Canada

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the segmentation of mitochondria from Electron Microscopy (EM) images. However, suffering from variations in mitochondrial morphology, imaging conditions, and image noise, existing methods still exhibit high uncertainty in their predictions. Moreover, in view of our findings, predictions with high levels of uncertainty are often accompanied by inaccuracies such as ambiguous boundaries and amount of false positive segments. To deal with the above problems, we propose a novel approach for mitochondria segmentation in 3D EM images that leverages evidential uncertainty estimation, which for the first time integrates evidential uncertainty to enhance the performance of segmentation. To be more specific, our proposed method not only provides accurate segmentation results, but also estimates associated uncertainty. Then, the estimated uncertainty is used to help improve the segmentation performance by an uncertainty rectification module, which leverages uncertainty maps and multi-scale information to refine the segmentation. Extensive experiments conducted on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over existing approaches.

AAAI 2024

Evidential Uncertainty-Guided Mitochondria Segmentation for 3D EM Images

deep learning; 3d mitochondria segmentation; evidential uncertainty estimation

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



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. 

Talking upper-body synthesis is a promising task due to its versatile potential for video creation and consists of animating the body and face from a source image with the motion from a given driving video. However, prior synthesis approaches fall short in addressing this task and have been either limited to animating heads of a target person only, or have animated the upper body but neglected the synthesis of precise facial details. To tackle this task, we propose a Photo-realistic Talking Upper-body Synthesis method via 3D-aware motion decomposition warping, named PTUS, to both precisely synthesize the upper body as well as recover the details of the face such as blinking and lip synchronization. In particular, the motion decomposition mechanism consists of a face-body motion decomposition, which decouples the 3D motion estimation of the face and body, and a local-global motion decomposition, which decomposes the 3D face motion into global and local motions resulting in the transfer of facial expression. The 3D-aware warping module transfers the large-scale and subtle 3D motions to the extracted 3D depth-aware features in a coarse-tofine manner. Moreover, we present a new dataset, Talking-UB, which includes upper-body images with high-resolution faces, addressing the limitations of prior datasets that either consist of only facial images or upper-body images with blurry faces. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can synthesize high-quality videos that preserve facial details, and achieves superior results compared to state-of-the-art cross-person motion transfer approaches.

PTUS: Photo-Realistic Talking Upper-Body Synthesis via 3D-Aware Motion Decomposition Warping

Among various interactions between humans, such as eye contact and gestures, physical interactions by contact can act as an essential moment in understanding human behaviors. Inspired by this fact, given a 3D partner human with the desired interaction label, we introduce a new task of 3D human generation in terms of physical contact. Unlike previous works of interacting with static objects or scenes, a given partner human can have diverse poses and different contact regions according to the type of interaction. To handle this challenge, we propose a novel method of generating interactive 3D humans for a given partner human based on a guided diffusion framework (ContactGen in short). Specifically, we newly present a contact prediction module that adaptively estimates potential contact regions between two input humans according to the interaction label. Using the estimated potential contact regions as complementary guidances, we dynamically enforce ContactGen to generate interactive 3D humans for a given partner human within a guided diffusion model. We demonstrate ContactGen on the CHI3D dataset, where our method generates physically plausible and diverse poses compared to comparison methods.

ContactGen: Contact-Guided Interactive 3D Human Generation for Partners

When dealing with tabular data, models based on decision
trees are a popular choice due to their high accuracy on these
data types, their ease of application, and explainability properties. However, when it comes to graph-structured data, it
is not clear how to apply them effectively, in a way that in-
corporates the topological information with the tabular data
available on the vertices of the graph. To address this challenge,
we introduce TREE-G. TREE-G modifies standard decision
trees, by introducing a novel split function that is specialized
for graph data. Not only does this split function incorporate
the node features and the topological information, but it also
uses a novel pointer mechanism that allows split nodes to
use information computed in previous splits. Therefore, the
split function adapts to the predictive task and the graph at
hand. We analyze the theoretical properties of TREE-G and
demonstrate its benefits empirically on multiple graph and
vertex prediction benchmarks. In these experiments, TREE-G
consistently outperforms other tree-based models and often
outperforms other graph-learning algorithms such as Graph
Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Kernels, sometimes by
large margins. Moreover, TREE-Gs models and their predic
tions can be explained and visualized.

TREE-G: Decision Trees Contesting Graph Neural Networks

Compound-Protein Interaction (CPI) prediction aims to predict the pattern and strength of compound-protein interactions for rational drug discovery. Existing deep learning-based methods utilize only the single modality of protein sequences or structures and lack the co-modeling of the joint distribution of the two modalities, which may lead to significant performance drops in complex real-world scenarios due to various factors, e.g., modality missing and domain shifting. More importantly, these methods only model protein sequences and structures at a single fixed scale, neglecting more fine-grained multi-scale information, such as those embedded in key protein fragments. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale Protein Sequence-structure Contrasting framework for CPI prediction (PSC-CPI), which captures the dependencies between protein sequences and structures through both intra-modality and cross-modality contrasting. We further apply length-variable protein augmentation to allow contrasting to be performed at different scales, from the amino acid level to the sequence level. Finally, in order to more fairly evaluate the model generalizability, we split the test data into four settings based on whether compounds and proteins have been observed during the training stage. Extensive experiments have shown that PSC-CPI generalizes well in all four settings, particularly in the more challenging ``Unseen-Both" setting, where neither compounds nor proteins have been observed during training. Furthermore, even when encountering a situation of modality missing, i.e., inference with only single-modality protein data, PSC-CPI still exhibits comparable or even better performance than previous approaches.

PSC-CPI: Multi-Scale Protein Sequence-Structure Contrasting for Efficient and Generalizable Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction

Call-and-response is a musical technique that enriches the creativity of music, crafting coherent musical ideas that mirror the back-and-forth nature of human dialogue with distinct musical characteristics. Although this technique is integral to numerous musical compositions, it remains largely uncharted in automatic music composition. To enhance the creativity of machine-composed music, we first introduce the Call-Response Dataset (CRD) containing 19,155 annotated musical pairs and crafted comprehensive objective evaluation metrics for musical assessment. Then, we design a knowledge-enhanced learning-based method to bridge the gap between human and machine creativity. Specifically, we train the composition module using the call-response pairs, supplementing it with musical knowledge in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Our experimental results underscore that our proposed model adeptly produces a wide variety of creative responses for various musical calls.

Responding to the Call: Exploring Automatic Music Composition Using a Knowledge-Enhanced Model

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their potential in rotation-sensitive scenarios has not been fully explored, and this limitation may be inherently attributed to the lack of spatial invariance in the data-forwarding process. In this study, we present a novel approach, termed Spatial Transform Decoupling (STD), providing a simple-yet-effective solution for oriented object detection with ViTs. Built upon stacked ViT blocks, STD utilizes separate network branches to predict the position, size, and angle of bounding boxes, effectively harnessing the spatial transform potential of ViTs in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Moreover, by aggregating cascaded activation masks (CAMs) computed upon the regressed parameters, STD gradually enhances features within regions of interest (RoIs), which complements the self-attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, STD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets including DOTA-v1.0 (82.24% mAP) and HRSC2016 (98.55% mAP), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/Spatial-Transform-Decoupling.

Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection

Hardware image signal processing (ISP), aiming at converting RAW inputs to RGB images, consists of a series of processing blocks, each with multiple parameters. Traditionally, ISP parameters are manually tuned in isolation by imaging experts according to application-specific quality and performance metrics, which is time-consuming and biased towards human perception due to complex interaction with the output image. Since the relationship between any single parameter’s variation and the output performance metric is a complex, non-linear function, optimizing such a large number of ISP parameters is challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Sequential ISP parameter optimization model, called the RL-SeqISP model, which utilizes deep reinforcement learning to jointly optimize all ISP parameters for a variety of imaging applications. Concretely, inspired by the sequential tuning process of human experts, the proposed model can progressively enhance image quality by seamlessly integrating information from both the image feature space and the parameter space. Furthermore, a dynamic parameter optimization module is introduced to avoid ISP parameters getting stuck into local optima, which is able to more effectively guarantee the optimal parameters resulting from the sequential learning strategy. These merits of the RL-SeqISP model as well as its high efficiency are substantiated by comprehensive experiments on a wide range of downstream tasks, including two visual analysis tasks (instance segmentation and object detection), and image quality assessment (IQA), as compared with representative methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, even using only 10% of the training data, our model outperforms other SOTA methods by an average of 7% mAP on two visual analysis tasks.

RL-SeqISP: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sequential Optimization for Image Signal Processing | VIDEO

Painterly image harmonization aims to harmonize a photographic foreground object on the painterly background. Different from previous auto-encoder based harmonization networks, we develop a progressive multi-stage harmonization network, which harmonizes the composite foreground from low-level styles (e.g., color, simple texture) to high-level styles (e.g., complex texture). Our network has better interpretability and harmonization performance. Moreover, we design an early-exit strategy to automatically decide the proper stage to exit, which can skip the unnecessary and even harmful late stages. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our progressive harmonization network.

Progressive Painterly Image Harmonization from Low-Level Styles to High-Level Styles

Most existing GAN inversion methods either achieve accurate reconstruction but lack editability or offer strong editability at the cost of fidelity. Hence, how to balance the distortion-editability trade-off is a significant challenge for GAN inversion.  To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-contextual discrepancy information compensation-based GAN-inversion method (SDIC), which consists of a discrepancy information prediction network (DIPN) and a discrepancy information compensation network (DICN). SDIC follows a ``compensate-and-edit'' paradigm and successfully bridges the gap in image details between the original image and the reconstructed/edited image. On the one hand, DIPN encodes the multi-level spatial-contextual information of the original and initial reconstructed images and then predicts a spatial-contextual guided discrepancy map with two hourglass modules. In this way, a reliable discrepancy map that models the contextual relationship and captures fine-grained image details is learned. On the other hand, DICN incorporates the predicted discrepancy information into both the latent code and the GAN generator with different transformations, generating high-quality reconstructed/edited images. This effectively compensates for the loss of image details during GAN inversion. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the excellent distortion-editability trade-off at a fast inference speed for both image inversion and editing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZzqLKED/SDIC.

Spatial-Contextual Discrepancy Information Compensation for GAN Inversion

The visual prompts have provided an efficient manner in addressing visual cross-domain problems. Previous works introduce domain prompts to tackle the classification Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) problem by placing image-level prompts on the input and fine-tuning prompts for each target domain. However, since the image-level prompts mask out continuous spatial details in the prompt-allocated region, it will suffer from inaccurate contextual information and limited domain knowledge extraction, particularly when dealing with dense prediction TTA problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Sparse Visual Domain Prompts (SVDP) approach, which applies minimal trainable parameters (e.g., 0.1%) to pixels across the entire image and reserves more spatial information of the input. To better apply SVDP in extracting domain-specific knowledge, we introduce the Domain Prompt Placement (DPP) method to adaptively allocates trainable parameters of SVDP on the pixels with large distribution shifts. Furthermore, recognizing that each target domain sample exhibits a unique domain shift, we design Domain Prompt Updating (DPU) strategy to optimize prompt parameters differently for each sample, facilitating efficient adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments were conducted on widely-used TTA and continual TTA benchmarks, and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks.

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PTUS: Photo-Realistic Talking Upper-Body Synthesis via 3D-Aware Motion Decomposition Warping

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