Canada

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.

AAAI 2024

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

federated learning

multimodal learning

language and vision

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.



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. 

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.

Hard Regularization to Prevent Deep Online Clustering Collapse without Data Augmentation | VIDEO

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) parses objects and predicts their relationships (predicate) to connect human language and visual scenes.
However, different language preferences of annotators and semantic overlaps between predicates lead to biased predicate annotations in the dataset, i.e. different predicates for the same object pairs.
Biased predicate annotations make PSG models struggle in constructing a clear decision plane among predicates, which greatly hinders the real application of PSG models.
To address the intrinsic bias above, we propose a novel framework named ADTrans to adaptively transfer biased predicate annotations to informative and unified ones. To promise consistency and accuracy during the transfer process, we propose to observe the invariance degree of representations in each predicate class, and learn unbiased prototypes of predicates with different intensities. Meanwhile, we continuously measure the distribution changes between each presentation and its prototype, and constantly screen potentially biased data. Finally, with the unbiased predicate-prototype representation embedding space, biased annotations are easily identified.
Experiments show that ADTrans significantly improves the performance of benchmark models, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance, and shows great generalization and effectiveness on multiple datasets. Our code is released at \url{https://github.com/lili0415/PSG-biased-annotation}.

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation with Semantics-Prototype Learning

Accurately computing optical flow in low-contrast and noisy dark images is challenging, especially when contour information is degraded or difficult to extract. This paper proposes CEDFlow, a latent space contour enhancement for estimating optical flow in dark environments. By leveraging local and global feature decomposition and aggregation, CEDFlow effectively encodes motion features. Importantly, we introduce the 2nd-order Gaussian difference operation to select salient contour features in the latent space precisely. It is specifically designed for large-scale contour components essential in dark optical flow estimation. Experimental results on the FCDN and VBOF datasets demonstrate that CEDFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the EPE index and produces more accurate and robust flow estimation.  Our code is available at: https://github.com/xautstuzfy.

CEDFlow: Latent Contour Enhancement for Dark Optical Flow Estimation

Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple (DiaASQ) is a newly-emergent task aiming to extract the sentiment quadruple (i.e., targets, aspects, opinions, and sentiments) from conversations. While showing promising performance, the prior DiaASQ approach unfortunately falls prey to the key crux of DiaASQ, including insufficient modeling of discourse features, and lacking quadruple extraction, which hinders further task improvement. To this end, we introduce a novel framework that not only capitalizes on comprehensive discourse feature modeling, but also captures the intrinsic interaction for optimal quadruple extraction. On the one hand, drawing upon multiple discourse features, our approach constructs a token-level heterogeneous graph and enhances token interactions through a heterogeneous attention network. We further propose a novel triadic scorer, strengthening weak token relations within a quadruple, thereby enhancing the cohesion of the quadruple extraction. Experimental results on the DiaASQ benchmark showcase that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines across both English and Chinese datasets.

Harnessing Holistic Discourse Features and Triadic Interaction for Sentiment Quadruple Extraction in Dialogues

In this paper, we introduce a new challenge for synthesizing novel view images in practical environments with limited input multi-view images and varying lighting conditions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF), one of the pioneering works for this task, demand an extensive set of multi-view images taken under constrained illumination, which is often unattainable in real-world settings. While some previous works have managed to synthesize novel views given images with different illumination, their performance still relies on a substantial number of input multi-view images. To address this problem, we suggest ExtremeNeRF, which utilizes multi-view albedo consistency, supported by geometric alignment. Specifically, we extract intrinsic image components that should be illumination-invariant across different views, enabling direct appearance comparison between the input and novel view under unconstrained illumination. We offer thorough experimental results for task evaluation, employing the newly created NeRF Extreme benchmark—the first in-the-wild benchmark for novel view synthesis under multiple viewing directions and varying illuminations.

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

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