Canada

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.

AAAI 2024

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

art/music/creativity

music generation

computational creativity

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



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. 

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.

Exploring Sparse Visual Prompt for Domain Adaptive Dense Prediction | VIDEO

Existing recurrent optical flow deep learning networks are computationally expensive since they use a fixed large number of iterations to update the flow field for each sample. An efficient network should skip iterations when the flow improvement is limited. In this paper, we develop a Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for efficient optical flow estimation, which determines the optimal number of iterations per sample. The policy network achieves this by learning contextual information to realize whether flow improvement is bottlenecked or minimal. On the one hand, we use iteration embedding and historical hidden cell that includes previous iterations information, to inform whether the flow improvement encounters the bottleneck. On the other hand, we use the incremental loss to make the policy network implicitly perceive the magnitude of optical flow improvement in the subsequent iteration. Furthermore, the computational complexity in our dynamic network is controllable, allowing us to satisfy various resource preferences with a single trained model. Our policy network can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art optical flow networks. Extensive experiments show that our method maintains performance while reducing FLOPs by about 40%/20% for the Sintel/KITTI datasets.

Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for Efficient Optical Flow Estimation | VIDEO

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) involves identifying the attributes of individuals in person images. Existing PAR methods typically rely on CNNs as the backbone network to extract pedestrian features. However, CNNs process only one adjacent region at a time, leading to the loss of long-range inter-relations between different attribute-specific regions. To address this limitation, we leverage the Vision Transformer (ViT) instead of CNNs as the backbone for PAR, aiming to model long-range relations and extract more robust features. However, PAR suffers from an inherent attribute imbalance issue, causing ViT to naturally focus more on attributes that appear frequently in the training set and ignore some pedestrian attributes that appear less. The native features extracted by ViT are not able to tolerate the imbalance attribute distribution issue. To tackle this issue, we propose two novel components: the Selective Feature Activation Method (SFAM) and the Orthogonal Feature Activation Loss. SFAM smartly suppresses the more informative attribute-specific features, compelling the PAR model to capture discriminative features from regions that are easily overlooked. The proposed loss enforces an orthogonal constraint on the original feature extracted by ViT and the suppressed features from SFAM, promoting the complementarity of features in space. We conduct experiments on several benchmark PAR datasets, including PETA, PA100K, RAPv1, and RAPv2, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by GRL, IAA-Caps, ALM, and SSC in terms of mA on the four datasets, respectively.

Selective and Orthogonal Feature Activation for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition | VIDEO

We present that visual grounding and image captioning, which perform as two mutually inverse processes, can be bridged together for collaborative training by careful designs. By consolidating this idea, we introduce CyCo, a cyclic-consistent learning framework to ameliorate the independent training pipelines of visual grounding and image captioning. The proposed framework (1) allows the semi-weakly supervised training of visual grounding; (2) improves the performance of fully supervised visual grounding; (3) yields a general captioning model that can describe arbitrary image regions. Extensive experiments show that our fully supervised grounding model achieves state-of-the-art performance, and the semi-weakly supervised one also exhibits competitive performance compared to the fully supervised counterparts. Our image captioning model has the capability to freely describe image regions and meanwhile shows impressive performance on prevalent captioning benchmarks.

Cycle-Consistency Learning for Captioning and Grounding

Recently, arbitrary-scale point cloud upsampling mechanism became increasingly popular due to its efficiency and convenience for practical applications. To achieve this, most previous approaches formulate it as a problem of surface approximation and employ point-based networks to learn surface representations. However, learning surfaces from sparse point clouds is more challenging, and thus they often suffer from the low-fidelity geometry approximation. To address it, we propose an arbitrary-scale Point cloud Upsampling framework using Voxel-based Network (PU-VoxelNet). Thanks to the completeness and regularity inherited from the voxel representation, voxel-based networks are capable of providing predefined grid space to approximate 3D surface, and an arbitrary number of points can be reconstructed according to the predicted density distribution within each grid cell. However, we investigate the inaccurate grid sampling caused by imprecise density predictions. To address this issue, a density-guided grid resampling method is developed to generate high-fidelity points while effectively avoiding sampling outliers. Further, to improve the fine-grained details, we present an auxiliary training supervision to enforce the latent geometric consistency among local surface patches. Extensive experiments indicate the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches not only in terms of fixed upsampling rates but also for arbitrary-scale upsampling. The code is available at https://github.com/hikvision-research/3DVision

Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling by Voxel-Based Network with Latent Geometric-Consistent Learning

Human motion forecasting, with the goal of estimating future human behavior over a period of time, is a fundamental task in many real-world applications. However, existing works typically concentrate on foretelling the major joints of the human body without considering the delicate movements of the human hands.
In practical applications, hand gesture plays an important role in human communication with the real world, and expresses the primary intention of human beings. In this work, we are the first to formulate whole-body human pose forecasting task, which jointly predicts future both body and gesture activities. Correspondingly, we propose a novel Encoding-Alignment-Interaction (EAI) framework that aims to predict both coarse (body joints) and fine-grained (gestures) activities collaboratively, enabling expressive and cross-facilitated forecasting of 3D whole-body human motions. Specifically, our model involves two key constituents: cross-context alignment (XCA) and cross-context interaction (XCI). Considering the heterogeneous information within the whole-body, XCA aims to align the latent features of various human components, while XCI focuses on effectively capturing the context interaction among the human components. We conduct extensive experiments on a newly-introduced large-scale benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is public for research purposes at https://github.com/Dingpx/EAI.

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