United States

Federated learning is a decentralized machine learning approach that consists of servers and clients. It protects data privacy during model training by keeping the training data locally in each client. However, the requirement for the server and clients to frequently synchronize the parameters of the model brings a heavy burden to the communication links, especially when the model size has grown drastically in recent years.  Several methods have been proposed to compress the model size by sparsification to reduce the communication overhead, albeit with significant accuracy degradation. In this work, we propose methods to better trade-off between model accuracy and training efficiency in federated learning. Our first proposed method is a novel sparse mask readjustment rule on the server and the second is a parameter-freezing method during training on the clients. Experimental results show that the model accuracy has significantly improved when combining our proposed methods. For example, compared with the previous state-of-the-art methods with the same total amount of communication cost and computation FLOPs, the accuracy increases on average by 4% and 6% in our methods for CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets on ResNet-18, respectively. On the other hand, when targeting the same accuracy, the proposed method can reduce the communication cost by 4-8 times for different datasets with different sparsity levels.

AAAI 2025

An Efficient and Accurate Dynamic Sparse Training Framework Based on Parameter-Freezing

distributed machine learning

federated learning

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.



poster

Existing cross-network node classification (CNNC) methods are mainly proposed for closed-set setting, where the source and the target networks share exactly the same label space. Such a setting is restricted in real-world applications, since target network might contain additional classes that are not present in the source. In this work, we study a more realistic open-set cross-network node classification (O-CNNC) problem, where target network contains all known classes in the source and further contains several target-private classes unseen in the source. Borrowing the concept from open-set domain adaptation, all target-private classes are defined as an additional “unknown” class. To address the challenging O-CNNC problem, we propose an unknown-excluded adversarial graph domain alignment (UAGA) model with a separate-adapt training strategy. Firstly, UAGA roughly separates known classes from unknown class, by training a graph neural network encoder and a neighborhood-aggregation node classifier in an adversarial framework. Then, unknown-excluded adversarial domain alignment is customized to align only target nodes from known classes with the source, while pushing target nodes from unknown class far away from the source. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate significant outperformance of the proposed UAGA over state-of-the-art methods on O-CNNC.

Open-Set Cross-Network Node Classification via Unknown-Excluded Adversarial Graph Domain Alignment

We present a lighting-aware image editing pipeline that, given a portrait image and a text prompt, performs single image relighting. Our model modifies the lighting and color of both the foreground and background to align with the provided text description. The unbounded nature in creativeness of a text allows us to describe the lighting of a scene with any sensory features including temperature, emotion, smell, time, and so on. However, the modeling of such mapping between the unbounded text and lighting is extremely challenging due to the lack of dataset where there exists no scalable data that provides large pairs of text and relighting, and therefore, current text-driven image editing models does not generalize to lighting-specific use cases. We overcome this problem by introducing a novel data synthesis pipeline: First, diverse and creative text prompts that describe the scenes with various lighting are automatically generated under a crafted hierarchy using a large language model (e.g., ChatGPT). A text-guided image generation model creates a lighting image that best matches the text. As a condition of the lighting images, we perform image-based relighting for both foreground and background using a single portrait image or a set of OLAT (One-Light-at-A-Time) images captured from lightstage system. Particularly for the background relighting, we represent the lighting image as a set of point lights and transfer them to other background images. A generative diffusion model learns the synthesized large-scale data with auxiliary task augmentation (e.g., portrait delighting and light positioning) to correlate the latent text and lighting distribution for text-guided portrait relighting. In our experiment, we demonstrate that our model outperforms existing text-guided image generation models, showing high-quality portrait relighting results with a strong generalization to unconstrained scenes.

Text2Relight: Creative Portrait Relighting with Text Guidance

Object counting is pivotal for understanding the composition of scenes. Previously, this task was dominated by class-specific methods, which have gradually evolved into more adaptable class-agnostic strategies. However, these strategies come with their own set of limitations, such as the need for manual exemplar input and multiple passes for multiple categories, resulting in significant inefficiencies. This paper introduces a more practical approach enabling simultaneous counting of multiple object categories using an open-vocabulary framework. Our solution, OmniCount, stands out by using semantic and geometric insights (priors) from pre-trained models to count multiple categories of objects as specified by users, all without additional training. OmniCount distinguishes itself by generating precise object masks and leveraging varied interactive prompts via the Segment Anything Model for efficient counting. To evaluate OmniCount, we created the OmniCount-191 benchmark, a first-of-its-kind dataset with multi-label object counts, including points, bounding boxes, and VQA annotations. Our comprehensive evaluation in OmniCount-191, alongside other leading benchmarks, demonstrates OmniCount's exceptional performance, significantly outpacing existing solutions.

OmniCount: Multi-label Object Counting with Semantic-Geometric Priors

Following formatting instructions to generate well-structured content is a fundamental yet often unmet capability for large language models (LLMs). To study this capability, which we refer to as format faithfulness, we present FormatBench, a comprehensive format-related benchmark. Compared to previous format-related benchmarks, FormatBench involves a greater variety of tasks in terms of application scenes (traditional NLP tasks, creative works, autonomous agency tasks), human-LLM interaction styles (single-turn instruction, multi-turn chat), and format types (inclusion, wrapping, length, coding). Moreover, each task in FormatBench is attached with a format checker program. Extensive experiments on the benchmark reveal that state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs still suffer from severe deficiency in format faithfulness. By virtue of the decidable nature of formats, we propose to Reinforce Format Faithfulness (ReFF) to help LLMs generate formatted output as instructed without compromising general quality. Without any annotated data, ReFF can substantially improve the format faithfulness rate (e.g., from 21.6% in original LLaMA3 to 95.0% on caption segmentation task), while keep the general quality comparable (e.g., from 47.3 to 46.4 in F1 scores). Combined with labeled training data, ReFF can simultaneously improve both format faithfulness (e.g., from 21.6% in original LLaMA3 to 75.5%) and general quality (e.g., from 47.3 to 61.6 in F1 scores). We further offer an interpretability analysis to explain how ReFF improves both format faithfulness and general quality.

ReFF: Reinforcing Format Faithfulness in Language Models across Varied Tasks

Generating Natural Language Explanations (NLEs) for model predictions on medical images, particularly those depicting thoracic pathologies, remains a critical and challenging task. Existing methodologies often struggle due to general models' insufficient domain-specific medical knowledge and privacy concerns associated with retrieval-based augmentation techniques. To address these issues, we propose a novel Vision-Language framework augmented with a Knowledge Graph (KG)-based datastore, which enhances the model's understanding by incorporating additional domain-specific medical knowledge essential for generating accurate and informative NLEs. Our framework employs a KG-based retrieval mechanism that not only improves the precision of the generated explanations but also preserves data privacy by avoiding direct data retrieval. The KG datastore is designed as a plug-and-play module, allowing for seamless integration with various model architectures. We introduce and evaluate three distinct frameworks within this paradigm: KG-LLaVA, which integrates the pre-trained LLaVA model with KG-RAG; Med-XPT, a custom framework combining MedCLIP, a transformer-based projector, and GPT-2; and Bio-LLaVA, which adapts LLaVA by incorporating the Bio-ViT-L vision model. These frameworks are validated on the MIMIC-NLE dataset, where they achieve state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness of KG augmentation in generating high-quality NLEs for thoracic pathologies.

LLaVA Needs More Knowledge: Retrieval Augmented Natural Language Generation with Knowledge Graph for Explaining Thoracic Pathologies

The rapid development of the autonomous driving industry has led to a significant accumulation of autonomous driving data. Consequently, there comes a growing demand for retrieving data to provide specialized optimization. However, directly applying previous image retrieval methods faces several challenges, such as the lack of global feature representation and inadequate text retrieval ability for complex driving scenes. To address these issues, firstly, we propose the BEV-TSR framework which leverages descriptive text as an input to retrieve corresponding scenes in the Bird’s Eye View (BEV) space. Then to facilitate complex scene retrieval with extensive text descriptions, we employ a large language model (LLM) to extract the semantic features of the text inputs and incorporate knowledge graph embeddings to enhance the semantic richness of the language embedding. To achieve feature alignment between the BEV feature and language embedding, we propose Shared Cross-modal Embedding with a set of shared learnable embeddings to bridge the gap between these two modalities, and employ a caption generation task to further enhance the alignment. Furthermore, there lack of well-formed retrieval datasets for effective evaluation. To this end, we establish a multi-level retrieval dataset, nuScenes-Retrieval, based on the widely adopted nuScenes dataset. Experimental results on the multi-level nuScenes-Retrieval show that BEV-TSR achieves state-of-the-art performance, e.g., 85.78% and 87.66% top-1 accuracy on scene-to-test and text-to-scene retrieval respectively. Codes and datasets will be available.

BEV-TSR: Text-Scene Retrieval in BEV Space for Autonomous Driving

Unknown Object Detection (UOD) aims to identify objects of unseen categories, differing from the traditional detection paradigm limited by the closed-world assumption. A key component of UOD is learning a generalized representation, i.e. objectness for both known and unknown categories to distinguish and localize objects from the background in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous methods obtain supervision signals for learning objectness in isolation from either localization or classification information, leading to poor performance for UOD. To address this issue, we propose a transformer-based UOD framework, UN-DETR. Based on this, we craft Instance Presence Score (IPS) to represent the probability of an object's presence. For the purpose of information complementarity, IPS employs a strategy of joint supervised learning, integrating attributes representing general objectness from the positional and the categorical latent space as supervision signals. To enhance IPS learning, we introduce a one-to-many assignment strategy to incorporate more supervision. Then, we propose Unbiased Query Selection to provide premium initial query vectors for the decoder. Additionally, we propose an IPS-guided post-process strategy to filter redundant boxes and correct classification predictions for known and unknown objects. Finally, we pretrain the entire UN-DETR in an unsupervised manner, in order to obtain objectness prior. Our UN-DETR is comprehensively evaluated on multiple UOD and known detection benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and achieving state-of-the-art performance.

UN-DETR: Promoting Objectness Learning via Joint Supervision for Unknown Object Detection

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to continuously learn new classes from a limited set of training samples without forgetting knowledge of previously learned classes. Conventional FSCIL methods typically build a robust feature extractor during the base training session with abundant training samples and subsequently freeze this extractor, only fine-tuning the classifier in subsequent incremental phases. However, current strategies primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting, considering only the relationship between novel and base classes, without paying attention to the specific decision spaces of each class. To address this challenge, we propose a plug-and-play Adaptive Decision Boundary Strategy (ADBS), which is compatible with most FSCIL methods. Specifically, we assign a specific decision boundary to each class and adaptively adjust these boundaries during training to optimally refine the decision
spaces for the classes in each session. Furthermore, to amplify the distinctiveness between classes, we employ a novel inter-class constraint loss that optimizes the decision boundaries and prototypes for each class. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, namely CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200, demonstrate that incorporating our ADBS method with existing FSCIL techniques significantly improves performance, achieving overall state-of-the-art results.

Adaptive Decision Boundary for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Edge labels are typically at various granularity levels owing to the varying preferences of annotators, thus handling the subjectivity of per-pixel labels has been a focal point for edge detection. Previous methods often employ a simple voting strategy to diminish such label uncertainty or impose a strong assumption of labels with a pre-defined distribution, e.g.,~Gaussian. In this work, we unveil that the segment anything model (SAM) provides strong prior knowledge to model the uncertainty in edge labels. Our key insight is that the intermediate SAM features inherently correspond to object edges at various granularities, which reflects different edge options due to uncertainty.
    Therefore, we attempt to align uncertainty with granularity by regressing intermediate SAM features from different layers to object edges at multi-granularity levels. In doing so, the model can fully and explicitly explore diverse ``uncertainties'' in a data-driven fashion.
    Specifically, we inject a lightweight module ($\sim1.5\%$ additional parameters) into the frozen SAM to progressively fuse and adapt its intermediate features to estimate edges from coarse to fine. It is crucial to normalize the granularity level of human edge labels to match their innate uncertainty. For this, we simply perform linear blending to the real edge labels at hand to create pseudo labels with varying granularities. 
    Consequently, our uncertainty-aligned edge detector can flexibly produce edges at any desired granularity (including an optimal one). Thanks to SAM, our model uniquely demonstrates strong generalizability for cross-dataset edge detection. Extensive experimental results on BSDS500, Muticue and NYUDv2 validate our model’s superiority.

SAUGE: Taming SAM for Uncertainty-Aligned Multi-Granularity Edge Detection

As immersive experiences become increasingly popular, panoramic video has garnered significant attention in both research and applications. The high cost associated with capturing panoramic video underscores the need for efficient prompt-based generation methods. Although recent text-to-video (T2V) diffusion techniques have shown potential in standard video generation, they face challenges when applied to panoramic videos due to substantial differences in content and motion patterns. In this paper, we propose PanoDiT, a framework that utilizes the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture to generate panoramic videos from text descriptions. Unlike traditional methods that rely on UNet-based denoising, our method leverages a transformer architecture for denoising, incorporating both temporal and global attention mechanisms. This ensures coherent frame generation and smooth motion transitions, offering distinct advantages in long-horizon generation tasks. To further enhance motion and consistency in the generated videos, we introduce DTM-LoRA and two panoramic-specific losses. Compared to previous methods, our PanoDiT achieves state-of-the-art performance across various evaluation metrics and user study, with code is available in the supplementary material.

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