United States

In this paper, we study graph-to-image generation conditioned exclusively on scene graphs, in which we seek to disentangle the veiled semantics between knowledge graphs and images.  While most existing research resorts to laborious auxiliary information such as object layouts or segmentation masks, it is also of interest to unveil the generality of the model with limited supervision, moreover, avoiding extra cross-modal alignments.  To tackle this challenge, we delve into the causality of the adversarial generation process, and reason out a new principle to realize a simultaneous semantic disentanglement with an alignment on target and model distributions.  This principle is named knowledge consensus, which explicitly describes a triangle causal dependency among observed images, graph semantics and hidden visual representations.  The consensus also determines a new graph-to-image generation framework, carried on several adversarial optimization objectives.  Extensive experimental results demonstrate that, even conditioned only on scene graphs, our model surprisingly achieves superior performance on semantics-aware image generation, without losing the competence on manipulating the generation through knowledge graphs.

AAAI 2023

Scene Graph to Image Synthesis via Knowledge Consensus

image & video synthesis; causality; multi-modal vision; computational photography; visual reasoning & symbolic representation

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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.

poster

Forced alignment refers to a technology that time-aligns a given transcription with a corresponding speech. However, as the forced alignment technologies have developed using speech audio, they might fail in alignment when the input speech audio is noise-corrupted or is not accessible. We focus on that there is another component that the speech can be inferred from, the speech video (i.e., talking face video). Since the drawbacks of audio-based forced alignment can be complemented using the visual information when the audio signal is under poor condition, we try to develop a novel video-based forced alignment method. However, different from audio forced alignment, it is challenging to develop a reliable visual forced alignment technology for the following two reasons: 1) Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) has a much lower performance compared to audio-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and 2) the translation from text to video is not reliable, so the method typically used for building audio forced alignment cannot be utilized in developing visual forced alignment. In order to alleviate these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new method that is appropriate for visual forced alignment, namely Deep Visual Forced Alignment (DVFA). The proposed DVFA can align the input transcription (i.e., sentence) with the talking face video without accessing the speech audio. Moreover, by augmenting the alignment task with anomaly case detection, DVFA can detect mismatches between the input transcription and the input video while performing the alignment. Therefore, we can robustly align the text with the talking face video even if there exist error words in the text. Through extensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed DVFA not only in the alignment task but also in interpreting the outputs of VSR models.

Deep Visual Forced Alignment: Learning to Align Transcription with Talking Face Video

This paper introduces a new few-shot learning pipeline that
casts relevance ranking for image retrieval as binary ranking
relation classification. In comparison to image classification,
ranking relation classification is sample efficient and
domain agnostic. Besides, it provides a new perspective on
few-shot learning and is complementary to state-of-the-art
methods. The core component of our deep neural network is
a simple MLP, which takes as input an image triplet encoded
as the difference between two vector-Kronecker products,
and outputs a binary relevance ranking order. The proposed
RankMLP can be built on top of any state-of-the-art feature
extractors, and our entire deep neural network is called
the ranking deep neural network, or RankDNN. Meanwhile,
RankDNN can be flexibly fused with other post-processing
methods. During the meta test, RankDNN ranks support images
according to their similarity with the query samples,
and each query sample is assigned the class label of its
nearest neighbor. Experiments demonstrate that RankDNN
can effectively improve the performance of its baselines
based on a variety of backbones and it outperforms previous
state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple few-shot learning
benchmarks, including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet,
Caltech-UCSD Birds, and CIFAR-FS. Furthermore, experiments
on the cross-domain challenge demonstrate the superior
transferability of RankDNN.The code is available at:
https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/RankDNN.

RankDNN: Learning to Rank for Few-shot Learning

This work addresses fair generative models. Dataset biases have been a major cause of unfairness in deep generative models. Previous work had proposed to augment large, biased datasets with small, unbiased reference datasets. Under this setup, a weakly-supervised approach has been proposed, which achieves state-of-the-art quality and fairness in generated samples. In our work, based on this setup, we propose a simple yet effective approach. Specifically, first, we propose fairTL, a transfer learning approach to learn fair generative models. Under fairTL, we pre-train the generative model with the available large, biased datasets and subsequently adapt the model using the small, unbiased reference dataset. We find that our fairTL can learn expressive sample generation during pre-training, thanks to the large (biased) dataset. This knowledge is then transferred to the target model during adaptation, which also learns to capture the underlying fair distribution of the small reference dataset. Second, we propose fairTL++, where we introduce two additional innovations to improve upon fairTL: (i) multiple feedback and (ii) Linear-Probing followed by Fine-Tuning (LP-FT). Taking one step further, we consider an alternative, challenging setup when only a pre-trained (potentially biased) model is available but the dataset that was used to pre-train the model is inaccessible. We demonstrate that our proposed fairTL and fairTL++ remain very effective under this setup. We note that previous work requires access to the large, biased datasets and is incapable of handling this more challenging setup. Extensive experiments show that fairTL and fairTL++ achieve state-of-the-art in both quality and fairness of generated samples. The code and additional resources can be found at bearwithchris.github.io/fairTL/.

Fair Generative Models via Transfer Learning

Learning programs with numerical values is fundamental to many AI applications, including bio-informatics and drug design. However, current program synthesis approaches struggle to learn programs with numerical values.
An especially difficult problem is learning continuous values from multiple examples, such as intervals. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an inductive logic programming approach which combines relational learning with numerical reasoning. Our approach, which we call NumSynth, uses satisfiability modulo theories solvers to efficiently learn programs with numerical values. Our approach can identify numerical values in linear arithmetic fragments, such as real difference logic, and from infinite domains, such as real numbers or integers. Our experiments on four diverse domains, including game playing and program synthesis, show that our approach can (i) learn programs with numerical values from linear arithmetical reasoning, and (ii) outperform existing approaches in terms of predictive accuracies and learning times.

Relational program synthesis with numerical reasoning

Neural machine translation (NMT) has got a great success in generating high-quality translations. However, the current NMT systems are not reliable enough to have stable outputs. The results of NMT are generally affected by lexical or syntactic changes in inputs, resulting in a large variance in quality, which limits the practicability and trustworthiness of NMT. One reason is that the \textit{one-to-one} training paradigm cannot handle the \textit{source diversity} phenomenon, in which inputs with the same meaning can be expressed differently. In this work, we treat this problem as a bilevel optimization problem and propose a consistency-aware meta-learning (CAML) framework derived from the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm to address it. Specifically, the NMT model with CAML first learns the consistent meta representation of semantically equivalent sentences in the outer loop. Subsequently, a mapping from the meta representation to the output sentence is learned in the inner loop. That is, the NMT model can translate semantically equivalent input sentences to the same output sentence.  We conduct experiments on the NIST Chinese to English task, TED M2O task and three WMT translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the NMT model with our approach effectively improves the overall translation quality and is reliable in coping with diverse inputs.

Towards Reliable Neural Machine Translation with Consistency-aware Meta-learning

This paper proposes a Semi-Attention Partition (SAP) method to learn well-aligned part features for occluded person re-identification (re-ID). Currently, the mainstream methods employ either external semantic partition or attention-based partition, and the latter manner is usually better than the former one. Under this background, this paper explores a potential that the weak semantic partition can be a good teacher for the strong attention-based partition. In other words, the attention-based student can substantially surpass its noisy semantic-based teacher, contradicting the common sense that the student usually achieves inferior (or comparable) accuracy. A key to this effect is: the proposed SAP encourages the attention-based partition of the (transformer) student to be partially consistent with the semantic-based teacher partition through knowledge distillation, yielding the so-called semi-attention. Such partial consistency allows the student to have both consistency and reasonable conflict with the noisy teacher. More specifically, on the one hand, the attention is guided by the semantic partition from the teacher. On the other hand, the attention mechanism itself still has some degree of freedom to comply with the inherent similarity between different patches, thus gaining resistance against noisy supervision. Moreover, we integrate a battery of well-engineered designs into SAP to reinforce their cooperation (e.g., multiple forms of teacher-student consistency), as well as to promote reasonable conflict (e.g., mutual absorbing partition refinement and a supervision signal dropout strategy). Experimental results confirm that the transformer student achieves substantial improvement after this semi-attention learning scheme, and produces new state-of-the-art accuracy on several standard re-ID benchmarks.

Semi-Attention Partition for Occluded Person Re-identification

Single-view RGB-D human reconstruction with implicit functions is often formulated as per-point classification. Specifically,  a set of 3D locations within the view-frustum of the camera are first projected independently onto the image and a corresponding feature is subsequently extracted for each 3D location. The feature of each 3D location is then used to classify independently whether the corresponding 3D point is inside or outside the observed object. This procedure leads to sub-optimal results because correlations between predictions for neighboring locations are only taken into account implicitly via the extracted features. For more accurate results we propose the occupancy planes (OPlanes) representation, which enables to formulate single-view RGB-D human reconstruction as occupancy prediction on planes which slice through the camera's view frustum. Such a representation provides more flexibility than voxel grids and enables to better leverage correlations than per-point classification. On the challenging S3D data we observe a simple classifier based on the OPlanes representation to yield compelling results, especially in difficult situations with partial occlusions due to other objects and partial visibility, which haven't been addressed by prior work.

Occupancy Planes for Single-view RGB-D Human Reconstruction

Transfer learning refers to the transfer of knowledge or information from a relevant source domain to a target domain. However, most existing transfer learning theories and algorithms focus on IID tasks, where the source/target samples are assumed to be independent and identically distributed. Very little effort is devoted to theoretically studying the knowledge transferability on non-IID tasks, e.g., cross-network mining. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose rigorous generalization bounds and algorithms for cross-network transfer learning from a source graph to a target graph. The crucial idea is to characterize the cross-network knowledge transferability from the perspective of the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. To this end, we propose a novel Graph Subtree Discrepancy to measure the graph distribution shift between source and target graphs. Then the generalization error bounds on cross-network transfer learning, including both cross-network node classification and link prediction tasks, can be derived in terms of the source knowledge and the Graph Subtree Discrepancy across domains. This thereby motivates us to propose a generic graph adaptive network (GRADE) to minimize the distribution shift between source and target graphs for cross-network transfer learning. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our GRADE framework on both cross-network node classification and cross-domain recommendation tasks.

Non-IID Transfer Learning on Graphs

Spotting camouflaged objects that are visually assimilated into the background is tricky for both object detection algorithms and humans who are usually confused or cheated by the perfectly intrinsic similarities between the foreground objects and the background surroundings. To tackle this challenge, we aim to extract the high-resolution texture details to avoid the detail degradation that causes blurred vision in edges and boundaries. We introduce a novel \textbf{HitNet} to refine the low-resolution representations by high-resolution features in an iterative feedback manner, essentially a global loop-based connection among the multi-scale resolutions. To design better feedback feature ﬂow and avoid the feature corruption caused by recurrent path, an iterative feedback strategy is proposed to impose more constraints on each feedback connection. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets demonstrate that our HitNet breaks the performance bottleneck and achieves significant improvements compared with 29 state-of-the-art methods. In addition, to address the data scarcity in camouflaged scenarios, we provide an application example to convert the salient objects to camouflaged objects, thereby generating more camouflaged training samples from the diverse salient object datasets. Code will be made publicly available.

High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Recent years have witnessed significant growth of face alignment. Though dense facial landmark is highly demanded in various scenarios, e.g., cosmetic medicine and facial beautification, most works only consider sparse face alignment. To address this problem, we present a framework that can enrich landmark density by existing sparse landmark datasets, e.g., 300W with 68 points and WFLW with 98 points. Firstly, we observe that the local patches along each semantic contour are highly similar in appearance. Then, we propose a weakly-supervised idea of learning the refinement ability on original sparse landmarks and adapting this ability to enriched dense landmarks. Meanwhile, several operators are devised and organized together to implement the idea. Finally, the trained model is applied as a plug-and-play module to the existing face alignment networks. To evaluate our method, we manually label the dense landmarks on 300W testset. Our method yields state-of-the-art accuracy not only in newly-constructed dense 300W testset but also in the original sparse 300W and WFLW testsets without additional cost.

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Scene Graph to Image Synthesis via Knowledge Consensus

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