Canada

Text-based Person Re-identification (T-ReID), which aims at retrieving a specific pedestrian image from a collection of images via text-based information, has received significant attention. However, previous research has overlooked a challenging yet practical form of T-ReID: dealing with image galleries mixed with occluded and inconsistent personal visuals, instead of ideal visuals with a full-body and clear view. Its major challenges lay in the insufficiency of benchmark datasets and the enlarged semantic gap incurred by arbitrary occlusions and modality gap between text description and visual representation of the target person. To alleviate these issues, we first design an Occlusion Generator (OGor) for the automatic generation of artificial occluded images from generic surveillance images. Then, a fine-granularity token selection mechanism is proposed to minimize the negative impact of occlusion for robust feature learning, and a novel multi-granularity contrastive consistency alignment framework is designed to leverage intra-/inter-granularity of visual-text representations for semantic alignment of occluded visuals and query texts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance. We believe this work could inspire the community to investigate more dedicated designs for implementing T-ReID in real-world scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/littlexinyi/MGCC.

AAAI 2024

Text-Based Occluded Person Re-identification via Multi-Granularity Contrastive Consistency Learning

image and video retrieval

multi-modal vision

language and vision

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. 

technical paper

The performance of deep learning models often degrades rapidly when faced with imbalanced data characterized by a long-tailed distribution. Researchers have found that the fully connected layer trained by cross-entropy loss has large weight-norms for classes with many samples, but not for classes with few samples. How to address the data imbalance problem with both the encoder and the classifier seems an under-researched problem. In this paper, we propose an inverse weight-balancing (IWB) approach to guide model training and alleviate the data imbalance problem in two stages. In the first stage, an encoder and classifier (the fully connected layer) are trained using conventional cross-entropy loss. In the second stage, with a fixed encoder, the classifier is finetuned through an adaptive distribution for IWB in the decision space. Unlike existing inverse image frequency that implements a multiplicative margin adjustment transformation in the classification layer, our approach can be interpreted as an adaptive distribution alignment strategy using not only the class-wise number distribution but also the sample-wise difficulty distribution in both encoder and classifier. Experiments show that our method can greatly improve performance on imbalanced datasets such as CIFAR100-LT with different imbalance factors, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturelists2018.

Inverse Weight-Balancing for Deep Long-Tailed Learning

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown promise in generating realistic novel views from sparse scene images. However, existing NeRF approaches often encounter challenges due to the lack of explicit 3D supervision and imprecise camera poses, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose AltNeRF---a novel framework designed to create resilient NeRF representations using self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SMDE) from monocular videos, without relying on known camera poses. SMDE in AltNeRF masterfully learns depth and pose priors to regulate NeRF training. The depth prior enriches NeRF's capacity for precise scene geometry depiction, while the pose prior provides a robust starting point for subsequent pose refinement. Moreover, we introduce an alternating algorithm that harmoniously melds NeRF outputs into SMDE through a consistence-driven mechanism, thus enhancing the integrity of depth priors. This alternation empowers AltNeRF to progressively refine NeRF representations, yielding the synthesis of realistic novel views. Extensive experiments showcase the compelling capabilities of AltNeRF in generating high-fidelity and robust novel views that closely resemble reality.

AltNeRF: Learning Robust Neural Radiance Field via Alternating Depth-Pose Optimization | VIDEO

Text-based audio generation models have limitations as they cannot encompass all the information in audio, leading to restricted controllability when relying solely on text. To address this issue, we propose a novel model that enhances the controllability of existing pre-trained text-to-audio models by incorporating additional conditions including content (timestamp) and style (pitch contour and energy contour) as supplements to the text. This approach achieves fine-grained control over the temporal order, pitch, and energy of generated audio. To preserve the diversity of generation, we employ a trainable control condition encoder that is enhanced by a large language model and a trainable Fusion-Net to encode and fuse the additional conditions while keeping the weights of the pre-trained text-to-audio model frozen. Due to the lack of suitable datasets and evaluation metrics, we consolidate existing datasets into a new dataset comprising the audio and corresponding conditions and use a series of evaluation metrics to evaluate the controllability performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our model successfully achieves fine-grained control to accomplish controllable audio generation. Audio samples and our dataset are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://conditionaudiogen.github.io/conditionaudiogen/}}.

Audio Generation with Multiple Conditional Diffusion Model | VIDEO

Multi-label few-shot aspect category detection (FS-ACD) is a challenging sentiment analysis task, which aims to learn a multi-label learning paradigm with limited training data. The difficulty of this task is how to use limited data to generalize effective discriminative representations for different categories. Nowadays, all advanced FS-ACD works utilize the prototypical network to learn label prototypes to represent different aspects. However, such point-based estimation methods are inherently noise-susceptible and bias-vulnerable. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Variational Hybrid-Attention Framework (VHAF) for the FS-ACD task. Specifically, to alleviate the data noise, we adopt a hybrid-attention mechanism to generate more discriminative aspect-specific embeddings. Then, based on these embeddings, we introduce the variational distribution inference to obtain the aspect-specific distribution as a more robust aspect representation, which can eliminate the scarce data bias for better inference. Moreover, we further leverage an adaptive threshold estimation to help VHAF better identify multiple relevant aspects. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our VHAF over other state-of-the-art methods.

Variational Hybrid-Attention Framework for Multi-Label Few-Shot Aspect Category Detection

To mitigate potential risks associated with language models (LMs), recent AI detection research proposes incorporating watermarks into machine-generated text through random vocabulary restrictions and utilizing this information for detection. In this paper, we show that watermarking algorithms designed for LMs cannot be seamlessly applied to conditional text generation (CTG) tasks without a notable decline in downstream task performance. To address this issue, we introduce a simple yet effective semantic-aware watermarking algorithm that considers the characteristics of conditional text generation with the input context. Compared to the baseline watermarks, our proposed watermark yields significant improvements in both automatic and human evaluations across various text generation models, including BART and Flan-T5, for CTG tasks such as summarization and data-to-text generation. Meanwhile, it maintains detection ability with higher z-scores but lower AUC scores, suggesting the presence of a detection paradox that poses additional challenges for watermarking CTG.

Watermarking Conditional Text Generation for AI Detection: Unveiling Challenges and a Semantic-Aware Watermark Remedy

Cross-domain text classification aims to transfer models from label-rich source domains to label-poor target domains, giving it a wide range of practical applications. Many approaches promote cross-domain generalization by capturing domaininvariant features. However, these methods rely on unlabeled samples provided by the target domains, which renders the model ineffective when the target domain is agnostic. Furthermore, the models are easily disturbed by shortcut learning in the source domain, which also hinders the improvement of domain generalization ability. To solve the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes TACIT, a target domain agnostic feature disentanglement framework which adaptively decouples robust and unrobust features by Variational Auto-Encoders. Additionally, to encourage the separation of unrobust features from robust features, we design a feature distillation task that compels unrobust features to approximate the output of the teacher. The teacher model is trained with a few easy samples that are easy to carry potential unknown shortcuts. Experimental results verify that our framework achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art baselines while utilizing only source domain data.

TACIT: A Target-Agnostic Feature Disentanglement Framework for Cross-Domain Text Classification

In recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC), which studies the challenging multi-view clustering problem on missing views, has received growing research interests. Previous IMVC methods suffer from the following issues: (1) the inaccurate imputation for missing data, which leads to suboptimal clustering performance, and (2) most existing IMVC models merely consider the explicit presence of graph structure in data, ignoring the fact that latent graphs of different views also provide valuable information for the clustering task. To overcome such challenges, we present a novel method, termed Adaptive feature imputation with latent graph for incomplete multi-view clustering (AGDIMC). Specifically, it captures the embbedded features of each view by incorporating the view-specific deep encoders. Then, we construct partial latent graphs on complete data, which can consolidate the intrinsic relationships within each view while preserving the topological information. With the aim of estimating the missing sample based on the available information, we utilize an adaptive imputation layer to impute the embedded feature of missing data by using cross-view soft cluster assignments and global cluster centroids. As the imputation progresses, the portion of complete data increases, contributing to enhancing the discriminative information contained in global pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, to alleviate the negative impact caused by inferior impute samples and the discrepancy of cluster structures, we further design an adaptive imputation strategy based on the global pseudo-label and the local cluster assignment. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing approaches.

Adaptive Feature Imputation with Latent Graph for Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering | VIDEO

Recently Text-to-Video (T2V) synthesis has undergone a breakthrough by training transformers or diffusion models on large-scale datasets. Nevertheless, inferring such large models incurs huge costs. Previous inference acceleration works either require costly retraining or are model-specific. To address this issue, instead of retraining we explore the inference process of two mainstream T2V models using transformers and diffusion models. The exploration reveals the redundancy in temporal attention modules of both models, which are commonly utilized to establish temporal relations among frames. Consequently, we propose a training-free and generalized pruning strategy called F3-Pruning to prune redundant temporal attention weights. Specifically, when aggregate temporal attention values are ranked below a certain ratio, corresponding weights will be pruned. Extensive experiments on three datasets using a classic transformer-based model CogVideo and a typical diffusion-based model Tune-A-Video verify the effectiveness of F3-Pruning in inference acceleration, quality assurance and broad applicability.

F3-Pruning: A Training-Free and Generalized Pruning Strategy towards Faster and Finer Text-to-Video Synthesis

Neural construction models have shown promising performance for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by adopting either the Autoregressive (AR) or Non-Autoregressive (NAR) learning approach. While AR models produce high-quality solutions, they generally have a high inference latency due to their sequential generation nature. Conversely, NAR models generate solutions in parallel with a low inference latency but generally exhibit inferior performance. In this paper, we propose a generic Guided Non-Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation (GNARKD) method to obtain high-performance NAR models having a low inference latency. GNARKD removes the constraint of sequential generation in AR models while preserving the learned pivotal components in the network architecture to obtain the corresponding NAR models through knowledge distillation. We evaluate GNARKD by applying it to three widely adopted AR models to obtain NAR VRP solvers for both synthesized and real-world instances. The experimental results demonstrate that GNARKD significantly reduces the inference time (4-5 times faster) with acceptable performance drop (2-3\%). To the best of our knowledge, this study is first-of-its-kind to obtain NAR VRP solvers from AR ones through knowledge distillation.

Distilling Autoregressive Models to Obtain High-Performance Non-autoregressive Solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems with Faster Inference Speed | VIDEO

Federated learning (FL) has attracted growing attention since it allows for privacy-preserving collaborative training on decentralized clients without explicitly uploading sensitive data to the central server. However, recent works have revealed that it still has the risk of exposing private data to adversaries. In this paper, we conduct reconstruction attacks and enhance inference attacks on various datasets to better understand that sharing trained classification model parameters to a central server is the main problem of privacy leakage in FL. To tackle this problem, a privacy-preserving image distribution sharing scheme with GAN (PPIDSG) is proposed, which consists of a block scrambling-based encryption algorithm, an image distribution sharing method, and local classification training. Specifically, our method can capture the distribution of a target image domain which is transformed by the block encryption algorithm, and upload generator parameters to avoid classifier sharing with negligible influence on model performance. Furthermore, we apply a feature extractor to motivate model utility and train it separately from the classifier. The extensive experimental results and security analyses demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme compared to other state-of-the-art defense methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ytingma/PPIDSG.

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Inverse Weight-Balancing for Deep Long-Tailed Learning

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