Canada

Visual retrieval aims to search for the most relevant visual items, e.g., images and videos, from a candidate gallery with a given query item. Accuracy and efficiency are two competing objectives in retrieval tasks. Instead of crafting a new method pursuing further improvement on accuracy, in this paper we propose a multi-teacher distillation framework Whiten-MTD, which is able to transfer knowledge from off-the-shelf pre-trained retrieval models to a lightweight student model for efficient visual retrieval. Furthermore, we discover that the similarities obtained by different retrieval models are diversified and incommensurable, which makes it challenging to jointly distill knowledge from multiple models. Therefore, we propose to whiten the output of teacher models before fusion, which enables effective multi-teacher distillation for retrieval models. Whiten-MTD is conceptually simple and practically effective. Extensive experiments on two landmark image retrieval datasets and one video retrieval dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and its good balance of retrieval performance and efficiency. Our source code is released at https://github.com/Maryeon/whiten_mtd.

AAAI 2024

Let All Be Whitened: Multi-Teacher Distillation for Efficient Visual Retrieval | VIDEO

efficient retrieval

multi-teacher distillation

image and video retrieval

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

technical paper

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.

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

Dynamic structural causal models (SCMs) are a powerful framework for reasoning in dynamic systems about direct effects which measure how a change in one variable affects another variable while holding all other variables constant. The causal relations in a dynamic structural causal model can be qualitatively represented with an acyclic full-time causal graph. Assuming linearity and no hidden confounding and given the full-time causal graph, the direct causal effect is always identifiable. However, in many application such a graph is not available for various reasons but nevertheless experts have access to the summary causal graph of the full-time causal graph which represents causal relations between time series while omitting temporal information and allowing cycles. This paper presents a complete identifiability result which characterizes all cases for which the direct effect
is graphically identifiable from a summary causal graph and gives two sound finite adjustment sets that can be used to estimate the direct effect whenever it is identifiable.

Identifiability of Direct Effects from Summary Causal Graphs

The immense popularity of racket sports has fueled substantial demand in tactical analysis with broadcast videos. However, existing manual methods require laborious annotation, and recent attempts leveraging video perception models are limited to low-level annotations like ball trajectories, overlooking tactics that necessitate an understanding of stroke techniques. State-of-the-art action segmentation models also struggle with technique recognition due to frequent occlusions and motion-induced blurring in racket sports videos. To address these challenges, We propose ViSTec, a Video-based Sports Technique recognition model inspired by human cognition that synergizes sparse visual data with rich contextual insights. Our approach integrates a graph to explicitly model strategic knowledge in stroke sequences and enhance technique recognition with contextual inductive bias. A two-stage action perception model is jointly trained to align with the contextual knowledge in the graph. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models by a significant margin. Case studies with experts from the Chinese national table tennis team validate our model's capacity to automate analysis for technical actions and tactical strategies. More details are available at: https://ViSTec2024.github.io/.

ViSTec: Video Modeling for Sports Technique Recognition and Tactical Analysis

Automatic medical report generation (MRG) is of great research value as it has the potential to relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing. Despite recent advancements, accurate MRG remains challenging due to the need for precise clinical understanding and disease identification. Moreover, the imbalanced distribution of diseases makes the challenge even more pronounced, as rare diseases are underrepresented in training data, making their diagnosis unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose diagnosis-driven prompts for medical report generation (PromptMRG), a novel framework that aims to improve the diagnostic accuracy of MRG with the guidance of diagnosis-aware prompts. Specifically, PromptMRG is based on encoder-decoder architecture with an extra disease classification branch. When generating reports, the diagnostic results from the classification branch are converted into token prompts to explicitly guide the generation process. To further improve the diagnostic accuracy, we design cross-modal feature enhancement, which retrieves similar reports from the database to assist the diagnosis of a query image by leveraging the knowledge from a pre-trained CLIP. Moreover, the disease imbalanced issue is addressed by applying an adaptive logit-adjusted loss to the classification branch based on the individual learning status of each disease, which overcomes the barrier of text decoder's inability to manipulate disease distributions. Experiments on two MRG benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed method, where it obtains state-of-the-art clinical efficacy performance on both datasets.

PromptMRG: Diagnosis-Driven Prompts for Medical Report Generation

Recently, foundation models have exhibited remarkable advancements in multi-modal learning. These models, equipped with millions (or billions) of parameters, typically require a substantial amount of data for finetuning. However, collecting and centralizing training data from diverse sectors becomes challenging due to distinct privacy regulations. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a promising solution, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train neural networks without centralizing their local data. To alleviate client computation burdens and communication overheads, previous works have adapted Parameter-efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods for FL. Hereby, only a small fraction of the model parameters are optimized and communicated during federated communications. Nevertheless, most previous works have focused on a single modality and neglected one common phenomenon, i.e., the presence of data heterogeneity across the clients. Therefore, in this work, we propose a finetuning framework tailored to heterogeneous multi-modal FL, called Federated Dual-Aadapter Teacher (FedDAT). Specifically, our approach leverages a Dual-Adapter Teacher (DAT) to address data heterogeneity by regularizing the client local updates and applying Mutual Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for an efficient knowledge transfer. FedDAT is the first approach that enables an efficient distributed finetuning of foundation models for a variety of heterogeneous Vision-Language tasks. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on four multi-modality FL benchmarks with different types of data heterogeneity, where FedDAT substantially outperforms the existing centralized PEFT methods adapted for FL.

FedDAT: An Approach for Foundation Model Finetuning in Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Federated Learning | VIDEO

Generating text-editable and pose-controllable character videos have an imperious demand in creating various digital human. Nevertheless, this task has been restricted by the absence of a comprehensive dataset featuring paired
video-pose captions and the generative prior models for videos. In this work, we design a novel two-stage training scheme that can utilize easily obtained datasets (i.e., image pose pair and pose-free video) and the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model to obtain the pose-controllable character videos. Specifically, in the first stage, only the keypoint-image pairs are used only for a controllable text-to-image
generation. We learn a zero-initialized convolutional encoder to encode the pose information. In the second stage, we finetune the motion of the above network via a pose-free video dataset by adding the learnable temporal self-attention and
reformed cross-frame self-attention blocks. Powered by our new designs, our method successfully generates continuously pose-controllable character videos while keeps the editing and concept composition ability of the pre-trained T2I model. The code and models will be made publicly available.

Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation Using Pose-Free Videos

Pathological images play a vital role in clinical cancer diagnosis. Computer-aided diagnosis utilized on digital Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has been widely studied. The major challenge of using deep learning models for WSI analysis is the huge size of WSI images and existing methods struggle between end-to-end learning and proper modeling of contextual information. Most state-of-the-art methods utilize a two-stage strategy, in which they use a pre-trained model to extract features of small patches cut from a WSI and then input these features into a classification model. These methods can not perform end-to-end learning and consider contextual information at the same time. To solve this problem, we propose a framework that models a WSI as a pathologist's observing video and utilizes Transformer to process video clips with a divide-and-conquer strategy, which helps achieve both context-awareness and end-to-end learning. Extensive experiments on three public WSI datasets show that our proposed method outperforms existing SOTA methods in both WSI classification and positive region detection. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/donquixote2402/VINO.

Transformer-Based Video-Structure Multi-Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

Federated learning (FL)  has been widely studied recently due to its property to collaboratively train data from different devices without sharing the raw  data. Nevertheless, recent studies show that an adversary can still be possible to infer private information about devices' data, e.g., sensitive attributes such as income, race, and sexual orientation. To mitigate the attribute inference attacks, various existing privacy-preserving FL methods can be adopted/adapted. However, all these existing methods have key limitations: they need to know the FL task in advance, or have intolerable computational overheads or utility losses, or do not have provable privacy guarantees. 

We address these issues and design a task-agnostic privacy-preserving presentation learning method for FL (TAPPFL) against attribute inference attacks. TAPPFL is formulated via information theory. Specifically, 
TAPPFL has two mutual information goals, where one goal learns task-agnostic data representations that contain the least information about the private attribute in each device's data, and the other goal ensures the learnt data representations include as much information as possible about the device data to maintain FL utility. We also derive privacy guarantees of TAPPFL against worst-case attribute inference attacks, as well as the inherent tradeoff between utility preservation and privacy protection. Extensive results on multiple datasets and applications validate the effectiveness of TAPPFL to protect data privacy, maintain the FL utility, and be efficient as well. 
Experimental results also show that TAPPFL outperforms the existing defenses.

Task-Agnostic Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Federated Learning against Attribute Inference Attacks

The behaviour of multi-agent learning in competitive network games is 
often studied under the assumption of zero-sum payoffs, for which 
convergence guarantees may be obtained. However, beyond zero-sum, 
multi-agent learning is known to display complex behaviours and 
convergence can no longer be guaranteed. Nonetheless, in order to 
develop a complete picture of the behaviour of multi-agent learning in 
competitive settings, the zero-sum assumption must be lifted.

Motivated by this, we study the Q-Learning dynamics, a popular model 
of exploration and exploitation in multi-agent learning, in general 
competitive network games. We determine how the degree of competition, 
exploration rate and network structure impact the convergence of 
Q-Learning. To study general competitive games, we parameterise 
network games in terms of their competitiveness and study the average 
behaviour of Q-Learning across all games drawn from a choice of this 
parameter. This statistical approach establishes choices of parameters for which 
Q-Learning dynamics converge to a stable fixed point. Different to 
previous works, we find that the stability of Q-Learning is explicitly 
dependent only on the network connectivity rather than the total 
number of agents. Our experiments validate these results and show 
that, under certain network structures, the total number of agents can 
be increased without affecting the likelihood of unstable or chaotic 
behaviours.

Stability of Multi-Agent Learning in Competitive Networks: Delaying the Onset of Chaos

Recently, diffusion-based methods for monocular 3D human pose estimation have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance by directly regressing the 3D joint coordinates from the 2D pose sequence. Although some methods decompose the task into bone length and bone direction prediction based on the human anatomical skeleton to explicitly incorporate more human body prior constraints, the performance of these methods is significantly lower than that of the SOTA diffusion-based methods. This can be attributed to the tree structure of the human skeleton. Direct application of the disentangled method could amplify the accumulation of hierarchical errors, propagating through each hierarchy. Meanwhile, the hierarchical information has not been fully explored by the previous methods. To address these problems, a Disentangled Diffusion-based 3D human Pose Estimation method with Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser is proposed, termed DDHPose. In our approach: (1) We disentangle the 3d pose and diffuse the bone length and bone direction during the forward process of the diffusion model to effectively model the human pose prior. A disentanglement loss is proposed to supervise diffusion model learning. (2) For the reverse process, we propose Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser (HSTDenoiser) to improve the hierarchical modelling of each joint. Our HSTDenoiser comprises two components: the Hierarchical-Related Spatial Transformer (HRST) and the Hierarchical-Related Temporal Transformer (HRTT). HRST exploits joint spatial information and the influence of the parent joint on each joint for spatial modeling, while HRTT utilizes information from both the joint and its hierarchical adjacent joints to explore the hierarchical temporal correlations among joints. Extensive experiments on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets show that our method outperforms the SOTA disentangled-based, non-disentangled based, and probabilistic approaches by 10.0%, 2.0%, and 1.3%, respectively.

Disentangled Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser

Online deep clustering refers to the joint use of a feature extraction network and a clustering model to assign cluster labels to each new data point or batch as it is processed. While faster and more versatile than offline methods, online clustering can easily reach the collapsed solution where the encoder maps all inputs to the same point and all are put into a single cluster. Successful existing models have employed various techniques to avoid this problem, most of which require data augmentation or which aim to make the average soft assignment across the dataset the same for each cluster. We propose a method that does not require data augmentation, and that, differently from existing methods, regularizes the hard assignments. Using a Bayesian framework, we derive an intuitive optimization objective that can be straightforwardly included in the training of the encoder network. Tested on four image datasets, it consistently avoids collapse more robustly than other methods and leads to more accurate clustering. We also conduct further experiments and analyses justifying our choice to regularize the hard cluster assignments. Code is available at https://github.com/Lou1sM/online_hard_clustering.

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