Canada

Building artificial intelligence (AI) systems on top of a set of foundation models (FMs) is becoming a new paradigm in AI research. Their representative and generative abilities learnt from vast amounts of data can be easily adapted and transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks without extra training from scratch. However, leveraging FMs in cross-modal generation remains under-researched when audio modality is involved. On the other hand, automatically generating semantically-relevant sound from visual input is an important problem in cross-modal generation studies. To solve this vision-to-audio (V2A) generation problem, existing methods tend to design and build complex systems from scratch using modestly sized datasets. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to this problem by leveraging foundation models, specifically CLIP, CLAP, and AudioLDM. We first investigate the domain gap between the latent space of the visual CLIP and the auditory CLAP models. Then we propose a simple yet effective mapper mechanism (V2A-Mapper) to bridge the domain gap by translating the visual input between CLIP and CLAP spaces. Conditioned on the translated CLAP embedding, pretrained audio generative FM AudioLDM is adopted to produce high-fidelity and visually-aligned sound. Compared to previous approaches, our method only requires a quick training of the V2A-Mapper. We further analyze and conduct extensive experiments on the choice of the V2A-Mapper and show that a generative mapper is better at fidelity and variability (FD) while a regression mapper is slightly better at relevance (CS). Both objective and subjective evaluation on two V2A datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to current state-of-the-art approaches - trained with 86% fewer parameters but achieving 53% and 19% improvement in FD and CS, respectively. Supplementary materials such as audio samples are provided at our demo website: https://v2a-mapper.github.io/.

AAAI 2024

V2A-Mapper: A Lightweight Solution for Vision-to-Audio Generation by Connecting Foundation Models

ml: deep neural architectures and foundation models

ml: multimodal learning

ml: applications

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 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. 

Predicting future frames of a video is challenging because it is difficult to learn the uncertainty of the underlying factors influencing their contents. In this paper, we propose a novel video prediction model, which has infinite-dimensional latent variables over the spatio-temporal domain. Specifically, we first decompose the video motion and content information, then take a neural stochastic differential equation to predict the temporal motion information, and finally, an image diffusion model autoregressively generates the video frame by conditioning on the predicted motion feature and the previous frame. The better expressiveness and stronger stochasticity learning capability of our model lead to state-of-the-art video prediction performances. As well, our model is able to achieve temporal continuous prediction, i.e., predicting in an unsupervised way the future video frames with an arbitrarily high frame rate. Our code is available at https://github.com/XiYe20/STDiffProject.

STDiff: Spatio-Temporal Diffusion for Continuous Stochastic Video Prediction

Infectious disease outbreaks continue to pose a significant threat to human health and well-being. To improve disease surveillance and understanding of disease spread, several surveillance systems have been developed to monitor daily news alerts and social media. However, existing systems lack thorough epidemiological analysis in relation to corresponding alerts or news, largely due to the scarcity of well-annotated reports data. To address this gap, we introduce the Biomedical Alert News Dataset (BAND), which includes 1,508 samples from existing reported news articles, open emails, and alerts, as well as 30 epidemiology-related questions. These questions necessitate the model's expert reasoning abilities, thereby offering valuable insights into the outbreak of the disease. The BAND dataset brings new challenges to the NLP world, requiring better inference capability of the content and the ability to infer important information. We provide several benchmark tasks, including Named Entity Recognition (NER), Question Answering (QA), and Event Extraction (EE), to demonstrate existing models' capabilities and limitations in handling epidemiology-specific tasks. It is worth noting that some models may lack the human-like inference capability required to fully utilize the corpus. To the best of our knowledge, the BAND corpus is the largest corpus of well-annotated biomedical outbreak alert news with elaborately designed questions, making it a valuable resource for epidemiologists and NLP researchers alike.

BAND: Biomedical Alert News Dataset | VIDEO

Real-world image super-resolution (RWSR) is a long-standing problem as low-quality (LQ) images often have complex and unidentified degradations. Existing methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or continuous diffusion models present their own issues including GANs being difficult to train while continuous diffusion models requiring numerous inference steps. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement (ITER) framework for RWSR, which utilizes a discrete diffusion model operating in the discrete token representation space, i.e., indexes of features extracted from a VQGAN codebook pre-trained with high-quality (HQ) images. We show that ITER is easier to train than GANs and more efficient than continuous diffusion models. Specifically, we divide RWSR into two sub-tasks, i.e., distortion removal and texture generation. Distortion removal involves simple HQ token prediction with LQ images, while texture generation uses a discrete diffusion model to iteratively refine the distortion removal output with a token refinement network. In particular, we propose to include a token evaluation network in the discrete diffusion process. It learns to evaluate which tokens are good restorations and helps to improve the iterative refinement results. Moreover, the evaluation network can first check status of the distortion removal output and then adaptively select total refinement steps needed, thereby maintaining a good balance between distortion removal and texture generation. Extensive experimental results show that ITER is easy to train and performs well within just 8 iterative steps.

Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement for Real-World Super-resolution

As an emerging neuromorphic camera with an asynchronous working mechanism, spike camera shows good potential for high-speed vision tasks. Each pixel in spike camera accumulates photons persistently and fires a spike whenever the accumulation exceeds a threshold. Such high-frequency fine-granularity photon recording facilitates the analysis and recovery of dynamic scenes with high-speed motion. This paper considers the optical flow estimation problem for spike cameras. Due to the Poisson nature of incoming photons, the occurrence of spikes is random and fluctuating, making conventional image matching inefficient. We propose a Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal (HiST) fusion module for spike representation to pursue reliable feature matching and develop a robust optical flow network, dubbed as HiST-SFlow. The HiST extracts features at multiple moments and hierarchically fuses the spatial-temporal information. We also propose an intra-moment filtering module to further extract the feature and suppress the influence of randomness in spikes. A scene loss is proposed to ensure that this hierarchical representation recovers the essential visual information in the scene. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with the existing methods. The source codes will be publicly available.

Optical Flow for Spike Camera with Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Spike Fusion

Obtaining large-scale radiology reports can be difficult for medical images due to ethical concerns, limiting the effectiveness of contrastive pre-training in the medical image domain and underscoring the need for alternative methods. In this paper, we propose eye-tracking as an alternative to text reports, as it allows for the passive collection of gaze signals without ethical issues. By tracking the gaze of radiologists as they read and diagnose medical images, we can understand their visual attention and clinical reasoning. When a radiologist has similar gazes for two medical images, it may indicate semantic similarity for diagnosis, and these images should be treated as positive pairs when pre-training a computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) network through contrastive learning. Accordingly, we introduce the Medical contrastive Gaze Image Pre-training (McGIP) as a plug-and-play module for contrastive learning frameworks. McGIP uses radiologist gaze to guide contrastive pre-training. We evaluate our method using two representative types of medical images and two common types of gaze data. The experimental results demonstrate the practicality of McGIP, indicating its high potential for various clinical scenarios and applications.

Mining Gaze for Contrastive Learning toward Computer-Assisted Diagnosis

Temporal sentence localization (TSL) aims to localize a target segment in a video according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on abundant yet expensive manual annotations for training. Moreover, these trained data-dependent models usually can not generalize well to unseen scenarios because of the inherent domain shift. To facilitate this issue, in this paper, we target another more practical but challenging setting: unsupervised domain adaptative temporal sentence localization (UDA-TSL), which explores whether the localization knowledge can be transferred from a fully-annotated data domain (source domain) to a new unannotated data domain (target domain). Particularly, we propose an effective and novel baseline for UDA-TSL to bridge the multi-modal gap across different domains and learn the potential correspondence between the video-query pairs in target domain. We first develop separate modality-specific domain adaptation modules to smoothly balance the minimization of the domain shifts in cross-dataset video and query domains. Then, to fully exploit the semantic correspondence of both modalities in target domain for unsupervised localization, we devise a mutual information learning module to adaptively align the video-query pairs which are more likely to be relevant in target domain, leading to more truly aligned target pairs and ensuring the discriminability of target features. In this way, our model can learn domain-invariant and semantic-aligned cross-modal representations. Three sets of migration experiments show that our model achieves competitive performance compared to existing methods.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptative Temporal Sentence Localization with Mutual Information Maximization

Federated learning encounters substantial challenges with heterogeneous data, leading to performance degradation and convergence issues. While considerable progress has been achieved in mitigating such an impact, the reliability aspect of federated models has been largely disregarded. In this study, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the reliability of both generic and personalized federated models. Our exploration uncovers a significant finding: federated models exhibit unreliability when faced with heterogeneous data, demonstrating poor calibration on in-distribution test data and low uncertainty levels on out-of-distribution data. This unreliability is primarily attributed to the presence of biased projection heads, which introduce miscalibration into the federated models. Inspired by this observation, we propose the "Assembled Projection Heads" (APH) method for enhancing the reliability of federated models. By treating the existing projection head parameters as priors, APH randomly samples multiple initialized parameters of projection heads from the prior and further performs targeted fine-tuning on locally available data under varying learning rates. Such a head ensemble introduces parameter diversity into the deterministic model, eliminating the bias and producing reliable predictions via head averaging. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed APH method across three prominent federated benchmarks. Experimental results validate the efficacy of APH in model calibration and uncertainty estimation. Notably, APH can be seamlessly integrated into various federated approaches but only requires less than 30% additional computation cost for 100x inferences within large models.

Watch Your Head: Assembling Projection Heads to Save the Reliability of Federated Models

Collecting and labeling real datasets to train the person search networks not only requires a lot of time and effort, but also accompanies privacy issues. 
The weakly-supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed to alleviate the labeling burden for target datasets, however, their generalization capability is limited. 
We introduce a novel person search method based on the domain generalization framework, that uses an automatically labeled unreal dataset only for training but is applicable to arbitrary unseen real datasets. 
To alleviate the domain gaps when transferring the knowledge from the unreal source dataset to the real target datasets, we estimate the fidelity of person instances which is then used to train the end-to-end network adaptively. 
Moreover, we devise a domain-invariant feature learning scheme to encourage the network to suppress the domain-related features.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides the competitive performance to existing person search methods even though it is applicable to arbitrary unseen datasets without any prior knowledge and re-training burdens.

Domain Generalizable Person Search Using Unreal Dataset

Dynamical systems are abstract models of interaction between space and time. They are often used in fields such as physics and engineering to understand complex processes, but due to their general nature, they have found applications for studying computational processes, interaction in multi-agent systems, machine learning algorithms and other computer science related phenomena. In the vast majority of applications, a dynamical system consists of the action of a continuous `transition function' on a metric space. In this work, we consider decidable formal systems for reasoning about such structures. Spatial logics can be traced back to the 1940's, but our work follows a more dynamic turn that these logics have taken due to two recent developments: the study of the topological $\mu$-calculus, and the the integration of linear temporal logic with logics based on the Cantor derivative. In this paper, we combine dynamic topological logics based on the Cantor derivative and the `next point in time' operators with an expressively complete fixed point operator to produce a combination of the topological $\mu$-calculus with linear temporal logic. We show that the resulting logics are decidable and have a natural axiomatisation. Moreover, we prove that these logics are complete for interpretations on the Cantor space, the rational numbers, and subspaces thereof.

Dynamic Tangled Derivative Logic of Metric Spaces

Aspect prediction (AP) and sentiment prediction (SP) are representative applications in fine-grained sentiment anal- ysis. They can be considered as sequential tasks, where AP identifies mentioned aspects in a sentence, and SP infers fine-grained sentiments for these aspects. Recent models perform the aspect-sentiment prediction in a joint man-ner, but heavily rely on the feature interactions of aspect and sentiment. One drawback is that they ignore correlation strength varies between aspect features and sentiment fea- tures across different sentences, and employ a fixed feature interaction strategy may limit effective knowledge transfer across tasks. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Inter-task Feature Interaction framework, AIFI, for joint aspect-sentiment prediction. Specifically, we introduce a novel contrast-based alignment method based on contrastive learning. Our approach considers the AP-specific and SP-specific representations of a given sentence as a positive pair, while representation of another random sentence serves as a negative example. Moreover, we propose an inter-task feature correlation network to predict the contrast strength, which is determined by the temperature coefficient in the InfoNCE loss. This dynamic correlation adjustment enhances model’s ability to capture proper feature interactions more efficiently. Experimental results on three datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

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