorithm to generalize well. In this paper, we propose a novel robust learning objective dubbed pairwise interactions (PI) for the model, such as Graph Neural Network (GNN) to combat noisy labels. Unlike classic robust training approaches that operate on the pointwise interactions between node and class label pairs, PI explicitly forces the embeddings for node pairs that hold a positive PI label to be close to each other, which can be applied to both labeled and unlabeled nodes. We design several instantiations for PI labels based on the graph structure and the node class labels, and further propose a new uncertainty-aware training technique to mitigate the negative effect of the sub-optimal PI labels. Extensive experiments on different datasets and GNN architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of PI, yielding a promising improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.

A Cooperative-Competitive Multi-Agent Framework for Auto-bidding in Online Advertising

In online advertising, auto-bidding has become an essential tool for advertisers to optimize their preferred ad performance metrics by simply expressing the high-level campaign objectives and constraints. Previous works consider the design of auto-bidding agents from the single-agent view without modeling the mutual influence between agents. In this paper, we instead consider this problem from the perspective of a distributed multi-agent system, and propose a general Multi-Agent reinforcement learning framework for Auto-Bidding, namely MAAB, to learn the auto-bidding strategies. First, we investigate the competition and cooperation relation among auto-bidding agents, and propose temperature-regularized credit assignment for establishing a mixed cooperative-competitive paradigm. By carefully making a competition and cooperation trade-off among the agents, we can reach an equilibrium state that guarantees not only individual advertiser's utility but also the system performance (social welfare). Second, due to the observed collusion behaviors of bidding low prices underlying the cooperation, we further propose bar agents to set a personalized bidding bar for each agent, and then to alleviate the degradation of revenue. Third, to deploy MAAB to the large-scale advertising system with millions of advertisers, we propose a mean-field approach. By grouping advertisers with the same objective as a mean auto-bidding agent, the interactions among advertisers are greatly simplified, making it practical to train MAAB efficiently. Extensive experiments on the offline industrial dataset and Alibaba advertising platform demonstrate that our approach outperforms several baseline methods in terms of social welfare and guarantees the ad platform's revenue.

Neural Auction: End-to-End Learning of Auction Mechanisms for E-Commerce Advertising

In e-commerce advertising, it is crucial to jointly consider various performance metrics, e.g., user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. Traditional auction mechanisms, such as GSP and VCG auctions, can be suboptimal due to their fixed allocation rules to optimize a single performance metric (e.g., revenue or social welfare). Recently, data-driven auctions, learned directly from auction outcomes to optimize multiple performance metrics, have attracted increasing research interests. However, the procedure of auction mechanisms involves various discrete calculation operations, making it challenging to be compatible with continuous optimization pipelines in machine learning. In this paper, we design \underline{D}eep \underline{N}eural \underline{A}uctions (DNAs) to enable end-to-end auction learning by proposing a differentiable model to relax the discrete sorting operation, a key component in auctions. We optimize the performance metrics by developing deep models to efficiently extract contexts from auctions, providing rich features for auction design. We further integrate the game theoretical conditions within the model design, to guarantee the stability of the auctions. DNAs have been successfully deployed in the e-commerce advertising system at Taobao. Experimental evaluation results on both large-scale data set as well as online A/B test demonstrated that DNAs significantly outperformed other mechanisms widely adopted in industry.

Energy-Based Learning for Cooperative Games, with Applications to Feature/Data/Model Valuations

Valuation problems, such as attribution-based feature interpretation, data valuation and model valuation for ensembles, become increasingly more important in many machine learning applications. Such problems are commonly solved by well-known game-theoretic criteria, such as Shapley value or Banzhaf index. In this work, we present a novel energy-based treatment for cooperative games, with a theoretical justification by the maximum entropy framework. Surprisingly, by conducting variational inference of the energy-based model, we recover various game-theoretic valuation criteria, such as Shapley value and Banzhaf index, through conducting one-step gradient ascent for maximizing the mean-field ELBO objective. This observation also verifies the rationality of existing criteria, as they are all trying to decouple the correlations among the players through the mean-field approach. By running gradient ascent for multiple steps, we achieve a trajectory of the valuations, among which we define the valuation with the best conceivable decoupling error as the Variational Index. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed Variational Index enjoys intriguing properties on certain synthetic and real-world valuation problems.

Adversarial Attack Framework on Graph Embedding Models with Limited Knowledge

With the success of the graph embedding model in both academic and industry areas, the robustness of graph embedding against adversarial attack inevitably becomes a crucial problem in graph learning. Existing works usually perform the attack in a white-box fashion: they need to access the predictions/labels to construct their adversarial loss. However, the inaccessibility of predictions/labels makes the white-box attack impractical to a real graph learning system. This paper promotes current frameworks in a more general and flexible sense -- we demand to attack various kinds of graph embedding models with black-box driven. We investigate the theoretical connections between graph signal processing and graph embedding models and formulate the graph embedding model as a general graph signal process with a corresponding graph filter. Therefore, we design a generalized adversarial attacker: GF-Attack. Without accessing any labels and model predictions, GF-Attack can perform the attack directly on the graph filter in a black-box fashion. We further prove that GF-Attack can perform an effective attack without knowing the number of layers of graph embedding models. To validate the generalization of GF-Attack, we construct the attacker on four popular graph embedding models. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GF-Attack on several benchmark datasets.

Exploring Robustness of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

Recent studies imply that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples -- inputs with a slight but intentional perturbation are incorrectly classified by the network. Such vulnerability makes it risky for some security-related applications (e.g., semantic segmentation in autonomous cars) and triggers tremendous concerns on the model reliability. For the first time, we comprehensively evaluate the robustness of existing UDA methods and propose a robust UDA approach. It is rooted in two observations: (i) the robustness of UDA methods in semantic segmentation remains unexplored, which pose a security concern in this field; and (ii) although commonly used self-supervision (e.g., rotation and jigsaw) benefits image tasks such as classification and recognition, they fail to provide the critical supervision signals that could learn discriminative representation for segmentation tasks. These observations motivate us to propose adversarial self-supervision UDA (or ASSUDA) that maximizes the agreement between clean images and their adversarial examples by a contrastive loss in the output space. Extensive empirical studies on commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that ASSUDA is resistant to adversarial attacks.

FedGraphNN: A Federated Learning System and Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Network (GNN) research is rapidly growing thanks to the capacity of GNNs to learn representations from graph-structured data. However, centralizing a massive amount of real-world graph data for GNN training is prohibitive due to user-side privacy concerns, regulation restrictions, and commercial competition. Federated learning (FL), a trending distributed learning paradigm, aims to solve this challenge while preserving privacy. Despite recent advances in vision and language domains, there is no suitable platform for the federated training of GNNs. To this end, we introduce FedGraphNN, an open research federated learning system and a benchmark to facilitate GNN-based FL research. FedGraphNN is built on a unified formulation of federated GNNs and supports commonly used datasets, GNN models, FL algorithms, and flexible APIs. We also contribute a new molecular dataset, hERG, to promote research exploration. Our experimental results present significant challenges in federated GNN training: federated GNNs perform worse in most datasets with a non-I.I.D split than centralized GNNs; the GNN model that attains the best result in the centralized setting may not hold its advantage in the federated setting. These results imply that more research efforts are needed to unravel the mystery behind federated GNN training. Moreover, our system performance analysis demonstrates that the FedGraphNN system is computationally affordable to most research labs with limited GPUs. We maintain the source code at https://github.com/FedML-AI/FedGraphNN.

QD-GCN: Query-Driven Graph Convolutional Networks for Attributed Community Search

Recently, attributed community search, a related but different problem to community detection and graph clustering, has been widely studied in the literature. Compared with the community detection that finds all existing static communities from a graph, the attributed community search (ACS) is more challenging since it aims to find dynamic communities with both cohesive structures and homogeneous node attributes given arbitrary queries. To solve the ACS problem, the most popular paradigm is to simplify the problem as two sub-problems, that is, structural matching and attribute filtering and deal with them separately. However, in real-world graphs, the community structure and the node attributes are actually correlated to each other. In this vein, current studies cannot capture these correlations which are vital for the ACS problem. In this paper, we propose Query-Driven Graph Convolutional Networks (QD-GCN), an end-to-end framework that unifies the community structure as well as node attribute to solve the ACS problem. In particular, QD-GCN leverages the Graph Convolutional Networks, which is a powerful tool to encode the graph topology and node attributes concurrently, as the backbones to extract the query-dependent community information from the original graph. By utilizing this query-dependent community information, QD-GCN is able to predict the target community given any queries. Experiments on real-world graphs with ground-truth communities demonstrate that QD-GCN outperforms existing attributed community search algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.