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In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximize their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent aims to learn an optimal policy among all policies that satisfy a given safety constraint. However, strict safety guarantees are often provided through approaches based on linear programming, and thus have limited scaling. In this paper we present a new, scalable method, which enjoys strict formal guarantees for Safe RL, in the case where the safety dynamics of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) are known, and safety is defined as an undiscounted probabilistic avoidance property. Our approach is based on state-augmentation of the MDP, and on the design of a shield that restricts the actions available to the agent. We show that our approach provides a strict formal safety guarantee that the agent stays safe at training and test time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach is viable in practice through experimental evaluation.

AAAI 2025

Probabilistic Shielding for Safe Reinforcement Learning

reinforcement learning

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. 

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 recent years, semantic segmentation has flourished in various applications.
However, the high computational cost remains a significant challenge that hinders its further adoption. 
The filter pruning method for structured network slimming offers a direct and effective solution for the reduction of segmentation networks. 
Nevertheless, we argue that the majority of existing pruning methods overlook the fact that segmentation is a location-sensitive task, which consequently leads to the sub-optimal performance of existing pruning methods originally designed for image classification when applied to segmentation networks. 
To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach, denoted as Spatial-aware Information Redundancy Filter Pruning (SIRFP), which aims to reduce feature redundancy between channels. 
First, we formulate the pruning problem as a maximum edge weight clique problem (MEWCP) in graph theory, thereby minimizing the feature redundancy among the remaining features after pruning. 
Within this framework, we introduce a spatial-aware redundancy metric based on feature maps into the consideration of segmentation network pruning, thus endowing the pruning process with location sensitivity to better adapt to segmentation tasks. 
Additionally, based on the MEWCP, we propose a low computational complexity greedy strategy to solve this NP-hard problem, making it feasible and efficient for structured pruning. 
To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive comparative experiments on various challenging datasets.
The results demonstrate the superior performance of SIRFP for semantic segmentation tasks.

Structural Pruning via Spatial-aware Information Redundancy for Semantic Segmentation

Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) aims to detect objects from novel categories beyond the base categories on which the detector is trained. However, existing open-vocabulary detectors trained on known category data tend to assign higher confidence to trained categories and confuse novel categories with background. To resolve this, we propose OV-DQUO, an Open-Vocabulary DETR with Denoising text Query training and open-world Unknown Objects supervision. Specifically, we introduce a wildcard matching method that enables the detector to learn from pairs of unknown objects recognized by the open-world detector and text embeddings with general semantics, mitigating the confidence bias between base and novel categories. Additionally, we propose a denoising text query training strategy that synthesizes additional noisy query-box pairs from open-world unknown objects to train the detector through contrastive learning, enhancing its ability to distinguish novel objects from the background. We conducted extensive experiments on the challenging OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results of 45.6 AP50 and 39.3 mAP on novel categories respectively, without the need for additional training data. The code is available at supplementary materials.

OV-DQUO: Open-Vocabulary DETR with Denoising Text Query Training and Open-World Unknown Objects Supervision

Multi-label metric learning, as an extension of metric learning to multi-label scenarios, aims to learn better similarity metrics for objects with rich semantics. Existing multi-label metric learning approaches employ the common assumption of equal labeling-importance, i.e., all associated labels are considered relevant to the training instance, while there is no differentiation in the relative importance of their semantics. However, this common assumption does not reflect the fact that the importance of each relevant label is generally different, even though such importance information is not directly accessible from the training examples. In this paper, we claim that it is beneficial to leverage the implicit Relative LabelingImportance (RLI) information to facilitate multi-label metric learning. Specifically, the manifold structure within the feature space is exploited by local linear reconstruction, and then the RLIs are recovered by transferring such structure to the label space. Subsequently, a discrimiative multi-label metric learning framework is introduced to align the predictive modeling outputs with the recovered RLIs, under which instances with similar RLI are implicitly pulled closer to each other, while those with dissimilar RLI are pushed further apart. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark multi-label datasets validate the superiority of our proposed approach in learning effective similarity metrics between multi-label examples.

Implicit Relative Labeling-Importance Aware Multi-Label Metric Learning

Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.

Distilling Knowledge from Heterogeneous Architectures for Semantic Segmentation

Recent research suggests that tree search algorithms (e.g. Monte Carlo Tree Search) can dramatically boost LLM performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks.
However, they often require more than 10 times the computational resources of greedy decoding due to wasteful search strategies, making them difficult to be deployed in practical applications.
This study introduces a novel guided tree search algorithm with dynamic node selection and node-level exploration budget (maximum number of children) calculation to tackle this issue.
By considering the search progress towards the final answer (history) and the guidance from a value network (future) trained without any step-wise annotations,
our algorithm iteratively selects the most promising tree node before expanding it within the boundaries of the allocated computational budget.
Experiments conducted on the GSM8K and TabMWP datasets demonstrate that our method not only offers competitive performance but also enjoys significantly lower computational costs compared to baseline methods.

LiteSearch: Efficient Tree Search with Dynamic Exploration Budget for Math Reasoning

We propose action-agnostic point-level (AAPL) supervision for temporal action detection to achieve accurate action instance detection with a lightly annotated dataset. In the proposed scheme, a small portion of video frames is sampled in an unsupervised manner and presented to human annotators, who then label the frames with action categories. Unlike point-level supervision, which requires annotators to search for every action instance in an untrimmed video, frames to annotate are selected without human intervention in AAPL supervision. We also propose a detection model and learning method to effectively utilize the AAPL labels. Extensive experiments on the variety of datasets (THUMOS '14, FineAction, GTEA, BEOID, and ActivityNet 1.3) demonstrate that the proposed approach is competitive with or outperforms prior methods for video-level and point-level supervision in terms of the trade-off between the annotation cost and detection performance. The code and the annotation tool used in this study are included in the supplementary material and will be made available to the public if our paper is accepted.

Action-Agnostic Point-Level Supervision for Temporal Action Detection

LLM-powered personalization agent systems employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict users’ behavior fromtheir past activities. However, their effectiveness often hinges on the ability to effectively leverage extensive, long user his-torical data due to its inherent noise and length of such data. Existing pretrained LLMs may generate summaries that are concise but lack the necessary context for downstream tasks, hindering their utility in personalization systems. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback (RLPF). RLPF fine-tunes LLMs to generate concise, human-readable user summaries that are optimized for downstream task performance. By maximizing the usefulness of the generated summaries, RLPF effectively distills extensive user history data while preserving essential information for downstream tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in both extrinsic downstream task utility and intrinsic summary quality, surpassing baseline methods by up to 22% and achieving an up to 84.59% win rate on Factuality, Abstractiveness, and Readability. RLPF also achieves a remarkable 74% reduction while improving performance on 16 out of 19 unseen tasks and/or datasets, showcasing its generalizability. This approach offers a promising solution for enhancing LLM personalization by effectively transforming long, noisy user histories into informative and human-readable representations.

RLPF: Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback for User Summarization with LLMs

Spatial-aware image editing focuses on modifying the position and size of elements within a given image. However, previous works still struggle with maintaining background harmony in the original editing areas, as well as preserving the initial identity of the edited elements, making it difficult to achieve complex multi-object editing in a single pass. In this paper, we aim to perform flexible spatial editing in a simple yet straightforward manner. We propose to inpaint the background first and develop a two-stage multi-layered latent diffusion framework to edit each element independently. Specifically, we design a key-masking self-attention scheme alongside artifact suppression to achieve background inpainting within the denoising process, leveraging the powerful generative capabilities of the Latent Diffusion Model, Stable Diffusion XL-1.0. The latent decomposition and fusion framework is capable of unifying various spatial-aware operations, including removal, resizing, relocation, flipping, addition, camera panning, zooming out, occlusion-aware editing, and cross-image editing. Experiments demonstrate the superior inpainting quality for object removal, along with enhanced versatility and higher precision in spatial-aware editing achieved by our method.

DesignEdit: Unify Spatial-Aware Image Editing via Training-free Inpainting with a Multi-Layered Latent Diffusion Framework

Removing reflection from a single image is challenging due to the absence of general reflection priors. Although existing methods incorporate extensive user guidance for satisfactory performance, they often lack the flexibility to adapt user guidance in different modalities, and dense user interactions further limit their practicality.
To alleviate these problems, this paper presents {\textbf{FIRM}}, a novel framework for \textbf{F}lexible \textbf{I}nteractive image \textbf{R}eflection re\textbf{M}oval with various forms of guidance, where users can provide sparse visual guidance (e.g., points, boxes, or strokes) or text descriptions for better reflection removal. 
Firstly, we design a novel user guidance conversion module (UGC) to transform different forms of guidance into unified contrastive masks. The contrastive masks provide explicit cues for identifying reflection and transmission layers in blended images. Secondly, we devise a contrastive mask-guided reflection removal network that comprises a newly proposed contrastive guidance interaction block (CGIB). This block leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism that merges contrastive masks with image features, allowing for precise layer separation. The proposed framework requires 10$\times$ less time to provide guidance compared to previous interactive-based methods, which makes a step-change in flexibility.  Extensive results on public real-world reflection removal datasets validate that our method demonstrates state-of-the-art reflection removal performance.

FIRM: Flexible Interactive Reflection ReMoval

Diffusion Models have emerged as powerful generative models for high-quality image synthesis, with many subsequent image editing techniques based on them. However, the ease of text-based image editing introduces significant risks, such as malicious editing for scams or intellectual property infringement. Previous works have attempted to safeguard images from diffusion-based editing by adding imperceptible perturbations. These methods are costly and specifically target prevalent Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), while Pixel-domain Diffusion Models (PDMs) remain largely unexplored and robust against such attacks. Our work addresses this gap by proposing a novel attacking framework with a feature representation attack loss that exploits vulnerabilities in denoising UNets and a latent optimization strategy to enhance the naturalness of protected images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in attacking dominant PDM-based editing methods (e.g., SDEdit) while maintaining reasonable protection fidelity and robustness against common defense methods. Additionally, our framework is extensible to LDMs, achieving comparable performance to existing approaches.

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