United States

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.

AAAI 2025

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

face gesture pose

biometrics

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 2022

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.



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.

Training-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Diverse Prototype Construction and Sub-region Matching

Given a graph representing the workspace, Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective start vertex to their respective goal vertex while minimizing path costs. Although many MAPF algorithms were developed and can handle up to thousands of agents, they usually rely on the assumption that each action of the agent takes a time unit, and the actions of all agents are synchronized in a sense that the actions of agents start at the same discrete time step, which may limit their use in practice. Only a few algorithms have been developed to address asynchronous actions, and they all lie on one end of the spectrum, focusing on finding optimal solutions with limited scalability. This paper develops new planners that lie on the other end of the spectrum, trading off solution quality for scalability, by finding an unbounded sub-optimal solution for many agents. Our method leverages both search-based methods in handling asynchronous actions and techniques in rule-based planning for MAPF. We analyze the properties of our method and test it against several baselines with up to a thousand agents with asynchronous actions in various maps. Given a runtime limit, our method can handle an order of magnitude more agents than the existing methods with about 25\% longer makespan.

Loosely Synchronized Rule-Based Planning for Multi-Agent Path Finding with Asynchronous Actions

Multimodal Relation Extraction (MRE) aims to predict relations between head and tail entities based on the context of sentence-image pairs. Most existing MRE methods progressively incorporate textual and visual inputs to dominate the learning process, assuming both contribute significantly to the task. However, the diverse visual appearances and text with ambiguous semantics contain less-informative contexts for the corresponding relation. To tackle these challenges, we highlight the importance of semantically invariant entity attributes that encompass fine-grained categories. Towards this, we propose a novel Prototype-Guided Multimodal Relation Extraction (PG-MRE) framework based on Entity Attributes. Specifically, we first generate detailed entity explanations using Large Language Models (LLMs) to supplement the attribute semantics. Then, the Attribute Prototype Module (APM) refines attribute categories and condenses scattered entity attribute features into cluster-level prototypes. Furthermore, prototype-aligned attribute features guide diverse visual appearance features to produce compact and distinctive multimodal representations in the Relation Prototype Module (RPM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method gains superior relation classification capability (especially in scenarios involving various unseen entities), achieving new state-of-the-art performances on MNRE dataset. Our code will be available soon.

Prototype-Guided Multimodal Relation Extraction based on Entity Attributes

Federated learning has become a promising solution for collaboration among medical institutions. However, data owned by each institution would be highly heterogeneous and the distribution is always non-independent and identical distribution (non-IID), resulting in client drift and unsatisfactory performance. Despite existing federated learning methods attempting to solve the non-IID problems, they still show marginal advantages but rely on frequent communication which would incur high costs and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning method: $\textbf{Fed}$erated learning via $\textbf{V}$aluable $\textbf{C}$ondensed $\textbf{K}$nowledge (FedVCK). We enhance the quality of condensed knowledge and select the most necessary knowledge guided by models, to tackle the non-IID problem within limited communication budgets effectively. Specifically, on the client side, we condense the knowledge of each client into a small dataset and further enhance the condensation procedure with latent distribution constraints, facilitating the effective capture of high-quality knowledge. During each round, we specifically target and condense knowledge that has not been assimilated by the current model, thereby preventing unnecessary repetition of homogeneous knowledge and minimizing the frequency of communications required. On the server side, we propose relational supervised contrastive learning to provide more supervision signals to aid the global model updating. Comprehensive experiments across various medical tasks show that FedVCK can outperform state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that it's non-IID robust and communication-efficient.

FedVCK: Non-IID Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Valuable Condensed Knowledge for Medical Image Analysis

We introduce TCAM-Diff, a novel 3D medical image generation model that reduces the memory requirements to encode and generate high-resolution 3D data. This model utilizes a decoder-only autoencoder method to learn triplane representation from dense volume and leverages generalization operations to prevent overfitting. Subsequently, it uses a triplane-aware cross-attention diffusion model to learn and integrate these features effectively. Furthermore, the features generated by the diffusion model can be rapidly transformed into 3D volumes using a pre-trained decoder module. Our experiments on three different scales of medical datasets, BrainTumour $128\times128\times128$, Pancreas $256\times256\times256$, and Colon $512\times512\times512$, demonstrated outstanding results. We utilized MSE and SSIM to evaluate reconstruction quality and leveraged the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (W-GAN) critic to assess generative quality. Comparisons to existing approaches show that our method gives better reconstruction and generation results than other encoder-decoder methods with similar-sized latent spaces.

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