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With the introduction of vision foundation models, in-context segmentation has drawn more attention. Its goal is to segment objects using given reference images. Most existing approaches adopt metric learning or masked image modeling to build the correlation between visual prompts and input image queries. This work explores this problem from a new perspective, using one representative generation model, the latent diffusion model (LDM). We unlock LDMs&#39; in-context segmentation capability and conduct comprehensive ablation studies to explore the effects of different designs. Specifically, our study is conducted from three perspectives: instruction extraction, output alignment, and meta-architectures. We design a two-stage masking strategy to prevent the leakage of interfering information into instructions. In addition, we propose an augmented pseudo-masking target to compel the model to predict without forgetting the original images. Moreover, we build a new and fair in-context segmentation benchmark that includes both image and video datasets. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating comparable or even stronger results than previous specialist or visual foundation models. We hope our explorations and findings can inspire people to unify the field of segmentation and generation. Code will be available.

AAAI 2025

Explore In-Context Segmentation via Latent Diffusion Models

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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

With the introduction of vision foundation models, in-context segmentation has drawn more attention. Its goal is to segment objects using given reference images. Most existing approaches adopt metric learning or masked image modeling to build the correlation between visual prompts and input image queries. This work explores this problem from a new perspective, using one representative generation model, the latent diffusion model (LDM). We unlock LDMs' in-context segmentation capability and conduct comprehensive ablation studies to explore the effects of different designs. Specifically, our study is conducted from three perspectives: instruction extraction, output alignment, and meta-architectures. We design a two-stage masking strategy to prevent the leakage of interfering information into instructions. In addition, we propose an augmented pseudo-masking target to compel the model to predict without forgetting the original images. Moreover, we build a new and fair in-context segmentation benchmark that includes both image and video datasets. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating comparable or even stronger results than previous specialist or visual foundation models. We hope our explorations and findings can inspire people to unify the field of segmentation and generation. Code will be available.

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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.



Reconstructing high-quality 3D models from sparse 2D images has garnered significant attention in computer vision. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained prominence due to its explicit representation with efficient training speed and real-time rendering capabilities. However, existing methods still heavily depend on accurate camera poses for reconstruction. Although some recent approaches attempt to train 3DGS models without the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) preprocessing from monocular video datasets, these methods suffer from prolonged training times, making them impractical for many applications.

In this paper, we present an efficient framework that operates without any depth or matching model. Our approach initially uses SfM to quickly obtain rough camera poses within seconds, and then refines these poses by leveraging the dense representation in 3DGS. This framework effectively addresses the issue of long training times. Additionally, we integrate the densification process with joint refinement and propose a coarse-to-fine frequency-aware densification to reconstruct different levels of details. This approach prevents camera pose estimation from being trapped in local minima or drifting due to high-frequency signals. Our method significantly reduces training time from hours to minutes while achieving more accurate novel view synthesis and camera pose estimation compared to previous methods.

KeyGS: A Keyframe-Centric Gaussian Splatting Method for Monocular Image Sequences

Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated great potential in the field of adversarial robustness, where DM-based defense methods can achieve superior defense capability without adversarial training. However, they all require huge computational costs due to the usage of large-scale pre-trained DMs, making it difficult to conduct full evaluation under strong attacks and compare with traditional CNN-based methods. Simply reducing the network size and timesteps in DMs could significantly harm the image generation quality, which invalidates previous frameworks. To alleviate this issue, we redesign the diffusion framework from generating high-quality images to predicting distinguishable image labels. Specifically, we employ an image translation framework to learn many-to-one mapping from input samples to designed orthogonal image labels. Based on this framework, we introduce an efficient Image-to-Image diffusion classifier with a pruned U-Net structure and reduced diffusion timesteps. Besides the framework, we redesign the optimization objective of DMs to fit the target of image classification, where a new classification loss is incorporated in the DM-based image translation framework to distinguish the generated label from those of other classes. We conduct sufficient evaluations of the proposed classifier under various attacks on popular benchmarks. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves better adversarial robustness with fewer computational costs than DM-based and CNN-based methods.

Efficient Image-to-Image Diffusion Classifier for Adversarial Robustness

Multi-label Learning with Partial Labels (ML-PL) learns from training data, where each sample is annotated with part of positive labels while leaving the rest of positive labels unannotated. Existing methods mainly focus on extending multi-label losses to estimate unannotated labels, further inducing a missing-robust network. However, training with single network could lead to confirmation bias (i.e., the model tends to confirm its mistakes). To tackle this issue, we propose a novel learning paradigm termed Co-Label Selection (CLS), where two networks feed forward all data and cooperate in a co-training manner for critical label selection. Different from traditional co-training based methods that networks select confident samples for each other, we start from a new perspective that two networks are encouraged to remove false-negative labels while keep training samples reserved. Meanwhile, considering the extreme positive-negative label imbalance in ML-PL that leads the model to focus on negative labels, we enforce the model to concentrate on positive labels by abandoning non-informative negative labels to alleviate such issue. By shifting the cooperation strategy from "Sample Selection'' to "Label Selection'', CLS avoids directly dropping samples and reserves training data in most extent, thus enhancing the utilization of supervised signals and the generalization of the learning model. Empirical results performed on various multi-label datasets demonstrate that our CLS is significantly superior to other state-of-the-art methods.

Addressing Multi-Label Learning with Partial Labels: From Sample Selection to Label Selection

Video-based human pose estimation has long been a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. Previous studies focus on spatio-temporal modeling through the enhancement of architecture design and optimization strategies. However, they overlook the causal relationships in the joints, leading to models that may be overly tailored and thus estimate poorly to challenging scenes. Therefore, adequate causal reasoning capability, coupled with good interpretability of model, are both indispensable and prerequisite for achieving reliable results. In this paper, we pioneer a causal perspective on pose estimation and introduce a causal-inspired multitask learning framework, consisting of two stages. \textit{In the first stage}, we try to endow the model with causal spatio-temporal modeling ability by introducing two self-supervision auxiliary tasks. Specifically, these auxiliary tasks enable the network to infer challenging keypoints based on observed keypoint information, thereby imbuing causal reasoning capabilities into the model and making it robust to challenging scenes. \textit{In the second stage}, we argue that not all feature tokens contribute equally to pose estimation. Prioritizing causal (keypoint-relevant) tokens is crucial to achieve reliable results, which could improve the interpretability of the model. To this end, we propose a Token Causal Importance Selection module to identify the causal tokens and non-causal tokens (\textit{e.g.}, background and objects). Additionally, non-causal tokens could provide potentially beneficial cues but may be redundant. We further introduce a non-causal tokens clustering module to merge the similar non-causal tokens. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale benchmark datasets. Our implementation is anonymously released and available in the supplementary material.

Causal-Inspired Multitask Learning for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation

Domain Generalization (DG) has been recently explored to improve the generalizability of point cloud classification (PCC) models toward unseen domains. However, they often suffer from limited receptive fields or quadratic complexity due to the use of convolution neural networks or vision Transformers. In this paper, we present the first work that studies the generalizability of state space models (SSMs) in DG PCC and find that directly applying SSMs into DG PCC will encounter several challenges: the inherent topology of the point cloud tends to be disrupted and leads to noise accumulation during the serialization stage. Besides, the lack of designs in domain-agnostic feature learning and data scanning will introduce unanticipated domain-specific information into the 3D sequence data. To this end, we propose a novel framework, PointDGMamba, that excels in strong generalizability toward unseen domains and has the advantages of global receptive fields and efficient linear complexity. PointDGMamba consists of three innovative components: Masked Sequence Denoising (MSD), Sequence-wise Cross-domain Feature Aggregation (SCFA), and Dual-level Domain Scanning (DDS). In particular, MSD selectively masks out the noised point tokens of the point cloud sequences, SCFA introduces cross-domain but same-class point cloud features to encourage the model to learn how to extract more generalized features. DDS includes intra-domain scanning and cross-domain scanning to facilitate information exchange between features. In addition, we propose a new and more challenging benchmark PointDG-3to1 for multi-domain generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of PointDGMamba.

PointDGMamba: Domain Generalization of Point Cloud Classification via Generalized State Space Model

This paper focuses on face stylization with a single artistic target. Existing works for this task often fail to retain the source content while achieving geometry variation. Here, we present a novel StyO model, i.e., Stylize the face in only One-shot, to solve the above problem. In particular, StyO exploits a disentanglement and recombination strategy. It first disentangles the content and style of source and target images into identifiers, which are then recombined in a cross manner to derive the stylized face image. In this way, StyO decomposes complex images into independent and specific attributes, and simplifies one-shot face stylization as the combination of different attributes from input images, thus producing results better matching face geometry of target image and content of source one. StyO is implemented with latent diffusion models (LDM) and composed of two key modules: 1) Identifier Disentanglement Learner (IDL) for disentanglement phase. It represents identifiers as contrastive text prompts, i.e. positive and negative descriptions. And it introduces a novel triple reconstruction loss to fine-tune the pre-trained LDM for encoding style and content into corresponding identifiers; 2) Fine-graind Content Controller (FCC) for recombination phase. It recombines disentangled identifiers from IDL to form an augmented text prompt for generating stylized faces. In addition, FCC also constrains the cross-attention maps of latent and text features to preserve source face details in results. The extensive evaluation shows that StyO produces high-quality images on numerous paintings of various styles and outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Code will be released.

StyO: Stylize Your Face in Only One-Shot

We propose DrivingForward, a feed-forward Gaussian Splatting model that reconstructs driving scenes from flexible surround-view input. Driving scene images from vehicle-mounted cameras are typically sparse, with limited overlap, and the movement of the vehicle further complicates the acquisition of camera extrinsics. To tackle these challenges and achieve real-time reconstruction, we jointly train a pose network, a depth network, and a Gaussian network to predict the Gaussian primitives that represent the driving scenes. The pose network and depth network determine the position of the Gaussian primitives in a self-supervised manner, without using depth ground truth and camera extrinsics during training. The Gaussian network independently predicts primitive parameters from each input image, including covariance, opacity, and spherical harmonics coefficients. At the inference stage, our model can achieve feed-forward reconstruction from flexible multi-frame surround-view input. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art feed-forward and scene-optimized reconstruction methods in terms of reconstruction. The code is available upon acceptance.

DrivingForward: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Driving Scene Reconstruction from Flexible Surround-view Input

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as effective approaches for both conditional and unconditional generation. Still conditional generation is based on either a specific training of a conditional model or classifier guidance, which requires training  a noise-dependent classifier, even when a classifier for uncorrupted data is given. We propose a method that, given a pre-trained unconditional score-based generative model, samples from the conditional distribution under arbitrary logical constraints, without requiring additional training. Differently from other zero-shot techniques, that rather aim at generating valid conditional samples, our method is designed for approximating the true conditional distribution. Firstly, we show how to manipulate the learned score in order to sample from an un-normalized distribution conditional on a user-defined constraint. Then, we define a flexible and numerically stable neuro-symbolic framework for encoding soft logical constraints. Combining these two ingredients we obtain a general, but approximate, conditional sampling algorithm. We further developed effective heuristics aimed at improving the approximation. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our approach in approximating conditional distributions for various types of constraints and data: tabular data, images and time series.

Zero-Shot Conditioning of Score-Based Diffusion Models by Neuro-Symbolic Constraints

Face recognition has made remarkable strides, driven by the expanding scale of datasets, advancements in various backbone and discriminative losses. However, face recognition performance is heavily affected by the label noise, especially closed-set noise. While numerous studies have focused on handling label noise, addressing closed-set noise still poses challenges. This paper identifies this challenge as training isn't robust to noise at the early-stage training, and necessitating an appropriate learning strategy for samples with low confidence, which are often misclassified as closed-set noise in later training phases. To address these issues, we propose a new framework to stabilize the training at early stages and split the samples into clean, ambiguous and noisy groups which are devised with separate training strategies. Initially, we employ generated auxiliary closed-set noisy samples to enable the model to identify noisy data at the early stages of training. Subsequently, we introduce how samples are split into clean, ambiguous and noisy groups by their similarity to the positive and nearest negative centers. Then we perform label fusion for ambiguous samples by incorporating accumulated model predictions. Finally, we apply label smoothing within the closed set, adjusting the label to a point between the nearest negative class and the initially assigned label. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method on mainstream face datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results.

RepFace: Refining Closed-Set Noise with Progressive Label Correction for Face Recognition

Accurate prediction of 3D semantic occupancy from 2D visual images is vital in enabling autonomous agents to comprehend their surroundings for planning and navigation. State-of-the-art methods typically employ fully supervised approaches, necessitating a huge labeled dataset acquired through expensive LiDAR sensors and meticulous voxel-wise labeling by human annotators. The resource-intensive nature of this annotating process significantly hampers the application and scalability of these methods. We introduce a novel semi-supervised framework to alleviate the dependency on densely annotated data. Our approach leverages 2D foundation models to generate essential 3D scene geometric and semantic cues, facilitating a more efficient training process. Our framework exhibits notable properties: (1) Generalizability, applicable to various 3D semantic scene completion approaches, including 2D-3D lifting and 3D-2D transformer methods. (2) Effectiveness, as demonstrated through experiments on SemanticKITTI and NYUv2, wherein our method achieves up to 85\% of the fully-supervised performance using only 10\% labeled data. This approach not only reduces the cost and labor associated with data annotation but also demonstrates the potential for broader adoption in camera-based systems for 3D semantic occupancy prediction.

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