"Thinking in pictures," [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology development. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), fueled by massive datasets, deeper models, and mighty computation, has come to a stage where (super-)human-level performances are observed in certain specific tasks. However, current AI's ability in "thinking in pictures" is still far lacking behind. In this work, we study how to improve machines' reasoning ability on one challenging task of this kind: Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Specifically, we borrow the very idea of "contrast effects" from the field of psychology, cognition, and education to design and train a permutation-invariant model. Inspired by cognitive studies, we equip our model with a simple inference module that is jointly trained with the perception backbone. Combining all the elements, we propose the Contrastive Perceptual Inference network (CoPINet) and empirically demonstrate that CoPINet sets the new state-of-the-art for permutation-invariant models on two major datasets. We conclude that spatial-temporal reasoning depends on envisaging the possibilities consistent with the relations between objects and can be solved from pixel-level inputs.

Contrastive learning methods, such as CLIP, leverage naturally paired data--for example, images and their corresponding text captions--to learn general representations that transfer efficiently to downstream tasks. While such approaches are generally applied to two modalities, domains such as robotics, healthcare, and video need to support many types of data at once. We show that the pairwise application of CLIP fails to capture joint information between modalities, thereby limiting the quality of the learned representations. To address this issue, we present Symile, a simple contrastive learning approach that captures higher-order information between any number of modalities. Symile provides a flexible, architecture-agnostic objective for learning modality-specific representations.

One of the benefits that immediately comes to mind for the contrast module vs. the RN model is that the contrast module seems to scale linearly in the number of answer choices vs. the RN which produces a quadratic set.

"Thinking in pictures," [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology development. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), fueled by massive datasets, deeper models, and mighty computation, has come to a stage where (super-)human-level performances are observed in certain specific tasks. However, current AI's ability in "thinking in pictures" is still far lacking behind. In this work, we study how to improve machines' reasoning ability on one challenging task of this kind: Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Specifically, we borrow the very idea of "contrast effects" from the field of psychology, cognition, and education to design and train a permutation-invariant model.

Depression recognition based on physiological signals such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalogram (EEG) has made considerable progress. However, most existing studies ignore the complementarity and semantic consistency of multimodal physiological signals under the same stimulation task in complex spatio-temporal patterns. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal physiological signals representation learning framework using Siamese architecture via multiscale contrasting for depression recognition (MRLMC). First, fNIRS and EEG are transformed into different but correlated data based on a time-domain data augmentation strategy. Then, we design a spatio-temporal contrasting module to learn the representation of fNIRS and EEG through weight-sharing multiscale spatio-temporal convolution. Furthermore, to enhance the learning of semantic representation associated with stimulation tasks, a semantic consistency contrast module is proposed, aiming to maximize the semantic similarity of fNIRS and EEG. Extensive experiments on publicly available and self-collected multimodal physiological signals datasets indicate that MRLMC outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Moreover, our proposed framework is capable of transferring to multimodal time series downstream tasks.

Contrastive learning, as a self-supervised learning paradigm, becomes popular for Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) classification. It ensures the consistency across different views of unlabeled samples and then learns effective representations for these samples. Existing contrastive learning methods mainly focus on achieving temporal consistency with temporal augmentation and contrasting techniques, aiming to preserve temporal patterns against perturbations for MTS data. However, they overlook spatial consistency that requires the stability of individual sensors and their correlations. As MTS data typically originate from multiple sensors, ensuring spatial consistency becomes essential for the overall performance of contrastive learning on MTS data. Thus, we propose Graph-Aware Contrasting for spatial consistency across MTS data. Specifically, we propose graph augmentations including node and edge augmentations to preserve the stability of sensors and their correlations, followed by graph contrasting with both node- and graph-level contrasting to extract robust sensor- and global-level features. We further introduce multi-window temporal contrasting to ensure temporal consistency in the data for each sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various MTS classification tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Frank-Wang-oss/TS-GAC.

In recent years, knowledge distillation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved promising results on image classification and object detection tasks. However, in this line of research, we note that less attention is paid to semantic segmentation. Existing methods heavily rely on data augmentation and memory buffer, which entail high computational resource demands when applying them to handle semantic segmentation that requires to preserve high-resolution feature maps for making dense pixel-wise predictions. In order to address this problem, we present Augmentation-free Dense Contrastive Knowledge Distillation (Af-DCD), a new contrastive distillation learning paradigm to train compact and accurate deep neural networks for semantic segmentation applications. Af-DCD leverages a masked feature mimicking strategy, and formulates a novel contrastive learning loss via taking advantage of tactful feature partitions across both channel and spatial dimensions, allowing to effectively transfer dense and structured local knowledge learnt by the teacher model to a target student model while maintaining training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five mainstream benchmarks with various teacher-student network pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. For instance, the DeepLabV3-Res18|DeepLabV3-MBV2 model trained by Af-DCD reaches 77.03%|76.38% mIOU on Cityscapes dataset when choosing DeepLabV3-Res101 as the teacher, setting new performance records. Besides that, Af-DCD achieves an absolute mIOU improvement of 3.26%|3.04%|2.75%|2.30%|1.42% compared with individually trained counterpart on Cityscapes|Pascal VOC|Camvid|ADE20K|COCO-Stuff-164K. Code is available at https://github.com/OSVAI/Af-DCD

"Thinking in pictures," [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology development. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), fueled by massive datasets, deeper models, and mighty computation, has come to a stage where (super-)human-level performances are observed in certain specific tasks. However, current AI's ability in "thinking in pictures" is still far lacking behind. In this work, we study how to improve machines' reasoning ability on one challenging task of this kind: Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Specifically, we borrow the very idea of "contrast effects" from the field of psychology, cognition, and education to design and train a permutation-invariant model. Inspired by cognitive studies, we equip our model with a simple inference module that is jointly trained with the perception backbone.