We explore the capability of plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) for semantic segmentation and propose the SegVit. Previous ViT-based segmentation networks usually learn a pixel-level representation from the output of the ViT. Differently, we make use of the fundamental component -- attention mechanism, to generate masks for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we propose the Attention-to-Mask (ATM) module, in which the similarity maps between a set of learnable class tokens and the spatial feature maps are transferred to the segmentation masks. Experiments show that our proposed SegVit using the ATM module outperforms its counterparts using the plain ViT backbone on the ADE20K dataset and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-Stuff-10K and PASCAL-Context datasets. Furthermore, to reduce the computational cost of the ViT backbone, we propose query-based down-sampling (QD) and query-based up-sampling (QU) to build a Shrunk structure. With the proposed Shrunk structure, the model can save up to $40\%$ computations while maintaining competitive performance.

在机器学习中，随机梯度下降（SGD）被广泛部署到使用具有同样复杂噪声模型的高度非凸目标的训练模型。不幸的是，SGD理论通常会做出限制性的假设，这些假设无法捕获实际问题的非跨性别，并且几乎完全忽略了实践中存在的复杂噪声模型。在这项工作中，我们在这一缺点上取得了长足的进步。首先，我们确定SGD的迭代将在几乎任意的非概念和噪声模型下全球收敛到固定点或分歧。在对文献中当前假设的非跨性别和噪声模型的共同行为的限制性稍微限制性的假设下，我们表明，即使迭代分歧，目标函数也无法分歧。由于我们的结果，可以将SGD应用于更大范围的随机优化问题，并在其全球收敛行为和稳定性上充满信心。

Given the increasingly intricate forms of partial differential equations (PDEs) in physics and related fields, computationally solving PDEs without analytic solutions inevitably suffers from the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recent advances in neural operators, a kind of mesh-independent neural-network-based PDE solvers, have suggested the dawn of overcoming this challenge. In this emerging direction, Koopman neural operator (KNO) is a representative demonstration and outperforms other state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Here we present KoopmanLab, a self-contained and user-friendly PyTorch module of the Koopman neural operator family for solving partial differential equations. Beyond the original version of KNO, we develop multiple new variants of KNO based on different neural network architectures to improve the general applicability of our module. These variants are validated by mesh-independent and long-term prediction experiments implemented on representative PDEs (e.g., the Navier-Stokes equation and the Bateman-Burgers equation) and ERA5 (i.e., one of the largest high-resolution data sets of global-scale climate fields). These demonstrations suggest the potential of KoopmanLab to be considered in diverse applications of partial differential equations.

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to underestimate a robot's inertia. Nevertheless, these models change and improve over time as humans gather more experience. Interestingly, robot actions influence what this experience is, and therefore influence how people's internal models change. In this work we take a step towards enabling robots to understand the influence they have, leverage it to better assist people, and help human models more quickly align with reality. Our key idea is to model the human's learning as a nonlinear dynamical system which evolves the human's internal model given new observations. We formulate a novel optimization problem to infer the human's learning dynamics from demonstrations that naturally exhibit human learning. We then formalize how robots can influence human learning by embedding the human's learning dynamics model into the robot planning problem. Although our formulations provide concrete problem statements, they are intractable to solve in full generality. We contribute an approximation that sacrifices the complexity of the human internal models we can represent, but enables robots to learn the nonlinear dynamics of these internal models. We evaluate our inference and planning methods in a suite of simulated environments and an in-person user study, where a 7DOF robotic arm teaches participants to be better teleoperators. While influencing human learning remains an open problem, our results demonstrate that this influence is possible and can be helpful in real human-robot interaction.

We introduce Argoverse 2 (AV2) - a collection of three datasets for perception and forecasting research in the self-driving domain. The annotated Sensor Dataset contains 1,000 sequences of multimodal data, encompassing high-resolution imagery from seven ring cameras, and two stereo cameras in addition to lidar point clouds, and 6-DOF map-aligned pose. Sequences contain 3D cuboid annotations for 26 object categories, all of which are sufficiently-sampled to support training and evaluation of 3D perception models. The Lidar Dataset contains 20,000 sequences of unlabeled lidar point clouds and map-aligned pose. This dataset is the largest ever collection of lidar sensor data and supports self-supervised learning and the emerging task of point cloud forecasting. Finally, the Motion Forecasting Dataset contains 250,000 scenarios mined for interesting and challenging interactions between the autonomous vehicle and other actors in each local scene. Models are tasked with the prediction of future motion for "scored actors" in each scenario and are provided with track histories that capture object location, heading, velocity, and category. In all three datasets, each scenario contains its own HD Map with 3D lane and crosswalk geometry - sourced from data captured in six distinct cities. We believe these datasets will support new and existing machine learning research problems in ways that existing datasets do not. All datasets are released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

Learning the underlying distribution of molecular graphs and generating high-fidelity samples is a fundamental research problem in drug discovery and material science. However, accurately modeling distribution and rapidly generating novel molecular graphs remain crucial and challenging goals. To accomplish these goals, we propose a novel Conditional Diffusion model based on discrete Graph Structures (CDGS) for molecular graph generation. Specifically, we construct a forward graph diffusion process on both graph structures and inherent features through stochastic differential equations (SDE) and derive discrete graph structures as the condition for reverse generative processes. We present a specialized hybrid graph noise prediction model that extracts the global context and the local node-edge dependency from intermediate graph states. We further utilize ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for efficient graph sampling, based on the semi-linear structure of the probability flow ODE. Experiments on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework. Particularly, the proposed method still generates high-quality molecular graphs in a limited number of steps.

Stance detection refers to the task of extracting the standpoint (Favor, Against or Neither) towards a target in given texts. Such research gains increasing attention with the proliferation of social media contents. The conventional framework of handling stance detection is converting it into text classification tasks. Deep learning models have already replaced rule-based models and traditional machine learning models in solving such problems. Current deep neural networks are facing two main challenges which are insufficient labeled data and information in social media posts and the unexplainable nature of deep learning models. A new pre-trained language model chatGPT was launched on Nov 30, 2022. For the stance detection tasks, our experiments show that ChatGPT can achieve SOTA or similar performance for commonly used datasets including SemEval-2016 and P-Stance. At the same time, ChatGPT can provide explanation for its own prediction, which is beyond the capability of any existing model. The explanations for the cases it cannot provide classification results are especially useful. ChatGPT has the potential to be the best AI model for stance detection tasks in NLP, or at least change the research paradigm of this field. ChatGPT also opens up the possibility of building explanatory AI for stance detection.

We study the task of learning state representations from potentially high-dimensional observations, with the goal of controlling an unknown partially observable system. We pursue a direct latent model learning approach, where a dynamic model in some latent state space is learned by predicting quantities directly related to planning (e.g., costs) without reconstructing the observations. In particular, we focus on an intuitive cost-driven state representation learning method for solving Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control, one of the most fundamental partially observable control problems. As our main results, we establish finite-sample guarantees of finding a near-optimal state representation function and a near-optimal controller using the directly learned latent model. To the best of our knowledge, despite various empirical successes, prior to this work it was unclear if such a cost-driven latent model learner enjoys finite-sample guarantees. Our work underscores the value of predicting multi-step costs, an idea that is key to our theory, and notably also an idea that is known to be empirically valuable for learning state representations.

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.