Canada

Image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from a degraded low-quality observation. Recently, Transformer models have achieved promising performance on image restoration tasks due to their powerful ability to model long-range dependencies. However, the quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input size makes them inapplicable to practical applications. In this paper, we develop an efficient convolutional network for image restoration by enhancing multi-scale representation learning. To this end, we propose an omni-kernel module that consists of three branches, i.e., global, large, and local branches, to learn global-to-local feature representations efficiently. Specifically, the global branch achieves a global perceptive field via the dual-domain channel attention and frequency-gated mechanism. Furthermore, to provide multi-grained receptive fields, the large branch is formulated via different shapes of depth-wise convolutions with unusually large kernel sizes. Moreover, we complement local information using a point-wise depth-wise convolution. Finally, the proposed network, dubbed OKNet, is established by inserting the omni-kernel module into the bottleneck position for efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 benchmark datasets for three representative image restoration tasks, including image dehazing, image desnowing, and image defocus deblurring. The code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/OKNet.

AAAI 2024

Omni-Kernel Network for Image Restoration | VIDEO

omni-kernel

low level vision

image restoration

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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-26 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.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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. 

Submodular maximization algorithms have found wide applications in various fields such as data summarization, recommendation systems, and active learning. In recent years, deletion-robust submodular maximization algorithms have garnered attention due to their significant implications in scenarios where some data points may be removed due to user preferences or privacy concerns, such as in recommendation systems and influence maximization. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of submodular maximization with knapsack constraints and propose a robust streaming algorithm for it. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to solve this problem for non-monotone submodular functions and can achieve an approximation ratio of $1/(6.82+2.63d)-\epsilon$ under a near-optimal summary size of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(k+r)$, where $k$ denotes the maximum cardinality of any feasible solution, $d$ denotes the number of the knapsack constraints and $r$ is the robustness parameter. For monotone submodular functions, our algorithm can achieve an approximation ratio of $1/(2+2d)-\epsilon$ under a near-optimal summary size of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(k+r)$, significantly improving upon the best-known ratio of $\Omega\big((1/d-\epsilon)^2\big)$. The empirical performance of our algorithm is extensively evaluated in several applications including influence maximization and recommendation systems, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Deletion-Robust Submodular Maximization with Knapsack Constraints

To enhance the efficacy of multi-scenario services in industrial recommendation systems, the emergence of multi-domain recommendation has become prominent, which entails simultaneous modeling of all domains through a unified model, effectively capturing commonalities and differences among them. However, current methods rely on manual domain partitioning, which overlook the intricate domain relationships and the heterogeneity of different domains during joint optimization, hindering the integration of domain commonalities and differences. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a universal and flexible framework D3 aimed at optimizing the multi-domain recommendation pipeline from three key aspects. Firstly, an attention-based domain adaptation module is introduced to automatically identify and incorporate domain-sensitive features during training. Secondly, we propose a fusion gate module that enables the seamless integration of commonalities and diversities among domains, allowing for implicit characterization of intricate domain relationships. Lastly, we tackle the issue of joint optimization by deriving loss weights from two complementary viewpoints: domain complexity and domain specificity, alleviating inconsistencies among different domains during the training phase. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework. In addition, D3 has been implemented on a real-life, high-traffic internet platform catering to millions of users daily.

D3: A Methodological Exploration of Domain Division, Modeling, and Balance in Multi-Domain Recommendations

One of the challenges in generating human-like music is articulating musical expressions such as dynamics, phrasing, and timbre, which are difficult for computational models to mimic. Previous efforts to tackle this problem have been insufficient due to a fundamental lack of data containing information about musical expressions. In this paper, we introduce MID-FiLD, a MIDI dataset for learning fine-level dynamics control. Notable properties of MID-FiLD are as follows: (1) All 4,422 MIDI samples are constructed by professional music writers with a strong understanding of composition and musical expression. (2) Each MIDI sample contains four different musical metadata including control change #1 (CC#1) value. We verify that our metadata is a key factor in MID-FiLD, exerting a substantial influence over CC#1 values. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of MID-FiLD to deep learning models by suggesting a token-based encoding methodology and reveal the potential for generating controllable, human-like musical expressions.

MID-FiLD: MIDI Dataset for Fine-Level Dynamics | VIDEO

Generative retrieval stands out as a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that aims to generate identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target.  This generative paradigm taps into powerful generative language models, distinct from traditional sparse or dense retrieval methods. However, we argue that only learning to generate is insufficient for generative retrieval. It learns to generate identifiers as an intermediate goal and then converts predicted identifiers into a passage rank list via a heuristic function.  This disconnect between the learning objective of autoregressive models and the desired passage ranking target leads to a learning gap. To bridge this gap, we propose a learning-to-rank framework for generative retrieval, dubbed LTRGR. LTRGR enables generative retrieval to learn to rank passages directly, optimizing the autoregressive model toward the final passage ranking target via a rank loss. This framework only requires an additional learning-to-rank training phase to enhance current generative retrieval systems and does not add any burden to the inference stage. We conducted experiments on three public benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that LTRGR achieves state-of-the-art performance among generative retrieval methods.

Learning to Rank in Generative Retrieval

Reconstructing high-fidelity hand models with intricate textures plays a crucial role in enhancing human-object interaction and advancing real-world applications. Despite the state-of-the-art methods excelling in texture generation and image rendering, they often face challenges in accurately capturing geometric details. Learning-based approaches usually offer better robustness and faster inference, which tend to produce smoother results and require substantial amounts of training data. To address these issues, we present a novel fine-grained multi-view hand mesh reconstruction method that leverages inverse rendering to restore hand poses and intricate details. Firstly, our approach predicts a parametric hand mesh model through Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) based method from multi-view images. We further introduce a novel Hand Albedo and Mesh (HAM) optimization module to refine both the hand mesh and textures, which is capable of preserving the mesh topology. In addition, we suggest an effective mesh-based neural rendering scheme to simultaneously generate photo-realistic image and optimize mesh geometry by fusing the pre-trained rendering network with vertex features. We conduct the comprehensive experiments on InterHand2.6M, DeepHandMesh and dataset collected by ourself, whose promising results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/agnJason/FMHR.

Fine-Grained Multi-View Hand Reconstruction Using Inverse Rendering

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) demonstrate their significance by effectively modeling complex interrelationships within graph-structured data. To enhance the credibility and robustness of GNNs, it becomes exceptionally crucial to bolster their ability to capture causal relationships. However, despite recent advancements that have indeed strengthened GNNs from a causal learning perspective, conducting an in-depth analysis specifically targeting the causal modeling prowess of GNNs remains an unresolved issue. In order to comprehensively analyze various GNN models from a causal learning perspective, we constructed an artificially synthesized dataset with known and controllable causal relationships between data and labels. The rationality of the generated data is further ensured through theoretical foundations. Drawing insights from analyses conducted using our dataset, we introduce a lightweight and highly adaptable GNN module designed to strengthen GNNs' causal learning capabilities across a diverse range of tasks. Through a series of experiments conducted on both synthetic datasets and other real-world datasets, we empirically validate the effectiveness of the proposed module.

Rethinking Causal Relationships Learning in Graph Neural Networks | VIDEO

Despite Graph neural networks' significant performance gain over many classic techniques in various graph-related downstream tasks, their successes are restricted in shallow models due to over-smoothness and the difficulties of optimizations among many other issues. In this paper, to alleviate the over-smoothing issue, we propose a soft graph normalization method to preserve the diversities of node embeddings and prevent indiscrimination due to possible over-closeness. Combined with residual connections, we analyze the reason why the method can effectively capture the knowledge in both input graph structures and node features even with deep networks. Additionally, inspired by Curriculum Learning that learns easy examples before the hard ones, we propose a novel label-smoothing-based learning framework to enhance the optimization of deep GNNs, which iteratively smooths labels in an auxiliary graph and constructs many gradual non-smooth tasks for extracting increasingly complex knowledge and gradually discriminating nodes from coarse to fine. The method arguably reduces the risk of overfitting and generalizes better results. Finally, extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of the proposed model and learning framework through comparison with twelve existing baselines including the state-of-the-art methods on twelve real-world node classification benchmarks.

Curriculum-Enhanced Residual Soft An-Isotropic Normalization for Over-Smoothness in Deep GNNs

This paper introduces a novel approach called "friendly attack" aimed at enhancing the performance of error correction channel codes. Inspired by the concept of adversarial attacks, our method leverages the idea of introducing slight perturbations to the neural network input, resulting in a substantial impact on the network's performance. By introducing small perturbations to fixed-point modulated codewords before transmission, we effectively improve the decoder's performance without violating the input power constraint. The perturbation design is accomplished by a modified iterative fast gradient method. This study investigates various decoder architectures suitable for computing gradients to obtain the desired perturbations. Specifically, we consider belief propagation (BP) for LDPC codes; the error correcting code transformer, BP and neural BP (NBP) for polar codes, and neural BCJR for convolutional codes. We demonstrate that the proposed friendly attack method can improve the reliability across different channels, modulations, codes, and decoders. This method allows us to increase the reliability of communication with a legacy receiver by simply modifying the transmitted codeword appropriately.

Friendly Attacks to Improve Channel Coding Reliability

Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning and explaining causal effects within Neural Network (NN) models. By virtue of NN architectures, previous approaches consider only direct and total causal effects assuming independence among input variables. We view an NN as a structural causal model (SCM) and extend our focus to include indirect causal effects by introducing feedforward connections among input neurons. We propose an ante-hoc method that captures and maintains direct, indirect, and total causal effects during NN model training. We also propose an algorithm for quantifying learned causal effects in an NN model and efficient approximation strategies for quantifying causal effects in high-dimensional data. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the causal effects learned by our ante-hoc method better approximate the ground truth effects compared to existing methods.

Towards Learning and Explaining Indirect Causal Effects in Neural Networks

Most Graph Convolutional Networks based 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods were involved in single-view 3D HPE and utilized certain spatial graphs, existing key problems such as depth ambiguity, insufficient feature representation, or limited receptive fields. To address these issues, we propose a multi-view 3D HPE framework based on deep semantic graph transformer, which adaptively learns and fuses multi-view significant semantic features of human nodes to improve 3D HPE performance. First, we propose a deep semantic graph transformer encoder to enrich spatial feature information. It deeply mines the position, spatial structure, and skeletal edge knowledge of joints and dynamically learns their correlations. Then, we build a progressive multi-view spatial-temporal feature fusion framework to mitigate joint depth uncertainty. To enhance the pose spatial representation, deep spatial semantic feature are interacted and fused across different viewpoints during monocular feature extraction. Furthermore, long-time relevant temporal dependencies are modeled and spatial-temporal information from all viewpoints is fused to intermediately supervise the depth. Extensive experiments on three 3D HPE benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. It can effectively enhance pose features, mitigate depth ambiguity in single-view 3D HPE, and improve 3D HPE performance without providing camera parameters. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/z0911k/SGraFormer.

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Deletion-Robust Submodular Maximization with Knapsack Constraints

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