Canada

Text-based person search is a challenging task aimed at locating specific target pedestrians through text descriptions. Recent advancements have been made in this field, but there remains a deficiency in datasets tailored for text-based person search. The creation of new, real-world datasets is hindered by concerns such as the risk of pedestrian privacy leakage and the substantial costs of annotation. In this paper, we introduce a framework, named Diverse Person (DP), to achieve efficient and high-quality text-based person search data generation without involving privacy concerns. Specifically, we propose to leverage available images of clothing and accessories as reference attribute images to edit the original dataset images through diffusion models. Additionally, we employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to produce annotations that are both high in quality and stylistically consistent with those found in real-world datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the baseline models trained with our DP can achieve new state-of-the-art results on three public datasets, with performance improvements up to 4.82%, 2.15%, and 2.28% on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid in terms of Rank-1 accuracy, respectively.

AAAI 2024

Diverse Person: Customize Your Own Dataset for Text-Based Person Search | VIDEO

image and video retrieval

multi-modal vision

computer 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

Bio-inspired spike camera mimics the sampling principle of primate fovea. It presents high temporal resolution and dynamic range, showing great promise in fast-moving object recognition. However, the physical limit of CMOS technology in spike cameras still hinders their capability of recognizing ultra-high-speed moving objects, e.g., extremely fast motions cause blur during the imaging process of spike cameras. This paper presents the first theoretical analysis for the causes of spiking motion blur and proposes a robust representation that addresses this issue through temporal-spatial context learning. The proposed method leverages multi-span feature aggregation to capture temporal cues and employs residual deformable convolution to model spatial correlation among neighbouring pixels. Additionally, this paper contributes an original real-captured spiking recognition dataset consisting of 12,000 \textbf{ultra-high-speed} (equivalent speed > 500 km/h) moving objects. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 73.2% accuracy in recognizing 10 classes of ultra-high-speed moving objects, outperforming all existing spike-based recognition methods. Resources will be available at https://github.com/Evin-X/UHSR.

Recognizing Ultra-High-Speed Moving Objects with Bio-Inspired Spike Camera

Understanding road structures is crucial for autonomous driving. Intricate road structures are often depicted using lane graphs, which include centerline curves and connections forming a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Accurate extraction of lane graphs relies on precisely estimating vertex and edge information within the DAG.
Recent research highlights Transformer-based language models' impressive sequence prediction abilities, making them effective for learning graph representations when graph data are encoded as sequences. However, existing studies focus mainly on modeling vertices explicitly, leaving edge information simply embedded in the network. 
Consequently, these approaches fall short in the task of lane graph extraction. To address this, we introduce LaneGraph2Seq, a novel approach for lane graph extraction. It leverages a language model with vertex-edge encoding and connectivity enhancement. Our serialization strategy includes a vertex-centric depth-first traversal and a concise edge-based partition sequence. Additionally, we use classifier-free guidance combined with nucleus sampling to improve lane connectivity. We validate our method on prominent datasets, nuScenes and Argoverse 2, showcasing consistent and compelling results. Our LaneGraph2Seq approach demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques in lane graph extraction.

LaneGraph2Seq: Lane Topology Extraction with Language Model via Vertex-Edge Encoding and Connectivity Enhancement

Hierarchy is an important and commonly observed topological property in real-world graphs that indicate the relationships between supervisors and subordinates or the organizational behavior of human groups. As hierarchy is introduced as a new inductive bias into the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in various tasks, it implies latent topological relations for attackers to improve their inference attack performance, leading to serious privacy leakage issues. In addition, existing privacy-preserving frameworks suffer from reduced protection ability in hierarchical propagation due to the deficiency of adaptive upper-bound estimation of the hierarchical perturbation boundary. It is of great urgency to effectively leverage the hierarchical property of data while satisfying privacy guarantees. To solve the problem, we propose the Poincar\'e Differential Privacy framework, named PoinDP, to protect the hierarchy-aware graph embedding based on hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, PoinDP first learns the hierarchy weights for each entity based on the Poincar\'e model in hyperbolic space. Then, the Personalized Hierarchy-aware Sensitivity is designed to measure the sensitivity of the hierarchical structure and adaptively allocate the privacy protection strength. Besides, Hyperbolic Gaussian Mechanism (HGM) is proposed to extend the Gaussian mechanism in Euclidean space to hyperbolic space to realize random perturbations that satisfy differential privacy under the hyperbolic space metric. Extensive experiment results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed PoinDP’s advantages of effective privacy protection while maintaining good performance on the node classification task.

Poincaré Differential Privacy for Hierarchy-Aware Graph Embedding | VIDEO

In recent years, researchers have developed novel Quantum-Inspired Neural Network (QINN) frameworks for the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, inspired by the theoretical investigations of quantum cognition. However, we have found that the training efficiency of QINNs is significantly lower than that of classical networks. We analyze the unitary transformation modules of existing QINNs based on the time displacement symmetry of quantum mechanics and discover that they are resembling a mathematical form similar to the first-order Euler method. The high truncation error associated with Euler method affects the training efficiency of QINNs. In order to enhance the training efficiency of QINNs, we generalize QINNs' unitary transformation modules to the Quantum-like high-order Runge-Kutta methods (QRKs). Moreover, we present the results of experiments on conversation emotion recognition and text classification tasks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Quantum-Inspired Neural Network with Runge-Kutta Method

The multi-armed bandit(MAB)  is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g.,  bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to design models for their problems, especially in non-stationary MAB problems. This paper aims to  design a multi-armed bandit algorithm that can be implemented without using information about the reward distribution  while still achieving substantial regret upper bounds. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm alternating between greedy rule and forced exploration. Our method can be applied to Gaussian, Bernoulli and other subgaussian distributions, and its implementation does not require additional information. We employ a unified analysis method for different forced exploration strategies and provide problem-dependent regret upper bounds for stationary and piecewise-stationary settings. Furthermore, we compare our algorithm with popular bandit algorithms on different reward distributions.

Forced Exploration in Bandit Problems

The actual collection of tabular data for sharing involves confidentiality and privacy constraints, leaving the potential risks of machine learning for interventional data analysis unsafely averted. Synthetic data has emerged recently as a privacy-protecting solution to address this challenge. However, existing approaches regard discrete and continuous modal features as separate entities, thus falling short in properly capturing their inherent correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning guided Gaussian Transformer autoencoder, termed GTCoder, to synthesize photo-realistic multimodal tabular data for scientific research. Our approach introduces a transformer-based fusion module that seamlessly integrates multimodal features, permitting for mining more informative latent representations. The attention within the fusion module directs the integrated output features to focus on critical components that facilitate the task of generating latent embeddings. Moreover, we formulate a contrastive learning strategy to implicitly constrain the embeddings from discrete features in the latent feature space by encouraging the similar discrete feature distributions closer while pushing the dissimilar further away, in order to better enhance the representation of the latent embedding. Experimental results indicate that GTCoder is effective to generate photo-realistic synthetic data, with interactive interpretation of latent embedding, and performs favorably against some baselines on most real-world and simulated datasets.

A Learnable Discrete-Prior Fusion Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning for Tabular Data Synthesis

Training state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep models often requires extensive data, resulting in substantial training and storage costs. To address these challenges, dataset condensation has been developed to learn a synthetic set that preserves essential information from the original large-scale dataset. Nowadays, Gradient-Matching (GM) based methods have been the primary method in the field of dataset condensation for achieving SOTA results. However, the bi-level optimization process hinders the practical application of such methods to realistic and larger datasets. To enhance condensation efficiency, previous works proposed Distribution-Matching (DM) as an alternative, which significantly reduces the condensation cost. Nonetheless, current DM-based methods have yielded less comparable results to GM-based methods due to their focus on aligning only the first moment of the distributions. In this paper, we present a novel DM-based method named M3D for dataset condensation by minimizing the maximum mean discrepancy between the condensed images and the original images. By embedding their distributions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, we align all orders of moments of the distributions of real and synthetic images, resulting in a more generalized condensed set. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight bi-level optimization fashion for DM, which demonstrates a significant performance boost while maintaining the efficiency of DM-based methods. Notably, our method even surpasses the SOTA GM-based method IDC on the high-resolution ImageNet dataset. Extensive analysis is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

M3D: Dataset Condensation by Minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy

As a classical NP-hard problem and the topic of the PACE 2022 competition, the directed feedback vertex set problem (DFVSP) aims to find a minimum subset of vertices such that, when vertices in the subset and all their adjacent edges are removed from the directed graph, the remainder graph is acyclic. In this paper, we propose a threshold-based responsive simulated annealing algorithm called TRSA for solving DFVSP. First, we simplify the problem instances with two new reduction rules proposed in this paper and eight reduction rules from the literature. Then, based on a new solution representation, TRSA solves DFVSP with a fast local search procedure featured by a swap-based neighborhood structure and three neighborhood acceleration strategies. Finally, all these strategies are incorporated into a threshold-based responsive simulated annealing framework. Computational experiments on 140 benchmark instances show that TRSA is highly competitive compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, TRSA can improve the best known results for 53 instances, while matching the best known results for 79 ones. Furthermore, some important features of TRSA are analyzed to identify its success factors.

Threshold-Based Responsive Simulated Annealing for Directed Feedback Vertex Set Problem

Hyperspectral image reconstruction from RGB inputs is a challenging while very important task for various vision-based applications. Existing learning-based hyperspectral reconstruction methods show limitations in fully exploiting the information among the hyperspectral bands. Although the introduction of Transformer provides a valuable framework for capturing long-range inter-dependencies, existing frameworks treat the problem trivially by directly studying the correlations in the hyperspectral space, with critical information compromised in early stages when features from different channels (with different energy and noise characteristics) are brutally combined and projected into the high dimensional space. As such, we propose to investigate the chromatic inter-dependencies in their respective hyperspectral embedding space. These embedded features can be fully exploited by querying the inter-channel correlations in a combinatorial manner, with the unique and complementary information efficiently fused into the final prediction. We found such independent modeling and combinatorial excavation mechanism are extremely beneficial to uncover marginal spectral features, especially in the long wavelength bands. In addition, we have proposed a spatio-spectral attention block and a spectrum-fusion attention module, which greatly facilitates the excavation and fusion of information at both semantically long-range levels and fine-grained pixel levels across all dimensions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method (dubbed CESST) achieves SOTA performance. The code will be open source.

Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction via Combinatorial Embedding of Cross-Channel Spatio-Spectral Clues

Batch Normalization (BN) is widely used to stabilize the optimization process and improve the test performance of deep neural networks. The regularization effect of BN depends on the batch size and explicitly using smaller batch sizes with Batch Normalization, a method known as Ghost Batch Normalization (GBN), has been found to improve generalization in many settings. We investigate the effectiveness of GBN by disentangling the induced ``Ghost Noise'' from normalization and quantitatively analyzing the distribution of noise as well as its impact on model performance. Inspired by our analysis, we propose a new regularization technique called Ghost Noise Injection (GNI) that imitates the noise in GBN without incurring the detrimental train-test discrepancy effects of small batch training. We experimentally show that GNI can provide a greater generalization benefit than GBN. Ghost Noise Injection can also be beneficial in otherwise non-noisy settings such as layer-normalized networks, providing additional evidence of the usefulness of Ghost Noise in Batch Normalization as a regularizer.

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Recognizing Ultra-High-Speed Moving Objects with Bio-Inspired Spike Camera

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