Canada

Adapting the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for direct image super-resolution is wasteful, given that a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can recover the main low-frequency content. Therefore, we present ResDiff, a novel Diffusion Probabilistic Model based on Residual structure for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). ResDiff utilizes a combination of a CNN, which restores primary low-frequency components, and a DPM, which predicts the residual between the ground-truth image and the CNN predicted image. In contrast to the common diffusion-based methods that directly use LR space to guide the noise towards HR space, ResDiff utilizes the CNN’s initial prediction to direct the noise towards the residual space between HR space and CNN-predicted space, which not only accelerates the generation process but also acquires superior sample quality. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss function for CNN is introduced to facilitate its restoration, and a frequency-domain guided diffusion is designed for DPM on behalf of predicting high-frequency details. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResDiff outperforms previous diffusion based methods in terms of shorter model convergence time, superior generation quality, and more diverse samples.

AAAI 2024

ResDiff: Combining CNN and Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution

cv: low level & physics-based vision

image & video synthesis

cv: computational photography

cv: applications

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

We present a novel computational approach to resolving conflicts among norms by nonmonotonic normative reasoning (in constrained I/O logics). Our approach extends standard sequent-based proof systems and makes them more adequate to nonmonotonic reasoning by adding to the sequents annotations that keep track of what is known about the defeasible status of the derived sequents. This makes transparent the reasons according to which norms should be applicable or inapplicable, and accordingly the sequents that make use of such norms are accepted or retracted. We also show that this proof theoretic method has tight links to the semantics of formal argumentation frameworks. The outcome of this paper is thus a threefold characterization result that relates, in the context of nonmonotonic normative reasoning, three traditional ingredients of AI-based reasoning methods: maximally consistent sets of premises (in constrained I/O logics), derived sequents (which are accepted in corresponding annotated sequent calculi), and logical arguments (that belong to the grounded extensions of the induced logical argumentation frameworks).

Defeasible Normative Reasoning: A Proof-Theoretic Integration of Logical Argumentation | VIDEO

Multi-task learning deals with multiple related tasks simultaneously by sharing knowledge. In a typical deep multi-task learning model, all tasks use the same feature space and share the latent knowledge. If the tasks are weakly correlated or some features are negatively correlated, sharing all knowledge often leads to negative knowledge transfer among. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a Fisher sparse multi-task learning method. It can obtain a sparse sharing representation for each task. In such a way, tasks share features on a sparse subspace. Our method can ensure that the knowledge transferred among tasks is beneficial. Specifically, we first propose a sparse deep multi-task learning model, and then introduce Fisher sparse module into traditional deep multi-task learning to learn the sparse variables of task. By alternately updating the neural network parameters and sparse variables, a sparse sharing representation can be learned for each task. In addition, in order to reduce the computational overhead, an heuristic method is used to estimate the Fisher information of neural network parameters. Experimental results show that, comparing with other methods, our proposed method can improve the performance for all tasks, and has high sparsity in multi-task learning.

Learning Multi-Task Sparse Representation Based on Fisher Information

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

GridFormer: Point-Grid Transformer for Surface Reconstruction

Offline meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods, which adapt to unseen target tasks with prior experience, are essential in robot control tasks. Current methods typically utilize task contexts and skills as prior experience, where task contexts are related to the information within each task and skills represent a set of temporally extended actions for solving subtasks. However, these methods still suffer from limited performance when adapting to unseen target tasks, mainly because the learned prior experience lacks generalization, i.e., they are unable to extract effective prior experience from meta-training tasks by exploration and learning of continuous latent spaces. We propose a framework called decoupled meta-reinforcement learning (DCMRL), which (1) contrastively restricts the learning of task contexts through pulling in similar task contexts within the same task and pushing away different task contexts of different tasks, and (2) utilizes a Gaussian quantization variational autoencoder (GQ-VAE) for clustering the Gaussian distributions of the task contexts and skills respectively, and decoupling the exploration and learning processes of their spaces. These cluster centers which serve as representative and discrete distributions of task context and skill are stored in task context codebook and skill codebook, respectively. DCMRL can acquire generalizable prior experience and achieve effective adaptation to unseen target tasks during the meta-testing phase. Experiments in the navigation and robot manipulation continuous control tasks show that DCMRL is more effective than previous meta-RL methods with more generalizable prior experience.

Decoupling Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Task Contexts and Skills | VIDEO

Lightweight creation of 3D digital avatars is a highly desirable but challenging task. With only sparse videos of a person under unknown illumination, we propose a method to create relightable and animatable neural avatars, which can be used to synthesize photorealistic images of humans under novel viewpoints, body poses, and lighting. The key challenge here is to disentangle the geometry, material of the clothed body, and lighting, which becomes more difficult due to the complex geometry and shadow changes caused by body motions.  To solve this ill-posed problem, we propose novel techniques to better model the geometry and shadow changes.  For geometry change modeling, we propose an invertible deformation field, which helps to solve the inverse skinning problem and leads to better geometry quality. To model the spatial and temporal varying shading cues, we propose a pose-aware part-wise light visibility network to estimate light occlusion. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our approach reconstructs high-quality geometry and generates realistic shadows under different body poses. Code and data are available at https://wenbin-lin.github.io/RelightableAvatar-page.

Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatars from Videos

Image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing onto a specific person. A significant challenge is arbitrarily matched clothing and person lack corresponding ground truth to supervised learning. A recent pioneering work leveraged an improved cycleGAN to enable one network to generate the desired image for another network during training. However, there is no difference in the result distribution before and after the clothing changes. Therefore, using two different networks is unnecessary and may even increase the difficulty of convergence. Furthermore, the introduced human parsing used to provide body structure information in the input will also have a negative impact on the try-on result. How to employ a single network for supervised learning while eliminating human parsing? To tackle these issues, we present a Cycle mapping Virtual Try-On Network (CycleVTON), which can produce photo-realistic try-on results by using a cycle mapping framework without the parser. In particular, we introduce a flow constraint loss to achieve supervised learning of arbitrarily matched clothing and person as inputs to the deformer, thus naturally mimicking the interaction between clothing and the human body. Additionally, we design a skin generation strategy that can adapt to the shape of the target clothing by dynamically adjusting the skin region, i.e., by first removing and then filling skin areas. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

CycleVTON: A Cycle Mapping Framework for Parser-Free Virtual Try-On

Recently, the cross-modal pretraining model has been employed to produce meaningful pseudo-labels to supervise the training of an image clustering model. However, numerous erroneous alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model could produce poor-quality pseudo labels and degrade clustering performance. To solve the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel Multi-level Cross-modal Alignment method to improve the alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model for downstream tasks, by building a smaller but better semantic space and aligning the images and texts in three levels, i.e., instance-level, prototype-level, and semantic-level. Theoretical results show that our proposed method converges, and suggests effective means to reduce the expected clustering risk of our method. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets clearly show the superiority of our new method.

Multi-Level Cross-Modal Alignment for Image Clustering

Many real-world scenarios including fleet management and Ad auctions can be modeled as Stackelberg mean-field games (SMFGs) where a leader aims to incentivize a large number of homogeneous self-interested followers to maximize her utility. Existing works focus on cases with a small number of heterogeneous followers, e.g., 5-10, and suffer from scalability issue when the number of followers increases. There are three major challenges in solving large-scale SMFGs: i) classical methods based on solving differential equations fail as they require exact dynamics parameters, ii) learning by interacting with environment is data-inefficient, and iii) complex interaction between the leader and followers makes the learning performance unstable. We address these challenges through transition-informed reinforcement learning. Our main contributions are threefold: i) we first propose an RL framework, the Stackelberg mean-field update, to learn the leader's policy without priors of the environment, ii) to improve the data efficiency and accelerate the learning process, we then propose the Transition-Informed Reinforcement Learning (TIRL) by leveraging the instantiated empirical Fokker-Planck equation, and iii) we develop a regularized TIRL by employing various regularizers to alleviate the sensitivity of the learning performance to the initialization of the leader's policy. Extensive experiments on fleet management and food gathering demonstrate that our approach can scale up to 100,000 followers and significantly outperform existing baselines.

Transition-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Stackelberg Mean-Field Games | VIDEO

Transformer's recent integration into style transfer leverages its proficiency in establishing long-range dependencies, albeit at the expense of attenuated local modeling. This paper introduces Strips Window Attention Transformer (S2WAT), a novel hierarchical vision transformer designed for style transfer. S2WAT employs attention computation in diverse window shapes to capture both short- and long-range dependencies. The merged dependencies utilize the "Attn Merge" strategy, which adaptively determines spatial weights based on their relevance to the target. Extensive experiments on representative datasets show the proposed method's effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) transformer-based and other approaches. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlienZhang1996/S2WAT.

S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer Using Strips Window Attention

Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first E-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.

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Next from AAAI 2024

Defeasible Normative Reasoning: A Proof-Theoretic Integration of Logical Argumentation | VIDEO

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