United States

Obtaining high certainty in predictive models is crucial for making informed and trustworthy decisions in many scientific and engineering domains. 
However, extensive experimentation required for model accuracy can be both costly and time-consuming. 
This paper presents an adaptive sampling approach designed to reduce epistemic uncertainty in predictive models. 
Our primary contribution is the development of a metric that estimates potential epistemic uncertainty leveraging prediction interval-generation neural networks.
This estimation relies on the distance between the predicted upper and lower bounds and the observed data at the tested positions and their neighboring points. 
Our second contribution is the proposal of a batch sampling strategy based on Gaussian processes (GPs). 
A GP is used as a surrogate model of the networks trained at each iteration of the adaptive sampling process. 
Using this GP, we design an acquisition function that selects a combination of sampling locations to maximize the reduction of epistemic uncertainty across the domain.
We test our approach on three unidimensional synthetic problems and a multi-dimensional dataset based on an agricultural field for selecting experimental fertilizer rates.
The results demonstrate that our method consistently converges faster to minimum epistemic uncertainty levels compared to Normalizing Flows Ensembles, MC-Dropout, and simple GPs.

AAAI 2025

Adaptive Sampling to Reduce Epistemic Uncertainty Using Prediction Interval-Generation Neural Networks

quantification

uncertainty

calibration

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.



In a surge of text-to-image (T2I) models and their customization methods that generate new images of a user-provided subject, current works focus on alleviating the costs incurred by a lengthy per-subject optimization. These zero-shot customization methods encode the image of a specified subject into a visual embedding which is then utilized alongside the textual embedding for diffusion guidance. The visual embedding incorporates intrinsic information about the subject, while the textual embedding provides a new context. However, the existing methods often 1) generate images with the same pose as an input image, and 2) exhibit deterioration in the subject's identity when facing a pose variation prompt. We first pin down the problem and show that redundant pose information in the visual embedding interferes with the pose indication in the textual embedding. Conversely, the textual embedding also harms the subject's identity which is tightly entangled with the pose in the visual embedding. As a remedy, we propose text-orthogonal visual embedding which effectively harmonizes with the given textual embedding. We also adopt the visual-only embedding and inject the subject's clear features utilizing a self-attention swap. Our method is both effective and robust, offering highly flexible zero-shot generation while effectively maintaining the subject's identity. The code will be publicly released.

Harmonizing Visual and Textual Embeddings for Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Customization

Deep learning has significantly advanced time series forecasting through its powerful capacity to capture sequence relationships.
However, training these models with the Mean Square Error (MSE) loss often results in over-smooth predictions, making it challenging to handle the complexity and learn high-entropy features from time series data with high variability and unpredictability.
In this work, we introduce a novel approach by tokenizing time series values to train forecasting models via cross-entropy loss, while considering the continuous nature of time series data. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network, HCAN, a general model-agnostic component that can be integrated with any forecasting model. HCAN is based on a Hierarchy-Aware Attention module that integrates multi-granularity high-entropy features at different hierarchy levels. At each level, we assign a class label for timesteps to train an Uncertainty-Aware Classifier. This classifier mitigates the over-confidence in softmax loss via evidence theory. We also implement a Hierarchical Consistency Loss to maintain prediction consistency across hierarchy levels. Extensive experiments integrating HCAN with state-of-the-art forecasting models demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines on several real-world datasets. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HCAN-4F7C.

Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network for Time Series Forecasting

Recently, diffusion-based video generation models have achieved significant success. However, existing models often suffer from issues like weak consistency and declining image quality over time. To overcome these challenges, inspired by aesthetic principles, we propose a non-invasive plug-in called Uniform Frame Organizer (UFO), which is compatible with any diffusion-based video generation model. The UFO comprises a series of adaptive adapters with adjustable intensities, which can significantly enhance the consistency between the foreground and background of videos and improve image quality without altering the original model parameters when integrated. The training for UFO is simple, efficient, requires minimal resources, and supports stylized training. Its modular design allows for the combination of multiple UFOs, enabling the customization of personalized video generation models. Furthermore, the UFO also supports direct transferability across different models of the same specification without the need for specific retraining. The experimental results indicate that UFO effectively enhances video generation quality and demonstrates its superiority in public video generation benchmarks. The code will soon be publicly available.

UFO: Enhancing Diffusion-Based Video Generation with a Uniform Frame Organizer

Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated superior performance in subject-driven image generation. Identity(ID) preserving image generation, as a subtask of subject-image generation, aims to generate customized images for specific human identity and has broad application potential. However, this task remains challenging due to the requirement for high ID fidelity and precise detail preservation. Additionally, generating high-quality context alongside the human ID presents another challenge, as existing methods struggle to achieve both high ID fidelity and satisfactory context simultaneously. To address the issues of insufficient ID fidelity, we introduced a simple yet effective test-time fine-tuning approach. Specifically, we propose an attribute-driven training method that establishes global-level and local-level tasks to learn the global face feature and fine-grained attribute features, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a novel ID-context decoupling framework that decouples image context generation from human ID generation, ensuring the quality of contextual content as well as facilitating the learning ID information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method and showcase its capabilities across various applications.

FaceA-Net: Facial Attribute-driven ID Preserving Image Generation Network

Incomplete multi-view multi-label classification aims to accurately predict labels for each sample in the face of some missing views. Moreover, it also encounters problems brought by redundant views. In this paper, we make the first attempt to take advantage of diffusion models to address the missing view problem and design a strategy to identify and remove redundant views. Specifically, we train a diffusion model conditioned on the pseudo-labels to recover information of missing views. The learned diffusion model can carry data distribution knowledge in training split to the data. Regarding redundant identification strategy, it is designed by considering both the additional information of views and the classification difficulty level of samples. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets, and the proposed method achieves favorable performance against several state-of-the-art methods on the multi-view multi-label classification task.

Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Diffusion-Guided Redundancy Removal

Sometimes we use a neural network to learn predictions, which are then used to compute a downstream quantity of interest. For instance, we could learn a step-by-step dynamics model and then use it to infer a utility function for decision making. Given limited training data, neither the neural network’s prediction nor the downstream quantity of interest will be exact. Quantifying the overall epistemic uncertainty in the downstream quantity of interest can be helpful. For instance we could use the uncertainty of the utility function from the example above to incorporate a safety margin or to perform active learning. We show that epistemic uncertainty of such quantities of interest can be estimated conveniently using gradients. In comparison to popular related approaches, such as ensemble methods, our method exhibits similar results while requiring fewer computational resources.

General Uncertainty Estimation with Delta Variances

Despite the advancements of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) in various tasks, they struggle with fine-grained temporal understanding tasks, such as Dense Video Captioning (DVC). DVC is a complicated task of describing all events within a video while also temporally locating each event in a video, which integrates multiple fine-grained tasks, including video segmentation, video captioning, and temporal video grounding.
Previous VideoLLMs attempt to solve DVC in a single step, failing to utilize their reasoning capability.
Moreover, previous loss used for training VideoLLMs does not fully reflect evaluation metrics, therefore providing supervision not directly aligned to target tasks.
To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework named VidChain comprised of Chain-of-Tasks (CoTasks) and Metric-based Direct Preference Optimization (M-DPO).
CoTasks decompose a complex task into a sequence of sub-tasks, allowing VideoLLMs to leverage their reasoning capabilities more effectively.
M-DPO aligns a VideoLLM with evaluation metrics, providing fine-grained supervision to each task that is well-aligned with metrics.
Applied to two different VideoLLMs, VidChain consistently improves their fine-grained video understanding, thereby outperforming previous VideoLLMs on two different DVC benchmarks and also on the temporal video grounding task.

VidChain: Chain-of-Tasks with Metric-based Direct Preference Optimization for Dense Video Captioning

Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized clients to collaboratively train a global model under the orchestration of a central server. However, the iterative exchange of model parameters between the server and clients imposes heavy communication burdens, risks potential privacy leakage, and even precludes collaboration among heterogeneous clients. Distillation-based FL tackles these challenges by exchanging low-dimensional model outputs rather than model parameters, yet it relies heavily on a task-relevant auxiliary dataset that is often not available in practice. Data-free FL attempts to overcome this limitation by training a server-side generator to directly synthesize task-specific data samples for knowledge transfer. However, the update rule of the generator requires clients to share on-device models for white-box access, which greatly compromises the advantages of distillation-based FL. This motivates us to explore a data-free and black-box FL framework via Zeroth-order Gradient Estimation (FedZGE), which estimates the gradients after flowing through on-device models in a black-box optimization manner to complete the training of the generator in terms of fidelity, transferability, diversity, and equilibrium, without involving any auxiliary data or sharing any model parameters, thus combining the advantages of both distillation-based FL and data-free FL. Experiments on large-scale image classification datasets and network architectures demonstrate the superiority of FedZGE in terms of data heterogeneity, model heterogeneity, communication efficiency, and privacy protection. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedZGE-B6A3.

Data-Free Black-Box Federated Learning via Zeroth-Order Gradient Estimation

Posters serve an essential function in marketing and advertising by improving visual communication and brand visibility, thus significantly contributing to industrial design. With the latest developments in controllable T2I diffusion models, research interest has surged in text rendering within synthesized images. Although text rendering accuracy has seen advancements, automatic poster generation remains a relatively untapped area. This paper presents an automatic poster generation framework featuring text rendering capabilities through the use of LLMs. Our framework employs a triple-cross attention mechanism based on alignment learning to achieve precise text placement within detailed contextual backgrounds. Moreover, it supports adjustable fonts, varying image resolutions, and poster rendering with textual prompts in both English and Chinese. Additionally, we present a comprehensive bilingual image-text dataset, GlyphDraw-3M, comprising 3 million image-text pairs, each with OCR annotations and resolutions exceeding 1024. Our method utilizes the SDXL architecture, and extensive experiments confirm its ability to generate posters with intricate and context-rich backgrounds.

GlyphDraw2: Automatic Generation of Complex Glyph Posters with Diffusion Models and Large Language Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer inherent interpretability by initially translating images into human-comprehensible concepts, followed by a linear combination of these concepts for classification. However, the annotation of concepts for visual recognition tasks requires extensive expert knowledge and labor, constraining the broad adoption of CBMs. Recent approaches have leveraged the knowledge of large language models to construct concept bottlenecks, with multimodal models like CLIP subsequently mapping image features into the concept feature space for classification. Despite this, the concepts produced by language models can be verbose and may introduce non-visual attributes, which hurts accuracy and interpretability. In this study, we investigate to avoid these issues by constructing CBMs directly from multimodal models. To this end, we adopt common words as base concept vocabulary, and leverage auxiliary unlabeled images to construct a Vision-to-Concept (V2C) tokenizer that can explicitly quantize images into their most relevant visual concepts, thus creating a vision-oriented concept bottleneck tightly coupled with the multimodal model. This leads to our V2C-CBM that is training efficient and interpretable with high accuracy. Our V2C-CBM has matched or outperformed LLM-supervised CBMs on various visual classification benchmarks, validating the efficacy of our approach. The associated code will be released soon.

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Harmonizing Visual and Textual Embeddings for Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Customization

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