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Junchi Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Junchi Yan.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

F2A2: Flexible Fully-decentralized Approximate Actor-critic for Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Traditional centralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms are sometimes unpractical in complicated applications, due to non-interactivity between agents, curse of dimensionality and computation complexity. Hence, several decentralized MARL algorithms are motivated. However, existing decentralized methods only handle the fully cooperative setting where massive information needs to be transmitted in training. The block coordinate gradient descent scheme they used for successive independent actor and critic steps can simplify the calculation, but it causes serious bias. In this paper, we propose a flexible fully decentralized actor-critic MARL framework, which can combine most of actor-critic methods, and handle large-scale general cooperative multi-agent setting. A primal-dual hybrid gradient descent type algorithm framework is designed to learn individual agents separately for decentralization. From the perspective of each agent, policy improvement and value evaluation are jointly optimized, which can stabilize multi-agent policy learning. Furthermore, our framework can achieve scalability and stability for large-scale environment and reduce information transmission, by the parameter sharing mechanism and a novel modeling-other-agents methods based on theory-of-mind and online supervised learning. Sufficient experiments in cooperative Multi-agent Particle Environment and StarCraft II show that our decentralized MARL instantiation algorithms perform competitively against conventional centralized and decentralized methods.

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Fine-Grained Music Plagiarism Detection: Revealing Plagiarists through Bipartite Graph Matching and a Comprehensive Large-Scale Dataset

Music plagiarism detection is gaining more and more attention due to the popularity of music production and society's emphasis on intellectual property. We aim to find fine-grained plagiarism in music pairs since conventional methods are coarse-grained and cannot match real-life scenarios. Considering that there is no sizeable dataset designed for the music plagiarism task, we establish a large-scale simulated dataset, named Music Plagiarism Detection Dataset (MPD-Set) under the guidance and expertise of renowned researchers from national-level professional institutions in the field of music. MPD-Set considers diverse music plagiarism cases found in real life from the melodic, rhythmic, and tonal levels respectively. Further, we establish a Real-life Dataset for evaluation, where all plagiarism pairs are real cases. To detect the fine-grained plagiarism pairs effectively, we propose a graph-based method called Bipatite Melody Matching Detector (BMM-Det), which formulates the problem as a max matching problem in the bipartite graph. Experimental results on both the simulated and Real-life Datasets demonstrate that BMM-Det outperforms the existing plagiarism detection methods, and is robust to common plagiarism cases like transpositions, pitch shifts, duration variance, and melody change. Datasets and source code are open-sourced at https://github.com/xuan301/BMMDet_MPDSet.

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Patch-Level Contrasting without Patch Correspondence for Accurate and Dense Contrastive Representation Learning

We propose ADCLR: A ccurate and D ense Contrastive Representation Learning, a novel self-supervised learning framework for learning accurate and dense vision representation. To extract spatial-sensitive information, ADCLR introduces query patches for contrasting in addition with global contrasting. Compared with previous dense contrasting methods, ADCLR mainly enjoys three merits: i) achieving both global-discriminative and spatial-sensitive representation, ii) model-efficient (no extra parameters in addition to the global contrasting baseline), and iii) correspondence-free and thus simpler to implement. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance for contrastive methods. On classification tasks, for ViT-S, ADCLR achieves 77.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with linear probing, outperforming our baseline (DINO) without our devised techniques as plug-in, by 0.5%. For ViT-B, ADCLR achieves 79.8%, 84.0% accuracy on ImageNet by linear probing and finetune, outperforming iBOT by 0.3%, 0.2% accuracy. For dense tasks, on MS-COCO, ADCLR achieves significant improvements of 44.3% AP on object detection, 39.7% AP on instance segmentation, outperforming previous SOTA method SelfPatch by 2.2% and 1.2%, respectively. On ADE20K, ADCLR outperforms SelfPatch by 1.0% mIoU, 1.2% mAcc on the segme

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IID-GAN: an IID Sampling Perspective for Regularizing Mode Collapse

Despite its success, generative adversarial networks (GANs) still suffer from mode collapse, i.e., the generator can only map latent variables to a partial set of modes in the target distribution. In this paper, we analyze and seek to regularize this issue with an independent and identically distributed (IID) sampling perspective and emphasize that holding the IID property referring to the target distribution for generation can naturally avoid mode collapse. This is based on the basic IID assumption for real data in machine learning. However, though the source samples {z} obey IID, the generations {G(z)} may not necessarily be IID sampling from the target distribution. Based on this observation, considering a necessary condition of IID generation that the inverse samples from target data should also be IID in the source distribution, we propose a new loss to encourage the closeness between inverse samples of real data and the Gaussian source in latent space to regularize the generation to be IID from the target distribution. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show the effectiveness of our model.

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GraphGLOW: Universal and Generalizable Structure Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Graph structure learning is a well-established problem that aims at optimizing graph structures adaptive to specific graph datasets to help message passing neural networks (i.e., GNNs) to yield effective and robust node embeddings. However, the common limitation of existing models lies in the underlying \textit{closed-world assumption}: the testing graph is the same as the training graph. This premise requires independently training the structure learning model from scratch for each graph dataset, which leads to prohibitive computation costs and potential risks for serious over-fitting. To mitigate these issues, this paper explores a new direction that moves forward to learn a universal structure learning model that can generalize across graph datasets in an open world. We first introduce the mathematical definition of this novel problem setting, and describe the model formulation from a probabilistic data-generative aspect. Then we devise a general framework that coordinates a single graph-shared structure learner and multiple graph-specific GNNs to capture the generalizable patterns of optimal message-passing topology across datasets. The well-trained structure learner can directly produce adaptive structures for unseen target graphs without any fine-tuning. Across diverse datasets and various challenging cross-graph generalization protocols, our experiments show that even without training on target graphs, the proposed model i) significantly outperforms expressive GNNs trained on input (non-optimized) topology, and ii) surprisingly performs on par with state-of-the-art models that independently optimize adaptive structures for specific target graphs, with notably orders-of-magnitude acceleration for training on the target graph.

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NodeFormer: A Scalable Graph Structure Learning Transformer for Node Classification

Graph neural networks have been extensively studied for learning with inter-connected data. Despite this, recent evidence has revealed GNNs' deficiencies related to over-squashing, heterophily, handling long-range dependencies, edge incompleteness and particularly, the absence of graphs altogether. While a plausible solution is to learn new adaptive topology for message passing, issues concerning quadratic complexity hinder simultaneous guarantees for scalability and precision in large networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel all-pair message passing scheme for efficiently propagating node signals between arbitrary nodes, as an important building block for a pioneering Transformer-style network for node classification on large graphs, dubbed as \textsc{NodeFormer}. Specifically, the efficient computation is enabled by a kernerlized Gumbel-Softmax operator that reduces the algorithmic complexity to linearity w.r.t. node numbers for learning latent graph structures from large, potentially fully-connected graphs in a differentiable manner. We also provide accompanying theory as justification for our design. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising efficacy of the method in various tasks including node classification on graphs (with up to 2M nodes) and graph-enhanced applications (e.g., image classification) where input graphs are missing.

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Towards Open-World Feature Extrapolation: An Inductive Graph Learning Approach

We target open-world feature extrapolation problem where the feature space of input data goes through expansion and a model trained on partially observed features needs to handle new features in test data without further retraining. The problem is of much significance for dealing with features incrementally collected from different fields. To this end, we propose a new learning paradigm with graph representation and learning. Our framework contains two modules: 1) a backbone network (e.g., feedforward neural nets) as a lower model takes features as input and outputs predicted labels; 2) a graph neural network as an upper model learns to extrapolate embeddings for new features via message passing over a feature-data graph built from observed data. Based on our framework, we design two training strategies, a self-supervised approach and an inductive learning approach, to endow the model with extrapolation ability and alleviate feature-level over-fitting. We also provide theoretical analysis on the generalization error on test data with new features, which dissects the impact of training features and algorithms on generalization performance. Our experiments over several classification datasets and large-scale advertisement click prediction datasets demonstrate that our model can produce effective embeddings for unseen features and significantly outperforms baseline methods that adopt KNN and local aggregation.

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MHSCNet: A Multimodal Hierarchical Shot-aware Convolutional Network for Video Summarization

Video summarization intends to produce a concise video summary by effectively capturing and combining the most informative parts of the whole content. Existing approaches for video summarization regard the task as a frame-wise keyframe selection problem and generally construct the frame-wise representation by combining the long-range temporal dependency with the unimodal or bimodal information. However, the optimal video summaries need to reflect the most valuable keyframe with its own information, and one with semantic power of the whole content. Thus, it is critical to construct a more powerful and robust frame-wise representation and predict the frame-level importance score in a fair and comprehensive manner. To tackle the above issues, we propose a multimodal hierarchical shot-aware convolutional network, denoted as MHSCNet, to enhance the frame-wise representation via combining the comprehensive available multimodal information. Specifically, we design a hierarchical ShotConv network to incorporate the adaptive shot-aware frame-level representation by considering the short-range and long-range temporal dependency. Based on the learned shot-aware representations, MHSCNet can predict the frame-level importance score in the local and global view of the video. Extensive experiments on two standard video summarization datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Source code will be made publicly available.

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DIFFormer: Scalable (Graph) Transformers Induced by Energy Constrained Diffusion

Real-world data generation often involves complex inter-dependencies among instances, violating the IID-data hypothesis of standard learning paradigms and posing a challenge for uncovering the geometric structures for learning desired instance representations. To this end, we introduce an energy constrained diffusion model which encodes a batch of instances from a dataset into evolutionary states that progressively incorporate other instances' information by their interactions. The diffusion process is constrained by descent criteria w.r.t.~a principled energy function that characterizes the global consistency of instance representations over latent structures. We provide rigorous theory that implies closed-form optimal estimates for the pairwise diffusion strength among arbitrary instance pairs, which gives rise to a new class of neural encoders, dubbed as DIFFormer (diffusion-based Transformers), with two instantiations: a simple version with linear complexity for prohibitive instance numbers, and an advanced version for learning complex structures. Experiments highlight the wide applicability of our model as a general-purpose encoder backbone with superior performance in various tasks, such as node classification on large graphs, semi-supervised image/text classification, and spatial-temporal dynamics prediction.

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Transformers in Time Series: A Survey

Transformers have achieved superior performances in many tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, which also triggered great interest in the time series community. Among multiple advantages of Transformers, the ability to capture long-range dependencies and interactions is especially attractive for time series modeling, leading to exciting progress in various time series applications. In this paper, we systematically review Transformer schemes for time series modeling by highlighting their strengths as well as limitations. In particular, we examine the development of time series Transformers in two perspectives. From the perspective of network structure, we summarize the adaptations and modifications that have been made to Transformers in order to accommodate the challenges in time series analysis. From the perspective of applications, we categorize time series Transformers based on common tasks including forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification. Empirically, we perform robust analysis, model size analysis, and seasonal-trend decomposition analysis to study how Transformers perform in time series. Finally, we discuss and suggest future directions to provide useful research guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to comprehensively and systematically summarize the recent advances of Transformers for modeling time series data. We hope this survey will ignite further research interests in time series Transformers.

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Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made impressive progress in recent years. Existing methods usually adopt the decoupled encoder-decoder paradigm, where the encoder extracts hidden features from raw sensor data, and the decoder outputs the ego-vehicle's future trajectories or actions. Under such a paradigm, the encoder does not have access to the intended behavior of the ego agent, leaving the burden of finding out safety-critical regions from the massive receptive field and inferring about future situations to the decoder. Even worse, the decoder is usually composed of several simple multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) or GRUs while the encoder is delicately designed (e.g., a combination of heavy ResNets or Transformer). Such an imbalanced resource-task division hampers the learning process. In this work, we aim to alleviate the aforementioned problem by two principles: (1) fully utilizing the capacity of the encoder; (2) increasing the capacity of the decoder. Concretely, we first predict a coarse-grained future position and action based on the encoder features. Then, conditioned on the position and action, the future scene is imagined to check the ramification if we drive accordingly. We also retrieve the encoder features around the predicted coordinate to obtain fine-grained information about the safety-critical region. Finally, based on the predicted future and the retrieved salient feature, we refine the coarse-grained position and action by predicting its offset from ground-truth. The above refinement module could be stacked in a cascaded fashion, which extends the capacity of the decoder with spatial-temporal prior knowledge about the conditioned future. We conduct experiments on the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance in closed-loop benchmarks. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed module.

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HIORE: Leveraging High-order Interactions for Unified Entity Relation Extraction

Entity relation extraction consists of two sub-tasks: entity recognition and relation extraction. Existing methods either tackle these two tasks separately or unify them with word-by-word interactions. In this paper, we propose HIORE, a new method for unified entity relation extraction. The key insight is to leverage the high-order interactions, i.e., the complex association among word pairs, which contains richer information than the first-order word-by-word interactions. For this purpose, we first devise a W-shape DNN (WNet) to capture coarse-level high-order connections. Then, we build a heuristic high-order graph and further calibrate the representations with a graph neural network (GNN). Experiments on three benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05, SciERC) show that HIORE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on relation extraction and an improvement of 1.1~1.8 F1 points over the prior best unified model.

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Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.

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Active Finetuning: Exploiting Annotation Budget in the Pretraining-Finetuning Paradigm

Given the large-scale data and the high annotation cost, pretraining-finetuning becomes a popular paradigm in multiple computer vision tasks. Previous research has covered both the unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning in this paradigm, while little attention is paid to exploiting the annotation budget for finetuning. To fill in this gap, we formally define this new active finetuning task focusing on the selection of samples for annotation in the pretraining-finetuning paradigm. We propose a novel method called ActiveFT for active finetuning task to select a subset of data distributing similarly with the entire unlabeled pool and maintaining enough diversity by optimizing a parametric model in the continuous space. We prove that the Earth Mover's distance between the distributions of the selected subset and the entire data pool is also reduced in this process. Extensive experiments show the leading performance and high efficiency of ActiveFT superior to baselines on both image classification and semantic segmentation. Our code is released at https://github.com/yichen928/ActiveFT.

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Policy Pre-training for Autonomous Driving via Self-supervised Geometric Modeling

Witnessing the impressive achievements of pre-training techniques on large-scale data in the field of computer vision and natural language processing, we wonder whether this idea could be adapted in a grab-and-go spirit, and mitigate the sample inefficiency problem for visuomotor driving. Given the highly dynamic and variant nature of the input, the visuomotor driving task inherently lacks view and translation invariance, and the visual input contains massive irrelevant information for decision making, resulting in predominant pre-training approaches from general vision less suitable for the autonomous driving task. To this end, we propose PPGeo (Policy Pre-training via Geometric modeling), an intuitive and straightforward fully self-supervised framework curated for the policy pretraining in visuomotor driving. We aim at learning policy representations as a powerful abstraction by modeling 3D geometric scenes on large-scale unlabeled and uncalibrated YouTube driving videos. The proposed PPGeo is performed in two stages to support effective self-supervised training. In the first stage, the geometric modeling framework generates pose and depth predictions simultaneously, with two consecutive frames as input. In the second stage, the visual encoder learns driving policy representation by predicting the future ego-motion and optimizing with the photometric error based on current visual observation only. As such, the pre-trained visual encoder is equipped with rich driving policy related representations and thereby competent for multiple visuomotor driving tasks. Extensive experiments covering a wide span of challenging scenarios have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed approach, where improvements range from 2% to even over 100% with very limited data.

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Energy-based Out-of-Distribution Detection for Graph Neural Networks

Learning on graphs, where instance nodes are inter-connected, has become one of the central problems for deep learning, as relational structures are pervasive and induce data inter-dependence which hinders trivial adaptation of existing approaches that assume inputs to be i.i.d.~sampled. However, current models mostly focus on improving testing performance of in-distribution data and largely ignore the potential risk w.r.t. out-of-distribution (OOD) testing samples that may cause negative outcome if the prediction is overconfident on them. In this paper, we investigate the under-explored problem, OOD detection on graph-structured data, and identify a provably effective OOD discriminator based on an energy function directly extracted from graph neural networks trained with standard classification loss. This paves a way for a simple, powerful and efficient OOD detection model for GNN-based learning on graphs, which we call GNNSafe. It also has nice theoretical properties that guarantee an overall distinguishable margin between the detection scores for in-distribution and OOD samples, which, more critically, can be further strengthened by a learning-free energy belief propagation scheme. For comprehensive evaluation, we introduce new benchmark settings that evaluate the model for detecting OOD data from both synthetic and real distribution shifts (cross-domain graph shifts and temporal graph shifts). The results show that GNNSafe achieves up to $17.0\%$ AUROC improvement over state-of-the-arts and it could serve as simple yet strong baselines in such an under-developed area.

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Revocable Deep Reinforcement Learning with Affinity Regularization for Outlier-Robust Graph Matching

Graph matching (GM) has been a building block in various areas including computer vision and pattern recognition. Despite recent impressive progress, existing deep GM methods often have obvious difficulty in handling outliers, which are ubiquitous in practice. We propose a deep reinforcement learning based approach RGM, whose sequential node matching scheme naturally fits the strategy for selective inlier matching against outliers. A revocable action framework is devised to improve the agent's flexibility against the complex constrained GM. Moreover, we propose a quadratic approximation technique to regularize the affinity score, in the presence of outliers. As such, the agent can finish inlier matching timely when the affinity score stops growing, for which otherwise an additional parameter i.e. the number of inliers is needed to avoid matching outliers. In this paper, we focus on learning the back-end solver under the most general form of GM: the Lawler's QAP, whose input is the affinity matrix. Especially, our approach can also boost existing GM methods that use such input. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate its performance regarding both accuracy and robustness.

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H2RBox: Horizontal Box Annotation is All You Need for Oriented Object Detection

Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate}{MMRotate} and Jittor-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor}{JDet}.

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