United States

Controllable image semantic understanding tasks, such as captioning or segmentation, necessitate users to input a prompt (e.g., text or bounding boxes) to predict a unique outcome, presenting challenges such as high-cost prompt input or limited information output. This paper introduces a new task ``Image Collaborative Segmentation and Captioning&#39;&#39; (SegCaptioning), which aims to translate a straightforward prompt, like a bounding box around an object, into diverse semantic interpretations represented by (caption, masks) pairs, allowing flexible result selection by users. This task poses significant challenges, including accurately capturing a user&#39;s intention from a minimal prompt while simultaneously predicting multiple semantically aligned caption words and masks. Technically, we propose a novel Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model that leverages structured scene graph features for correlated mask-caption prediction. Initially, we introduce a Prompt-Centric Scene Graph Adaptor to map a user&#39;s prompt to a scene graph, effectively capturing his intention. Subsequently, we employ a diffusion process incorporating a Scene Graph Guided Bimodal Transformer to predict correlated caption-mask pairs by uncovering intricate correlations between them. To ensure accurate alignment, we design a Multi-Entities Contrastive Learning loss to explicitly align visual and textual entities by considering inter-modal similarity, resulting in well-aligned caption-mask pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate that SGDiff achieves superior performance in SegCaptioning, yielding promising results for both captioning and segmentation tasks with minimal prompt input.

AAAI 2025

SGDiff: Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model for Image Collaborative SegCaptioning

language and vision

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.



Controllable image semantic understanding tasks, such as captioning or segmentation, necessitate users to input a prompt (e.g., text or bounding boxes) to predict a unique outcome, presenting challenges such as high-cost prompt input or limited information output. This paper introduces a new task ``Image Collaborative Segmentation and Captioning'' (SegCaptioning), which aims to translate a straightforward prompt, like a bounding box around an object, into diverse semantic interpretations represented by (caption, masks) pairs, allowing flexible result selection by users. This task poses significant challenges, including accurately capturing a user's intention from a minimal prompt while simultaneously predicting multiple semantically aligned caption words and masks. Technically, we propose a novel Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model that leverages structured scene graph features for correlated mask-caption prediction. Initially, we introduce a Prompt-Centric Scene Graph Adaptor to map a user's prompt to a scene graph, effectively capturing his intention. Subsequently, we employ a diffusion process incorporating a Scene Graph Guided Bimodal Transformer to predict correlated caption-mask pairs by uncovering intricate correlations between them. To ensure accurate alignment, we design a Multi-Entities Contrastive Learning loss to explicitly align visual and textual entities by considering inter-modal similarity, resulting in well-aligned caption-mask pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate that SGDiff achieves superior performance in SegCaptioning, yielding promising results for both captioning and segmentation tasks with minimal prompt input.

poster

The end-to-end automated design of machine learning (ML) pipelines significantly reduces the workload for data scientists and democratizes ML for non-experts. Evolutionary algorithm (EA)-based automated ML (AutoML) systems, a prominent category of AutoML, often face inefficiencies due to the costly fitness evaluation of candidate ML pipelines. Although surrogate models have been employed to approximate the true performance of pipelines more quickly, a key challenge remains in effectively bridging the semantic gap between the heterogeneous features of datasets and pipelines. To address this issue, we propose ADELA, a novel accompanying surrogate-based optimization strategy that accelerates EA-based AutoML while retaining the performance of the resulting pipelines. ADELA operates in two phases: Offline, leveraging a high-quality curated pipeline corpus to meta-learn an accompanying surrogate model; and Online, selecting the accompanying pipeline and using the learned model to predict the performance of evaluation pipelines instead of executing them. The accompanying mechanism effectively mitigates the semantic gap between datasets and pipelines, enabling ADELA to reduce computation times by an average of 73.66\% while retaining 98.78\% of the final pipeline performance, as demonstrated in extensive experimental evaluations. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ADELA-0534.

ADELA: Accelerating Evolutionary Design of Machine Learning Pipelines with the Accompanying Surrogate Model

Heterogeneous graphs, which are common in real-world downstream tasks, have recently sparked a wave of research interest. The performance of end-to-end heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) greatly relies on supervised training for specific tasks. To reduce the labeling cost, the "pretrain-finetune" paradigm has been widely adopted, but it leads to a knowledge gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks. In an effort to address this gap, the "pretrain-prompt" paradigm has emerged as a promising approach. This involves fine-tuning randomly initialized learnable vectors in downstream tasks. However, this approach may result in an insufficient representation of downstream task features. Existing techniques for heterogeneous graph prompting restructure the heterogeneous graph to align with the homogeneous graph prompting scheme. This can potentially introduce the same limitations as homogeneous graph prompt learning. In this paper, we propose HePa, short for Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for all-level classification tasks. It not only includes a unified prompt template-graph adapted for heterogeneous graphs but also introduces a novel pre-prompt token optimized during the pre-training phase to convey task information downstream. With these designs, HePa can complete all levels of classification tasks toward few-shot scenarios while activating in-context learning. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis of HePa on three benchmark datasets.

HePa: Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for All-Level Classification Tasks

Social Intelligence Queries (Social-IQ) serve as the primary multimodal benchmark for evaluating a model's social intelligence level. While impressive multiple-choice question (MCQ) accuracy is achieved by current solutions, increasing evidence shows that they are largely, and in some cases entirely, dependent on language modality, overlooking visual context. Additionally, the closed-set nature further prevents the exploration of whether and to what extent the reasoning path behind selection is correct. To address these limitations, we propose the Visually Explainable and Grounded Artificial Social Intelligence (VEGAS) model.  As a generative multimodal model, VEGAS leverages open-ended answering to provide explainable responses, which enhances the clarity and evaluation of reasoning paths. To enable visually grounded answering, we propose a novel sampling strategy to provide the model with more relevant visual frames. We then enhance the model's interpretation of these frames through Generalist Instruction Fine-Tuning (GIFT), which aims to: i) learn multimodal-language transformations for fundamental emotional social traits, and ii) establish multimodal joint reasoning capabilities.  Extensive experiments, comprising modality ablation, open-ended assessments, and supervised MCQ evaluations, consistently show that VEGAS effectively utilizes visual information in reasoning to produce correct and also credible answers. We expect this work to offer a new perspective on Social-IQ and advance the development of human-like Social-AI. Code will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VEGAS-3D3D/.

VEGAS: Towards Visually Explainable and Grounded Artificial Social Intelligence

While recent works have achieved great success on one-shot 3D common object generation, high quality and fidelity 3D head generation from a single image remains a great challenge. Previous text-based methods for generating 3D heads were limited by text descriptions and image-based methods struggled to produce high-quality head geometry. To handle this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework, ID-Sculpt, to generate high-quality 3D heads while preserving their identities. Our work incorporates the identity information of the portrait image into three parts: 1) geometry initialization, 2) geometry sculpting, and 3) texture generation stages. Given a reference portrait image, we first align the identity features with text features to realize ID-aware guidance enhancement, which contains the control signals representing the face information. We then use the canny map, ID features of the portrait image, and a pre-trained text-to-normal/depth diffusion model to generate ID-aware geometry supervision and 3D-GAN inversion is employed to generate ID-aware geometry initialization. 
Furthermore, with the ability to inject identity information into 3D head generation, we use ID-aware guidance to calculate ID-aware Score Distillation (ISD) for geometry sculpting. For texture generation, we adopt the ID Consistent Texture Inpainting and Refinement which progressively expands the view for texture inpainting to obtain an initialization UV texture map. We then use the id-aware guidance to provide image-level supervision for noisy multi-view images to obtain a refined texture map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can generate high-quality 3D heads with accurate geometry and texture from a single in-the-wild portrait image.

ID-Sculpt: ID-aware 3D Head Generation from Single In-the-wild Portrait Image

Medical image segmentation often faces the dual challenges of limited annotations and domain shifts, further complicated by degraded images in practical scenarios. Traditional methods tend to underperform when these issues occur simultaneously, as they are typically designed for specific tasks. To address this, we propose a unified framework that effectively handles limited annotations and domain shifts while also managing both clean and degraded images during inference. Overcoming these challenges requires focusing on three critical aspects: First, the model must be robust to various noise conditions. Second, it should excel at capturing domain-invariant features. Third, it should effectively utilize unlabeled data. We propose three major components in our approach to tackle these challenges. First, the Wavelet-based Cross-Component Exchange (WCCE) swaps high-frequency wavelet components between labeled and unlabeled images to enhance robustness. Second, we employ a diffusion VNet architecture with a reweighting mechanism to capture domain-invariant features. Finally, we utilize Cross-Decoder Pseudo (CDP) training to effectively leverage unlabeled data. Evaluations on three publicly available medical datasets and across four types of degraded image scenarios demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, consistently delivering superior performance across varying image qualities. Our approach not only addresses annotation scarcity and domain shift but also effectively manages noisy and blurred conditions, setting a new benchmark in medical image segmentation.

A Unified Degradation-Robust Approach to SSL and UDA for 3D Medical Images

Current research on adversarial attacks mainly focuses on RGB trackers, with no existing methods for attacking RGB-T cross-modal trackers. To fill this gap and overcome its challenges, we propose a coarse-to-fine cross-modal adversarial patch generation framework, achieving cross-modal stealth. On the one hand, we design a coarse-to-fine architecture grounded in the latent space to progressively and precisely uncover the vulnerabilities of RGB-T trackers. On the other hand, we introduce a correlation-breaking loss that disrupts the modal coupling within the tracker, spanning from the pixel to the semantic level. These two design elements ensure that the proposed method can overcome the obstacles posed by cross-modal information complementarity in implementing attacks. Furthermore, to enhance the reliable application of the proposed adversarial patches in the real world, we develop a point-tracking-based reprojection strategy that effectively mitigates performance degradation caused by multi-angle distortion during imaging. Extensive comparative and generalization experiments demonstrate the superiority of our attack method.

Cross-Modal Stealth: A Coarse-to-Fine Attack Framework for RGB-T Tracker

Existing Salient Object Ranking (SOR) aims to infer ranking of salient objects based on their saliency degree. However, it tends to only focus on salient objects while neglecting non-salient ones. This coarse-grained ranking limits the performance of downstream tasks. For instance, in image retrieval tasks, focusing solely on the relationship between salient objects is insufficient for achieving fine-grained scene analysis, which may result in retrieved results that do not satisfy user requirements. High-quality retrieval requires fine-grained analysis, making it essential to rank non-salient objects. Based on this need, we propose a new task: Fine-grained Object Importance Ranking in 360$^{\rm o}$ Scenes (FOIR-360), which focus on predicting the relative importance of "ALL objects'' at the instance-level. Our task takes into account all objects, allowing us to refine the original "coarse-grained'' to a "fine-grained'' level. Currently, the main challenge for this new task is the lack of supervised data for model training or even for model testing. Therefore, we propose a novel weakly supervised method to address the shortage of datasets. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing suitable annotation protocol for this new task. The main reason is that annotating fine-grained rankings is extremely difficult, especially in panoramic scenes that contain numerous instances where even humans are unable to determine which one is more important than others. As the first attempt, we introduce a new annotation protocol designed to highlight the ranking of objects that are non-salient yet still important. Based on this protocol, we construct the first fine-grained 360Rank dataset. In summary, all these new task, weakly supervised method, annotation protocol, and dataset have the potential to drive advancements in the field. Both the code and dataset are publicly available at [https://github.com/noname965/FOIR-360](https://github.com/noname965/FOIR-360).

Fine-Grained Perception in Panoramic Scenes: A Novel Task, Dataset, and Method for Object Importance Ranking

Multi-shape matching is a central problem in various applications of computer vision and graphics, where cycle consistency constraints play a pivotal role. For this issue, we propose a novel and efficient approach that models multi-shapes as directed graphs for two-stage optimization, i.e., optimizing pairwise correspondence accuracy using landmarks, and refining matching consistency through cycle consistency basis. Specifically, we utilize local mapping distortion to identify landmarks and extract the dimension of the functional space, which is then used to upsample in the spectral domain, thereby producing smoother results. Next, to optimize the consistency of correspondences, we introduce the cycle consistency basis, which succinctly describes all consistent cycles in the collection. We then propose cycle consistency refinement, which resolves inconsistencies in cycles efficiently via the alternating direction method of multipliers. Our approach simultaneously balances the accuracy and consistency of multi-shape matching, achieving lower correspondence errors. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over current state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-Shape Matching with Cycle Consistency Basis via Functional Maps

Image feature matching is a cardinal problem in computer vision, aiming to establish accurate correspondences between two-view images. Existing methods are constrained by the performance of feature extractors and struggle to capture local information affected by sparse texture or occlusions. Recognizing that human eyes consider not only similar local geometric features but also high-level semantic information of scene objects when matching images, this paper introduces SemaGlue. This novel algorithm perceives and incorporates semantic information into the matching process. In contrast to recent approaches that leverage semantic consistency to narrow the scope of matching areas, SemaGlue achieves semantic amalgamation with the designed Semantic-Aware Fusion (SAF) Block by injecting abundant semantic features from the pre-trained segmentation model. Moreover, the Cross-Domain Alignment (CDA) Block is proposed to address domain alignment issues, bridging the gaps between semantic and geometric domains to ensure applicable semantic amalgamation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SemaGlue outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various applications such as homography estimation, relative pose estimation, and visual localization.

Matching While Perceiving: Enhance Image Feature Matching with Applicable Semantic Amalgamation

In real-world scenarios, acquiring dense depth measurements is challenging, so typically sparse depth data is obtained. This has led to studies in depth completion to complete depth maps. Existing methods have primarily focused on in-domain generalization, which targets performance on specific datasets, while domain-generalizable depth completion remains a challenge due to domain shifts. In this paper, we leverage the depth prior provided by a pre-trained depth diffusion model, which implicitly understands how to fill in depth information. By utilizing the comprehensive prior knowledge across various scenes, we enhance the generalizability and quality of depth maps in depth completion. We present the prior-based depth completion pipeline that effectively integrates sparse measurements with relative depth prior, enabling zero-shot metric depth completion. To achieve desirable solutions, we perform an adaptation during the reverse sampling process using the optimization loop as hard guidance. Additionally, we propose the outlier filtering method based on a prior about the depth affinity relationships. We also propose the outlier filtering method based on a prior about the depth affinity relationships. Our zero-shot adaptation method demonstrates generalization across various domain datasets, achieving an average performance improvement of 22.8% over previous state-of-the-art methods, and improves spatial understanding by sharpening details.

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