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Enhancing the performance of semantic segmentation models with multi-spectral images (RGB-IR) is crucial, particularly for low-light and adverse environments. While multimodal fusion techniques aim to learn cross-modality features for generating fused images or engage in knowledge distillation, they often treat multi-modal and missing modality scenarios as separate challenges, which is not an optimal
approach. To address this, a novel multi-modal fusion approach called Optically-Guided Pixel-level contrastive learning Network (OGP-Net) is proposed, which uses Distillation with Multi-View Contrastive (DMC) and Distillation for Uni-modal Retention (DUR) to maintain the correlation between modality-shared and modality-specific features. DMC aligns the unimodal features by projecting the semantic information across modalities into a unified latent space, ensuring that the feature maps retain multi-modal representations. Pixel-level multi-view contrastive learning is then introduced, enabling modality-invariant representation learning. DUR is introduced to preserve modality-specific information by distilling detailed textures from RGB images into the optical branch of OGP-Net. Additionally, the Gated Spectral Unit (GSU) is incorporated into the framework to eliminate manual tuning and prevent forced feature alignment. Comprehensive experiments show that OGP-Net outperforms state-of-the-art models in multi-modal and missing modality scenarios across
three public benchmarking datasets. It achieves quicker convergence and learns efficiently from limited training samples.

AAAI 2025

OGP-Net: Optical Guidance Meets Pixel-Level Contrastive Distillation for Robust Multi-Modal and Missing Modality Segmentation

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.



Graph neural networks for hyperbolic space has emerged as a powerful tool for embedding datasets exhibiting a highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy e.g.,  graphs with hierarchical structures. While several Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks (Hy-GNNs) have been developed to enhance the representation of hierarchical datasets, they remain susceptible to noise and adversarial attacks, posing serious risks in critical applications. The absence of robust Hy-GNN frameworks underscores a pressing problem. This research addresses this challenge by introducing HyperDefender—a robust and flexible approach designed to fortify Hy-GNNs against adversarial attacks and noises. HyperDefender aims to secure the reliability of applications that depend on the integrity of hierarchical graph-structured data in real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that HyperDefender significantly improves node classification accuracy across various attacks, effectively mitigating the performance degradation typically observed in Hy-GNNs when the hierarchy in original datasets is compromised.

HyperDefender: A Robust Framework for Hyperbolic GNNs

Handling heterogeneous data in tabular datasets poses a significant challenge for deep learning models. While attention-based architectures and self-supervised learning have achieved notable success, their application to tabular data remains less effective over linear and tree based models.
Although several breakthroughs have been achieved by models which transform tables into uni-modal transformations like image, language and graph, these models often underperform in the presence of feature heterogeneity.
To address this gap, we introduce **TabGLM** (**Tab**ular **G**raph **L**anguage **M**odel), a novel multi-modal architecture designed to model both structural and semantic information from a table. 
TabGLM transforms each row of a table into a fully connected graph and serialized text, which are then encoded using a graph neural network (GNN) and a text encoder, respectively. By aligning these representations, TabGLM leverages complementary information from both modalities through a joint multi-modal self-supervised learning objective, thereby enhancing feature learning.
TabGLM's flexible graph-text pipeline efficiently processes heterogeneous datasets combining structural and semantic information with significantly fewer parameters than state-of-the-art approaches. Evaluations across 26 benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial performance gains, with TabGLM achieving an average AUCROC improvement of upto 6% over existing tabular learning methods.

TabGLM: Tabular Graph Language Model for Learning Transferable Representations Through Multi-Modal Consistency Minimization

This paper presents the Text Encoding Diffusion Model (TEncDM), a novel approach to diffusion modeling that operates in the space of pre-trained language model encodings. In contrast to traditionally used embeddings, encodings integrate contextual information. In our approach, we also employ a transformer-based decoder, specifically designed to incorporate context in the token prediction process. We conduct a comprehensive examination of the influence of the encoder, decoder, noise scheduler, and self-conditioning on zero-shot generation. Furthermore, we compare TEncDM with previous approaches on three conditional text generation tasks: QQP, XSum, and Wiki-Auto. The results show that TEncDM exhibits superior performance compared to existing non-autoregressive diffusion models.

TEncDM: Understanding the Properties of the Diffusion Model in the Space of Language Model Encodings

Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a powerful and elegant method for learning complex functions from noisy data with a wide range of applications, including in safety-critical domains. Such applications have two key features: (i) they require rigorous error quantification, and (ii) the noise is often bounded and non-Gaussian due to, e.g., physical constraints. While error bounds for applying GPR in the presence of non-Gaussian noise exist, they tend to be overly restrictive and conservative in practice. In this paper, we provide novel error bounds for GPR under bounded support noise. Specifically, by relying on concentration inequalities and assuming that the latent function has low complexity in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) corresponding to the GP kernel, we derive both probabilistic and deterministic bounds on the error of the GPR. We show that these errors are substantially tighter than existing state-of-the-art bounds and are particularly well-suited for GPR with neural network kernels, i.e., Deep Kernel Learning (DKL). Furthermore, motivated by applications in safety-critical domains, we illustrate how these bounds can be combined with stochastic barrier functions to successfully quantify the safety probability of an unknown dynamical system from finite data. We validate the efficacy of our approach through several benchmarks and comparisons against existing bounds. The results show that our bounds are consistently smaller, and that DKLs can produce error bounds tighter than sample noise, significantly improving the safety probability of control systems.

Error Bounds for Gaussian Process Regression Under Bounded Support Noise with Applications to Safety Certification

In perpetual voting, multiple decisions are made in different moments of time. Taking the history of previous decisions into account allows us to satisfy properties such as proportionality over periods of time. In this paper, we consider the following question: is there a perpetual approval voting method that guarantees that no voter is dissatisfied too many times? We identify a sufficient condition on voter behavior ---which we call 'bounded conflicts' condition---under which a sublinear growth of dissatisfaction is possible. We provide a tight upper bound on the growth of dissatisfaction under bounded conflicts, using techniques from Kolmogorov complexity. We also observe that the approval voting with binary choices mimicks the machine learning setting of prediction with expert advice. This allows us to exemplify a voting method with sublinear guarantees on dissatisfaction under bounded conflicts, based on the standard techniques from prediction with expert advice.

Optimal Bounds for Dissatisfaction in Perpetual Voting

Diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding performance in generative tasks, making them ideal candidates for image editing. Recent studies highlight their ability to apply desired edits effectively by following textual instructions, yet with two key challenges remaining. First, these models struggle to apply multiple edits simultaneously, resulting in computational inefficiencies due to their reliance on sequential processing. Second, relying on textual prompts to determine the editing region can lead to unintended alterations to the image.  We introduce FunEditor, an efficient diffusion model designed to learn atomic editing functions and perform complex edits by aggregating simpler functions. This approach enables complex editing tasks, such as object movement, by aggregating multiple functions and applying them simultaneously to specific areas. Our experiments demonstrate that FunEditor significantly outperforms recent inference-time optimization methods and fine-tuned models, either quantitatively across various metrics or through visual comparisons or both, on complex tasks like object movement and object pasting. In the meantime, with only 4 steps of inference, FunEditor achieves 5--24$\times$ inference speedups over existing popular methods.

FunEditor: Achieving Complex Image Edits via Function Aggregation with Diffusion Models

First-order linear temporal logic (FOLTL) is a flexible and expressive formalism capable of naturally describing complex behaviors and properties. Although the logic is in general highly undecidable, the idea of using it as a specification language for the verification of complex infinite-state systems is appealing. However, a missing piece, which has proved to be an invaluable tool in dealing with other temporal logics, is an automaton model capable of capturing the logic. In this paper we address this issue, by defining and studying such a model, which we call first-order automaton. We define this very general class of automata, and the corresponding notion of regular first-order language, showing their closure under most common language-theoretic operations. We show how they can capture any FOLTL formula over any signature and theory, and provide sufficient conditions for the semi-decidability of their non-emptiness problem. Then, to show the usefulness of the formalism, we prove the decidability of monodic FOLTL, a classic result known in the literature, with a simpler and direct proof.

First-Order Automata

Although distributed machine learning (distributed ML) is gaining considerable attention in the community, prior works have independently looked at instances of distributed ML in either the training or the inference phase. No prior work has examined the combined robustness stemming from distributing both the learning and the inference process.

In this work, we explore, for the first time, the robustness of distributed ML models that are fully heterogeneous in training data, architecture, scheduler, optimizer, and other model parameters. Supported by theory and extensive experimental validation using CIFAR10 and FashionMNIST, we show that such properly distributed ML instantiations achieve across-the-board improvements in accuracy-robustness tradeoffs against state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks that could otherwise not be realized by current ensemble or federated learning instantiations. For instance, our experiments on CIFAR10 show that for CSE, one of the most powerful state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks, our method improves robust accuracy by up to 40%, with a minimal impact on clean task accuracy.

On the Robustness of Distributed Machine Learning Against Transfer Attacks

Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal tokens. Follow-up studies have largely involved altering the tokenization and self-attention modules to better adapt Transformers for addressing special challenges like non-stationarity, channel-wise dependency, and variable correlation in time series. However, we found that the expressive capability of sequence representation is a key factor influencing Transformer performance in time forecasting after investigating several representative methods, where there is an almost linear relationship between sequence representation entropy and mean square error, with more diverse representations performing better. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism with Sequence Complementors and prove feasible from an information theory perspective, where these learnable sequences are able to provide complementary information beyond current input to feed attention. We further enhance the Sequence Complementors via a diversification loss that is theoretically covered. The empirical evaluation of both long-term and short-term forecasting has confirmed its superiority over the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers for Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences

The design of multi-item, multi-bidder auctions involves a delicate balancing act of economic objectives, bidder incentives, and real-world complexities. Efficient auctions, that is, auctions that allocate items to maximize total bidder value, are practically desirable since they promote the most economically beneficial use of resources. Arguably the biggest drawback of efficient auctions, however, is their potential to generate very low revenue. In this work, we show how the auction designer can artificially inject competition into the auction to boost revenue while striving to maintain efficiency. First, we invent a new auction family that enables the auction designer to specify competition in a precise, expressive, and interpretable way. We then introduce a new model of bidder behavior and individual rationality to understand how bidders act when prices are too competitive. Next, under our bidder behavior model, we use our new competitive auction class to derive the globally revenue-optimal efficient auction under two different knowledge models for the auction designer: knowledge of full bidder value distributions and knowledge of bidder value quantiles. Finally, we study a third knowledge model for the auction designer: knowledge of historical bidder valuation data. In this setting we present sample and computationally efficient learning algorithms that find high-revenue probably-efficient competitive auctions from bidder data. Our learning algorithms are instance adaptive and can be run in parallel across bidders, unlike most prior approaches to data-driven auction design.

OGP-Net: Optical Guidance Meets Pixel-Level Contrastive Distillation for Robust Multi-Modal and Missing Modality Segmentation

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Next from AAAI 2025

HyperDefender: A Robust Framework for Hyperbolic GNNs