Canada

Image augmentation is a common mechanism to alleviate data scarcity in image classification. Existing image augmentation methods consist of two categories. Perturbation-based methods apply pre-defined perturbations to augment an original image, but only locally vary the image, thus lacking image diversity. In contrast, generative methods bring more image diversity in the augmented images but may not preserve semantic consistency, thus incorrectly change the essential semantics of the original image. To balance image diversity and semantic consistency in augmented images, we propose SGID, a Semantic-guided Generative Image augmentation method with Diffusion models for image classification. Specifically, SGID employs image labels and captions as semantic guidance to generate augmented images that preserve the essential semantics in original images and simultaneously bring good image diversity. Experimental results show that SGID outperforms the best augmentation baseline by 1.72% on ResNet-50 (scratch), 0.33% on ViT (ImageNet-21k), and 0.14% on ViT (LAION-2B). Moreover, SGID further improves baseline performance as a plug-in. We demonstrate the semantic consistency and image diversity of SGID through quantitative human and automated evaluations, as well as qualitative case studies.

AAAI 2024

Semantic-Guided Generative Image Augmentation Method with Diffusion Models for Image Classification

applications

image classification

language and vision

data augmentation

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

Electroencephalography (EEG) has proven to be effective in emotion analysis. However, current methods struggle with individual variations, complicating the generalization of models trained on data from source subjects to unseen target subjects. To tackle this issue, we propose the Denoising Mixed Mutual Reconstruction (DMMR) model, employing a two-stage pre-training followed by fine-tuning approach. During the pre-training phase, DMMR leverages self-supervised learning through a multi-decoder autoencoder, which encodes and reconstructs features of one subject, aiming to generate features resembling those from other subjects within the same category, thereby encouraging the encoder to learn subject-invariant features. We introduce a hidden-layer mixed data augmentation approach to mitigate the limitations posed by the scarcity of source data, thereby extending the method to a two-stage process. To bolster stability against noise, we incorporate a noise injection method, named “Time Steps Shuffling”, into the input data. During the fine-tuning phase, an emotion classifier is integrated to extract emotion-related features. Experimental accuracy on the SEED and SEED-IV datasets reached 88.27% (±5.62) and 72.70% (±8.01), respectively, demonstrating state-of-the-art and comparable performance, thereby showcasing the superiority of DMMR. The proposed data augmentation and noise injection methods were observed to complementarily enhance accuracy and stability, thus alleviating the aforementioned issues.

DMMR: Cross-Subject Domain Generalization for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition via Denoising Mixed Mutual Reconstruction

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to locate action regions and identify action categories in untrimmed videos simultaneously by taking only video-level labels as the supervision. Pseudo label generation is a promising strategy to solve the challenging problem, but the current methods ignore the natural temporal structure of the video that can provide rich information to assist such a generation process. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised temporal action localization method by inferring salient snippet-feature. First, we design a saliency inference module that exploits the variation relationship between temporal neighbor snippets to discover salient snippet-features, which can reflect the significant dynamic change in the video. Secondly, we introduce a boundary refinement module that enhances salient snippet-features through the information interaction unit. Then, a discrimination enhancement module is introduced to enhance the discriminative nature of snippet-features. Finally, we adopt the refined snippet-features to produce high-fidelity pseudo labels, which could be used to supervise the training of the action localization network. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets, i.e., THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.3, demonstrate our proposed method achieves significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wuli55555/ISSF.

Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Inferring Salient Snippet-Feature | VIDEO

As a prominent parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique in NLP, prompt tuning is being explored its potential in computer vision. Typical methods for visual prompt tuning follow the sequential modeling paradigm stemming from NLP, which represents an input image as a flattened sequence of token embeddings and then learns a set of unordered parameterized tokens prefixed to the sequence representation as the visual prompts for task adaptation of large vision models. While such sequential modeling paradigm of visual prompt has shown great promise, there are two potential limitations. First, the learned visual prompts cannot model the underlying spatial relations in the input image, which is crucial for image encoding. Second, since all prompt tokens play the same role of prompting for all image tokens without distinction, it lacks the fine-grained prompting capability, i.e., individual prompting for different image tokens. In this work, we propose the Spatially Aligned-and-Adapted Visual Prompt model (SA^2VP), which learns a two-dimensional prompt token map with equal (or scaled) size to the image token map, thereby being able to spatially align with the image map. Each prompt token is designated to prompt knowledge only for the spatially corresponding image tokens. As a result, our model can conduct individual prompting for different image tokens in a fine-grained manner. Moreover, benefiting from the capability of preserving the spatial structure by the learned prompt token map, our SA^2VP is able to model the spatial relations in the input image, leading to more effective prompting. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks for image classification demonstrate the superiority of our model over other state-of-the-art methods for visual prompt tuning.

SA²VP: Spatially Aligned-and-Adapted Visual Prompt

With the strong robusticity on illumination variations, near-infrared (NIR) can be an effective and essential complement to visible (VIS) facial expression recognition in low lighting or complete darkness conditions. However, facial expression recognition (FER) from NIR images presents a more challenging problem than traditional FER due to the limitations imposed by the data scale and the difficulty of extracting discriminative features from incomplete visible lighting contents. In this paper, we give the first attempt at deep NIR facial expression recognition and propose a novel method called near-infrared facial expression transformer (NFER-Former). Specifically, to make full use of the abundant label information in the field of VIS, we introduce a Self-Attention Orthogonal Decomposition mechanism that disentangles the expression information and spectrum information from the input image, so that the expression features can be extracted without the interference of spectrum variation. We also propose a Hypergraph-Guided Feature Embedding method that models some key facial behaviors and learns the structure of the complex correlations between them, thereby alleviating the interference of inter-class similarity. Additionally, we construct a large NIR-VIS Facial Expression dataset that includes 360 subjects to better validate the efficiency of NFER-Former. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that NFER-Former significantly improves the performance of NIR FER and achieves state-of-the-art results on the only two available NIR FER datasets, Oulu-CASIA and Large-HFE.

Hypergraph-Guided Disentangled Spectrum Transformer Networks for Near-Infrared Facial Expression Recognition

Geometric fracture assembly presents a challenging practical task in archaeology and 3D computer vision. Previous methods have focused solely on assembling fragments based on semantic information, which has limited the quantity of objects that can be effectively assembled. Therefore, there is a need to develop a scalable framework for geometric fracture assembly without relying on semantic information. To improve the effectiveness of assembling geometric fractures without semantic information, we propose a co-creation space comprising several assemblers capable of gradually and unambiguously assembling fractures. Additionally, we introduce a novel loss function, i.e., the geometric-based collision loss, to address collision issues during the fracture assembly process and enhance the results. Our framework exhibits better performance on both PartNet and Breaking Bad datasets compared to existing state-of-the-art frameworks. Extensive experiments and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which features linear computational complexity, enhanced abstraction, and improved generalization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ruiyuan-Zhang/CCS.

Scalable Geometric Fracture Assembly via Co-creation Space among Assemblers

Layout generation is a critical step in graphic design to achieve meaningful compositions of elements. Most previous works view it as a sequence generation problem by concatenating element attribute tokens (i.e., category, size, position). So far the autoregressive approach (AR) has achieved promising results, but is still limited in global context modeling and suffers from error propagation since it can only attend to the previously generated tokens. Recent non-autoregressive attempts (NAR) have shown competitive results, which provides a wider context range and the flexibility to refine with iterative decoding. However, current works only use simple heuristics to recognize erroneous tokens for refinement which is inaccurate. This paper first conducts an in-depth analysis to better understand the difference between the AR and NAR framework. Furthermore, based on our observation that pixel space is more sensitive in capturing spatial patterns of graphic layouts (e.g., overlap, alignment), we propose a learning-based locator to detect erroneous tokens which takes the wireframe image rendered from the generated layout sequence as input. We show that it serves as a complementary modality to the element sequence in object space and contributes greatly to the overall performance. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach outperforms both AR and NAR baselines. Extensive studies further prove the effectiveness of different modules with interesting findings.

Spot the Error: Non-autoregressive Graphic Layout Generation with Wireframe Locator

Although recent methods in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have achieved success in segmenting rainy or snowy scenes by improving consistency, they face limitations when dealing with more challenging scenarios like foggy and night scenes. We argue that these prior methods excessively focus on weather-specific features in adverse scenes, which exacerbates the existing domain gaps.
To address this issue, we propose a new metric to evaluate the severity of all adverse scenes and offer a novel perspective that enables task unification across all adverse scenarios. Our method focuses on Severity, allowing our model to learn more consistent features and facilitate domain distribution alignment, thereby alleviating domain gaps. Unlike the vague descriptions of consistency in previous methods, we introduce Cross-domain Consistency, which is quantified using the Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) to measure the distance between the source and target domains. Specifically, our unified model consists of two key modules: the Merging Style Augmentation Module (MSA) and the Severity Perception Mask Module (SPM). The MSA module transforms all adverse scenes into augmented scenes, effectively eliminating weather-specific features and enhancing Cross-domain Consistency. The SPM module incorporates a Severity Perception mechanism, guiding a Mask operation that enables our model to learn highly consistent features from the augmented scenes. Our unified framework, named PASS (Parsing All adverSe Scenes), achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on widely-used benchmarks for all adverse scenes. Notably, the performance of PASS is superior to Semi-Unified models and even surpasses weather-specific models.

Parsing All Adverse Scenes: Severity-Aware Semantic Segmentation with Mask-Enhanced Cross-Domain Consistency

Exposure correction aims to enhance images suffering from improper exposure to achieve satisfactory visual effects. Despite recent progress, existing methods generally mitigate either overexposure or underexposure in input images, and they still struggle to handle images with mixed exposure, \emph{i.e.}, one image incorporates both overexposed and underexposed regions. The mixed exposure distribution is non-uniform and leads to varying representation, which makes it challenging to address in a unified process. In this paper, we introduce an effective Region-aware Exposure Correction Network (RECNet) that can handle mixed exposure by adaptively learning and bridging different regional exposure representations. Specifically, to address the challenge posed by mixed exposure disparities, we develop a region-aware de-exposure module that effectively translates regional features of mixed exposure scenarios into an exposure-invariant feature space. Simultaneously, as de-exposure operation inevitably reduces discriminative information, we introduce a mixed-scale restoration unit that integrates exposure-invariant features and unprocessed features to recover local information. To further achieve a uniform exposure distribution in the global image, we propose an exposure contrastive regularization strategy under the constraints of intra-regional exposure consistency and inter-regional exposure continuity. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority and generalization of our proposed method.

Region-Aware Exposure Consistency Network for Mixed Exposure Correction

We propose a novel Dynamic Context-Guided Upsampling (DCGU) module for video super-resolution (VSR) that leverages temporal context guidance to achieve efficient and effective arbitrary-scale VSR. While most VSR research focuses on backbone design,  the importance of the upsampling part is often overlooked. Existing methods rely on pixelshuffle-based upsampling, which has limited capabilities in handling arbitrary upsampling scales. Recent attempts to replace pixelshuffle-based modules with implicit neural function-based and filter-based approaches suffer from slow inference speeds and limited representation capacity, respectively. To overcome these limitations, our DCGU module predicts non-local sampling locations and content-dependent filter weights, enabling efficient and effective arbitrary-scale VSR.  Our proposed multi-granularity location search (MGLS) module efficiently identifies non-local sampling locations across the entire low-resolution (LR) grid, while the temporal bilateral filter modulation (TBFM) module integrates content information with the filter weight to enhance textual details.  Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of performance and speed on arbitrary-scale VSR.

Arbitrary-Scale Video Super-resolution Guided by Dynamic Context

Graph neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved great success in designing architectures for graph data processing.However, distribution shifts pose great challenges for graph NAS, since the optimal searched architectures for the training graph data may fail to generalize to the unseen test graph data. The sole prior work tackles this problem by customizing architectures for each graph instance through learning graph structural information, but failed to consider data augmentation during training, which has been proven by existing works to be able to improve generalization.In this paper, we propose Data-augmented Curriculum Graph Neural Architecture Search (DCGAS), which learns an architecture customizer with good generalizability to data under distribution shifts. Specifically, we design an embedding-guided data generator, which can generate sufficient graphs for training to help the model better capture graph structural information. In addition, we design a two-factor uncertainty-based curriculum weighting strategy, which can evaluate the importance of data in enabling the model to learn key information in real-world distribution and reweight them during training. Experimental results on synthetic datasets and real datasets with distribution shifts demonstrate that our proposed method learns generalizable mappings and outperforms existing methods.

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