Faithful and Consistent Graph Neural Network Explanations with Rationale Alignment

Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over recent years. Instance-level GNN explanation aims to discover critical input elements, like nodes or edges, that the target GNN relies upon for making predictions. %These identified sub-structures can provide interpretations of GNN's behavior. Though various algorithms are proposed, most of them formalize this task by searching the minimal subgraph which can preserve original predictions. However, an inductive bias is deep-rooted in this framework: several subgraphs can result in the same or similar outputs as the original graphs. Consequently, they have the danger of providing spurious explanations and failing to provide consistent explanations. Applying them to explain weakly-performed GNNs would further amplify these issues. To address this problem, we theoretically examine the predictions of GNNs from the causality perspective. Two typical reasons for spurious explanations are identified: confounding effect of latent variables like distribution shift, and causal factors distinct from the original input. Observing that both confounding effects and diverse causal rationales are encoded in internal representations, \tianxiang{we propose a new explanation framework with an auxiliary alignment loss, which is theoretically proven to be optimizing a more faithful explanation objective intrinsically. Concretely for this alignment loss, a set of different perspectives are explored: anchor-based alignment, distributional alignment based on Gaussian mixture models, mutual-information-based alignment, etc. A comprehensive study is conducted both on the effectiveness of this new framework in terms of explanation faithfulness/consistency and on the advantages of these variants.Comment: TIST2023. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.1373

Concept-wise Fine-tuning Matters in Preventing Negative Transfer

A multitude of prevalent pre-trained models mark a major milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, while fine-tuning has been a common practice that enables pretrained models to figure prominently in a wide array of target datasets. Our empirical results reveal that off-the-shelf finetuning techniques are far from adequate to mitigate negative transfer caused by two types of underperforming features in a pre-trained model, including rare features and spuriously correlated features. Rooted in structural causal models of predictions after fine-tuning, we propose a Concept-wise fine-tuning (Concept-Tuning) approach which refines feature representations in the level of patches with each patch encoding a concept. Concept-Tuning minimizes the negative impacts of rare features and spuriously correlated features by (1) maximizing the mutual information between examples in the same category with regard to a slice of rare features (a patch) and (2) applying front-door adjustment via attention neural networks in channels and feature slices (patches). The proposed Concept-Tuning consistently and significantly (by up to 4.76%) improves prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods on eleven datasets, diverse pre-training strategies (supervised and self-supervised ones), various network architectures, and sample sizes in a target dataset

Open-world Semantic Segmentation via Contrasting and Clustering Vision-Language Embedding

To bridge the gap between supervised semantic segmentation and real-world applications that acquires one model to recognize arbitrary new concepts, recent zero-shot segmentation attracts a lot of attention by exploring the relationships between unseen and seen object categories, yet requiring large amounts of densely-annotated data with diverse base classes. In this paper, we propose a new open-world semantic segmentation pipeline that makes the first attempt to learn to segment semantic objects of various open-world categories without any efforts on dense annotations, by purely exploiting the image-caption data that naturally exist on the Internet. Our method, Vision-language-driven Semantic Segmentation (ViL-Seg), employs an image and a text encoder to generate visual and text embeddings for the image-caption data, with two core components that endow its segmentation ability: First, the image encoder is jointly trained with a vision-based contrasting and a cross-modal contrasting, which encourage the visual embeddings to preserve both fine-grained semantics and high-level category information that are crucial for the segmentation task. Furthermore, an online clustering head is devised over the image encoder, which allows to dynamically segment the visual embeddings into distinct semantic groups such that they can be classified by comparing with various text embeddings to complete our segmentation pipeline. Experiments show that without using any data with dense annotations, our method can directly segment objects of arbitrary categories, outperforming zero-shot segmentation methods that require data labeling on three benchmark datasets.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 202

A Comprehensive Survey on Deep-Learning-based Vehicle Re-Identification: Models, Data Sets and Challenges

Vehicle re-identification (ReID) endeavors to associate vehicle images collected from a distributed network of cameras spanning diverse traffic environments. This task assumes paramount importance within the spectrum of vehicle-centric technologies, playing a pivotal role in deploying Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and advancing smart city initiatives. Rapid advancements in deep learning have significantly propelled the evolution of vehicle ReID technologies in recent years. Consequently, undertaking a comprehensive survey of methodologies centered on deep learning for vehicle re-identification has become imperative and inescapable. This paper extensively explores deep learning techniques applied to vehicle ReID. It outlines the categorization of these methods, encompassing supervised and unsupervised approaches, delves into existing research within these categories, introduces datasets and evaluation criteria, and delineates forthcoming challenges and potential research directions. This comprehensive assessment examines the landscape of deep learning in vehicle ReID and establishes a foundation and starting point for future works. It aims to serve as a complete reference by highlighting challenges and emerging trends, fostering advancements and applications in vehicle ReID utilizing deep learning models

Representation learning with structured invariance

Invariance is crucial for neural networks, enabling them to generalize effectively across variations of the input data by focusing on key attributes while filtering out irrelevant details. In this thesis, we study representation learning in neural networks through the lens of structured invariance. We start by studying the properties and limitations of the invariance that neural networks can learn from the data. Next, we develop a method to extract the structure of invariance learned by a neural network, providing a more nuanced analysis of the quality of learned invariance. In the next chapter, we focus on contrastive learning, demonstrating how more structured supervision results in a better quality of learned representations. The last two chapters that follow, focus on practical aspects of representation learning with structured invariance in computer vision

Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning

Generative models : a critical review

Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons et motivons la modélisation générative comme une tâche centrale pour l’apprentissage automatique et fournissons une vue critique des algorithmes qui ont été proposés pour résoudre cette tâche. Nous montrons comment la modélisation générative peut être définie mathématiquement en essayant de faire une distribution d’estimation identique à une distribution de vérité de terrain inconnue. Ceci peut ensuite être quantifié en termes de valeur d’une divergence statistique entre les deux distributions. Nous décrivons l’approche du maximum de vraisemblance et comment elle peut être interprétée comme minimisant la divergence KL. Nous explorons un certain nombre d’approches dans la famille du maximum de vraisemblance, tout en discutant de leurs limites. Enfin, nous explorons l’approche antagoniste alternative qui consiste à étudier les différences entre une distribution d’estimation et une distribution de données réelles. Nous discutons de la façon dont cette approche peut donner lieu à de nouvelles divergences et méthodes qui sont nécessaires pour réussir l’apprentissage par l’adversité. Nous discutons également des nouveaux paramètres d’évaluation requis par l’approche contradictoire. Le chapitre ref chap: fortnet montre qu’en apprenant des modèles génératifs des couches cachées d’un réseau profond, on peut identifier quand le réseau fonctionne sur des données différentes des données observées pendant la formation. Cela nous permet d’étudier les différences entre les modes de fonctionnement libre et de forçage des enseignants dans les réseaux récurrents. Cela conduit également à une meilleure robustesse face aux attaques adverses. Le chapitre ref chap: gibbsnet a exploré une procédure itérative pour la génération et l’inférence dans les réseaux profonds, qui est inspirée par la procédure MCMC de gibbs bloquées pour l’échantillonnage à partir de modèles basés sur l’énergie. Cela permet d’améliorer l’inpainting, la génération et l’inférence en supprimant l’exigence que les variables a priori sur les variables latentes aient une distribution connue. Le chapitre ref chap: discreg a étudié si les modèles génératifs pouvaient être améliorés en exploitant les connaissances acquises par des modèles de classification discriminants. Nous avons étudié cela en augmentant les autoencoders avec des pertes supplémentaires définies dans les états cachés d’un classificateur fixe. Dans la pratique, nous avons montré que cela conduisait à des modèles générateurs mettant davantage l’accent sur les aspects saillants des données, et discutait également des limites de cette approche.In this thesis we introduce and motivate generative modeling as a central task for machine learning and provide a critical view of the algorithms which have been proposed for solving this task. We overview how generative modeling can be de ned mathematically as trying to make an estimating distribution the same as an unknown ground truth distribution. This can then be quanti ed in terms of the value of a statistical divergence between the two distributions. We outline the maximum likelihood approach and how it can be interpreted as minimizing KL-divergence. We explore a number of approaches in the maximum likelihood family, while discussing their limitations. Finally, we explore the alternative adversarial approach which involves studying the di erences between an estimating distribution and a real data distribution. We discuss how this approach can give rise to new divergences and methods that are necessary to make adversarial learning successful. We also discuss new evaluation metrics which are required by the adversarial approach. Chapter 2 shows that by learning generative models of the hidden layers of a deep network can identify when the network is being run on data di ering from the data seen during training. This allows us to study di erences between freerunning and teacher forcing modes in recurrent networks. It also leads to improved robustness to adversarial attacks. Chapter 3 explored an iterative procedure for generation and inference in deep networks, which is inspired by the blocked gibbs MCMC procedure for sampling from energy-based models. This achieves improved inpainting, generation, and inference by removing the requirement that the prior over the latent variables have a known distribution. Chapter 4 studied whether generative models could be improved by exploiting the knowledge learned by discriminative classi cation models. We studied this by augmenting autoencoders with additional losses de ned in the hidden states of a xed classi er. In practice we showed that this led to generative models with better focus on salient aspects of the data, and also discussed limitations in this approach