Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

This paper illustrates the technologies of user next intent prediction with a concept knowledge graph. The system has been deployed on the Web at Alipay, serving more than 100 million daily active users. Specifically, we propose AlipayKG to explicitly characterize user intent, which is an offline concept knowledge graph in the Life-Service domain modeling the historical behaviors of users, the rich content interacted by users and the relations between them. We further introduce a Transformer-based model which integrates expert rules from the knowledge graph to infer the online user's next intent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively enhance the performance of the downstream tasks while retaining explainability.

Blind watermarking provides powerful evidence for copyright protection, image authentication, and tampering identification. However, it remains a challenge to design a watermarking model with high imperceptibility and robustness against strong noise attacks. To resolve this issue, we present a framework Combining the Invertible and Non-invertible (CIN) mechanisms. The CIN is composed of the invertible part to achieve high imperceptibility and the non-invertible part to strengthen the robustness against strong noise attacks. For the invertible part, we develop a diffusion and extraction module (DEM) and a fusion and split module (FSM) to embed and extract watermarks symmetrically in an invertible way. For the non-invertible part, we introduce a non-invertible attention-based module (NIAM) and the noise-specific selection module (NSM) to solve the asymmetric extraction under a strong noise attack. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods of imperceptibility and robustness significantly. Our framework can achieve an average of 99.99% accuracy and 67.66 dB PSNR under noise-free conditions, while 96.64% and 39.28 dB combined strong noise attacks. The code will be available in https://github.com/rmpku/CIN.

We present X-Decoder, a generalized decoding model that can predict pixel-level segmentation and language tokens seamlessly. X-Decodert takes as input two types of queries: (i) generic non-semantic queries and (ii) semantic queries induced from text inputs, to decode different pixel-level and token-level outputs in the same semantic space. With such a novel design, X-Decoder is the first work that provides a unified way to support all types of image segmentation and a variety of vision-language (VL) tasks. Further, our design enables seamless interactions across tasks at different granularities and brings mutual benefits by learning a common and rich pixel-level visual-semantic understanding space, without any pseudo-labeling. After pretraining on a mixed set of a limited amount of segmentation data and millions of image-text pairs, X-Decoder exhibits strong transferability to a wide range of downstream tasks in both zero-shot and finetuning settings. Notably, it achieves (1) state-of-the-art results on open-vocabulary segmentation and referring segmentation on eight datasets; (2) better or competitive finetuned performance to other generalist and specialist models on segmentation and VL tasks; and (3) flexibility for efficient finetuning and novel task composition (e.g., referring captioning and image editing). Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://x-decoder-vl.github.io.

Audio-visual approaches involving visual inputs have laid the foundation for recent progress in speech separation. However, the optimization of the concurrent usage of auditory and visual inputs is still an active research area. Inspired by the cortico-thalamo-cortical circuit, in which the sensory processing mechanisms of different modalities modulate one another via the non-lemniscal sensory thalamus, we propose a novel cortico-thalamo-cortical neural network (CTCNet) for audio-visual speech separation (AVSS). First, the CTCNet learns hierarchical auditory and visual representations in a bottom-up manner in separate auditory and visual subnetworks, mimicking the functions of the auditory and visual cortical areas. Then, inspired by the large number of connections between cortical regions and the thalamus, the model fuses the auditory and visual information in a thalamic subnetwork through top-down connections. Finally, the model transmits this fused information back to the auditory and visual subnetworks, and the above process is repeated several times. The results of experiments on three speech separation benchmark datasets show that CTCNet remarkably outperforms existing AVSS methods with considerablely fewer parameters. These results suggest that mimicking the anatomical connectome of the mammalian brain has great potential for advancing the development of deep neural networks. Project repo is https://github.com/JusperLee/CTCNet.

Traditional multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) uses a single model to translate all directions. However, with the increasing scale of language pairs, simply using a single model for massive MNMT brings new challenges: parameter tension and large computations. In this paper, we revisit multi-way structures by assigning an individual branch for each language (group). Despite being a simple architecture, it is challenging to train de-centralized models due to the lack of constraints to align representations from all languages. We propose a localized training recipe to map different branches into a unified space, resulting in an efficient detachable model, Lego-MT. For a fair comparison, we collect data from OPUS and build the first large-scale open-source translation benchmark covering 7 language-centric data, each containing 445 language pairs. Experiments show that Lego-MT (1.2B) brings gains of more than 4 BLEU while outperforming M2M-100 (12B) (We will public all training data, models, and checkpoints)

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

In this paper, we revisit the class of iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithms (ISTA) for solving the linear inverse problem with sparse representation, which arises in signal and image processing. It is shown in the numerical experiment to deblur an image that the convergence behavior in the logarithmic-scale ordinate tends to be linear instead of logarithmic, approximating to be flat. Making meticulous observations, we find that the previous assumption for the smooth part to be convex weakens the least-square model. Specifically, assuming the smooth part to be strongly convex is more reasonable for the least-square model, even though the image matrix is probably ill-conditioned. Furthermore, we improve the pivotal inequality tighter for composite optimization with the smooth part to be strongly convex instead of general convex, which is first found in [Li et al., 2022]. Based on this pivotal inequality, we generalize the linear convergence to composite optimization in both the objective value and the squared proximal subgradient norm. Meanwhile, we set a simple ill-conditioned matrix which is easy to compute the singular values instead of the original blur matrix. The new numerical experiment shows the proximal generalization of Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (NAG) for the strongly convex function has a faster linear convergence rate than ISTA. Based on the tighter pivotal inequality, we also generalize the faster linear convergence rate to composite optimization, in both the objective value and the squared proximal subgradient norm, by taking advantage of the well-constructed Lyapunov function with a slight modification and the phase-space representation based on the high-resolution differential equation framework from the implicit-velocity scheme.

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those algorithms that adheres to safety constraints at each decision step under complex and unknown dynamics. In this paper, we revisit prior work in this scope from the perspective of state-wise safe RL and categorize them as projection-based, recovery-based, and optimization-based approaches, respectively. Furthermore, we propose Unrolling Safety Layer (USL), a joint method that combines safety optimization and safety projection. This novel technique explicitly enforces hard constraints via the deep unrolling architecture and enjoys structural advantages in navigating the trade-off between reward improvement and constraint satisfaction. To facilitate further research in this area, we reproduce related algorithms in a unified pipeline and incorporate them into SafeRL-Kit, a toolkit that provides off-the-shelf interfaces and evaluation utilities for safety-critical tasks. We then perform a comparative study of the involved algorithms on six benchmarks ranging from robotic control to autonomous driving. The empirical results provide an insight into their applicability and robustness in learning zero-cost-return policies without task-dependent handcrafting. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/saferlkit.