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Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize an object detector trained on labeled source-domain data to a target domain without annotations, the core principle of which is source-target feature alignment. Typically, existing approaches employ adversarial learning to align the distributions of the source and target domains as a whole, barely considering the varying significance of distinct regions, say instances under different circumstances and foreground vs background areas, during feature alignment. To overcome the shortcoming, this work investigates a differential feature alignment strategy. Specifically, a prediction-discrepancy feedback instance alignment module (dubbed PDFA) is designed to adaptively assign higher weights to instances of higher teacher-student detection discrepancy, effectively handling heavier domain-specific information. On the other hand, an uncertainty-based foreground-oriented image alignment module (UFOA) is proposed to explicitly guide the model to focus more on regions of interest. Extensive experiments on widely-used DAOD datasets together with ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method and reveal its superiority over other SOTA alternatives. Our code will be made publicly available.

AAAI 2025

Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

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We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Deep hashing models have achieved great success in retrieval tasks due to their powerful representation ability and strong information compression capabilities. However, they inherit the vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial perturbations. Attackers can severely impact the retrieval capability of hashing models by adding small, carefully crafted adversarial perturbations to benign images, transforming them into adversarial images. Most existing adversarial attacks target image classification models, with few focusing on hashing retrieval models. We propose HUANG, a targeted adversarial attack algorithm for hashing retrieval in black-box scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that leverages a diffusion model to achieve adversarial attacks on retrieval models. In our approach, adversarial denoising uses adversarial perturbations and residual images to guide the shift from benign to adversarial distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of HUANG across different datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance in black-box targeted attacks. Additionally, the dynamic interplay between denoising and adding adversarial perturbations in adversarial denoising endows HUANG with exceptional robustness and transferability.

HUANG: A Robust Diffusion Model-based Targeted Adversarial Attack Against Deep Hashing Retrieval

Probability calibration transforms raw output of a classification model into empirically interpretable probability. When the model is purposed to detect rare event and only a small expensive data source has clean labels, it becomes extraordinarily challenging to obtain accurate probability calibration. Utilizing an additional large cheap data source is very helpful, however, such data sources oftentimes suffer from biased labels. To this end, we introduce an approximate expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to extract useful information from the large data sources. For a family of calibration methods based on the logistic likelihood, we derive closed-form updates and call the resulting iterative algorithm CalEM. We shpw that CalEM inherits convergence guarantees from the approximate EM algorithm. We test the proposed model in simulation and on the marketing uplift dataset, where it shows significant performance increases.

Improving Model Probability Calibration by Integration of Large Data Sources with Biased Labels

A recent endeavor in one class of video anomaly detection is to leverage diffusion models and posit the task as a generation problem, where the diffusion model is trained to recover normal patterns exclusively, thus reporting abnormal patterns as outliers. Yet, existing attempts neglect the various formations of anomaly and predict normal samples at the feature level regardless that abnormal objects in surveillance videos are often relatively small.
To address this, a novel patch-based diffusion model is proposed, specifically engineered to capture fine-grained local information. We further observe that anomalies in videos manifest themselves as deviations in both appearance and motion. Therefore, we argue that a comprehensive solution must consider both of these aspects simultaneously to achieve accurate frame prediction. To address this, we introduce innovative motion and appearance conditions that are seamlessly integrated into our patch diffusion model. These conditions are designed to guide the model in generating coherent and contextually appropriate predictions for both semantic content and motion relations. Experimental results on four challenging video anomaly detection datasets empirically substantiate the efficacy of our proposed approach, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms most existing methods in detecting abnormal behaviors.

Video Anomaly Detection with Motion and Appearance Guided Patch Diffusion Model

Noisy labels can negatively impact deep neural network performance. One common solution is label refurbishment, which involves reconstructing noisy labels through predictions and distributions. However, these methods may introduce problematic semantic associations, a phenomenon we identify as Semantic Contamination. Through an analysis of Robust LR, a representative label refurbishment method, we found that utilizing the logits of views for refurbishment does not adequately balance the semantic information of individual classes. Conversely, using the logits of models fails to maintain consistent semantic relationships across models, which explains why label refurbishment methods frequently encounter issues related to Semantic Contamination. To address this issue, we propose a novel method called Collaborative Cross Learning, which utilizes semi-supervised learning on refurbished labels to extract appropriate semantic associations from embeddings across views and models. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world noisy datasets, effectively mitigating the impact of label noise and Semantic Contamination.

Combating Semantic Contamination in Learning with Label Noise

The strength of multimodal learning lies in its ability to integrate information from various sources, providing rich and comprehensive insights. However, in real-world scenarios, multi-modal systems often face the challenge of dynamic modality contributions, the dominance of different modalities may change with the environments, leading to suboptimal performance in multimodal learning. Current methods mainly enhance weak modalities to balance multimodal representation bias, which inevitably optimizes from a partial modality perspective, easily leading to performance descending for dominant modalities. To address this problem, we propose an Asymmetric Reinforcing method against Multimodal Representation bias (ARMR). Our ARMR dynamically reinforces on the weak modalities while maintaining the representation ability of dominant modalities through condition mutual information. Moreover, we first provide an in-depth analysis that optimizing certain modalities could cause information loss and prevent leveraging the full advantages of multimodal data. By exploring the dominance and narrowing the contribution gaps between modalities, we have significantly improved the performance of multimodal learning, making notable progress in mitigating imbalanced multimodal cooperation.

Asymmetric Reinforcing against Multi-modal Representation Bias

With the explosive growth of deep learning applications, the right to be forgotten has been required unprecedentedly in various AI industries. For example, given a facial recognition system, some individuals may wish to remove images that might have been used in the training phase from the trained model. Unfortunately, modern deep neural networks sometimes unexpectedly leak personal identities.
Recent studies have presented various machine unlearning algorithms to make a trained model unlearn the data to be forgotten. 
While these methods generally perform well in terms of forgetting scores, we have found that an unexpected model utility drop can occur. This phenomenon, which we term correlation collapse, happens when the machine unlearning algorithms reduce the useful correlation between image features and the true label. To address this challenge, we propose Distribution-Level Feature Distancing (DLFD), a novel method that efficiently forgets instances while preventing correlation collapse. Our method synthesizes data samples so that the generated data distribution is far from the distribution of samples being forgotten in the feature space, achieving significant results even within a single training epoch. Through extensive experiments on facial recognition datasets, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art machine unlearning methods. All datasets and codes will be publicly available upon acceptance of the paper. All datasets and codes are publicly available after they are accepted.

Distribution-Level Feature Distancing for Machine Unlearning: Towards a Better Trade-off Between Model Utility and Forgetting

Blind-spot networks (BSN) have been prevalent neural architectures in self-supervised image denoising (SSID). However, most existing BSNs are conducted with convolution layers. Although transformers have shown the potential to overcome the limitations of convolutions in many image restoration tasks, the attention mechanisms may violate the blind-spot requirement, thereby restricting their applicability in BSN. To this end, we propose to analyze and redesign the channel and spatial attentions to meet the blind-spot requirement. Specifically, channel self-attention may leak the blind-spot information in multi-scale architectures, since the downsampling shuffles the spatial feature into channel dimensions. To alleviate this problem, we divide the channel into several groups and perform channel attention separately. For spatial self-attention, we apply an elaborate mask to the attention matrix to restrict and mimic the receptive field of dilated convolution. Based on the redesigned channel and window attentions, we build a Transformer-based Blind-Spot Network (TBSN), which shows strong local fitting and global perspective abilities. Furthermore, we introduce a knowledge distillation strategy that distills TBSN into smaller denoisers to improve computational efficiency while maintaining performance. Extensive experiments on real-world image denoising datasets show that TBSN largely extends the receptive field and exhibits favorable performance against state-of-the-art SSID methods. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available.

Rethinking Transformer-Based Blind-Spot Network for Self-Supervised Image Denoising

Model extraction attacks are one type of inference-time attacks that approximate the functionality and performance of a black-box victim model by launching a certain number of queries to the model and then leveraging the model's predictions to train a substitute model. 
These attacks pose severe security threats to production models and MLaaS platforms and could cause significant monetary losses to the model owners. 
A body of work has proposed to defend machine learning models against model extraction attacks, including both active defense methods that modify the model's outputs or increase the query overhead to avoid extraction and passive defense methods that detect malicious queries or leverage watermarks to perform post-verification.
In this work, we introduce a new defense paradigm called attack as defense which modifies the model's output to be poisonous such that any malicious users that attempt to use the output to train a substitute model will be poisoned. 
To this end, we propose a novel lightweight backdoor attack method dubbed HoneypotNet that replaces the classification layer of the victim model with a honeypot layer and then finetunes the honeypot layer with a shadow model (to simulate model extraction) via bi-level optimization to modify its output to be poisonous while remaining the original performance. 
We empirically demonstrate on four commonly used benchmark datasets that HoneypotNet can inject backdoors into substitute models with a high success rate. 
The injected backdoor not only facilitates ownership verification but also disrupts the functionality of substitute models, serving as a significant deterrent to model extraction attacks.

HoneypotNet: Backdoor Attacks Against Model Extraction

Human beings often experience stress, which can significantly influence their performance. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit stress responses similar to those of humans and whether their performance fluctuates under different stress-inducing prompts. To investigate this, we developed a novel set of prompts, termed \textit{StressPrompt}, designed to induce varying levels of stress. These prompts were derived from established psychological frameworks and carefully calibrated based on ratings from human participants. We then applied these prompts to several LLMs to assess their responses across a range of tasks, including instruction-following, complex reasoning, and emotional intelligence. The findings suggest that LLMs, like humans, perform optimally under moderate stress, consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Notably, their performance declines under both low and high-stress conditions. Our analysis further revealed that these \textit{StressPrompts} significantly alter the internal states of LLMs, leading to changes in their neural representations that mirror human responses to stress. This research provides critical insights into the operational robustness and flexibility of LLMs, demonstrating the importance of designing AI systems capable of maintaining high performance in real-world scenarios where stress is prevalent, such as in customer service, healthcare, and emergency response contexts. Moreover, this study contributes to the broader AI research community by offering a new perspective on how LLMs handle different scenarios and their similarities to human cognition.

StressPrompt: Does Stress Impact Large Language Models and Human Performance Similarly?

Transformers have revolutionized the point cloud learning task, but the quadratic complexity hinders its extension to long sequence and makes a burden on limited computational resources. The recent advent of RWKV, a fresh breed of deep sequence models, has shown immense potential for sequence modeling in NLP tasks. In this paper, we present PointRWKV, a model of linear complexity derived from the RWKV model in the NLP field with necessary modifications for point cloud learning tasks. Specifically, taking the embedded point patches as input, we first propose to explore the global processing capabilities within PointRWKV blocks using modified multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic attention recurrence mechanism. To extract local geometric features simultaneously, we design a  parallel branch to encode the point cloud efficiently in a fixed radius near-neighbors graph with a graph stabilizer. Furthermore, we design PointRWKV as a multi-scale framework for hierarchical feature learning of 3D point clouds, facilitating various downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on different point cloud learning tasks show our proposed PointRWKV outperforms the transformer- and mamba-based counterparts, while significantly saving about 42\% FLOPs, demonstrating the potential option for constructing foundational 3D models. 
The code and models will be available for further research.

Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

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HUANG: A Robust Diffusion Model-based Targeted Adversarial Attack Against Deep Hashing Retrieval

Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

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HUANG: A Robust Diffusion Model-based Targeted Adversarial Attack Against Deep Hashing Retrieval

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