On the Discrimination and Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning

Exemplar-free class incremental learning (EF-CIL) is a nontrivial task that requires continuously enriching model capability with new classes while maintaining previously learned knowledge without storing and replaying any old class exemplars. An emerging theory-guided framework for CIL trains task-specific models for a shared network, shifting the pressure of forgetting to task-id prediction. In EF-CIL, task-id prediction is more challenging due to the lack of inter-task interaction (e.g., replays of exemplars). To address this issue, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the importance and feasibility of preserving a discriminative and consistent feature space, upon which we propose a novel method termed DCNet. Concretely, it progressively maps class representations into a hyperspherical space, in which different classes are orthogonally distributed to achieve ample inter-class separation. Meanwhile, it also introduces compensatory training to adaptively adjust supervision intensity, thereby aligning the degree of intra-class aggregation. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis verified the superiority of the proposed DCNet.

KAN based Autoencoders for Factor Models

Inspired by recent advances in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), we introduce a novel approach to latent factor conditional asset pricing models. While previous machine learning applications in asset pricing have predominantly used Multilayer Perceptrons with ReLU activation functions to model latent factor exposures, our method introduces a KAN-based autoencoder which surpasses MLP models in both accuracy and interpretability. Our model offers enhanced flexibility in approximating exposures as nonlinear functions of asset characteristics, while simultaneously providing users with an intuitive framework for interpreting latent factors. Empirical backtesting demonstrates our model's superior ability to explain cross-sectional risk exposures. Moreover, long-short portfolios constructed using our model's predictions achieve higher Sharpe ratios, highlighting its practical value in investment management.

Harnessing Neural Unit Dynamics for Effective and Scalable Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to train a model to learn new classes from non-stationary data streams without forgetting old ones. In this paper, we propose a new kind of connectionist model by tailoring neural unit dynamics that adapt the behavior of neural networks for CIL. In each training session, it introduces a supervisory mechanism to guide network expansion whose growth size is compactly commensurate with the intrinsic complexity of a newly arriving task. This constructs a near-minimal network while allowing the model to expand its capacity when cannot sufficiently hold new classes. At inference time, it automatically reactivates the required neural units to retrieve knowledge and leaves the remaining inactivated to prevent interference. We name our model AutoActivator, which is effective and scalable. To gain insights into the neural unit dynamics, we theoretically analyze the model's convergence property via a universal approximation theorem on learning sequential mappings, which is under-explored in the CIL community. Experiments show that our method achieves strong CIL performance in rehearsal-free and minimal-expansion settings with different backbones.

DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving

End-to-end driving has made significant progress in recent years, demonstrating benefits such as system simplicity and competitive driving performance under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Nevertheless, the lack of interpretability and controllability in its driving decisions hinders real-world deployment for end-to-end driving systems. In this paper, we collect a comprehensive end-to-end driving dataset named DriveCoT, leveraging the CARLA simulator. It contains sensor data, control decisions, and chain-of-thought labels to indicate the reasoning process. We utilize the challenging driving scenarios from the CARLA leaderboard 2.0, which involve high-speed driving and lane-changing, and propose a rule-based expert policy to control the vehicle and generate ground truth labels for its reasoning process across different driving aspects and the final decisions. This dataset can serve as an open-loop end-to-end driving benchmark, enabling the evaluation of accuracy in various chain-of-thought aspects and the final decision. In addition, we propose a baseline model called DriveCoT-Agent, trained on our dataset, to generate chain-of-thought predictions and final decisions. The trained model exhibits strong performance in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed dataset.

LiMAML: Personalization of Deep Recommender Models via Meta Learning

In the realm of recommender systems, the ubiquitous adoption of deep neural networks has emerged as a dominant paradigm for modeling diverse business objectives. As user bases continue to expand, the necessity of personalization and frequent model updates have assumed paramount significance to ensure the delivery of relevant and refreshed experiences to a diverse array of members. In this work, we introduce an innovative meta-learning solution tailored to the personalization of models for individual members and other entities, coupled with the frequent updates based on the latest user interaction signals. Specifically, we leverage the Model-Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML) algorithm to adapt per-task sub-networks using recent user interaction data. Given the near infeasibility of productionizing original MAML-based models in online recommendation systems, we propose an efficient strategy to operationalize meta-learned sub-networks in production, which involves transforming them into fixed-sized vectors, termed meta embeddings, thereby enabling the seamless deployment of models with hundreds of billions of parameters for online serving. Through extensive experimentation on production data drawn from various applications at LinkedIn, we demonstrate that the proposed solution consistently outperforms the baseline models of those applications, including strong baselines such as using wide-and-deep ID based personalization approach. Our approach has enabled the deployment of a range of highly personalized AI models across diverse LinkedIn applications, leading to substantial improvements in business metrics as well as refreshed experience for our members.

Towards Continual Learning Desiderata via HSIC-Bottleneck Orthogonalization and Equiangular Embedding

Deep neural networks are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when trained on sequential tasks. Various continual learning (CL) methods often rely on exemplar buffers or/and network expansion for balancing model stability and plasticity, which, however, compromises their practical value due to privacy and memory concerns. Instead, this paper considers a strict yet realistic setting, where the training data from previous tasks is unavailable and the model size remains relatively constant during sequential training. To achieve such desiderata, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective method that attributes forgetting to layer-wise parameter overwriting and the resulting decision boundary distortion. This is achieved by the synergy between two key components: HSIC-Bottleneck Orthogonalization (HBO) implements non-overwritten parameter updates mediated by Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion in an orthogonal space and EquiAngular Embedding (EAE) enhances decision boundary adaptation between old and new tasks with predefined basis vectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy performance, even with absolute superiority of zero exemplar buffer and 1.02x the base model.

AccidentGPT: Accident Analysis and Prevention from V2X Environmental Perception with Multi-modal Large Model

Traffic accidents, being a significant contributor to both human casualties and property damage, have long been a focal point of research for many scholars in the field of traffic safety. However, previous studies, whether focusing on static environmental assessments or dynamic driving analyses, as well as pre-accident predictions or post-accident rule analyses, have typically been conducted in isolation. There has been a lack of an effective framework for developing a comprehensive understanding and application of traffic safety. To address this gap, this paper introduces AccidentGPT, a comprehensive accident analysis and prevention multi-modal large model. AccidentGPT establishes a multi-modal information interaction framework grounded in multi-sensor perception, thereby enabling a holistic approach to accident analysis and prevention in the field of traffic safety. Specifically, our capabilities can be categorized as follows: for autonomous driving vehicles, we provide comprehensive environmental perception and understanding to control the vehicle and avoid collisions. For human-driven vehicles, we offer proactive long-range safety warnings and blind-spot alerts while also providing safety driving recommendations and behavioral norms through human-machine dialogue and interaction. Additionally, for traffic police and management agencies, our framework supports intelligent and real-time analysis of traffic safety, encompassing pedestrian, vehicles, roads, and the environment through collaborative perception from multiple vehicles and road testing devices. The system is also capable of providing a thorough analysis of accident causes and liability after vehicle collisions. Our framework stands as the first large model to integrate comprehensive scene understanding into traffic safety studies. Project page: https://accidentgpt.github.io

IF2Net: Innately Forgetting-Free Networks for Continual Learning

Continual learning can incrementally absorb new concepts without interfering with previously learned knowledge. Motivated by the characteristics of neural networks, in which information is stored in weights on connections, we investigated how to design an Innately Forgetting-Free Network (IF2Net) for continual learning context. This study proposed a straightforward yet effective learning paradigm by ingeniously keeping the weights relative to each seen task untouched before and after learning a new task. We first presented the novel representation-level learning on task sequences with random weights. This technique refers to tweaking the drifted representations caused by randomization back to their separate task-optimal working states, but the involved weights are frozen and reused (opposite to well-known layer-wise updates of weights). Then, sequential decision-making without forgetting can be achieved by projecting the output weight updates into the parsimonious orthogonal space, making the adaptations not disturb old knowledge while maintaining model plasticity. IF2Net allows a single network to inherently learn unlimited mapping rules without telling task identities at test time by integrating the respective strengths of randomization and orthogonalization. We validated the effectiveness of our approach in the extensive theoretical analysis and empirical study.

Multi-View Class Incremental Learning

Multi-view learning (MVL) has gained great success in integrating information from multiple perspectives of a dataset to improve downstream task performance. To make MVL methods more practical in an open-ended environment, this paper investigates a novel paradigm called multi-view class incremental learning (MVCIL), where a single model incrementally classifies new classes from a continual stream of views, requiring no access to earlier views of data. However, MVCIL is challenged by the catastrophic forgetting of old information and the interference with learning new concepts. To address this, we first develop a randomization-based representation learning technique serving for feature extraction to guarantee their separate view-optimal working states, during which multiple views belonging to a class are presented sequentially; Then, we integrate them one by one in the orthogonality fusion subspace spanned by the extracted features; Finally, we introduce selective weight consolidation for learning-without-forgetting decision-making while encountering new classes. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

DeepAccident: A Motion and Accident Prediction Benchmark for V2X Autonomous Driving

Safety is the primary priority of autonomous driving. Nevertheless, no published dataset currently supports the direct and explainable safety evaluation for autonomous driving. In this work, we propose DeepAccident, a large-scale dataset generated via a realistic simulator containing diverse accident scenarios that frequently occur in real-world driving. The proposed DeepAccident dataset contains 57K annotated frames and 285K annotated samples, approximately 7 times more than the large-scale nuScenes dataset with 40k annotated samples. In addition, we propose a new task, end-to-end motion and accident prediction, based on the proposed dataset, which can be used to directly evaluate the accident prediction ability for different autonomous driving algorithms. Furthermore, for each scenario, we set four vehicles along with one infrastructure to record data, thus providing diverse viewpoints for accident scenarios and enabling V2X (vehicle-to-everything) research on perception and prediction tasks. Finally, we present a baseline V2X model named V2XFormer that demonstrates superior performance for motion and accident prediction and 3D object detection compared to the single-vehicle model.