United States

We introduce RealPortrait,  a framework based on Diffusion Transformers (DiT), designed to generate highly expressive and visually appealing portrait animations. Given a static portrait image, our method can transfer complex facial expressions and head pose movements extracted from a driving video onto the portrait, transforming it into a lifelike video.
Specifically, we exploit the robust spatial-temporal modeling capabilities of DiT, enabling the generation of portrait videos that maintain high-fidelity visual details and ensure temporal coherence. In contrast to conventional image-to-video generation frameworks that necessitate a separate reference network, we incorporate an efficient reference attention within the DiT backbone, thereby obviating the computational overhead and achieving superior reference appearance preservation.
Concurrently, we integrate a parallel ControlNet to precisely regulate intricate facial expressions and head poses. Diverging from prior methods that utilize explicit sparse motion representations, such as facial landmarks or 3DMM coefficients, we adopt a dense implicit motion representation as the control guidance. This implicit motion representation excels in capturing nuanced emotional facial expressions and subtle non-rigid dynamics of the lips.
To further enhance the generalization capability of the model, we augment the training dataset by incorporating a substantial volume of facial image data through random crop augmentation. This strategy ensures the model&#39;s robustness across a wide variety of facial appearances and expressions.
Empirical evaluations demonstrate that RealPortrait excels in generating portrait animations with hyper-realistic quality and exceptional temporal coherence in appearance retention. The framework effectively mitigates the uncanny valley effect, significantly narrowing the disparity between synthetic and real portrait animations.

AAAI 2025

RealPortrait: Realistic Portrait Animation with Diffusion Transformers

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

We introduce RealPortrait,  a framework based on Diffusion Transformers (DiT), designed to generate highly expressive and visually appealing portrait animations. Given a static portrait image, our method can transfer complex facial expressions and head pose movements extracted from a driving video onto the portrait, transforming it into a lifelike video.
Specifically, we exploit the robust spatial-temporal modeling capabilities of DiT, enabling the generation of portrait videos that maintain high-fidelity visual details and ensure temporal coherence. In contrast to conventional image-to-video generation frameworks that necessitate a separate reference network, we incorporate an efficient reference attention within the DiT backbone, thereby obviating the computational overhead and achieving superior reference appearance preservation.
Concurrently, we integrate a parallel ControlNet to precisely regulate intricate facial expressions and head poses. Diverging from prior methods that utilize explicit sparse motion representations, such as facial landmarks or 3DMM coefficients, we adopt a dense implicit motion representation as the control guidance. This implicit motion representation excels in capturing nuanced emotional facial expressions and subtle non-rigid dynamics of the lips.
To further enhance the generalization capability of the model, we augment the training dataset by incorporating a substantial volume of facial image data through random crop augmentation. This strategy ensures the model's robustness across a wide variety of facial appearances and expressions.
Empirical evaluations demonstrate that RealPortrait excels in generating portrait animations with hyper-realistic quality and exceptional temporal coherence in appearance retention. The framework effectively mitigates the uncanny valley effect, significantly narrowing the disparity between synthetic and real portrait animations.

poster

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.



Golog is an expressive high-level agent language that includes nondeterministic operators which allow to leave some of the decisions to be made only at execution time. This so-called program realization is typically implemented by means of search, or in an incremental online fashion. In this paper, we consider the more realistic case where parts of the non-determinism are under the control of the environment. Program realization then becomes a synthesis problem, where a successful realization executes the program and satisfies the temporal goal for all possible environment actions. We consider Golog programs in combination with an expressive class of first-order action theories that allow for an unbounded number of objects and non-local effects, together with a temporal goal specified in a first-order extension of LTLf. We solve the synthesis problem by constructing a game arena that captures all possible executions of the program while tracking the satisfaction of the temporal goal and then solving the resulting two-player game. We evaluate the approach in two domains, showing the general feasibility of the approach.

LTLf Synthesis on First-Order Agent Programs in Nondeterministic Environments

This paper investigates a challenging problem of zero-shot learning in the multi-label scenario (MLZSL), wherein the model is trained to recognize multiple unseen classes within a sample (e.g., an image) based on seen classes and auxiliary knowledge, e.g., semantic information. Existing methods usually resort to analyzing the relationship of various seen classes residing in a sample from the dimension of spatial or semantic characteristics and transferring the learned model to unseen ones. However, they neglect the integrity of local and global features. Although the use of the attention structure will accurately locate local features, especially objects, it will significantly lose its integrity, and the relationship between classes will also be affected. Rough processing of global features will also directly affect comprehensiveness. This neglect will make the model lose its grasp of the main components of the image. Relying only on the local existence of seen classes during the inference stage introduces unavoidable bias. In this paper, we propose a novel and comprehensive visual-semantic framework for MLZSL, dubbed Epsilon, to fully make use of such properties and enable a more accurate and robust visual-semantic projection. In terms of spatial information, we achieve effective refinement by group aggregating image features into several semantic prompts. It can aggregate semantic information rather than class information, preserving the correlation between semantics. In terms of global semantics, we use global forward propagation to collect as much information as possible to ensure that semantics are not omitted. Experiments on large-scale MLZSL benchmark datasets NUS-Wide and Open-Images-v4 demonstrate that the proposed Epsilon outperforms other state-of-the-art methods with large margins.

Epsilon: Exploring Comprehensive Visual-Semantic Projection for Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning

Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) capture event data with high temporal resolution and low power consumption, presenting a more efficient solution for visual processing in dynamic and real-time scenarios compared to conventional video capture methods. Event data augmentation serve as an essential method for overcoming the limitation of scale and diversity in event datasets.   Our comparative experiments demonstrate that the two factors, spatial integrity and temporal continuity, can significantly affect the capacity of event data augmentation, which are guarantee for maintaining the sparsity and high dynamic range characteristics unique to event data. However, existing augmentation methods often neglect the preservation of spatial integrity and temporal continuity. To address this, we developed a novel event data augmentation strategy EventZoom, which employs a temporal progressive strategy, embedding transformed samples into the original samples through progressive scaling and shifting. The scaling process avoids the spatial information loss associated with cropping, while the progressive strategy prevents interruptions or abrupt changes in temporal information. We validated EventZoom across various supervised learning frameworks.  The experimental results show that EventZoom consistently outperforms existing event data augmentation methods with SOTA performance. For the first time, we have concurrently employed Semi-supervised and Unsupervised learning to verify feasibility on event augmentation algorithms, demonstrating the applicability and effectiveness of EventZoom as a powerful event-based data augmentation tool in handling real-world scenes with high dynamics and variability environments.

EventZoom: A Progressive Approach to Event-Based Data Augmentation for Enhanced Neuromorphic Vision

There are two crucial aspects of reliable autonomous driving systems: the reasoning behind decision-making and the precision of environmental perception. This paper introduces DME-Driver, a new autonomous driving system that enhances performance and robustness by fully leveraging the two crucial aspects. This system comprises two main models. The first, the Decision Maker, is responsible for providing logical driving instructions. The second, the Executor, receives these instructions and generates precise control signals for the vehicles. To ensure explainable and reliable driving decisions, we build the Decision-Maker based on a large vision language model. This model follows the logic employed by experienced human drivers and simulates making decisions in a safe and reasonable manner. On the other hand, the generation of accurate control signals relies on precise and detailed environmental perception, where 3D scene perception models excel. Therefore, a planning-oriented perception model is employed as the Executor. It translates the logical decisions made by the Decision-Maker into accurate control signals for the self-driving cars. To effectively train the proposed system, a new dataset named Human-driver Behavior and Decision-making (HBD) dataset has been collected. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of human driver behaviors and their underlying motivations. By leveraging this dataset, our system achieves high-precision planning accuracy through a logical thinking process.

DME-Driver: Integrating Human Decision Logic and 3D Scene Perception in Autonomous Driving

Shadow is a phenomenon that degenerates the image quality and decreases the performance of downstream vision algorithms. Despite that current image shadow removal methods have achieved promising progress, many of them require an externally obtained shadow mask as a necessary part of the input data, which not only introduces additional workload but also leads to degenerated performance near the shadow boundary due to the inaccuracy of the mask. Some of them do not require the shadow mask, however, they need to simultaneously consider the restoration of the brightness and color information along with the preservation of the texture and structure information inside the shadow region without external clues, which poses highly ill-posedness and makes the results prone to artifacts. In this paper, we propose **Pol-ShaRe**, the first **Pol**arization-guided image **Sha**dow **Re**moval solution, to remove shadow in a mask-free manner with fewer artifacts. Specifically, it consists of a two-stage pipeline to relieve the ill-posedness and a neural network tailored to the pipeline to suppress the artifacts. Experimental results show that our Pol-ShaRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world images.

Polarization Guided Mask-Free Shadow Removal

Drug response prediction (DRP) is a longstanding challenge in modern oncology that underpins personalized treatment. Early DRP methods, trained on label-rich cell line samples, suffer from performance degradation when applied to label-scarce patient samples due to the distribution shift. Recently, a few transfer learning efforts have addressed this issue by aligning cell line (source domain) and patient (target domain) data via unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). However, these efforts often treat each drug's response prediction as an isolated task, requiring model retraining when the drug changes; and focus only on aligning data distributions as a whole, neglecting the category (e.g., different cancers or tissues) confusion problem. To address these limitations, we propose a knowledge-guided domain adaptation model to transfer the DRP from cell lines to patients, named TransDRP. Specifically, TransDRP operates in two phases: pre-training and adaptation. In the first phase, we pre-train a multi-label graph neural network using molecular knowledge, to simultaneously predict responses for various drugs and capture their interdependencies. In the second phase, we implement a global-local domain adversarial strategy with clinical knowledge, to encourage representation alignment within same cancer categories and separation among different cancer categories across domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransDRP outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods in both transfer efficiency and precision for the patient DRP.

Knowledge-guided domain adaptation model for transferring drug response prediction from cell lines to patients

Model counting is a fundamental task that involves determining the number of satisfying assignments to a logical formula, typically in conjunctive normal form (CNF). While CNF model counting has received extensive attention over recent decades, interest in Pseudo-Boolean (PB) model counting is emerging partly due to the greater flexibility of PB formulas. As such, we observed feature gaps in existing PB counters such as a lack of support for projected and incremental settings, which could hinder adoption.

In this work, our main contribution is the introduction of the PB model counter PI-PBC, the first exact PB model counter with support for projected and incremental model counting. Our counter, PI-PBC, uses our Least Occurrence Weighted Min Degree (LOW-MD) computation ordering heuristic to support projected model counting and a cache mechanism to enable incremental model counting. In our evaluations, PI-PBC completed at least 1.40x the number of benchmarks of competing methods for projected model counting and at least 1.18x of competing methods in incremental model counting.

Towards Projected and Incremental Pseudo-Boolean Model Counting

Large vision-language models show tremendous potential in understanding visual information through human languages. However, they are prone to suffer from object hallucination, i.e., the generated image descriptions contain objects that do not exist in the image. In this paper, we reveal that object hallucination can be attributed to overconfidence in irrelevant visual features when soft visual tokens map to the LLM's word embedding space. Specifically, by figuring out the semantic similarity between visual tokens and LLM's word embedding, we observe that the smoothness of similarity distribution strongly correlates with the emergence of object hallucinations. To mitigate hallucinations, we propose using the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to alleviate overconfidence by introducing stochastic noise, facilitating the constraining of irrelevant information. Furthermore, we propose an entropy-based noise-controlling strategy to enable the injected noise to be adaptively constrained regarding the smoothness of the similarity distribution. We adapt the proposed AdaVIB across distinct model architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AdaVIB mitigates object hallucinations by effectively alleviating the overconfidence in irrelevant visual features, with consistent improvements on two object hallucination benchmarks.

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Adaptively Constraining Information Flow

Learned image compression (LIC) has achieved state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance, deemed promising for next-generation image compression techniques. However, pre-trained LIC models usually suffer from significant performance degradation when applied to out-of-training-domain images, implying their poor generalization capabilities. To tackle this problem, we propose a few-shot domain adaptation method for LIC by integrating plug-and-play adapters into pre-trained models. Drawing inspiration from the analogy between latent channels and frequency components, we examine domain gaps in LIC and observe that out-of-training-domain images disrupt pre-trained channel-wise decomposition. Consequently, we introduce a method for channel-wise re-allocation using convolution-based adapters and low-rank adapters, which are lightweight and compatible to mainstream LIC schemes. Extensive experiments across multiple domains and multiple representative LIC schemes demonstrate that our method significantly enhances pre-trained models, achieving comparable performance to H.266/VVC intra coding with merely 25 target-domain samples. Additionally, our method matches the performance of full-model finetune while transmitting fewer than 2% of the parameters.

Few-Shot Domain Adaptation for Learned Image Compression

Online to batch conversion involves constructing a new batch learner by utilizing a series of models generated by an existing online learning algorithm, for achieving generalization guarantees under i.i.d assumption. However, when applied to real-world streaming applications such as streaming recommender systems, the data stream may be sampled from time-varying distributions instead of persistently being i.i.d. This poses a challenge in terms of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Existing approaches employ fixed conversion mechanisms that are unable to adapt to novel testing distributions, hindering the testing accuracy of the batch learner. To address these issues, we propose AdaO2B, an adaptive online to batch conversion approach under the bandit setting. AdaO2B is designed to be aware of the distribution shifts in the testing data and achieves OOD generalization guarantees. Specifically, AdaO2B can dynamically combine the sequence of models learned by a contextual bandit algorithm and determine appropriate combination weights using a context-aware weighting function. This innovative approach allows for the conversion of a sequence of models into a batch learner that facilitates OOD generalization. Theoretical analysis provides justification for why and how the learned adaptive batch learner can achieve OOD generalization error guarantees. Experimental results have demonstrated that AdaO2B significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both synthetic data and real-world data.

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