Canada

Object detection in dark conditions has always been a great challenge due to the complex formation process of low-light images. Currently, the mainstream methods usually adopt domain adaptation with Teacher-Student architecture to solve the dark object detection problem, and they imitate the dark conditions by using non-learnable data augmentation strategies on the annotated source daytime images. Note that these methods neglected to model the intrinsic imaging process, i.e. image signal processing (ISP), which is important for camera sensors to generate low-light images. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel method named ISP-Teacher for dark object detection by exploring Teacher-Student architecture from a new perspective (i.e. self-supervised learning based ISP degradation). Specifically, we first design a day-to-night transformation module that consistent with the ISP pipeline of the camera sensors (ISP-DTM) to make the augmented images look more in line with the natural low-light images captured by cameras, and the ISP-related parameters are learned in a self-supervised manner. Moreover, to avoid the conflict between the ISP degradation and detection tasks in a shared encoder, we propose a disentanglement regularization (DR) that minimizes the absolute value of cosine similarity to disentangle two tasks and push two gradients vectors as orthogonal as possible. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method in dark object detection. In particular, ISP-Teacher achieves an improvement of +2.4% AP and +3.3% AP over the SOTA method on BDD100k and SHIFT datasets, respectively. The code can be found at https://github.com/zhangyin1996/ISP-Teacher.

AAAI 2024

ISP-Teacher:Image Signal Process with Disentanglement Regularization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Dark Object Detection

object detection

self-supervised learning

domain adaptation

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

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.<br><br><br><br>

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. 

The filter bubble is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), which describes the phenomenon whereby users are exposed to a limited and narrow range of information or content that reinforces their existing dominant preferences and beliefs. This results in a lack of exposure to diverse and varied content. Many existing works have predominantly examined filter bubbles in static or relatively-static recommendation settings. However, filter bubbles will be continuously intensified over time due to the feedback loop between the user and the system in the real-world online recommendation. To address these issues, we propose a novel paradigm, Multi-Facet Preference Learning for Pricking Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommender System (FacetCRS), which aims to burst filter bubbles in the conversational recommender system (CRS) through timely user-item interactions via natural language conversations. By considering diverse user preferences and intentions, FacetCRS automatically model user preference into multi-facets, including entity-, word-, context-, and review-facet, to capture diverse and dynamic user preferences to prick filter bubbles in the CRS. It is an end-to-end CRS framework to adaptively learn representations of various levels of preference facet and diverse types of external knowledge. Extensive experiments on two publicly available benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating filter bubbles and enhancing recommendation quality in CRS.

FacetCRS: Multi-Faceted Preference Learning for Pricking Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommender System

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this paper, we study the sample complexity of online Q-learning methods when some prior knowledge about the dynamics is available or can be learned efficiently. We focus on systems that evolve according to an additive disturbance model of the form S_{h+1} = ƒ(S_h, A_h) + W_h, where ƒ represents the underlying system dynamics, and W_h are unknown disturbances independent of states and actions. In the setting of finite episodic Markov decision processes with S states, A actions, and episode length H, we present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm that achieves Õ(Poly(H)√T) regret under perfect knowledge of ƒ, where T is the total number of interactions with the system. This is in contrast to the typical Õ(Poly(H)√SAT) regret for existing Q-learning methods. Further, if only a noisy estimate \hat{ƒ} of ƒ is available, our method can learn an approximately optimal policy in a number of samples that is independent of the cardinalities of state and action spaces. The sub-optimality gap depends on the approximation error \hat{ƒ}−ƒ, as well as the Lipschitz constant of the corresponding optimal value function. Our approach does not require modeling of the transition probabilities and enjoys the same memory complexity as model-free methods.

Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Partial Dynamics Knowledge

In this paper, we address the nonrigid shape matching with outliers by a novel and effective pointwise map refinement method, termed Locality Preserving Refinement. For accurate pointwise conversion from a given functional map, our method formulates a two-step procedure. Firstly, starting with noisy point-to-point correspondences, we identify inliers by leveraging the neighborhood support, which yields a closed-form solution with linear time complexity. After obtained the reliable correspondences of inliers, we refine the pointwise correspondences for outliers using local linear embedding, which operates in an adaptive spectral similarity space to further eliminate the ambiguities that are difficult to handle in the functional space. By refining pointwise correspondences with local consistency thus embedding geometric constraints into functional spaces, our method achieves considerable improvement in accuracy with linearithmic time and space cost. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/XiaYifan1999/LOPR.

Locality Preserving Refinement for Shape Matching with Functional Maps

Continual Semantic Segmentation (CSS) is an emerging trend, where catastrophic forgetting has been a perplexing problem. In this paper, we propose a Text-to-Image Knowledge Preservation (TIKP) framework to address this issue. TIKP applies Text-to-Image techniques to CSS by automatically generating prompts and content adaptation. It extracts associations between the labels of seen data and constructs text-level prompts based on these associations, which are preserved and maintained at each incremental step. During training, these prompts generate correlated images to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting. Particularly, as the generated images may have different distributions from the original data, TIKP transfers the knowledge by a content adaption loss, which determines the role played by the generated images in incremental training based on the similarity. In addition, for the classifier, we use the previous model from a different perspective: misclassifying new classes into old objects instead of the background. We propose a knowledge distillation loss based on wrong labels, enabling us to attribute varying weights to individual objects during the distillation process. Extensive experiments conducted in the same setting show that TIKP outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on benchmark datasets.

TIKP: Text-to-Image Knowledge Preservation for Continual Semantic Segmentation | VIDEO

Motivation: Advances in single-cell measurement techniques provide rich multimodal data, which helps us to explore the life state of cells more deeply. However, multimodal integration, or, learning joint embeddings from multimodal data remains a current challenge. The difficulty in integrating unpaired single-cell multimodal data is that different modalities have different feature spaces, which easily leads to information loss in joint embedding. And few existing methods have fully exploited and fused the information in single-cell multimodal data. Result: In this study, we propose CoVEL, a deep learning method for unsupervised integration of single-cell multimodal data. CoVEL learns single-cell representations from a comprehensive view, including regulatory relationships between modalities, fine-grained representations of cells, and relationships between different cells. The comprehensive view embedding enables CoVEL to remove the gap between modalities while protecting biological heterogeneity. Experimental results on multiple public datasets show that CoVEL is accurate and robust to single-cell multimodal integration. Data availability: https://github.com/shapsider/scintegration.

Comprehensive View Embedding Learning for Single-Cell Multimodal Integration

Lidar-based 3D Detection is one of the significant components of Autonomous Driving. However, current methods over-focus on improving the performance of 3D Lidar perception, which causes the architecture of networks becoming complicated and hard to deploy. Thus, the methods are difficult to apply in Autonomous Driving for real-time processing. In this paper, we propose a high-efficiency network, SwiftPillars, which includes Swift Pillar Encoder  (SPE) and Multi-scale Aggregation Decoder  (MAD). The SPE is constructed by a concise Dual-attention Module with lightweight operators. The Dual-attention Module utilizes feature pooling, matrix multiplication, etc. to speed up point-wise and channel-wise attention extraction and fusion. The MAD interconnects multiple scale features extracted by SPE with minimal computational cost to leverage performance. In our experiments, our proposal accomplishes 61.3% NDS and 53.2% mAP in nuScenes dataset. In addition, we evaluate inference time on several platforms  (P4,  T4,  A2, MLU370, RTX3080), where SwiftPillars achieves up to 13.3ms  (75FPS) on NVIDIA Tesla T4. Compared with PointPillars, SwiftPillars is on average 24.34% faster in inference speed with equivalent GPUs and a higher mAP of approximately 3.2%  in the nuScenes dataset.

SwiftPillars: High-Efficiency Pillar Encoder for Lidar-Based 3D Detection

The emergence of ChatGPT has once again sparked research in generative artificial intelligence (GAI). While people have been amazed by the generated results, they have also noticed the reasoning potential reflected in the generated textual content. However, this current ability for causal reasoning is primarily limited to the domain of language generation, such as in models like GPT-3. In visual modality, there is currently no equivalent research. Considering causal reasoning in visual content generation is significant. This is because visual information contains infinite granularity. Particularly, images can provide more intuitive and specific demonstrations for certain reasoning tasks, especially when compared to coarse-grained text. Hence, we propose a new image generation task called visual question answering with image (VQAI) and establish a dataset of the same name based on the classic Tom and Jerry animated series. Additionally, we develop a new paradigm for image generation to tackle the challenges of this task. Finally, we perform extensive experiments and analyses, including visualizations of the generated content and discussions on the potentials and limitations. The code and data are publicly available under the license of CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for academic and non-commercial usage.

Image Content Generation with Causal Reasoning | VIDEO

While text-3D editing has made significant strides in leveraging score distillation sampling, emerging approaches still fall short in delivering separable, precise and consistent outcomes that are vital to content creation. In response, we introduce FocalDreamer, a framework that merges base shape with editable parts according to text prompts for fine-grained editing within desired regions. Specifically, equipped with geometry union and dual-path rendering, FocalDreamer assembles independent 3D parts into a complete object, tailored for convenient instance reuse and part-wise control. We propose geometric focal loss and style consistency regularization, which encourage focal fusion and congruent overall appearance. Furthermore, FocalDreamer generates high-fidelity geometry and PBR textures which are compatible with widely-used graphics engines. Extensive experiments have highlighted the superior editing capabilities of FocalDreamer in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

FocalDreamer: Text-Driven 3D Editing via Focal-Fusion Assembly

RAW to sRGB mapping, which aims to convert RAW images from smartphones into RGB form equivalent to that of Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, has become an important area of research. However, current methods often ignore the difference between cell phone RAW images and DSLR camera RGB images, a difference that goes beyond the color matrix and extends to spatial structure due to resolution variations. Recent methods directly rebuild color mapping and spatial structure via shared deep representation, limiting optimal performance. Inspired by Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, which distinguishes image restoration and enhancement, we present a novel Neural ISP framework, named FourierISP. This approach breaks the image down into style and structure within the frequency domain, allowing for independent optimization. FourierISP is comprised of three subnetworks: Phase Enhance Subnet for structural refinement, Amplitude Refine Subnet for color learning, and Color Adaptation Subnet for blending them in a smooth manner. This approach sharpens both color and structure, and extensive evaluations across varied datasets confirm that our approach realizes state-of-the-art results. Code will be available at https://github.com/alexhe101/FourierISP.

Enhancing RAW-to-sRGB with Decoupled Style Structure in Fourier Domain | VIDEO

Open-sourced large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in various tasks with instruction tuning. 
However, these models can sometimes struggle with tasks that require more specialized knowledge such as translation. 
One possible reason for such deficiency is that instruction tuning aims to generate fluent and coherent text that continues from a given instruction without being constrained by any task-specific requirements. 
Moreover, it can be more challenging to tune smaller LLMs with lower-quality training data.
To address this issue, we propose a novel framework using examples in comparison to teach LLMs to learn translation. 
Our approach involves output comparison and preference comparison, presenting the model with 
carefully designed examples of correct and incorrect translations and an additional preference loss for better regularization.
Empirical evaluation on four language directions of WMT2022 and FLORES-200 benchmarks shows the superiority of our proposed method over existing methods. 
Our findings offer a new perspective on fine-tuning LLMs for translation tasks and provide a promising solution for generating high-quality translations.
Please refer to Github for more details:
https://github.com/lemon0830/TIM.

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