Canada

It is well-known that image quality assessment usually meets with the problem of perception-distortion (p-d) tradeoff. The existing deep image super-resolution (SR) methods either focus on high fidelity with pixel-level objectives or high perception with generative models. The emergence of diffusion
model paves a fresh way for image restoration, which has the potential to offer a brand-new solution for p-d trade-off. We experimentally observed that the perceptual quality and distortion change in an opposite direction with the increase of sampling steps. In light of this property, we propose an adaptive skip diffusion model (SkipDiff), which aims to achieve high-fidelity perceptual image SR with fewer sampling steps. Specifically, it decouples the sampling procedure into coarse skip approximation and fine skip refinement stages. A coarse-grained skip diffusion is first performed as a high-fidelity prior to obtaining a latent approximation of the full diffusion. Then, a fine-grained skip diffusion is followed to further refine the latent sample for promoting perception, where the fine time steps are adaptively learned by deep reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, this approach also enables faster sampling of diffusion model through skipping the intermediate denoising process to shorten the effective steps of the computation. Extensive experimental results show that our SkipDiff achieves superior perceptual quality with plausible reconstruction accuracy and a faster sampling speed. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaotongtt/SkipDiff.

AAAI 2024

SkipDiff: Adaptive Skip Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Perceptual Image Super-resolution

perception-distortion (p-d) tradeoff

diffusion model

image super-resolution

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

Speech signals are inherently complex as they encompass both global acoustic characteristics and local semantic information. However, in the task of target speech extraction, certain elements of global and local semantic information in the reference speech, which are irrelevant to speaker identity, can lead to speaker confusion within the speech extraction network. To overcome this challenge, we propose a self-supervised disentangled representation learning method. Our approach tackles this issue through a two-phase process, utilizing a reference speech encoding network and a global information disentanglement network to gradually disentangle the speaker identity information from other irrelevant factors. We exclusively employ the disentangled speaker identity information to guide the speech extraction network. Moreover, we introduce the adaptive modulation Transformer to ensure that the acoustic representation of the mixed signal remains undisturbed by the speaker embeddings. This component incorporates speaker embeddings as conditional information, facilitating natural and efficient guidance for the speech extraction network. Experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of our meticulously crafted approach, showcasing a substantial reduction in the likelihood of speaker confusion.

Self-Supervised Disentangled Representation Learning for Robust Target Speech Extraction

Conventional Federated Domain Adaptation (FDA) approaches usually demand an abundance of assumptions, which makes them significantly less feasible for real-world situations and introduces security hazards. This paper relaxes the assumptions from previous FDAs and studies a more practical scenario named Universal Federated Domain Adaptation (UFDA). It only requires the black-box model and the label set information of each source domain, while the label sets of different source domains could be inconsistent, and the target-domain label set is totally blind. Towards a more effective solution for our newly proposed UFDA scenario, we propose a corresponding methodology called Hot-Learning with Contrastive Label Disambiguation (HCLD). It particularly tackles UFDA's domain shifts and category gaps problems by using one-hot outputs from the black-box models of various source domains. Moreover, to better distinguish the shared and unknown classes, we further present a cluster-level strategy named Mutual-Voting Decision (MVD) to extract robust consensus knowledge across peer classes from both source and target domains. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance for our UFDA scenario with much fewer assumptions, compared to previous methodologies with comprehensive additional assumptions.

UFDA: Universal Federated Domain Adaptation with Practical Assumptions

Machine learning models deployed in the wild can be challenged by out-of-distribution (OOD) data from unknown classes. Recent advances in OOD detection rely on distance measures to distinguish samples that are relatively far away from the in-distribution (ID) data. Despite the promise, distance-based methods can suffer from the curse-of-dimensionality problem, which limits the efficacy in high dimensional feature space. To combat this problem, we propose a novel framework, Subspace Nearest Neighbor (SNN), for OOD detection. In training, our method regularizes the model and its feature representation by leveraging the most relevant subset of dimensions (i.e. subspace). The subspace learning yields highly distinguishable distance measures between ID and OOD data. We provide comprehensive experiments and ablations to validate the efficacy of SNN. Compared to the current best distance-based method, SNN reduces the average FPR95 by 15.96% on the CIFAR-100 benchmark.

How to Overcome Curse-of-Dimensionality for Out-of-Distribution Detection?

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Transformers have been widely applied to skeleton-based human action recognition, with each offering unique advantages in capturing spatial relationships and long-range dependencies. However, for most GCN methods, the construction of topological structures relies solely on the spatial information of human joints, limiting their ability to directly capture richer spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, the self-attention modules of many Transformer methods lack topological structure information, restricting the robustness and generalization of the models. To address these issues, we propose a Joint Trajectory Graph (JTG) that integrates spatio-temporal information into a uniform graph structure. We also present a Joint Trajectory GraphFormer (JT-GraphFormer), which directly captures the spatio-temporal relationships among all joint trajectories for human action recognition. To better integrate topological information into spatio-temporal relationships, we introduce a Spatio-Temporal Dijkstra Attention (STDA) mechanism to calculate relationship scores for all the joints in JTG. Furthermore, we incorporate the Koopman operator into the classification stage to enhance the model's representation ability and classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that JT-GraphFormer achieves outstanding performance in human action recognition tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on the NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and N-UCLA datasets.

Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Human Action Recognition via Joint Trajectory Graph

Sequential Recommendation plays a significant role in daily recommendation systems, such as e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Taobao. However, even with the advent of large models, these platforms often face sparse issues in the historical browsing records of individual users due to new users joining or the introduction of new products. As a result, existing sequence recommendation algorithms may not perform well. To address this, sequence-based data augmentation methods have garnered attention.

Existing sequence enhancement methods typically rely on augmenting existing data, employing techniques like cropping, masking prediction, random reordering, and random replacement of the original sequence. While these methods have shown improvements, they often overlook the exploration of the deep embedding space of the sequence. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Sparse Enhanced Network (SparseEnNet), which is a robust adversarial generation method. SparseEnNet aims to fully explore the hidden space in sequence recommendation, generating more robust enhanced items. Additionally, we adopt an adversarial generation method, allowing the model to differentiate between data augmentation categories and achieve better prediction performance for the next item in the sequence. Experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves a remarkable 4-14% improvement over existing methods when evaluated on the real-world datasets. (https://github.com/junyachen/SparseEnNet)

Sparse Enhanced Network: An Adversarial Generation Method for Robust Augmentation in Sequential Recommendation

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to improve the generalization ability of models trained on a specific group of source domains, enabling them to perform well on new, unseen target domains. Recent studies have shown that methods that converge to smooth optima can enhance the generalization performance of supervised learning tasks such as classification. In this study, we examine the impact of smoothness-enhancing formulations on domain adversarial training, which combines task loss and adversarial loss objectives. Our approach leverages the fact that converging to a smooth minimum with respect to task loss can stabilize the task loss and lead to better performance on unseen domains.
Furthermore, we recognize that the distribution of objects in the real world often follows a long-tailed class distribution, resulting in a mismatch between machine learning models and our expectations of their performance on all classes of datasets with long-tailed class distributions. To address this issue, we consider the domain generalization problem from the perspective of the long-tail distribution and propose using the maximum square loss to balance different classes which can improve model generalizability. Our method's effectiveness is demonstrated through comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on various domain generalization datasets.

Sharpness-Aware Model-Agnostic Long-Tailed Domain Generalization

Video Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) is a task of retrieving persons from multi-camera surveillance systems. Despite the progress made in leveraging spatio-temporal information in videos, occlusion in dense crowds still hinders further progress. To address this issue, we propose a Temporal Correlation Vision Transformer (TCViT) for video person Re-ID. TCViT consists of a Temporal Correlation Attention (TCA) module and a Learnable Temporal Aggregation (LTA) module. The TCA module is designed to reduce the impact of non-target persons by relative state, while the LTA module is used to aggregate frame-level features based on their completeness. Specifically, TCA is a parameter-free module that first aligns frame-level features to restore semantic coherence in videos and then enhances the features of the target person according to temporal correlation. Additionally, unlike previous methods that treat each frame equally with a pooling layer, LTA introduces a lightweight learnable module to weigh and aggregate frame-level features under the guidance of a classification score. Extensive experiments on four prevalent benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in video Re-ID.

Temporal Correlation Vision Transformer for Video Person Re-Identification

Point cloud completion is an indispensable task for recovering complete point clouds due to incompleteness caused by occlusion, limited sensor resolution, etc. The family of coarse-to-fine generation architectures has recently exhibited great success in point cloud completion and gradually became mainstream. In this work, we unveil one of the key ingredients behind these methods: meticulously devised feature extraction operations with explicit cross-resolution aggregation. We present Cross-Resolution Transformer that efficiently performs cross-resolution aggregation with local attention mechanisms. With the help of our recursive designs, the proposed operation can capture more scales of features than common aggregation operations, which is beneficial for capturing fine geometric characteristics. While prior methodologies have ventured into various manifestations of inter-level cross-resolution aggregation, the effectiveness of intra-level one and their combination has not been analyzed. With unified designs, Cross-Resolution Transformer can perform intra- or inter-level cross-resolution aggregation by switching inputs. We integrate two forms of Cross-Resolution Transformers into one up-sampling block for point generation, and following the coarse-to-fine manner, we construct CRA-PCN to incrementally predict complete shapes with stacked up-sampling blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on several widely used benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/EasyRy/CRA-PCN.

CRA-PCN: Point Cloud Completion with Intra- and Inter-level Cross-Resolution Transformers

Research on emergent communication has recently gained significant traction as a promising avenue for the linguistic community to unravel human language's origins and explore artificial intelligence's generalization capabilities. Current research has predominantly concentrated on recognizing qualitative patterns of object attributes(e.g., shape and color) and paid little attention to the quantitative relationship among object quantities which is known as the part of numerical concepts. The ability to generalize numerical concepts, i.e., counting and calculations with unseen quantities, is essential, as it mirrors humans' foundational abstract reasoning abilities. In this work, we introduce the NumGame, leveraging the referential game framework, forcing agents to communicate and generalize the numerical concepts effectively. Inspired by the human learning process of numbers, we present a two-stage training approach that sequentially fosters a rudimentary numerical sense followed by the ability of arithmetic calculation, ultimately aiding agents in generating semantically stable and unambiguous language for numerical concepts. The experimental results indicate the impressive generalization capabilities to unseen quantities and regularity of the language emergence from communication.

Emergent Communication for Numerical Concepts Generalization

While coresets have been growing in terms of their application, barring few exceptions, they have mostly been limited to unsupervised settings. We consider supervised classification problems, and non-decomposable evaluation measures in such settings. We show that stratified uniform sampling based coresets have excellent empirical performance that are backed by theoretical guarantees too. We focus on the F1 score and Matthews Correlation Coefficient, two widely used non-decomposable objective functions that are nontrivial to optimize for and show that uniform coresets attain a lower bound for coreset size, and have good empirical performance, comparable with ``smarter'' coreset construction strategies.

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