United States

Alignment-free RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) salient object detection (SOD) aims to achieve robust performance in complex scenes by directly leveraging the complementary information from unaligned visible-thermal image pairs, without requiring manual alignment. However, the labor-intensive process of collecting and annotating image pairs limits the scale of existing benchmarks, hindering the advancement of alignment-free RGB-T SOD. In this paper, we construct a large-scale and high-diversity unaligned RGB-T SOD dataset named UVT20K, comprising 20,000 image pairs, 407 scenes, and 1256 object categories. All samples are collected from real-world scenarios with various challenges, such as low illumination, image clutter, complex salient objects, and so on. To support the exploration for further research, each sample in UVT20K is annotated with a comprehensive set of ground truths, including saliency masks, scribbles, boundaries, and challenge attributes. In addition, we propose a Progressive Correlation Network (PCNet), which models inter- and intra-modal correlations on the basis of explicit alignment to achieve accurate predictions in unaligned image pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two unaligned three weakly aligned three aligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code will be available to facilitate research in this field.

AAAI 2025

Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection: A Large-Scale Dataset and Progressive Correlation Network

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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.



Distinguishing spatial relations is a basic part of human cognition which requires fine-grained perception on cross-instance.  
Although benchmarks like MME, MMBench and SEED  comprehensively have evaluated various capabilities which already include visual spatial reasoning(VSR).
There is still a lack of sufficient quantity and quality evaluation and optimization datasets for Vision Large Language Models(VLLMs) specifically targeting visual positional reasoning. 
To handle this, we first diagnosed current VLLMs with the VSR dataset and proposed a unified test set.
We found current VLLMs to exhibit a contradiction of over-sensitivity to language instructions and under-sensitivity to visual positional information.
By expanding the original benchmark from two aspects of tunning data and model structure, we mitigated this phenomenon. 
To our knowledge, we expanded spatially positioned image data controllably using diffusion models for the first time and integrated original visual encoding(CLIP) with other 3 powerful visual encoders(SigLIP, SAM and DINO).
After conducting combination experiments on scaling data and models, we obtained a VLLM VSR Expert(VSRE) that not only generalizes better to different instructions but also accurately distinguishes differences in visual positional information. 
VSRE achieved over a 27\% increase in accuracy on the VSR test set. 
It becomes a performant VLLM on the position reasoning of both the VSR dataset and relevant subsets of other evaluation benchmarks. 
We open-sourced the expanded model with data and hope our work will inspire and accelerate advancements in VLLM on VSR learning.

Expand VSR Benchmark for VLLM to Expertize in Spatial Rules

Audio-driven talking head synthesis is a critical task in digital human modeling. While recent advances using diffusion models and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have improved visual quality, they often require substantial computational resources, limiting practical deployment. We present a novel framework for audio-driven talking head synthesis, namely it Hierarchically Controlled Deformable 3D Gaussians (HiCoDe), which achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced computational costs. Our key contribution is a hierarchical control strategy that effectively bridges the gap between sparse audio features and dense 3D Gaussian point clouds. Specifically, this strategy comprises two control levels: i) coarse-level control based on a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and ii) fine-level control using facial landmarks. Extensive experiments on the HDTF dataset and additional test sets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in visual quality, facial landmark accuracy, and audio-visual synchronization while being more computationally efficient in both training and inference.

Hierarchically Controlled Deformable 3D Gaussians for Talking Head Synthesis

Human preference alignment can significantly enhance the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, collecting high-quality preference data remains a costly endeavor. One promising solution is the self-evolution strategy, which involves iterative training models on their generated data. Current multimodal self-evolution techniques, nevertheless, still need human- or GPT-annotated questions. Some methods even require extra models or ground truth answers to construct preference data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel multimodal self-evolution framework that empowers the model to autonomously generate high-quality questions and answers using only unannotated images. First, during the question generation phrase, we introduce an image-driven self-questioning mechanism. This mechanism allows the model to generate questions and then assess their relevance and answerability in relation to the image content. If a question is found to be irrelevant or unanswerable, the model regenerates it to ensure alignment with the image. This process establishes a solid foundation for subsequent answer generation and optimization. Second, while generating answers, we design an answer self-enhancement technique to boost the discriminative power of answers. We begin by captioning the images and then use the descriptions to enhance the generated answers. Additionally, we utilize corrupted images to generate rejected answers, thereby forming distinct preference pairs for effective optimization. Finally, in the optimization step, we incorporate an image content alignment loss function alongside the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) loss to mitigate hallucinations. This function maximizes the likelihood of the above generated descriptions in order to constrain the model's attention to the image content. As a result, model can generate more accurate and reliable outputs. Experiments demonstrate that our framework is competitively compared with previous methods that utilize external information, paving the way for more efficient and scalable MLLMs.

Beyond Human Data: Aligning Multimodal Large Language Models by Iterative Self-Evolution

AI becomes increasingly vital for telecom industry, as the burgeoning complexity of upcoming mobile communication networks places immense pressure on network operators. While there is a growing consensus that intelligent network self-driving holds the key, it heavily relies on expert experience and knowledge extracted from network data. In an effort to facilitate convenient analytics and utilization of wireless big data, we introduce the concept of knowledge graphs into the field of mobile networks, giving rise to what we term as wireless data knowledge graphs (WDKGs). However, the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of communication networks renders manual WDKG construction both prohibitively costly and error-prone, presenting a fundamental challenge. In this context, we propose an unsupervised data-and-model driven graph structure learning (DMGSL) framework, aimed at automating WDKG refinement and updating. Tackling WDKG heterogeneity involves stratifying the network into homogeneous layers and refining it at a finer granularity. Furthermore, to capture WDKG dynamics effectively, we segment the network into static snapshots based on the coherence time and harness the power of recurrent neural networks to incorporate historical information. Extensive experiments conducted on the established WDKG demonstrate the superiority of the DMGSL over the baselines, particularly in terms of node classification accuracy.

Fine-Grained Graph Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Mobile Networks with Attentive Fusion and Contrastive Learning

In radar-camera 3D object detection, the radar point clouds are sparse and noisy, which causes the difficulty in fusing camera and radar modalities. To solve it, we introduce a novel query-based detection method named Radar-Camera Transformer (RCTrans). Specifically, we first design a Radar Dense Encoder to enrich the sparse valid radar tokens, then concatenate them with the image tokens. By doing this, we can fully explore the 3D information of each interest region and reduce the interference of empty tokens during the fusing stage. We then design a Pruning Sequential Decoder to predict 3D boxes based on the obtained tokens and random initialized queries. To alleviate the effect of elevation ambiguity in the radar point clouds, we gradually locate the position of object via a sequential fusion structure. It helps to get more precise and flexible correspondences between tokens and queries. A pruning training strategy is adopted in the decoder, which can save much time during inference and inhibit the queries from losing the their distinctiveness. Extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset prove the superiority of our method, and we also achieve new state-of-the-art radar-camera 3D detection results.

RCTrans: Radar-Camera Transformer via Radar Densifier and Sequential Decoder for 3D Object Detection

In this work, we address unsupervised temporal action segmentation, which segments a set of long, untrimmed videos into semantically meaningful segments that are consistent across videos. While recent approaches combine representation learning and clustering in a single step for this task, they do not cope with large variations within temporal segments of the same class. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method, termed Hierarchical Vector Quantization (HVQ), that consists of two subsequent vector quantization modules. This results in a hierarchical clustering where the additional subclusters cover the variations within a cluster. We demonstrate that our approach captures the distribution of segment lengths much better than the state-of-the-art. To this end, we introduce a new metric based on the Jensen-Shannon Distance (JSD) for unsupervised temporal action segmentation.  
We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, namely Breakfast, YouTube Instructional and IKEA ASM. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of F1 score, recall and JSD.  
Our code will be made available upon acceptance of the paper.

Hierarchical Vector Quantization for Unsupervised Action Segmentation

With the rapid advancement of 3D scanning technology, point clouds have become a crucial data type in computer vision and machine learning. However, learning robust representations for point clouds remains a significant challenge due to their irregularity and sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Manifold Regularization (DMR) framework that makes full use of the properties of positive and negative curvature in manifolds to improve the representation of point clouds. Specifically, we leverage DMR based on hyperbolic and hyperspherical manifolds to address the limitations of traditional single-manifold regularization techniques, including inadequate generalization ability and adaptability to data diversity, as well as the difficulty of capturing complex relationships between data. To begin, we utilize the tree-like structure of the hyperbolic manifold to model the part-whole hierarchical relationships within point clouds. This allows for a more comprehensive representation of the data, improving the model's capability to understand complex shapes. Additionally, we construct positive samples through topological consistency augmentation and employ contrastive learning techniques in the hyperspherical manifold to capture more discriminative features within the data. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional supervised learning and single-manifold regularization techniques in point cloud analysis. Specifically, for shape classification, DMR achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance with 94.8% Overall Accuracy (OA) on ModelNet40 and 90.7% OA on ScanObjectNN, surpassing the recent SOTA model without increasing the baseline parameters.

Dual Manifold Regularization Steered Robust Representation Learning for Point Cloud Analysis

Most techniques approach the problem of image forgery localization as a binary segmentation task, training neural networks to label original areas as 0 and forged areas as 1. In contrast, we tackle this issue from a more fundamental perspective by partitioning images according to their originating sources. To this end, we propose Segment Any Forged Image Region (SAFIRE), which solves forgery localization using point prompting. Each point on an image is used to segment the source region containing itself. This allows us to partition images into multiple source regions, a capability achieved for the first time. Additionally, rather than memorizing certain forgery traces, SAFIRE naturally focuses on uniform characteristics within each source region. This approach leads to more stable and effective learning, achieving superior performance in both the new task and the traditional binary forgery localization. Code will be available.

SAFIRE: Segment Any Forged Image Region

Recently, transformer-based methods have been introduced to estimate 3D human pose from multiple views by aggregating the spatial-temporal information of human joints to achieve the lifting of 2D to 3D. However, previous approaches cannot model the inter-frame correspondence of each view's joint individually, nor can they directly consider all view interactions at each time, leading to insufficient learning of multi-view associations. To address this issue, we propose a Spatial-View-Temporal transformer (SVTformer) to decouple spatial-view-temporal information in sequential order for correlation learning and model dependencies between them in a local-to-global manner. SVTformer includes an attended Spatial-View-Temporal (SVT) patch embedding to attentively capture the local features of the input poses and stacked SVT encoders to extract global spatial-view-temporal dependencies progressively. Specifically, SVT encoders perform three reconstructions sequentially to attended features with the learning through view decoupling for temporal-enhanced spatial correlation, temporal decoupling for spatial-enhanced view correlation, and another view decoupling for spatial-enhanced temporal relationship. This decoupling-coupling-decoupling multi-view scheme enables us to alternatively model the inter-joint spatial relationships, cross-view dependencies, and temporal motion associations. We evaluate the proposed SVTformer on three popular 3D HPE datasets, and it yields state-of-the-art performance. It effectively deals with ill-posed problems and enhances the accuracy of 3D human pose estimation. Please refer to the supplementary material for our code.

SVTformer: Spatial-View-Temporal Transformer for Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation

Story visualization has gained increasing attention in artificial intelligence. However, existing methods still struggle with maintaining a balance between character identity preservation and text-semantics alignment, largely due to a lack of detailed semantic modeling of the story scene. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph, namely Character Graph (**CG**), which comprehensively represents various story-related knowledge, including the characters, the attributes related to characters, and the relationship between characters.
We then introduce StoryWeaver, an image generator that achieve Customization via Character Graph (**C-CG**), capable of consistent story visualization with rich text semantics. To further improve the multi-character generation performance, we incorporate knowledge-enhanced spatial guidance (**KE-SG**) into StoryWeaver to precisely inject character semantics into generation. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted using a new benchmark called TBC-Bench. The experiments confirm that our StoryWeaver excels not only in creating vivid visual story plots but also in accurately conveying character identities across various scenarios with considerable storage efficiency, *e.g.*, achieving an average increase of +9.03\% DINO-I and +13.44\% CLIP-T. Furthermore, ablation experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed module. Codes and datasets are released anonymously at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StoryWeaver-C8A4.

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