United States

Recommender systems are increasingly prevalent to provide personalized suggestions and enhance user satisfaction. Typical recommendation models encode users and items as embeddings, and generate recommendations by assessing the similarity between these embeddings. Despite their effectiveness, these embedding-based models struggle with modeling user uncertainty and capturing diverse user interests using a single fixed user embedding. Recent studies have begun to explore a user-distribution paradigm to learn distributions for users. However, this approach employs a single distribution per user, which fails to effectively delineate semantic boundaries, resulting in sub-optimal recommendations. To this end, we propose GCDR, a Guided Conditional Diffusion Recommender model, to learn multiple distributions for each user in this paper. Specifically, GCDR addresses two major challenges: 1) learning disentangled distributions, and 2) learning personalized distributions. GCDR captures inter-user and intra-user distribution properties through conditional and guided diffusion, respectively. It maintains user-specific embeddings to encode long-term interests for conditional diffusion, while for guided diffusion, it incorporates short-term interests encoded from recent interactions with category preferences. To align the diffusion model with the recommendation task, we train GCDR with three loss functions, included the user loss, the recommendation loss and the diffusion loss. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that GCDR is able to learn effective user distributions and is superior to thirteen state-of-the-art baseline methods. The source code is available at https://shorturl.at/Pru2Q.

AAAI 2025

Learning Multiple User Distributions for Recommendation via Guided Conditional Diffusion

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

Acquiring pairwise noisy-clean training data is challenging. Consequently, some self-supervised denoising methods utilize noisy image pairs as both input and target for network training. However, a major issue with these methods is the gap between the clean images of the input and target. In this paper, we achieve high-quality image denoising by reducing or even eliminating this gap. Our method, Zero-Shot Noise2Mean, requires no training data or prior knowledge of the noise distribution. It consists of two lightweight networks that can be trained using only a single noisy test image. Specifically, we propose a random mask-based downsampler that generates multiple pairs of downsampled noisy images, which are similar but distinct. These image pairs serve as the input for the first network, with the mean image of each pair used as the target. This initially reduces the gap between the clean images of the input and target. Particularly, in our method, the clean counterpart of the first network's target (i.e., the mean image) can be obtained. We then train a second network using the mean image as input and its clean counterpart as the target. This effectively eliminates the gap and achieves better denoising results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms in both denoising performance and efficiency.

Zero-Shot Noise2Mean: Gap Minimization for Efficient Denoising from a Single Noisy Image

Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) aims to learn optimal joint policies from pre-collected datasets without further interaction with the environment. Despite the encouraging results achieved so far, we identify the policy mismatch problem that arises from employing diverse offline MARL datasets, a highly important ingredient for cooperative generalization yet largely overlooked by existing literature. Specifically, in the case that offline datasets exhibit various optimal joint policies, policy mismatch often occurs when individual actions from different optimal joint actions are combined in a way that results in a suboptimal joint action. In this paper, we introduce a novel Cooperative Policy Agreement (CPA) method, that not only mitigates the policy mismatch problem but also learns to generate diverse joint policies.
CPA firstly introduces an autoregressive decision-making mechanism among agents during offline training. This mechanism enables agents to access the actions previously taken by other agents, thereby facilitating effective joint policy matching. 
Moreover, diverse joint policies can be directly obtained through sequential action sampling from the autoregressive model.
Then we further incorporate a policy agreement mechanism to convert these  autoregressive joint policies into decentralized policies with a non-autoregressive form, while still ensuring the diversity  of the generated policies. This mechanism guarantees that the proposed CPA adheres to the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) constraint.
Experiments conducted on various benchmarks demonstrate that CPA yields  superior performance to state-of-the-art competitors.
Our code will be made publicly available.

Cooperative Policy Agreement: Learning Diverse Policy for Offline MARL

Federated few-shot learning (FedFSL) aims to enable the clients to obtain personalized generalization models for unseen categories with only a small number of referenceable samples in the distributed collaborative training paradigm. Most existing FedFSL-related algorithms suffer from domain bias and feature coupling in the presence of data heterogeneity and sample scarcity. In this work, we propose a collaborative feature representation disentanglement (CFRD) scheme for FedFSL to address these issues. After each client receives the global aggregation parameters, the original feature representation is decoupled into global communal features and local personality features with personalized bias representation, to maintain both global consistency and local relevance in the first feature representation disentanglement. On the few-shot metric space about the second feature representation disentanglement, category-independent information is encoded by class-specific and class-irrelevant reconstructions to separate the discriminative features. The proposed scheme collaboratively accomplishes global domain bias feature disentanglement and local category degradation feature disentanglement from client-wise and class-wise. Experiments on three few-shot benchmark datasets conforming to the FedFSL paradigm demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both global generality and local specificity.

FedFSL-CFRD: Personalized Federated Few-Shot Learning with Collaborative Feature Representation Disentanglement

Sampling strategy (e.g., fixed farthest point sampling) of point cloud has been an essential step for developing practical solutions in 3D computer vision tasks. Previous fixed sampling is simple, but suffer from suboptimal performance for downstream tasks. To adapt to target networks properly, adaptive sampling methods with trainable parameters have been recently developed to enhance the performance. However, existing adaptive sampling methods still suffer from the over-coupling problem of target network, and thus become model-specific, which limits their practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel general cross-scale decoupled sampling method (GCD-sampling) for point cloud, which consists of original feature cache, cross-scale feature fusion and convex combination learning for better feature extraction. To reduce the coupling relationship with the target task network, our method only utilizes the
point cloud coordinates as the input and output of itself. Besides, we introduce an arbitrary scale structure to enable parameter sharing across multi-scale sampling in point cloud networks. Extensive experiments on different architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over other existing adaptive sampling methods.

GCD-Sampling: A General Cross-scale Decoupled Sampling for Point Cloud

Data-driven deep learning models have enabled tremendous progress in change detection (CD) with the support of pixel-level annotations. However, collecting diverse data and manually annotating them is costly, laborious, and knowledge-intensive. Existing generative methods for CD data synthesis show competitive potential in addressing this issue but still face the following limitations: 1). difficulty in flexibly controlling change events, 2). dependence on additional data to train the data generators, 3). focus on specific change detection tasks.  To this end, this paper focuses on the semantic CD (SCD) task and develops a multi-temporal SCD data generator ChangeDiff by exploring powerful diffusion models. ChangeDiff innovatively generates change data in two steps: first, it uses text prompts and a text-to-layout (T2L) model to create continuous layouts, and then it employs layout-to-image(L2I) to convert these layouts into images.  Specifically, we propose multi-class distribution-guided text prompts (MCDG-TP), allowing for layouts to be generated flexibly through controllable classes and their corresponding ratios. Subsequently, to generalize the T2L model to the proposed MCDG-TP, a class distribution refinement loss is further designed as training supervision. To generalize the text-to-image diffusion model to the proposed MCDG-TP, a class distribution refinement loss is designed as training supervision. For the latter, MCDG-TP in three modes is proposed to synthesize new layout masks from various texts.  Our generated data shows significant progress in temporal continuity, spatial diversity, and quality realism, empowering change detectors with accuracy and transferability. The code will be open source.

ChangeDiff: A Multi-Temporal Change Detection Data Generator with Flexible Text Prompts via Diffusion Model

Prior work employing deep neural networks (DNN) with explainable techniques has identified human visual cortical selective representation to specific categories. However, constructing high-performing encoding models that accurately capture brain responses to coexisting multi-semantics remains elusive. Here, we used CLIP models combined with CLIP Dissection to establish a multi-semantic mapping framework (CLIP-MSM) for hypothesis-free analysis in human high-level visual cortex. First, we utilize CLIP models to construct voxel-wise encoding models for predicting visual cortical responses to natural scene images. Then, we apply CLIP Dissection and normalize the semantic mapping score to achieve the mapping of single brain voxels to multiple semantics. Our findings indicate that CLIP Dissection applied to DNNs modeling the human high-level visual cortex demonstrates better interpretability accuracy compared to Network Dissection. In addition, to demonstrate how our method enables fine-grained discovery in hypothesis-free analysis, we quantify the accuracy between CLIP-MSM’s reconstructed brain activation in response to categories of faces, bodies, places, words and food, and the ground truth of brain activation. We demonstrate that CLIP-MSM provides more accurate predictions of visual responses compared to traditional methods. Our results have been validated using two large natural image datasets: the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) and the Natural Object Dataset (NOD).

CLIP-MSM: A Multi-Semantic Mapping Brain Representation for Human High-Level Visual Cortex

With the popularity of federated learning, federated domain generalization (FedDG) has attracted more and more attentions. Existing works of federated learning indicate that the generalization performance of the global model can be improved when the global model is obtained by aggregating local models according to a suitable weights. However, the existing methods to calculate weights do not fully utilize the data influences on the global model update, which gives us an opportunity to improve the generalization performance of the global model further. In this paper, we propose the method DI (data influences), which utilizes the data influences on the global model update to calculate dynamical weights of local model in each round of training. Specifically, the first component data influences calculator (DIC) of DI calculates the local weights of local model from the influences of each data on the global model update and we introduce the influences function to complete the calculation process. The second component data influences adjuster (DIA) of DI calculates the global weights (which are used in the aggregation process of the global model) from local weights. Extensive experiments indicate that our method improves the generalization performance of models significantly. In particular, our method improves model accuracy on benchmark datasets PACS, OfficeHome, and Office-31 by 1.79\%, 1.61\%, and 2.39\% on average, respectively. Source code is publicly available at github.

Improving Federated Domain Generalization Through Dynamical Weights Calculated from Data Influences on Global Model Update

Vision-language foundation models have exhibited remarkable success across a multitude of downstream tasks due to their scalability on extensive image-text paired data. However, these models also display significant limitations when applied to downstream tasks, such as fine-grained image classification, as a result of ``decision shortcuts'' that hinder their generalization capabilities. In this work, we find that the CLIP model possesses a rich set of features, encompassing both desired invariant causal features and undesired decision shortcuts. Moreover, the underperformance of CLIP on downstream tasks originates from its inability to effectively utilize pre-trained features in accordance with specific task requirements. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective method, Spurious Feature Eraser (SEraser), to alleviate the decision shortcuts by erasing the spurious features. Specifically, we introduce a test-time prompt tuning paradigm that optimizes a learnable prompt, thereby compelling the model to exploit invariant features while disregarding decision shortcuts during the inference phase. The proposed method effectively alleviates excessive dependence on potentially misleading spurious information. We conduct comparative analysis of the proposed method against various approaches which validates the significant superiority.

Spurious Feature Eraser: Stabilizing Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Foundation Model

Score-based generative models can effectively learn the distribution of data by estimating the gradient of the distribution. Due to the multi-step denoising characteristic, researchers have recently considered combining score-based generative models with the gradient boosting algorithm, a multi-step supervised learning algorithm, to solve supervised learning tasks. However, existing generative model algorithms are often limited by the stochastic nature of the models and the long inference time, impacting prediction performances. Therefore, we propose a Supervised Score-based Model (SSM), which can be viewed as a gradient boosting algorithm combining score matching. We provide a theoretical analysis of learning and sampling for SSM to balance inference time and prediction accuracy. Via the ablation experiment in selected examples, we demonstrate the outstanding performances of the proposed techniques. Additionally, we compare our model with other probabilistic models, including Natural Gradient Boosting (NGboost), Classification and Regression Diffusion Models (CARD), Diffusion Boosted Trees (DBT), and Bayesian neural network-based models. The experimental results show that our model outperforms existing models in both accuracy and inference time.

Supervised Score-Based Modeling by Gradient Boosting

With the development of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) in recent years, Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) has become a better choice compared to modifying models in most scenarios. Different from retraining or fine-tuning models, VICL does not require modifications to the model's weights and architecture, and only needs a prompt with demonstrations to teach VFM how to solve tasks. Currently, significant computational cost for finding optimal prompts for every test sample hinders the deployment of VICL, as determining which demonstrations to use for constructing the prompt is very costly. In this paper, however, we find a counterintuitive phenomenon that most test samples actually achieve optimal performance under the same prompts, and searching for sample-level prompts only costs much time but results in completely identical prompts actually. Therefore, we propose task-level prompting to reduce the cost of searching for prompts during the inference stage and introduce two time-saving yet effective task-level prompt search strategies accordingly. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method can identify near-optimal prompts and reach the best VICL performance with a minimal cost that prior work has never achieved.

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