United States

Attribute classification is crucial for identifying specific characteristics within image regions. Vision-Language Models
(VLMs) have been particularly effective in zero-shot tasks by leveraging their general knowledge from large-scale datasets.
Recent studies demonstrate that zero-shot multi-label classification, including attribute classification, can be effectively addressed by transformer-based models with classwise queries. However, attribute classification generally involves a large number of attribute classes and that makes it difficult to maintain the model’s scalability. Additionally, poor utilization of the relationship between seen and unseen attributes leads the model to lack of generalizability. To address these issues, we propose Super-class guided transFormer (SugaFormer), a framework that leverages super-classes with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through Super-class Query Initialization and Super-class guided Consistency Regularization for attribute classification. Superclass Query Initialization reduces the number of queries by
aligning attributes with their relevant super-classes enhancing the generalizability and scalability of the model. Super-class guided Consistency Regularization encourages features of SugaFormer to be similar to those of the VLMs by using region-specific prompts and their corresponding tokens. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of SugaFormer, achieving state-of-the-art results in three widely-used attribute classification benchmarks under zero-shot, and cross-dataset transfer settings.

AAAI 2025

Super-Class Guided Transformer for Zero-Shot Attribute Classification

multi-class

extreme classification

multi-label learning

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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.



Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels typically uses Class Activation Maps (CAM) to achieve dense predictions. Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) has provided an alternative to generate localization maps from class-patch attention. However, due to the little constraint to model such attention, we observe that the Localization Attention Maps (LAM) usually struggle with the artifact issue, i.e., patch regions with minimal semantic relevance are falsely activated by class tokens. In this work, we propose MoRe to address this issue and further explore the potential of LAM. Our findings suggest that additional regularization on class-patch attention is necessary. To this end, we first view the attention as a novel directed graph and propose the Graph Category Representation module to implicitly regularize the interaction among class-patch entities. It ensures that class tokens dynamically condense the related patch information and suppress unrelated artifacts at a graph level. Second, motivated by the observation that CAM from classification weights maintains smooth localization of objects, we devise the Localization-informed Regularization module to explicitly regularize the class-patch attention. It directly mines the token relations from CAM and further supervises the consistency between class and patch tokens in a learnable manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, validating the efficiency of MoRe in addressing the artifact issue and thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance over recent single-stage and even multi-stage methods. Codes will be available.

MoRe: Class Patch Attention Needs Regularization for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Large-scale pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on visual tasks but are computationally expensive to transfer to downstream tasks. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers a promising transferring approach by updating only a subset of parameters. However, PEFT's effectiveness is hindered by discrepancies between pre-training and downstream tasks in terms of object scale and granularity. Downstream tasks often focus on finer-grained and more specialized recognition, requiring more detailed features. The diversity of feature scales of existing PEFT methods for ViT is limited. To address this, we propose a novel PEFT method named Wavelet-based multi-Scale Tuning (WST), which learns multi-scale features in a simple and efficient way. WST introduces a parallel fine-tuning patch embedding branch with a smaller patch size than the pre-trained model to capture finer-grained features. Furthermore, to handle the computational challenge from the resulting longer token sequence, WST designs wavelet fine-tuning blocks that balance both efficiency and performance. In the block, wavelet transform enables invertible and lossless down-sampling of the longer token sequence, aligning it with that of the backbone, and two lightweight linear mappings are employed to learn task-specific features. This design facilitates efficient multi-scale information exchange between the pre-trained backbone and fine-tuning branch. Extensive experiments on transfer learning demonstrate the promising performance and efficiency of our WST. Notably, our WST achieves state-of-the-art average accuracy of 78\% with only 0.08M trainable parameters on VTAB-1K vision benchmark.

WST: Wavelet-Based Multi-scale Tuning for Visual Transfer Learning

Long-tailed (LT) data distribution is common in multi-label image classification (MLC) and can significantly impact the performance of classification models. One reason is the challenge of learning unbiased instance representations (i.e. features) for imbalanced datasets. Additionally, the co-occurrence of head/tail classes within the same instance, along with complex label dependencies, introduces further challenges. In this work, we delve into this problem through the lens of neural collapse (NC). NC refers to a phenomenon where the last-layer features and classifier of a deep neural network model exhibit a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) structure during its terminal training phase. This structure creates an optimal linearly separable state. However, this phenomenon typically occurs in balanced datasets but rarely applies to the typical imbalanced problem. To induce NC properties under Long-tailed multi-label classification (LT-MLC) conditions, we propose an approach named MLC-NC, which aims to learn high-quality data representations and improve the model’s generalization ability. Specifically, MLC-NC accounts for the fact that different labels correspond to different feature parts located in images. MLC-NC extracts class-wise features from each instance through a cross-attention mechanism. To guide the features toward the ETF structure, we introduce visual-semantic feature alignment with a fixed ETF structured label embedding, which helps to learn evenly distributed class centers. To reduce within-class feature variation, we introduce collapse calibration within a lower-dimensional feature space. To mitigate classification bias, we concatenate features and feed them into a binarized fixed ETF classifier. As an orthogonal approach to existing methods, MLC-NC can be seamlessly integrated into various frameworks. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

MLC-NC: Long-Tailed Multi-Label Image Classification Through the Lens of Neural Collapse

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) aims to recognize activities by training models on massive sensor data. In real-world deployment, a crucial aspect of HAR that has been largely overlooked is that the test sets may have different distributions from training sets due to inter-subject variability including age, gender, behavioral habits, etc., which leads to poor generalization performance. One promising solution is to learn domain-invariant representations to enable a model to generalize on an unseen distribution. However, most existing methods only consider the feature-invariance of the penultimate layer for domain-invariant learning, which leads to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a Categorical Concept Invariant Learning (CCIL) framework for generalizable activity recognition, which introduces a concept matrix to regularize the model in the training stage by simultaneously concertrating on feature-invariance and logit-invariance. Our key idea is that the concept matrix for samples belonging to the same activity category should be similar. Extensive experiments on four public HAR benchmarks demonstrate that our CCIL substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under cross-person, cross-dataset, cross-position, and one-person-to-another settings. Code will be released.

Generalizable Sensor-Based Activity Recognition via Categorical Concept Invariant Learning

With the emergence of vision-language pre-trained models, such as CLIP, some textual prompts have been gradually introduced recently into re-identification (Re-ID) tasks to obtain considerably robust multimodal information. However, most textual descriptions based on vehicle Re-ID tasks only contain identity index words without specific words to describe vehicle view information, thereby resulting in difficulty to be widely applied in vehicle Re-ID tasks with view variations. This case inspires us to propose a CLIP-driven view-aware prompt learning framework for unsupervised vehicle Re-ID. We first design a learnable textual prompt template called view-aware context optimization (ViewCoOp) based on dynamic multi-view word embeddings, which can fully obtain the proportion and position encoding of each view in the whole vehicle body region. Subsequently, a cross-modal mutual graph is constructed to explore the connections between inter-modal and intra-modal. Each sample is treated as a graph node, which extracts textual features based on ViewCoOp and the visual features of images. Moreover, leveraging the inter-cluster and intra-cluster correlation in the bimodal clustering results in the determination of connectivity between graph node pairs. Lastly, the proposed cross-modal mutual graph method utilizes supervised information from the bimodal gap to directly fine-tune the image encoder of CLIP for downstream unsupervised vehicle Re-ID tasks. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed method is capable of effectively obtaining cross-modal description ability from multiple views.

CLIP-driven View-aware Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Vehicle Re-identification

The rise in sophisticated image forgery techniques, driven by advancements in image editing and generation, has posed new security challenges. Traditional methods, designed for specific tampering artifacts, struggle with out-of-distribution image forgery detection. In this paper, we propose a shift in paradigm, placing greater emphasis on the universal characteristics of authentic images, as opposed to solely focusing on specific forgery signals. We introduce an enhancement to the Masked Autoencoder (MAE), aptly termed the Forgery MAE (FMAE). This modification retains the inherent characteristics of natural images while integrating multi-source forgery information. Our implementation involves applying the lottery ticket hypothesis during pre-training to identify forgery-sensitive parameters, followed by their sparse fine-tuning to target the forgery detection and localization task. Concurrently, we develop a ``mixture of experts'' noise extractor to compile multi-source forgery data. Our FMAE effectively extracts forgery features and shows strong resilience against unseen forgeries. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets confirm our method's superior accuracy and generalization capability over existing techniques.

A Lottery Ticket Hypothesis Approach with Sparse Fine-tuning and MAE for Image Forgery Detection and Localization

Gigapixel image analysis, particularly for whole slide images (WSIs), often relies on multiple instance learning (MIL). Under the paradigm of MIL, patch image representations are extracted and then fixed during the training of the MIL classifiers for efficiency consideration.
However, the invariance of representations makes it difficult to perform data augmentation for WSI-level model training, which significantly limits the performance of the downstream WSI analysis. The current data augmentation methods for gigapixel images either introduce additional computational costs or result in a loss of semantic information, which is hard to meet the requirements for efficiency and stability needed for WSI model training. In this paper, we propose a Promptable Representation Distribution Learning framework (PRDL) for both patch-level representation learning and WSI-level data augmentation. Meanwhile, we explore the use of prompts to guide data augmentation in feature space, which achieves promptable data augmentation for training robust WSI-level models. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method stably outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Promptable Representation Distribution Learning and Data Augmentation for Gigapixel Histopathology WSI Analysis

Explanation for deep learning models on time series classification (TSC) tasks is an important and challenging problem. Most existing approaches use attribution maps to explain outcomes. However, they have limitations in generating explanations that are well-aligned with humans's perceptions. Recently LIME-based approaches provide a more meaningful explanation via segmenting the data. However, these approaches are still suffering from the processes of segment generations and evaluations. In this paper, we propose a novel time series explanation approach called InteDisUX to overcome these problems. Our technique utilizes the segment-level integrated gradient (SIG) for calculating importance scores for an initial set of small and equal segments before iteratively merge two consecutive ones to create better explanations under a unique greedy strategy guided by two new proposed metrics including discrimination and faithfulness gains. By this way, our method does not depend on predefined segments like others while being robusts to instability, poor local fidelity and data imbalance like LIME-based methods. Furthermore, InteDisUX is the first work to use the model's information to improve the set of segments} for time series explanation. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms LIME-based ones in 12 datasets in terms of faithfulness and 8/12 datasets in terms of robustness.

InteDisUX: Intepretation-Guided Discriminative User-Centric Explanation for Time Series

Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (FSSL) has emerged as a crucial topic in medical image analysis, allowing multiple medical institutions to collaboratively train a global model using limited labeled data. However, existing FSSL methods focus solely on an effective combination of federated learning and semi-supervised learning, ignoring the heterogeneity of client data and the inadaptability of semi-supervised methods in diverse environments, which leads to knowledge bias in local models and impedes stable convergence. To this end, we explore the application of personalization in FSSL and propose a novel dual-calibrated co-training framework. To adapt to the unique feature distribution of client data, we consider collaborative relationships among clients to aggregate a personalized model for each client. We further build a dual-student architecture with the personalized model and private local model on the client side, which encourages model disagreement for co-training while enhancing participant privacy. Most importantly, we design dual calibration strategies that adaptively optimize the model: Local calibration improves the boundary discrimination of the local model by dynamically replacing pseudo-label boundary patches; Global calibration corrects model direction based on the real-time perception of the biases between local dual-student models. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method on a private medical dataset and two public medical datasets. The code will be available online.

Dual-calibrated Co-training Framework for Personalized Federated Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based volumetric video has revolutionized visual media by delivering photorealistic Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) experiences that provide audiences with unprecedented immersion and interactivity. However, the substantial data volumes pose significant challenges for storage and transmission. Existing solutions typically optimize NeRF representation and compression independently or focus on a single fixed rate-distortion (RD) tradeoff. In this paper, we propose VRVVC, a novel end-to-end joint optimization variable-rate framework for volumetric video compression that achieves variable bitrates using a single model while maintaining superior RD performance. Specifically, VRVVC introduces a compact tri-plane implicit residual representation for inter-frame modeling of long-duration dynamic scenes, effectively reducing temporal redundancy. We further propose a variable-rate residual representation compression scheme that leverages a learnable quantization and a tiny MLP-based entropy model. This approach enables variable bitrates through the utilization of predefined Lagrange multipliers to manage the quantization error of all latent representations. Finally, we present an end-to-end progressive training strategy combined with a multi-rate-distortion loss function to optimize the entire framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRVVC achieves a wide range of variable bitrates within a single model and surpasses the RD performance of existing methods across various datasets.

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MoRe: Class Patch Attention Needs Regularization for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

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