United States

Unpaired training has been verified as one of the most effective paradigms for real scene dehazing by learning from unpaired real-world hazy and clear images. Although numerous studies have been proposed, current methods demonstrate limited generalization for various real scenes due to limited feature representation and insufficient use of real-world prior. Inspired by the strong generative capabilities of diffusion models in producing both hazy and clear images, we exploit diffusion prior for real-world image dehazing, and propose an unpaired framework named Diff-Dehazer. Specifically, we leverage diffusion prior as bijective mapping learners within the CycleGAN, a classic unpaired learning framework. Considering that physical priors contain pivotal statistics information of real-world data, we further excavate real-world knowledge by integrating physical priors into our framework. Furthermore, we introduce a new perspective for adequately leveraging the representation ability of diffusion models by removing degradation in image and text modalities, so as to improve the dehazing effect. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Our code and model will be open-sourced.

AAAI 2025

Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Dehazing with Unpaired Training

low level physics based 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.



poster

The real estate market relies heavily on structured data, such as property details, market trends, and price fluctuations. However, the lack of specialized Tabular Question Answering datasets in this domain limits the development of automated question-answering systems. To fill this gap, we introduce RETQA, the first large-scale open-domain Chinese Tabular Question Answering dataset for Real Estate. RETQA comprises 4,932 tables and 20,762 question-answer pairs across 16 sub-fields within three major domains: property information, real estate company finance information and land auction information. Compared with existing tabular question answering datasets, RETQA poses greater challenges due to three key factors: long-table structures, open-domain retrieval, and multi-domain queries. To tackle these challenges, we propose the SLUTQA framework, which integrates large language models with spoken language understanding tasks to enhance retrieval and answering accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLUTQA significantly improves the performance of large language models on RETQA by in-context learning. RETQA and SLUTQA provide essential resources for advancing tabular question answering research in the real estate domain, addressing critical challenges in open-domain and long-table question-answering.

RETQA: A Large-Scale Open-Domain Tabular Question Answering Dataset for Real Estate Sector

Best arm identification (BAI) is a key problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, where $K$ arms each has an associated reward distribution, and the objective is to minimize the number of queries needed to identify the best arm with high confidence.
In this paper, we explore BAI using *quantum oracles*. For the case where each query probes only one arm ($m=1$), we devise a quantum algorithm with a query complexity upper bound of $\tilde{O}(K\Delta^{-1}\log(1/\delta))$, where $\delta$ is the confidence parameter and $\Delta$ is the reward gap between best and second best arms. This improves on the classical bound by a factor of $\Delta^{-1}$. For the general case where a single query can probe $m$ arms ($1\le m\le K$) simultaneously, we propose an algorithm with an upper bound of $\tilde{O}((K/\sqrt{m})\Delta^{-1}\log(1/\delta))$, improving by a factor of $\sqrt{m}$ compared to the $m=1$ case.
    We also provide query complexity lower bounds for both scenarios, which match the upper bounds up to logarithmic factors, and validate our theoretical results with Qiskit-based simulations.

Quantum Best Arm Identification with Quantum Oracles

In recent years, multi-view learning has aroused extensive research passion. Most existing multi-view learning methods often rely on well-annotations to improve decision accuracy. However, noise labels are ubiquitous in multi-view data due to imperfect annotations. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel noisy label calibration method (NLC) for multi-view classification to resist the negative impact of noisy labels. Specifically, to capture consensus information from multiple views, we employ max-margin rank loss to reduce the heterogeneous gap. Subsequently, we evaluate the confidence
scores to enrich predictions associated with noise instances according to all reliable neighbors. Further,  we propose Label Noise Detection (LND) to separate multi-view data into a clean or noisy subset, and propose Label Calibration Learning (LCL) to correct noisy instances. Finally, we adopt the cross-entropy loss to achieve multi-view classification. Extensive experiments on six datasets validate that our method outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods.

Noisy Label Calibration for Multi-View Classification

On facial expression datasets with complex and numerous feature types, where the significance and dominance of labeled features are difficult to predict, facial expression recognition(FER) encounters the challenges of inter-class similarity and intra-class variances, making it difficult to mine effective features. We aim to solely leverage the feature similarity among facial samples to address this. We introduce the Cross Similarity Attention (CSA), an input-output position-sensitive attention mechanism that harnesses feature similarity across different images to compute the corresponding global spatial attention. Based on this, we propose a four-branch circular framework, called Quadruplet Cross Similarity (QCS), to extract discriminative features from the same class and eliminate redundant ones from different classes synchronously to refine cleaner features. The symmetry of the network ensures balanced and stable training and reduces the amount of CSA interaction matrix. Contrastive residual distillation is utilized to transfer the information learned in the cross module back to the base network. The cross-attention module exists during training, and only one base branch is retained during inference. our proposed QCS model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several popular FER datasets, without requiring additional landmark information or pre-training on external FER datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com.

QCS:Feature Refining from Quadruplet Cross Similarity for Facial Expression Recognition

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can successfully learn to handle complex tasks, effectively generalizing acquired skills to unfamiliar settings remains a challenge. One of the reasons behind this is the visual encoder used are task-dependent, preventing effective feature extraction in different settings. To address this issue, recent studies have tried to pretrain encoders with diverse visual inputs in order to improve their performance. However, they rely on existing pretrained encoders without further exploring the impact of pretraining period. In this work, we propose APE: efficient reinforcement learning through Adaptively Pretrained visual Encoder—a framework that utilizes adaptive augmentation strategy during the pretraining phase and extracts useful features with only a few interactions within the task environments in the policy learning period. Experiments are conducted across various domains, including DeepMind Control Suite, Atari Games and Memory Maze benchmarks, to verify the effectiveness of our method. Results show that mainstream RL methods, such as DreamerV3 and DrQ-v2, achieve state-of-the-art performance when equipped with APE. In addition, APE significantly improves the sampling efficiency during learning, approaching the efficiency of state-based method using only visual inputs in several control tasks. These findings demonstrate the potential of adaptive pretraining of encoder in enhancing the generalization ability and efficiency of visual RL algorithms.

Efficient Reinforcement Learning Through Adaptively Pretrained Visual Encoder

Learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods have enabled the deployment of machine learning systems with imperfectly labeled data. However, these methods often struggle to identify noise in the presence of long-tailed (LT) class distributions, where the memorization effect becomes class-dependent. Conversely, LT methods are suboptimal under label noise, as it hinders access to accurate label frequency statistics. This study aims to address the long-tailed noisy data by bridging the methodological gap between LNL and LT approaches. We propose a direct solution, termed Robust Logit Adjustment, which estimates ground-truth labels through label refurbishment, thereby mitigating the impact of label noise. Simultaneously, our method incorporates the distribution of training-time corrected target labels into the LT method logit adjustment, providing class-rebalanced supervision. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world long-tailed noisy datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Robust-Logit-Adjustment-0C47/.

Robust Logit Adjustment for Learning with Long-Tailed Noisy Data

Recent Anomaly Detection (AD) methods have achieved great success with In-Distribution (ID) data. However, real-world data often exhibits distribution shift, causing huge performance decay on traditional AD methods. From this perspective, few previous work has explored AD with distribution shift, and the distribution-invariant normality learning has been proposed based on the Reverse Distillation (RD) framework. However, we observe the misalignment issue between the teacher and the student network that causes detection failure, thereby propose FiCo, Filter or Compensate, to address the distribution shift issue in AD. FiCo firstly compensates the distribution-specific information to reduce the misalignment between the teacher and student network via the Distribution-Specific Compensation (DiSCo) module, and secondly filters all abnormal information to capture distribution-invariant normality with the Distribution-Invariant Filter (DiIFi) module. Extensive experiments on three different AD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FiCo, which outperforms all existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and even achieves better results on the ID scenario compared with RD-based methods. Our code will be available after the double-blind review.

Filter or Compensate: Towards Invariant Representation from Distribution Shift for Anomaly Detection

Large-scale generative models, such as text-to-image diffusion models, have garnered widespread attention across diverse domains due to their creative and high-fidelity image generation. Nonetheless, existing large-scale diffusion models are confined to generating images of up to 1K resolution, which is far from meeting the demands of contemporary commercial applications. Directly sampling higher-resolution images often yields results marred by artifacts such as object repetition and distorted shapes. Addressing the aforementioned issues typically necessitates training or fine-tuning models on higher resolution datasets. However, this poses a formidable challenge due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale high-resolution images and substantial computational resources. While several preceding works have proposed alternatives to bypass the cumbersome training process, they often fail to produce convincing results. In this work, we probe the generative ability of diffusion models at higher resolution beyond their original capability and propose a novel progressive approach that fully utilizes generated low-resolution images to guide the generation of higher-resolution images. Our method obviates the need for additional training or fine-tuning which significantly lowers the burden of computational costs. Extensive experiments and results validate the efficiency and efficacy of our method.

DiffuseHigh: Training-Free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis Through Structure Guidance

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) aims to reconstruct a 3D voxel representation occupied by semantic classes based on ordinary inputs such as 2D RGB images, depth maps, or point clouds. Given the cost-effective and promising applications in autonomous driving, camera-based SSC has attracted considerable attention to developing various approaches. However, current methods mainly focus on precise 2D-to-3D projection while overlooking the challenge of completing invisible regions, leading to numerous false negatives and suboptimal SSC performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel architecture, Memory-augmented Re-completion (MARE), designed to enhance completion capability. Our MARE model encapsulates regional relationships by incorporating a memory bank that stores vital region-tokens while two protocols concerning diversity and age are adopted to optimize the bank adversarially. Additionally, we introduce a Re-completion pipeline incorporated with an Information Spreading module to progressively complete the invisible regions while bridging the scale gap between region-level and voxel-level information. Extensive experiments conducted on the SSCBench-KITTI-360 and SemanticKITTI datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating remarkable improvements in both mIoU and recall scores, thereby enriching the geometric understanding for the SSC task.

Memory-Augmented Re-Completion for 3D Semantic Scene Completion

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment images of arbitrary categories specified by class labels. While previous approaches relied on extensive image-text pairs or dense semantic annotations, recent training-free methods attempted to overcome these limitations by constructing semantic prototypes in the construction stage and image-to-image matching (i.e., prototype matching) during testing. However, these methods often struggle to effectively capture the visual characteristics of categories and fail to utilize local features during prototype matching. To deal with these problems, we propose a novel training-free framework for OVSS that constructs diverse prototypes and performs fine-grained sub-region matching. Specifically, our method leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide support image generation by descriptions of different attributes of categories and employs coarse-fine clustering to obtain diverse and robust part-level prototypes in the construction stage. During testing, we propose a sub-region matching method, which assigns part-level prototypes to sub-regions utilizing optimal transport, to fully utilize local image features among part-level prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous methods across five datasets.

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Next from AAAI 2025

RETQA: A Large-Scale Open-Domain Tabular Question Answering Dataset for Real Estate Sector

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