Canada

Few-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) realizes few-shot cross-modal learning,  which is an emerging and challenging task in computer vision. Currently, most of the few-shot VQA methods are confined to simply extending few-shot classification methods to cross-modal tasks while ignoring the spatial distribution properties of multimodal features and cross-modal information interaction. To address this problem, we propose a novel Cross-modal feature Distribution Calibration Inference Network (CDCIN) in this paper, where a new concept named visual information entropy is proposed to realize multimodal features distribution calibration by cross-modal information interaction for more effective few-shot VQA. Visual information entropy is a statistical variable that represents the spatial distribution of visual features guided by the question, which is aligned before and after the reasoning process to mitigate redundant information and improve multi-modal features by our proposed visual information entropy calibration module. To further enhance the inference ability of cross-modal features, we additionally propose a novel pre-training method, where the reasoning sub-network of CDCIN is pretrained on the base class in a VQA classification paradigm and fine-tuned on the few-shot VQA datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed CDCIN achieves excellent performance on few-shot VQA and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three widely used benchmark datasets.

AAAI 2024

Cross-Modal Feature Distribution Calibration for Few-Shot Visual Question Answering | VIDEO

cv: multi-modal vision; cv: language and vision

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. 

As the exorbitant expense of labeling autopilot datasets and the growing trend of utilizing unlabeled data, semi-supervised segmentation on point clouds becomes increasingly imperative. Intuitively, finding out more ``unspoken words'' (i.e., latent instance information) beyond the label itself should be helpful to improve performance. In this paper, we discover two types of latent labels behind the displayed label embedded in LiDAR and image data. First, in the LiDAR Branch, we propose a novel augmentation, Cylinder-Mix, which is able to augment more yet reliable samples for training. Second, in the Image Branch, we propose the Instance Position-scale Learning (IPSL) Module to learn and fuse the information of instance position and scale, which is from a 2D pre-trained detector and a type of latent label obtained from 3D to 2D projection. Finally, the two latent labels are embedded into the multi-modal panoptic segmentation network. The ablation of the IPSL module demonstrates its robust adaptability, and the experiments evaluated on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method, LaserMix.

Beyond the Label Itself: Latent Labels Enhance Semi-supervised Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation | VIDEO

Deep Compressed Sensing (DCS) has attracted considerable interest due to its superior quality and speed compared to traditional CS algorithms. However, current approaches employ simplistic convolutional downsampling to acquire measurements, making it difficult to retain high-level features of the original signal for better image reconstruction. Furthermore, these approaches often overlook the presence of both high- and low-frequency information within the network, despite their critical role in achieving high-quality reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multi-Cross Sampling and Frequency Division Network (MCFD-Net) for image CS. The Dynamic Multi-Cross Sampling (DMCS) module, a sampling network of MCFD-Net, incorporates pyramid cross convolution and dual-branch sampling with multi-level pooling. Additionally, it introduces an attention mechanism between perception blocks to enhance adaptive learning effects. In the second deep reconstruction stage, we design a Frequency Division Reconstruction Module (FDRM). This module employs a discrete wavelet transform to extract high- and low-frequency information from images. It then applies multi-scale convolution and self-similarity attention compensation separately to both types of information before merging the output reconstruction results. The MCFD-Net integrates the DMCS and FDRM to construct an end-to-end learning network. Extensive CS experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our MCFD-Net outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, while also exhibiting superior noise robustness.

Multi-Cross Sampling and Frequency-Division Reconstruction for Image Compressed Sensing

Fully Observable Non-Deterministic (FOND) planning is a variant of classical symbolic planning in which actions are nondeterministic, with the potential to yield alternative outcomes upon execution. It is a popular planning paradigm with applications ranging from robot planning to dialogue agent design and reactive synthesis. Over the last 20 years, a number of approaches to FOND planning have emerged. In this work, we establish a new state of the art in FOND planning, following in the footsteps of some of the most powerful FOND planners to date. Our planner, PR2, decisively outperforms the four leading FOND planners, at times by a large margin, in 17 of 18 domains that represent a comprehensive benchmark suite. Ablation studies demonstrate the impact of various techniques we introduce, with the largest improvement coming from our novel FOND-aware heuristic.

PRP Rebooted: Advancing the State of the Art in FOND Planning

This study introduces an efficient and effective method, MeDM, that utilizes pre-trained image Diffusion Models for video-to-video translation with consistent temporal flow. The proposed framework can render videos from scene position information, such as a normal G-buffer, or perform text-guided editing on videos captured in real-world scenarios. We employ explicit optical flows to construct a practical coding that enforces physical constraints on generated frames and mediates independent frame-wise scores. By leveraging this coding, maintaining temporal consistency in the generated videos can be framed as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. To ensure compatibility with Stable Diffusion, we also suggest a workaround for modifying observation-space scores in latent Diffusion Models. Notably, MeDM does not require fine-tuning or test-time optimization of the Diffusion Models. Through extensive qualitative, quantitative, and subjective experiments on various benchmarks, the study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Our project page can be found at https://medm2023.github.io

MeDM: Mediating Image Diffusion Models for Video-to-Video Translation with Temporal Correspondence Guidance

Programmatic Weak Supervision (PWS) and generative models serve as crucial tools that enable researchers to maximize the utility of existing datasets without resorting to laborious data gathering and manual annotation processes. PWS uses various weak supervision techniques to estimate the underlying class labels of data, while generative models primarily concentrate on sampling from the underlying distribution of the given dataset. Although these methods have the potential to complement each other, they have mostly been studied independently.
    Recently, WSGAN proposed a mechanism to fuse these two models. Their approach utilizes the discrete latent factors of InfoGAN for the training of the label models and leverages the class-dependent information of the label models to generate images of specific classes. However, the disentangled latent factor learned by the InfoGAN may not necessarily be class specific and hence could potentially affect the label model's accuracy. Moreover, the prediction of the label model is often noisy in nature and can have a detrimental impact on the quality of images generated by GAN. In our work, we address these challenges by (i) implementing a noise-aware classifier using the pseudo labels generated by the label model, (ii) utilizing the prediction of the noise-aware classifier for training the label model as well as generation of class-conditioned images. Additionally, We also investigate the effect of training the classifier with a subset of the dataset within a defined uncertainty budget on pseudo labels. We accomplish this by formalizing the subset selection problem as submodular maximization with a knapsack constraint on the entropy of pseudo labels. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of our methods on several tasks vis-a-vis the current state-of-the-art methods.

Fusing Conditional Submodular GAN and Programmatic Weak Supervision

Deep neural networks are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when trained on sequential tasks. Various continual learning (CL) methods often rely on exemplar buffers or/and network expansion for balancing model stability and plasticity, which, however, compromises their practical value due to privacy and memory concerns. Instead, this paper considers a strict yet realistic setting, where the training data from previous tasks is unavailable and the model size remains relatively constant during sequential training. To achieve such desiderata, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective method that attributes forgetting to \textit{layer-wise parameter overwriting} and the resulting \textit{decision boundary distortion}. This is achieved by the synergy between two key components: \textit{HSIC-Bottleneck Orthogonalization} (HBO) implements non-overwritten parameter updates mediated by Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion in an orthogonal space and \textit{EquiAngular Embedding} (EAE) enhances decision boundary adaptation between old and new tasks with predefined basis vectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy performance, even with absolute superiority of zero exemplar buffer and 1.02x the base model.

Towards Continual Learning Desiderata via HSIC-Bottleneck Orthogonalization and Equiangular Embedding

Controllable text generation is a challenging and meaningful field in natural language generation (NLG). Especially, poetry generation is a typical one with well-defined and strict conditions for text generation which is an ideal playground for the assessment of current methodologies. While prior works succeeded in controlling either semantic or metrical aspects of poetry generation, simultaneously addressing both remains a challenge. In this paper, we pioneer the use of the Diffusion model for generating sonnets and Chinese SongCi poetry to tackle such challenges. In terms of semantics, our PoetryDiffusion model, built upon the Diffusion model, generates entire sentences or poetry by comprehensively considering the entirety of sentence information. This approach enhances semantic expression, distinguishing it from autoregressive and large language models (LLMs). For metrical control, the separation feature of diffusion generation and its constraint control module enable us to flexibly incorporate a novel metrical controller to manipulate and evaluate metrics (format and rhythm). The denoising process in PoetryDiffusion allows for gradual enhancement of semantics and flexible integration of the metrical controller which can calculate and impose penalties on states that stray significantly from the target control distribution. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing models in terms of automatic evaluation of semantic, metrical, and overall performance as well as human evaluation.

PoetryDiffusion: Towards Joint Semantic and Metrical Manipulation in Poetry Generation

Lane detection is to determine the precise location and shape of lanes on the road. Despite efforts made by current methods, it remains a challenging task due to the complexity of real-world scenarios. Existing approaches, whether proposal-based or keypoint-based, suffer from depicting lanes effectively and efficiently. Proposal-based methods detect lanes by distinguishing and regressing a collection of proposals in a streamlined top-down way, yet lack sufficient flexibility in lane representation. Keypoint-based methods, on the other hand, construct lanes flexibly from local descriptors, which typically entail complicated post-processing. In this paper, we present a “Sketch-and-Refine” paradigm that utilizes the merits of both keypoint-based and proposal-based methods. The motivation is that local directions of lanes are semantically simple and clear. At the “Sketch” stage, local directions of keypoints can be easily estimated by fast convolutional layers. Then we can build a set of lane proposals accordingly with moderate accuracy. At the “Refine” stage, we further optimize these proposals via a novel Lane Segment Association Module (LSAM), which allows adaptive lane segment adjustment. Last but not least, we propose multi-level feature integration to enrich lane feature representations more efficiently. Based on the proposed “Sketch-and-Refine” paradigm, we propose a fast yet effective lane detector dubbed “SRLane”. Experiments show that our SRLane can run at a fast speed (i.e., 278 FPS) while yielding an F1 score of 78.9%. The source code is available at: https://github.com/passerer/SRLane.

Sketch and Refine: Towards Fast and Accurate Lane Detection

We study a new problem of semantic complete scene forecasting (SCSF) in this work. Given a 4D dynamic point cloud sequence, our goal is to forecast the complete scene corresponding to the future next frame along with its semantic labels. To tackle this challenging problem, we properly model the synergetic relationship between future forecasting and semantic scene completion through a novel network named SCSFNet. SCSFNet leverages a hybrid geometric representation for high-resolution complete scene forecasting. To leverage multi-frame observation as well as the understanding of scene dynamics to ease the completion task, SCSFNet introduces an attention-based skip connection scheme. To ease the need to model occlusion variations and to better focus on the occluded part, SCSFNet utilizes auxiliary visibility grids to guide the forecasting task. To evaluate the effectiveness of SCSFNet, we conduct experiments on various benchmarks including two large-scale indoor benchmarks we contributed and the outdoor SemanticKITTI benchmark. Extensive experiments show SCSFNet outperforms baseline methods on multiple metrics by a large margin, and also prove the synergy between future forecasting and semantic scene completion.

Semantic Complete Scene Forecasting from a 4D Dynamic Point Cloud Sequence

Recently, neural implicit functions have demonstrated remarkable results in the field of multi-view reconstruction. However, most existing methods are tailored for dense views and exhibit unsatisfactory performance when dealing with sparse views. Several latest methods have been proposed for generalizing implicit reconstruction to address the sparse view reconstruction task, but they still suffer from high training costs and are merely valid under carefully selected perspectives. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse view reconstruction framework that leverages on-surface priors to achieve highly faithful surface reconstruction.  Specifically, we design several constraints on global geometry alignment and local geometry refinement for jointly optimizing coarse shapes and fine details. To achieve this, we train a neural network to learn a global implicit field from the on-surface points obtained from SfM and then leverage it as a coarse geometric constraint. To exploit local geometric consistency, we project on-surface points onto seen and unseen views, treating the consistent loss of projected features as a fine geometric constraint. The experimental results with DTU and BlendedMVS datasets in two prevalent sparse settings demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

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Beyond the Label Itself: Latent Labels Enhance Semi-supervised Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation | VIDEO

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