United States

As an essential step in the pathological diagnosis, histochemical staining can show specific tissue structure information and, consequently, assist pathologists in making accurate diagnoses. Clinical kidney histopathological analyses usually employ more than one type of staining: H&amp;E, MAS, PAS, PASM, etc. However, due to the interference of colors among multiple stains, it is not easy to perform multiple staining simultaneously on one biological tissue. To address this problem, we propose a network based on unpaired training data to virtually generate multiple types of staining from one staining. Our method can preserve the content of input images while transferring them to multiple target styles accurately. To efficiently control the direction of stain transfer, we propose a style guided normalization (SGN). Furthermore, a multiple style encoding (MSE) is devised to represent the relationship among different staining styles dynamically. An improved one-hot label is also proposed to enhance the generalization ability and extendibility of our method. Vast experiments have demonstrated that our model can achieve superior performance on a tiny dataset. The results exhibit not only good performance but also great visualization and interpretability. Especially, our method also achieves satisfactory results over cross-tissue, cross-staining as well as cross-task. We believe that our method will significantly influence clinical stain transfer and reduce the workload greatly for pathologists. Our code and Supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/linyiyang98/UMDST.

AAAI 2022

Unpaired Multi-Domain Stain Transfer for Kidney Histopathological Images

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/)

AAAI 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.



As an essential step in the pathological diagnosis, histochemical staining can show specific tissue structure information and, consequently, assist pathologists in making accurate diagnoses. Clinical kidney histopathological analyses usually employ more than one type of staining: H&E, MAS, PAS, PASM, etc. However, due to the interference of colors among multiple stains, it is not easy to perform multiple staining simultaneously on one biological tissue. To address this problem, we propose a network based on unpaired training data to virtually generate multiple types of staining from one staining. Our method can preserve the content of input images while transferring them to multiple target styles accurately. To efficiently control the direction of stain transfer, we propose a style guided normalization (SGN). Furthermore, a multiple style encoding (MSE) is devised to represent the relationship among different staining styles dynamically. An improved one-hot label is also proposed to enhance the generalization ability and extendibility of our method. Vast experiments have demonstrated that our model can achieve superior performance on a tiny dataset. The results exhibit not only good performance but also great visualization and interpretability. Especially, our method also achieves satisfactory results over cross-tissue, cross-staining as well as cross-task. We believe that our method will significantly influence clinical stain transfer and reduce the workload greatly for pathologists. Our code and Supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/linyiyang98/UMDST.

technical paper

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. 

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform very well in image classification and object detection in recent years, but even the most advanced models have limited rotation invariance. Known solutions include the enhancement of training data and the increase of rotation invariance by globally merging the rotation equivariant features. These methods either increase the workload of training or increase the number of model parameters. To address this problem, this paper proposes a module that can be inserted into the existing networks, and directly incorporates the rotation invariance into the feature extraction layers of the CNNs. This module does not have learnable parameters and will not increase the complexity of the model. At the same time, only by training the upright data, it can perform well on the rotated testing set. These ad-vantages will be suitable for fields such as biomedicine and astronomy where it is difficult to obtain upright samples or the target has no directionality. Evaluate our module with LeNet-5, ResNet-18 and tiny-yolov3, we get impressive results.

RRL: Regional Rotate Layer in Convolutional Neural Network

We consider the problem of reducing the false discovery rate in multiple high-dimensional interventional datasets under unknown targets. Traditional algorithms merged directly multiple causal graphs learned, which ignores the contradictions of different datasets, leading to lots of inconsistent directions of edges. For reducing the contradictory information, we propose a new algorithm, which first learns an interventional Markov equivalence class (I-MEC) before merging multiple graphs. It utilizes the full power of the constraints available in interventional data and combines ideas from local learning, intervention, and search-and-score techniques in a principled and effective way in different intervention experiments. Specifically, local learning on multiple datasets is used to build a causal skeleton. Perfect intervention destroys some possible triangles, leading to the identification of more possible V-structures. And then a theoretically correct I-MEC is learned. Search and scoring techniques based on the learned I-MEC further identify the remaining unoriented edges. Both theoretical analysis and experiments on benchmark Bayesian networks with the number of variables from 20 to 724 validate that the effectiveness of our algorithm in reducing the false discovery rate in high-dimensional interventional data.

Efficient Causal Structure Learning from Multiple Interventional Datasets with Unknown Targets

Tensor factorization and distanced based models play important roles in knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, the relational matrices in KGC methods often induce a high model complexity, bearing a high risk of overfitting. As a remedy, researchers propose a variety of different regularizers such as the tensor nuclear norm regularizer. Our motivation is based on the observation that the previous work only focuses on the â€œsizeâ€ of the parametric space, while leaving the implicit semantic information widely untouched. To address this issue, we propose a new regularizer, namely, Equivariance Regularizer (ER), which can suppress overfitting by leveraging the implicit semantic information. Specifically, ER can enhance the generalization ability of the model by employing the semantic equivariance between the head and tail entities. Moreover, it is a generic solution for both distance based models and tensor factorization based models. Our experimental results indicate a clear and substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art relation prediction methods.

ER: Equivariance Regularizer for Knowledge Graph Completion

Recently, many regression based conditional independence (CI) test methods have been proposed to solve the problem of causal discovery. These methods provide alternatives to test CI by first removing the information of the controlling set from the two target variables, and then testing the independence between the corresponding residuals Res1 and Res2. When the residuals are linearly uncorrelated, the independence test between them is nontrivial. With the ability to calculate inner product in high-dimensional space, kernel-based methods are usually used to achieve this goal, but still consume considerable time. In this paper, we investigate the independence between two linear combinations under linear non-Gaussian structural equation model. We show that the dependence between the two residuals can be captured by the difference between the similarity of (Res1, Res2) and that of (Res1, Res3) (Res3 is generated by random permutation) in high-dimensional space. With this result, we design a new method called SCIT for CI test, where permutation test is performed to control Type I error rate. The proposed method is simpler yet more efficient and effective than the existing ones. When applied to causal discovery, the proposed method outperforms the counterparts in terms of both speed and Type II error rate, especially in the case of small sample size, which is validated by our extensive experiments on various datasets.

Residual Similarity Based Conditional Independence Test and Its Application in Causal Discovery

Occlusion is common in the actual 3D scenes, causing the boundary ambiguity of the targeted object. This uncertainty brings difficulty for labeling and learning. Current 3D detectors predict the bounding box directly, regarding it as Dirac delta distribution. However, it does not fully consider such ambiguity. To deal with it, distribution learning is used to efficiently represent the boundary ambiguity. In this paper, we revise the common regression method by predicting the distribution of the 3D box and then present a distribution-aware regression (DAR) module for box refinement and localization quality estimation. It contains scale adaptive (SA) encoder and joint localization quality estimator (JLQE). With the adaptive receptive field, SA encoder refines discriminative features for precise distribution learning. JLQE provides a reliable location score by further leveraging the distribution statistics, correlating with the localization quality of the targeted object. Combining DAR module and the baseline VoteNet, we propose a novel 3D detector called DAVNet. Extensive experiments on both ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that the proposed DAVNet achieves significant improvement and outperforms state-of-the-art 3D detectors.

Distribution Aware VoteNet for 3D Object Detection

Learning from multimodal data is an important research topic in machine learning, which has the potential to obtain better representations. In this work, we propose a novel approach to generative modeling of multimodal data based on generative adversarial networks. To learn a coherent multimodal generative model, we show that it is necessary to align different encoder distributions with the joint decoder distribution simultaneously. To this end, we construct a specific form of the discriminator to enable our model to utilize data efficiently, which can be trained constrastively. By taking advantage of contrastive learning through factorizing the discriminator, we train our model on unimodal data. We have conducted experiments on the benchmark datasets, whose promising results show that our proposed approach outperforms the-state-ofthe-art methods on a variety of metrics. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/6b5d/mmali.

Multimodal Adversarially Learned Inference with Factorized Discriminators

We study fair and efficient allocation of divisible goods, in an online manner, among n agents. The goods arrive online in a sequence of T time periods. The agents' values for a good are revealed only after its arrival, and the online algorithm needs to fractionally allocate the good, immediately and irrevocably, among the agents. Towards a unifying treatment of fairness and economic efficiency objectives, we develop an algorithmic framework for finding online allocations to maximize the generalized mean of the values received by the agents. In particular, working with the assumption that each agent's value for the grand bundle of goods is appropriately scaled, we address online maximization of p-mean welfare. Parameterized by an exponent term p in (-infty, 1], these means encapsulate a range of welfare functions, including social welfare (p=1), egalitarian welfare (p to -infty), and Nash social welfare (p to 0).

We present a simple algorithmic template that takes a threshold as input and, with judicious choices for this threshold, leads to both universal and tailored competitive guarantees. First, we show that one can compute online a single allocation that O (sqrt(n) log n)-approximates the optimal p-mean welfare for all p <= 1. The existence of such a universal allocation is interesting in and of itself. Moreover, this universal guarantee achieves essentially tight competitive ratios for specific values of p. 

Next, we obtain improved competitive ratios for different ranges of p by executing our algorithm with p-specific thresholds, e.g., we provide O(log^3 n)-competitive ratio for all p in (-1/(log 2n),1). 

We complement our positive results by establishing lower bounds to show that our guarantees are essentially tight for a wide range of the exponent parameter.

Universal and Tight Online Algorithms for Generalized-Mean Welfare

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used to tackle the few-shot learning (FSL) problem and shown great potentials under the transductive setting. However under the inductive setting, existing GNN based methods are less competitive. This is because they use an instance GNN as a label propagation/classification module, which is jointly meta-learned with a feature embedding network. This design is problematic because the classifier needs to adapt quickly to new tasks while the embedding does not. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid GNN (HGNN) model consisting of two GNNs, an instance GNN and a prototype GNN. Instead of label propagation, they act as feature embedding adaptation modules for quick adaptation of the meta-learned feature embedding to new tasks. Importantly they are designed to deal with a fundamental yet often neglected challenge in FSL, that is, with only a handful of shots per class, any few-shot classifier would be sensitive to badly sampled shots which are either outliers or can cause inter-class distribution overlapping. Extensive experiments show that our HGNN obtains new state-of-the-art on three FSL benchmarks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianyuanYu/HGNN.

Hybrid Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Learning

Current representation learning methods for whole slide image (WSI) with pyramidal resolutions are inherently homogeneous and flat, which cannot fully exploit the multiscale and heterogeneous diagnostic information of different structures for comprehensive analysis. This paper presents a novel graph neural network-based multiple instance learning framework (i.e., H^2-MIL) to learn hierarchical representation from a heterogeneous graph with different resolutions for WSI analysis. A heterogeneous graph with the â€œresolutionâ€ attribute is constructed to explicitly model the feature and spatial-scaling relationship of multi-resolution patches. We then design a novel resolution-aware attention convolution (RAConv) block to learn compact yet discriminative representation from the graph, which tackles the heterogeneity of node neighbors with different resolutions and yields more reliable message passing. More importantly, to explore the task-related structured information of WSI pyramid, we elaborately design a novel iterative hierarchical pooling (IHPool) module to progressively aggregate the heterogeneous graph based on scaling relationships of different nodes. We evaluated our method on two public WSI datasets from the TCGA project, i.e., esophageal cancer and kidney cancer. Experimental results show that our method clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both tumor typing and staging tasks.

H^2-MIL: Exploring Hierarchical Representation with Heterogeneous Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Cross-modal hashing has attracted considerable attention for large-scale multimodal data. Recent supervised cross-modal hashing methods using multi-label networks utilize the semantics of multi-labels to enhance retrieval accuracy, where label hash codes are learned independently. However, all these methods assume that label annotations reliably reflect the relevance between their corresponding instances, which is not true in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Bidirectional Reinforcement Guided Hashing for Effective Cross-Modal Retrieval (Bi-CMR), which exploits a bidirectional learning to relieve the negative impact of this assumption. Specifically, in the forward learning procedure, we highlight the representative labels and learn the reinforced multi-label hash codes by intra-modal semantic information, and further adjust similarity matrix. In the backward learning procedure, the reinforced multi-label hash codes and adjusted similarity matrix are used to guide the matching of instances. We construct two datasets with explicit relevance labels that reflect the semantic relevance of instance pairs based on two benchmark datasets. The Bi-CMR is evaluated by conducting extensive experiments over these two datasets. Experimental results prove the superiority of Bi-CMR over four state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness.

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