United States

In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 19 state-of-the-art tracking methods. Dataset, code, model and results are available at https://github.com/mmic-lcl/source-code.

AAAI 2022

Cross-Modal Object Tracking: Modality-Aware Representations and a Unified Benchmark

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

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. 

3D delineation of anatomical structures is a cardinal goal in medical imaging analysis. Prior to deep learning, statistical shape models (SSMs) that imposed anatomical constraints and produced high quality surfaces were a core technology. Today's fully-convolutional networks (FCNs), while dominant, do not offer these capabilities. We present deep implicit statistical shape models (DISSMs), a new approach that marries the representation power of deep networks with the benefits of SSMs. DISSMs use an implicit representation to produce compact and descriptive deep surface embeddings that permit statistical models of anatomical variance. To reliably fit anatomically plausible shapes to an image, we introduce a novel rigid and non-rigid pose estimation pipeline that is modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Intra-dataset experiments on the task of pathological liver segmentation demonstrate that DISSMs can perform more robustly than four leading FCN models, including nnU-Net + an adversarial prior: reducing the mean Hausdorff distance (HD) by 7.5-14.3 mm and improving the worst case Dice-SÃ¸rensen coefficient (DSC) by 1.2-2.3%. More critically, cross-dataset experiments on an external and highly challenging clinical dataset demonstrate that DISSMs improve the mean DSC and HD by 2.1-5.9% and 9.9-24.5 mm, respectively, and the worst-case DSC by 5.4-7.3%. Supplemental validation on a highly challenging and low-contrast larynx dataset further demonstrate DISSM's improvements. These improvements are over and above any benefits from representing delineations with high-quality surfaces.

Deep Implicit Statistical Shape Models for 3D Medical Image Delineation

We propose an information-theoretic bias measurement technique through a causal interpretation of spurious correlation, which is effective to identify the feature-level algorithmic bias by taking advantage of conditional mutual information. Although several bias measurement methods have been proposed and widely investigated to achieve algorithmic fairness in various tasks such as face recognition, their accuracy- or logit-based metrics are susceptible to leading to trivial prediction score adjustment rather than fundamental bias reduction. Hence, we design a novel debiasing framework against the algorithmic bias, which incorporates a bias regularization loss derived by the proposed information-theoretic bias measurement approach. In addition, we present a simple yet effective unsupervised debiasing technique based on stochastic label noise, which does not require the explicit supervision of bias information. The proposed bias measurement and debiasing approaches are validated in diverse realistic scenarios through extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks.

Information-Theoretic Bias Reduction via Causal View of Spurious Correlation

Modeling complex hierarchical and grouped feature interaction in the multivariate time series data is indispensable to comprehend the data dynamics and predicting the future condition. The implicit feature interaction and high-dimensional data make multivariate forecasting very challenging. Many existing works did not put more emphasis on exploring explicit correlation among multiple time series data, and complicated models are designed to capture long- and short-range pattern with the aid of attention mechanism. In this work, we think that pre-defined graph or general learning method is difficult due to their irregular structure. Hence, we present CATN, an end-to-end model of Cross Attentive Tree-aware Network to jointly capture the inter-series correlation and intra-series temporal pattern. We first construct a tree structure to learn hierarchical and grouped correlation and design an embedding approach that can pass dynamic message to generalize implicit but interpretable cross features among multiple time series. Next in temporal aspect, we propose a multi-level dependency learning mechanism including global&local learning and cross attention mechanism, which can combine long-range dependencies, short-range dependencies as well as cross dependencies at different time steps. The extensive experiments on different datasets from real world show the effectiveness and robustness of the method we proposed when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.

CATN: Cross Attentive Tree-Aware Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received tremendous attention due to their superiority in learning node representations. These models rely on message passing and feature transformation functions to encode the structural and feature information from neighbors. However, stacking more convolutional layers significantly decreases the performance of GNNs. Most recent studies attribute this limitation to the over-smoothing issue, where node embeddings converge to indistinguishable vectors. Through a number of experimental observations, we argue that the main factor degrading the performance is the unstable forward normalization and backward gradient resulted from the improper design of the feature transformation, especially for shallow GNNs where the over-smoothing has not happened. Therefore, we propose a novel orthogonal feature transformation, named Ortho-GConv, which could generally augment the existing GNN backbones to stabilize the model training and improve the model's generalization performance. Specifically, we maintain the orthogonality of the feature transformation comprehensively from three perspectives, namely hybrid weight initialization, orthogonal transformation, and orthogonal regularization. By equipping the existing GNNs (e.g. GCN, JKNet, GCNII) with Ortho-GConv, we demonstrate the generality of the orthogonal feature transformation to enable stable training, and show its effectiveness for node and graph classification tasks.

Orthogonal Graph Neural Networks

Even though considerable progress has been made in deep learning-based 3D point cloud processing, how to obtain accurate correspondences for robust registration remains a major challenge because existing hard assignment methods cannot deal with outliers naturally. Alternatively, the soft matching-based methods have been proposed to learn the matching probability rather than hard assignment. However, in this paper, we prove that these methods have an inherent ambiguity causing many deceptive correspondences. To address the above challenges, we propose to learn a partial permutation matching matrix, which does not assign corresponding points to outliers, and implements hard assignment to prevent ambiguity. However, this proposal poses two new problems, i.e. existing hard assignment algorithms can only solve a full rank permutation matrix rather than a partial permutation matrix, and this desired matrix is defined in the discrete space, which is non-differentiable. In response, we design a dedicated soft-to-hard (S2H) matching procedure within the registration pipeline consisting of two steps: solving the soft matching matrix (S-step) and projecting this soft matrix to the partial permutation matrix (H-step). Specifically, we augment the profit matrix before the hard assignment to solve an augmented permutation matrix, which is cropped to achieve the final partial permutation matrix. Moreover, to guarantee end-to-end learning, we supervise the learned partial permutation matrix but propagate the gradient to the soft matrix instead. Our S2H matching procedure can be easily integrated with existing registration frameworks, which has been verified in representative frameworks including DCP, RPMNet, and DGR. Extensive experiments have validated our method, which creates a new state-of-the-art performance.

End-to-End Learning the Partial Permutation Matrix for Robust 3D Point Cloud Registration

Procedural text understanding requires machines to reason about entity states within the dynamical narratives. Current procedural text understanding approaches are commonly entity-wise, which separately track each entity and independently predict different states of each entity. Such an entity-wise paradigm does not consider the interaction between entities and their states. In this paper, we propose a new scene-wise paradigm for procedural text understanding, which jointly tracks states of all entities in a scene-by-scene manner. Based on this paradigm, we propose Scene Graph Reasoner (SGR), which introduces a series of dynamically evolving scene graphs to jointly formulate the evolution of entities, states and their associations throughout the narrative. In this way, the deep interactions between all entities and states can be jointly captured and simultaneously derived from scene graphs. Experiments show that SGR not only achieves the new state-of-the-art performance but also significantly accelerates the speed of reasoning.

Procedural Text Understanding via Scene-Wise Evolution

Abstract dialectical frameworks (in short, ADFs) are a unifying model of formal argumentation, where argumentative relations between arguments are represented by assigning acceptance conditions to atomic arguments. This idea is generalized by letting acceptance conditions being assigned to complex formulas, resulting in conditional abstract dialectical frameworks (in short, cADFs). We define the semantics of cADFs in terms of a non-truth-functional four-valued logic, and study the semantics in-depth, by showing existence results and proving that all semantics are generalizations of the corresponding semantics for ADFs.

Conditional Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

We consider the problem of Combinatorial Pure Exploration (CPE), which deals with finding a combinatorial set of arms with a high reward, when the rewards of individual arms are unknown in advance and must be estimated using arm pulls. Previous algorithms for this problem, while obtaining sample complexity reductions in many cases, are highly computationally intensive, thus making them impractical even for mildly large problems. In this work, we propose a new CPE algorithm in the PAC setting, which is computationally light weight, and so can easily be applied to problems with tens of thousands of arms. This is achieved since the proposed algorithm requires a very small number of combinatorial oracle calls. The algorithm is based on successive acceptance of arms, along with elimination which is based on the combinatorial structure of the problem. We provide sample complexity guarantees for our algorithm, and demonstrate in experiments its usefulness on large problems, whereas previous algorithms are impractical to run on problems of even a few dozen arms. The code is provided at https://github.com/noabdavid/csale. The full version of this paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04197.

A Fast Algorithm for PAC Combinatorial Pure Exploration

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? 
For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods.
For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. 
Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/renli1024/SE-GNN.

How Does Knowledge Graph Embedding Extrapolate to Unseen Data: a Semantic Evidence View

With the vigorous development of multimedia equipments and applications, efficient retrieval of large-scale multi-modal data has become a trendy research topic.  Thereinto, hashing has become a prevalent choice due to its retrieval efficiency and low storage cost. Although multi-modal hashing has drawn lots of attention in recent years, there still remain some problems. The first point is that existing methods are mainly designed in batch mode and not able to efficiently handle streaming multi-modal data. The second point is that all existing online multi-modal hashing methods fail to effectively handle unseen new classes which come continuously with streaming data chunks. In this paper, we propose a new model, termed Online enhAnced SemantIc haShing (OASIS). We design novel semantic-enhanced representation for data, which could help handle the new coming classes, and thereby construct the enhanced semantic objective function. An efficient and effective discrete online optimization algorithm is further proposed for OASIS. Extensive experiments show that our method can exceed the state-of-the-art models. For good reproducibility and benefiting the community, our code and data are already publicly available.

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