United States

In the pursuit of efficient vision architectures, substantial efforts have been devoted to optimizing operator efficiency. Depth-wise separable operators, such as DWConv, are find cheap in both FLOPs and parameters. As a result, they are increasingly incorporated into efficient backbones, trading for deeper and wider architectures to enhance performance. However, separable operators are not really fast on devices due to the discontinuous memory access requirements. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FreeNets}, a family of simple and efficient backbones that free the separable operation to further accelerate the running speed. We introduce sparse sampling mixers (S2-Mixer) to supersede existing separable token mixers. The S2-Mixer samples multiple segments of partially continuous signals across spatial and channel dimensions for convolutional processing, achieving extremely fast on-device speed. The sparse sampling also enables S2-Mixer to capture long-range pixel relationships from dynamic receptive fields. Furthermore, we introduce a Shift Feed-Forward Network (ShiftFFN) as a faster alternative to existing channel mixers. It utilizes a shift neck architecture that aggregates global information to shift features, enabling faster channel mixing while incorporating global pixel information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeNet offers a superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to the latest efficient models. On ImageNet-1k, FreeNet-S4 outperforms the leading model, FastViT-SA12, by 1.0\% in top-1 accuracy, while running 1.3$\times$ faster on GPU and 1.7$\times$ faster on Mobile.

AAAI 2025

FreeNet: Liberating Depth-Wise Separable Operations for Building Faster Mobile Vision Architectures

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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.



Current benchmarks for video segmentation aim to segment and track objects; however, they are limited to annotating
only salient objects (i.e., foreground instances). As a result, despite their impressive architectural designs, previous works
have struggled to adapt to real-world scenarios, since current benchmarks only handle salient objects. We believe that developing a new video segmentation dataset aimed at tracking multi-granularity segmentation target in the video scene is necessary for the research community. In this work, we aim to generate new video segmentation dataset that is annotated for both salient and non-salient masks. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale, densely annotated Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation(MUG-VOS) dataset that includes various types and granularities of mask annotations. We automatically collected a training set that assists in tracking both salient and non-salient objects, and we also curated a human-annotated test set for reliable evaluation. As a result, Memory-based Mask Propagation Model(MMPM) trained on MUG-VOS dataset leads to the best performance on MUG-VOS dataset among the existing video object segmentation methods and Segment Anything Model(SAM)-based video segmentation methods. The project page with MUG-VOS dataset and code will be made available soon.

Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation

The importance of time series forecasting drives continuous research and the development of new approaches to tackle this problem. Typically, these methods are introduced through empirical studies that frequently claim superior accuracy for the proposed approaches. Nevertheless, concerns are rising about the reliability and generalizability of these results due to limitations in experimental setups. This paper addresses a critical limitation: the number and representativeness of the datasets used.
We investigate the impact of dataset selection bias, particularly the practice of cherry-picking datasets, on the performance evaluation of forecasting methods. Through empirical analysis with a diverse set of benchmark datasets, our findings reveal that cherry-picking datasets can significantly distort the perceived performance of methods, often exaggerating their effectiveness.
Furthermore, our results demonstrate that by selectively choosing just four datasets — what most studies report — 46\% of methods could be deemed best in class, and 77\% could rank within the top three. Additionally, recent deep learning-based approaches show high sensitivity to dataset selection, whereas classical methods exhibit greater robustness.
Our study highlights the critical need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that more accurately reflect real-world scenarios. Adopting such frameworks will ensure the development of robust and reliable forecasting methods.

Cherry-Picking in Time Series Forecasting: How to Select Datasets to Make Your Model Shine

Networked time series are time series on a graph, one for each node, with applications in traffic and weather monitoring. Graph neural networks are natural candidates for networked time series imputation and have recently outperformed existing alternatives such as recurrent and generative models for time series imputation as they utilize a relational inductive bias for imputation. However, existing GNN-based approaches fail to capture the higher-order topological structure between sensors, which are shaped by recurring substructures in the graph, referred to as temporal motifs. In addition, it remains uncertain which motifs are the most pivotal motifs guiding the imputation task in networked time series. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a graph neural network designed to leverage motif structures within the network by employing weighted motif adjacency matrices to capture higher-order neighborhood information. In particular, (1) we design a motif-wise multi-view attention module that explicitly captures various higher-order structures along with an attention mechanism that automatically assigns high weights to informative ones in order to maximize the use of higher-order information. (2) We introduce a gated fusion module by merging gated recurrent networks and graph convolutional networks to capture the spatial and temporal dependency in order to reflect the intricate impacts of temporal and spatial influence. Experimental results demonstrate that when compared to state-of-the-art models for time-series imputation tasks, our proposed model can reduce the error by around 19\%.

Motif-aware Graph Neural Networks for Networked Time Series Imputation

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) have emerged as an efficient framework for representing and learning complex probability distributions. Nevertheless, the existing body of research on PCs predominantly concentrates on data-driven parameter learning, often neglecting the potential of knowledge-intensive learning, a particular issue in data-scarce/knowledge-rich domains such as healthcare. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel unified framework that can systematically integrate diverse domain knowledge into the parameter learning process of PCs. Experiments on several benchmarks as well as real world datasets show that our proposed framework can both effectively and efficiently leverage domain knowledge to achieve superior performance compared to purely data-driven learning approaches.

A Unified Framework for Human-Allied Learning of Probabilistic Circuits

Time series data is essential in various applications, including climate modeling, healthcare monitoring, and financial analytics. Understanding the contextual information associated with real-world time series data is often essential for accurate and reliable event predictions. In this paper, we introduce TimeCAP, a time-series processing framework that creatively employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as contextualizers of time series data, extending their typical usage as predictors. Specifically, it incorporates two independent LLM agents: one generates a textual summary that captures the context of the time series, while the other uses this enriched summary to make more informed predictions. In addition, TimeCAP employs a multi-modal encoder that synergizes with the LLM agents, enhancing predictive performance through mutual augmentation of inputs with in-context examples. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeCAP outperforms state-of-the-art time series event prediction methods, including those utilizing LLMs as predictors, achieving an average improvement of 28.75% in F1 score.

TimeCAP: Learning to Contextualize, Augment, and Predict Time Series Events with Large Language Model Agents

Advancements in hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units and neural processing units, have significantly propelled computer vision research. The vision transformer (ViT), leveraging the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism, has surpassed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in accuracy but faces challenges in mobile and edge deployment due to its large size and computational demands. In addition, as privacy concerns push for on-device training, research on quantization methods for ViTs, particularly gradient quantization, has gained attention. Unlike CNNs, ViTs face challenges due to outliers and a complex loss landscape. To address this, we propose a gradient quantization framework that stabilizes training by adapting quantization points based on interquartile ranges and constructing an outlier-robust loss function. Additionally, we employ a scaling method to align quantized gradients with original gradients and adaptively assign the learning rate based on quantization error analysis. When quantizing weights, activations, and gradients to INT8, our method improves performance by 0.52\% and 0.21\% over DeiT-Base and Swin-Base, respectively, and achieves near parity with MobileViT-S with only a 0.09\% accuracy drop. Furthermore, a 2.06$\times$ speedup was observed when applying our framework to MobileViT in a CUDA 11.8 environment.

GradQ-ViT: Robust and Efficient Gradient Quantization for Vision Transformers

Pairwise learning includes various machine learning tasks, with ranking and metric learning serving as the primary representatives. While randomized coordinate descent (RCD) is popular in various problems, there is much less theoretical analysis on the generalization behavior of models trained by RCD, especially under the pairwise learning framework. In this paper, we consider the generalization of RCD for pairwise learning. We measure the on-average argument stability for both convex and strongly convex objective functions, based on which we develop generalization bounds in expectation. The early-stopping strategy is adopted to quantify the balance between estimation and optimization. Our analysis further incorporates the low-noise setting into the excess risk bounds to achieve the optimistic bound as $O(1/n)$, where $n$ is the sample size. High-probability generalization bounds are also given via uniform stability, which imply better applications of RCD for pairwise learning problems.

Stability-based Generalization Analysis of Randomized Coordinate Descent for Pairwise Learning

Aerodynamic coefficient prediction is pivotal in aircraft and vehicles' design, performance evaluation, and motion control. Integrating artificial neural networks into aerodynamic coefficient prediction offers a promising alternative to traditional numerical methods burdened by extensive computations and high costs. Nevertheless, this data-driven approach faces several critical challenges, which limit its further performance enhancement: i) The current research lacks a profound understanding of the complex interplay between the shape of an object and its aerodynamic characteristics. ii) The scarcity of high-quality aerodynamic data poses a significant barrier. The models trained on limited datasets lack generalization ability, struggling to accurately predict and adapt to diverse aerodynamic performance under new shapes or conditions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce an innovative framework that employs cross-attention to capture the intimate interplay between shape and flow conditions and allows for the direct utilization of pre-trained models on general shape datasets to mitigate the scarcity of aerodynamic data. Furthermore, to bolster the inference capabilities of this data-driven approach, we integrate physical information constraints into the model, leveraging them as guiding principles to enhance the model's predictive power under unknown conditions. Experimental validation demonstrates that our proposed method performs excellently in multiple aerodynamic prediction tasks. This achievement brings a new technological breakthrough to the field of aerodynamic prediction and provides robust support for the design optimization of complex systems such as aircraft and vehicles.

Aerodynamic Coefficients Prediction via Cross-Attention Fusion and Physical-Informed Training

We study the problem of optimizing a guidance policy capable of dynamically guiding the agents for lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) based on real-time traffic patterns.
MAPF focuses on moving multiple agents from their start to goal locations without collisions. Its lifelong variant, LMAPF, continuously assigns new goals to agents. To solve LMAPF, replan-based algorithms decompose LMAPF into a series of MAPF problems and solve them sequentially, while rule-based algorithms first plan paths for each agent without considering collisions and then use pre-defined rules to resolve collisions on the fly. Although replan-based algorithms yield higher solution quality than rule-based ones, they scale poorly to challenging LMAPF instances with large numbers of agents and limited planning time. On the other hand, rule-based algorithms scale to extremely challenging instances yet have poor solution quality.
In this work, we focus on improving the solution quality of PIBT, the state-of-the-art rule-based LMAPF algorithm, by optimizing a policy to generate adaptive guidance. We design two pipelines to incorporate guidance in PIBT in two different ways. We demonstrate the superiority of the optimized policy over both static guidance and human-designed policies. Additionally, we explore scenarios where task distribution changes over time, a challenging yet common situation in real-world applications that is rarely explored in the literature.

Online Guidance Graph Optimization for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding

Neural implicit methods have made remarkable progress in 3D reconstruction. However, previous methods often assume view-independent properties of target objects, which fails to accurately reconstruct objects with challenging characteristics, such as transparency and high reflectivity. To address this limitation, we propose a polarimetric implicit 3D reconstruction method that integrates geometric and polarization information, enabling the production of high-quality meshes in complex scenes. For high-fidelity surface reconstruction, we introduce a view-dependent physical representation that thoroughly analyzes the subtle physical properties of reflections. The reconstruction process is further enhanced by a simple yet effective view-dependent detection algorithm and optimized using the principles of ray tracing and polarization. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in both real and synthetic scenarios.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2025

Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation

Similar lecture

Sparse Mixers: Combining MoE and Mixing to build a more efficient BERT