Goal-oriented visual dialogue involves multi-round interaction between artificial agents, which has been of remarkable attention due to its wide applications. Given a visual scene, this task occurs when a Questioner asks an action-oriented question and an Answerer responds with the intent of letting the Questioner know the correct action to take. The quality of questions affects the accuracy and efficiency of the target search progress. However, existing methods lack a clear strategy to guide the generation of questions, resulting in the randomness in the search process and inconvergent results. We propose a Tree-Structured Strategy with Answer Distribution Estimator (TSADE) which guides the question generation by excluding half of the current candidate objects in each round. The above process is implemented by maximizing a binary reward inspired by the ``divide-and-conquer'' paradigm. We further design a candidate-minimization reward which encourages the model to narrow down the scope of candidate objects toward the end of the dialogue. We experimentally demonstrate that our method can enable the agents to achieve high task-oriented accuracy with fewer repeating questions and rounds compared to traditional ergodic question generation approaches. Qualitative results further show that TSADE facilitates agents to generate higher-quality questions.

Few-shot image generation aims to generate data of an unseen category based on only a few samples. Apart from basic content generation, a bunch of downstream applications hopefully benefit from this task, such as low-data detection and few-shot classification. To achieve this goal, the generated images should guarantee category retention for classification beyond the visual quality and diversity. In our preliminary work, we present an “editing-based” framework, Attribute Group Editing (AGE), for reliable few-shot image generation, which largely improves the performance compared with existing methods that require re-training a GAN with limited data. Nevertheless, AGE’s performance on downstream classification is not as satisfactory as expected. Furthermore, existing generative models suffer from similar issues. This paper focuses on addressing the issue of universal class inconsistency in all generative models. It not only improves AGE to enhance its ability to preserve class information but also conducts a comprehensive analysis of the causes of this problem in generative models from multiple perspectives, proposing potential directions for resolution. We first propose Stable Attribute Group Editing (SAGE) for more stable class-relevant image generation. SAGE corrects the inaccurate assumptions in AGE and leverages the distribution information from seen categories to accurately estimate the data distribution of unseen categories, thereby eliminating the class inconsistency issue in the generated data. We apply SAGE to both GANs and diffusion models to verify its flexibility and further achieve promising generation performance. Going one step further, we find that even though the generated images look photo-realistic and require no category-relevant editing, they are usually of limited help for downstream classification. We systematically discuss this issue from both the generation and classification perspectives, and propose to boost the downstream classification performance of SAGE by enhancing the pixel and frequency components. Extensive experiments provide valuable insights into extending image generation to wider downstream applications. Codes are available at https://github.com/UniBester/SAGE.

Multilabel image recognition (MLR) aims to annotate an image with comprehensive labels and suffers from object occlusion or small object sizes within images. Although the existing works attempt to capture and exploit label correlations to tackle these issues, they predominantly rely on global statistical label correlations as prior knowledge for guiding label prediction, neglecting the unique label correlations present within each image. To overcome this limitation, we propose a semantic and correlation disentangled graph convolution (SCD-GC) method, which builds the image-specific graph and employs graph propagation to reason the labels effectively. Specifically, we introduce a semantic disentangling module to extract categorywise semantic features as graph nodes and develop a correlation disentangling module to extract image-specific label correlations as graph edges. Performing graph convolutions on this image-specific graph allows for better mining of difficult labels with weak visual representations. Visualization experiments reveal that our approach successfully disentangles the dominant label correlations existing within the input image. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior results on the challenging Microsoft COCO (MS-COCO), PASCAL visual object classes (PASCAL-VOC), NUS web image dataset (NUS-WIDE), and Visual Genome 500 (VG-500) datasets. Code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/caigitrepo/SCDGC.

Compared to Euclidean convolution, existing graph convolution methods generally fail to learn diverse convolution operators under limited parameter scales and depend on additional treatments of multi-scale feature extraction. The challenges of generalizing Euclidean convolution to graphs arise from the irregular structure of graphs. To bridge the gap between Euclidean space and graph space, we propose a differentiable method for regularization on graphs that applies permutations to the input graphs. The permutations constrain all nodes in a row regardless of their input order and therefore enable the flexible generalization of Euclidean convolution. Based on the regularization of graphs, we propose Compressed Convolution Network (CoCN) for hierarchical graph representation learning. CoCN follows the local feature learning and global parameter sharing mechanisms of Convolution Neural Networks. The whole model can be trained end-to-end and is able to learn both individual node features and the corresponding structure features. We validate CoCN on several node classification and graph classification benchmarks. CoCN achieves superior performance over competitive convolutional GNNs and graph pooling models. Codes are available at https://github.com/sunjss/CoCN.

Neural networks often make predictions relying on the spurious correlations from the datasets rather than the intrinsic properties of the task of interest, facing with sharp degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Existing de-bias learning frameworks try to capture specific dataset bias by annotations but they fail to handle complicated OOD scenarios. Others implicitly identify the dataset bias by special design low capability biased models or losses, but they degrade when the training and testing data are from the same distribution. In this paper, we propose a General Greedy De-bias learning framework (GGD), which greedily trains the biased models and base model. The base model is encouraged to focus on examples that are hard to solve with biased models, thus remaining robust against spurious correlations in the test stage. GGD largely improves models' OOD generalization ability on various tasks, but sometimes over-estimates the bias level and degrades on the in-distribution test. We further re-analyze the ensemble process of GGD and introduce the Curriculum Regularization inspired by curriculum learning, which achieves a good trade-off between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution performance. Extensive experiments on image classification, adversarial question answering, and visual question answering demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. GGD can learn a more robust base model under the settings of both task-specific biased models with prior knowledge and self-ensemble biased model without prior knowledge. Codes are available at https://github.com/GeraldHan/GGD.

Graph neural architecture search has sparked much attention as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown powerful reasoning capability in many relational tasks. However, the currently used graph search space overem-phasizes learning node features and neglects mining hierarchical relational information. Moreover, due to diverse mechanisms in the message passing, the graph search space is much larger than that of CNNs. This hinders the straightforward application of classical search strategies for exploring complicated graph search space. We propose Automatic Relation-aware Graph Network Proliferation (ARGNP) for efficiently searching GNNs with a relation-guided message passing mechanism. Specifically, we first devise a novel dual relation-aware graph search space that comprises both node and relation learning operations. These operations can extract hierarchical node/relational information and provide anisotropic guidance for message passing on a graph. Second, analogous to cell proliferation, we design a network proliferation search paradigm to progressively determine the GNN architectures by iteratively performing network division and differentiation. The experiments on six datasets for four graph learning tasks demonstrate that GNNs produced by our method are superior to the current state-of-the-art hand-crafted and search-based GNNs. Codes are available at https://github.com/phython96/ARGNP.

Few-shot image generation is a challenging task even using the state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Due to the unstable GAN training process and the limited training data, the generated images are often of low quality and low diversity. In this work, we propose a new “editing-based” method, i.e., Attribute Group Editing (AGE), for few-shot image generation. The basic assumption is that any image is a collection of attributes and the editing direction for a specific attribute is shared across all categories. AGE examines the internal representation learned in GANs and identifies semantically meaningful directions. Specifically, the class embedding, i.e., the mean vector of the latent codes from a specific category, is used to represent the category-relevant attributes, and the category-irrelevant attributes are learned globally by Sparse Dictionary Learning on the difference between the sample embedding and the class embedding. Given a GAN well trained on seen categories, diverse images of unseen categories can be synthesized through editing category-irrelevant attributes while keeping category-relevant attributes unchanged. Without re-training the GAN, AGE is capable of not only producing more realistic and diverse images for downstream visual applications with limited data but achieving controllable image editing with interpretable category-irrelevant directions. Code is available at https://github.com/UniBester/AGE.

Image-text matching is a fundamental research topic bridging vision and language. Recent works use hard negative mining to capture the multiple correspondences between visual and textual domains. Unfortunately, the truly informative negative samples are quite sparse in the training data, which are hard to obtain only in a randomly sampled mini-batch. Motivated by causal inference, we aim to overcome this shortcoming by carefully analyzing the analogy between hard negative mining and causal effects optimizing. Further, we propose Counterfactual Matching (CFM) framework for more effective image-text correspondence mining. CFM contains three major components, \ie, Gradient-Guided Feature Selection for automatic casual factor identification, Self-Exploration for causal factor completeness, and Self-Adjustment for counterfactual sample synthesis. Compared with traditional hard negative mining, our method largely alleviates the over-fitting phenomenon and effectively captures the fine-grained correlations between image and text modality. We evaluate our CFM in combination with three state-of-the-art image-text matching architectures. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on two publicly available datasets demonstrate its strong generality and effectiveness. Code is available at: https://github.com/weihao20/cfm.

Language bias is a critical issue in Visual Question Answering (VQA), where models often exploit dataset biases for the final decision without considering the image information. As a result, they suffer from performance drop on out-of-distribution data and inadequate visual explanation. Based on experimental analysis for existing robust VQA methods, we stress the language bias in VQA that comes from two aspects, i.e., distribution bias and shortcut bias. We further propose a new de-bias framework, Greedy Gradient Ensemble (GGE), which combines multiple biased models for unbiased base model learning. With the greedy strategy, GGE forces the biased models to over-fit the biased data distribution in priority, thus makes the base model pay more attention to examples that are hard to solve by biased models. The experiments demonstrate that our method makes better use of visual information and achieves state-of-the-art performance on diagnosing dataset VQACP without using extra annotations.