Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.

Patients take care of what their teeth will be like after the orthodontics. Orthodontists usually describe the expectation movement based on the original smile images, which is unconvincing. The growth of deep-learning generative models change this situation. It can visualize the outcome of orthodontic treatment and help patients foresee their future teeth and facial appearance. While previous studies mainly focus on 2D or 3D virtual treatment outcome (VTO) at a profile level, the problem of simulating treatment outcome at a frontal facial image is poorly explored. In this paper, we build an efficient and accurate system for simulating virtual teeth alignment effects in a frontal facial image. Our system takes a frontal face image of a patient with visible malpositioned teeth and the patient's 3D scanned teeth model as input, and progressively generates the visual results of the patient's teeth given the specific orthodontics planning steps from the doctor (i.e., the specification of translations and rotations of individual tooth). We design a multi-modal encoder-decoder based generative model to synthesize identity-preserving frontal facial images with aligned teeth. In addition, the original image color information is used to optimize the orthodontic outcomes, making the results more natural. We conduct extensive qualitative and clinical experiments and also a pilot study to validate our method.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been a prevailing technique for tackling various analysis tasks on graph data. A key premise for the remarkable performance of GNNs relies on complete and trustworthy initial graph descriptions (i.e., node features and graph structure), which is often not satisfied since real-world graphs are often incomplete due to various unavoidable factors. In particular, GNNs face greater challenges when both node features and graph structure are incomplete at the same time. The existing methods either focus on feature completion or structure completion. They usually rely on the matching relationship between features and structure, or employ joint learning of node representation and feature (or structure) completion in the hope of achieving mutual benefit. However, recent studies confirm that the mutual interference between features and structure leads to the degradation of GNN performance. When both features and structure are incomplete, the mismatch between features and structure caused by the missing randomness exacerbates the interference between the two, which may trigger incorrect completions that negatively affect node representation. To this end, in this paper we propose a general GNN framework based on teacher-student distillation to improve the performance of GNNs on incomplete graphs, namely T2-GNN. To avoid the interference between features and structure, we separately design feature-level and structure-level teacher models to provide targeted guidance for student model (base GNNs, such as GCN) through distillation. Then we design two personalized methods to obtain well-trained feature and structure teachers. To ensure that the knowledge of the teacher model is comprehensively and effectively distilled to the student model, we further propose a dual distillation mode to enable the student to acquire as much expert knowledge as possible.

Dialogue models are able to generate coherent and fluent responses, but they can still be challenging to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. This unpredictability diminishes user trust and can hinder the use of the models in the real world. To address this, we introduce DialGuide, a novel framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines. These guidelines provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response, allowing the models to generate responses that are more closely aligned with the developer's expectations and intent. We evaluate DialGuide on three tasks in open-domain dialogue response generation: guideline selection, response generation, and response entailment verification. Our dataset contains 10,737 positive and 15,467 negative dialogue context-response-guideline triplets across two domains - chit-chat and safety. We provide baseline models for the tasks and benchmark their performance. We also demonstrate that DialGuide is effective in the dialogue safety domain, producing safe and engaging responses that follow developer guidelines.

This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall outcomes for a given population. Existing policy learning methods rely on a uniform overlap assumption, i.e., the propensities of exploring all actions for all individual characteristics are lower bounded in the offline dataset; put differently, the performance of the existing methods depends on the worst-case propensity in the offline dataset. As one has no control over the data collection process, this assumption can be unrealistic in many situations, especially when the behavior policies are allowed to evolve over time with diminishing propensities for certain actions. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that optimizes lower confidence bounds (LCBs) -- instead of point estimates -- of the policy values. The LCBs are constructed using knowledge of the behavior policies for collecting the offline data. Without assuming any uniform overlap condition, we establish a data-dependent upper bound for the suboptimality of our algorithm, which only depends on (i) the overlap for the optimal policy, and (ii) the complexity of the policy class we optimize over. As an implication, for adaptively collected data, we ensure efficient policy learning as long as the propensities for optimal actions are lower bounded over time, while those for suboptimal ones are allowed to diminish arbitrarily fast. In our theoretical analysis, we develop a new self-normalized type concentration inequality for inverse-propensity-weighting estimators, generalizing the well-known empirical Bernstein's inequality to unbounded and non-i.i.d. data.

We propose the first joint audio-video generation framework that brings engaging watching and listening experiences simultaneously, towards high-quality realistic videos. To generate joint audio-video pairs, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion model (i.e., MM-Diffusion), with two-coupled denoising autoencoders. In contrast to existing single-modal diffusion models, MM-Diffusion consists of a sequential multi-modal U-Net for a joint denoising process by design. Two subnets for audio and video learn to gradually generate aligned audio-video pairs from Gaussian noises. To ensure semantic consistency across modalities, we propose a novel random-shift based attention block bridging over the two subnets, which enables efficient cross-modal alignment, and thus reinforces the audio-video fidelity for each other. Extensive experiments show superior results in unconditional audio-video generation, and zero-shot conditional tasks (e.g., video-to-audio). In particular, we achieve the best FVD and FAD on Landscape and AIST++ dancing datasets. Turing tests of 10k votes further demonstrate dominant preferences for our model. The code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at https://github.com/researchmm/MM-Diffusion.

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.

While federated learning has shown strong results in optimizing a machine learning model without direct access to the original data, its performance may be hindered by intermittent client availability which slows down the convergence and biases the final learned model. There are significant challenges to achieve both stable and bias-free training under arbitrary client availability. To address these challenges, we propose a framework named Federated Graph-based Sampling (FedGS), to stabilize the global model update and mitigate the long-term bias given arbitrary client availability simultaneously. First, we model the data correlations of clients with a Data-Distribution-Dependency Graph (3DG) that helps keep the sampled clients data apart from each other, which is theoretically shown to improve the approximation to the optimal model update. Second, constrained by the far-distance in data distribution of the sampled clients, we further minimize the variance of the numbers of times that the clients are sampled, to mitigate long-term bias. To validate the effectiveness of FedGS, we conduct experiments on three datasets under a comprehensive set of seven client availability modes. Our experimental results confirm FedGS's advantage in both enabling a fair client-sampling scheme and improving the model performance under arbitrary client availability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WwZzz/FedGS}.

This paper is about an extraordinary phenomenon. Suppose we don't use any low-light images as training data, can we enhance a low-light image by deep learning? Obviously, current methods cannot do this, since deep neural networks require to train their scads of parameters using copious amounts of training data, especially task-related data. In this paper, we show that in the context of fundamental deep learning, it is possible to enhance a low-light image without any task-related training data. Technically, we propose a new, magical, effective and efficient method, termed \underline{Noi}se \underline{SE}lf-\underline{R}egression (NoiSER), which learns a gray-world mapping from Gaussian distribution for low-light image enhancement (LLIE). Specifically, a self-regression model is built as a carrier to learn a gray-world mapping during training, which is performed by simply iteratively feeding random noise. During inference, a low-light image is directly fed into the learned mapping to yield a normal-light one. Extensive experiments show that our NoiSER is highly competitive to current task-related data based LLIE models in terms of quantitative and visual results, while outperforming them in terms of the number of parameters, training time and inference speed. With only about 1K parameters, NoiSER realizes about 1 minute for training and 1.2 ms for inference with 600$\times$400 resolution on RTX 2080 Ti. Besides, NoiSER has an inborn automated exposure suppression capability and can automatically adjust too bright or too dark, without additional manipulations.

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved great progress in image denoising tasks. However, their complicated architectures and heavy computational cost hinder their deployments on a mobile device. Some recent efforts in designing lightweight denoising networks focus on reducing either FLOPs (floating-point operations) or the number of parameters. However, these metrics are not directly correlated with the on-device latency. By performing extensive analysis and experiments, we identify the network architectures that can fully utilize powerful neural processing units (NPUs) and thus enjoy both low latency and excellent denoising performance. To this end, we propose a mobile-friendly denoising network, namely MFDNet. The experiments show that MFDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world denoising benchmarks SIDD and DND under real-time latency on mobile devices. The code and pre-trained models will be released.