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Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher&#39;s knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.

AAAI 2025

Distilling Knowledge from Heterogeneous Architectures for Semantic Segmentation

segmentation

Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/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. AAAI-25 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.



Recent research suggests that tree search algorithms (e.g. Monte Carlo Tree Search) can dramatically boost LLM performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks.
However, they often require more than 10 times the computational resources of greedy decoding due to wasteful search strategies, making them difficult to be deployed in practical applications.
This study introduces a novel guided tree search algorithm with dynamic node selection and node-level exploration budget (maximum number of children) calculation to tackle this issue.
By considering the search progress towards the final answer (history) and the guidance from a value network (future) trained without any step-wise annotations,
our algorithm iteratively selects the most promising tree node before expanding it within the boundaries of the allocated computational budget.
Experiments conducted on the GSM8K and TabMWP datasets demonstrate that our method not only offers competitive performance but also enjoys significantly lower computational costs compared to baseline methods.

LiteSearch: Efficient Tree Search with Dynamic Exploration Budget for Math Reasoning

We propose action-agnostic point-level (AAPL) supervision for temporal action detection to achieve accurate action instance detection with a lightly annotated dataset. In the proposed scheme, a small portion of video frames is sampled in an unsupervised manner and presented to human annotators, who then label the frames with action categories. Unlike point-level supervision, which requires annotators to search for every action instance in an untrimmed video, frames to annotate are selected without human intervention in AAPL supervision. We also propose a detection model and learning method to effectively utilize the AAPL labels. Extensive experiments on the variety of datasets (THUMOS '14, FineAction, GTEA, BEOID, and ActivityNet 1.3) demonstrate that the proposed approach is competitive with or outperforms prior methods for video-level and point-level supervision in terms of the trade-off between the annotation cost and detection performance. The code and the annotation tool used in this study are included in the supplementary material and will be made available to the public if our paper is accepted.

Action-Agnostic Point-Level Supervision for Temporal Action Detection

LLM-powered personalization agent systems employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict users’ behavior fromtheir past activities. However, their effectiveness often hinges on the ability to effectively leverage extensive, long user his-torical data due to its inherent noise and length of such data. Existing pretrained LLMs may generate summaries that are concise but lack the necessary context for downstream tasks, hindering their utility in personalization systems. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback (RLPF). RLPF fine-tunes LLMs to generate concise, human-readable user summaries that are optimized for downstream task performance. By maximizing the usefulness of the generated summaries, RLPF effectively distills extensive user history data while preserving essential information for downstream tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in both extrinsic downstream task utility and intrinsic summary quality, surpassing baseline methods by up to 22% and achieving an up to 84.59% win rate on Factuality, Abstractiveness, and Readability. RLPF also achieves a remarkable 74% reduction while improving performance on 16 out of 19 unseen tasks and/or datasets, showcasing its generalizability. This approach offers a promising solution for enhancing LLM personalization by effectively transforming long, noisy user histories into informative and human-readable representations.

RLPF: Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback for User Summarization with LLMs

Spatial-aware image editing focuses on modifying the position and size of elements within a given image. However, previous works still struggle with maintaining background harmony in the original editing areas, as well as preserving the initial identity of the edited elements, making it difficult to achieve complex multi-object editing in a single pass. In this paper, we aim to perform flexible spatial editing in a simple yet straightforward manner. We propose to inpaint the background first and develop a two-stage multi-layered latent diffusion framework to edit each element independently. Specifically, we design a key-masking self-attention scheme alongside artifact suppression to achieve background inpainting within the denoising process, leveraging the powerful generative capabilities of the Latent Diffusion Model, Stable Diffusion XL-1.0. The latent decomposition and fusion framework is capable of unifying various spatial-aware operations, including removal, resizing, relocation, flipping, addition, camera panning, zooming out, occlusion-aware editing, and cross-image editing. Experiments demonstrate the superior inpainting quality for object removal, along with enhanced versatility and higher precision in spatial-aware editing achieved by our method.

DesignEdit: Unify Spatial-Aware Image Editing via Training-free Inpainting with a Multi-Layered Latent Diffusion Framework

Removing reflection from a single image is challenging due to the absence of general reflection priors. Although existing methods incorporate extensive user guidance for satisfactory performance, they often lack the flexibility to adapt user guidance in different modalities, and dense user interactions further limit their practicality.
To alleviate these problems, this paper presents {\textbf{FIRM}}, a novel framework for \textbf{F}lexible \textbf{I}nteractive image \textbf{R}eflection re\textbf{M}oval with various forms of guidance, where users can provide sparse visual guidance (e.g., points, boxes, or strokes) or text descriptions for better reflection removal. 
Firstly, we design a novel user guidance conversion module (UGC) to transform different forms of guidance into unified contrastive masks. The contrastive masks provide explicit cues for identifying reflection and transmission layers in blended images. Secondly, we devise a contrastive mask-guided reflection removal network that comprises a newly proposed contrastive guidance interaction block (CGIB). This block leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism that merges contrastive masks with image features, allowing for precise layer separation. The proposed framework requires 10$\times$ less time to provide guidance compared to previous interactive-based methods, which makes a step-change in flexibility.  Extensive results on public real-world reflection removal datasets validate that our method demonstrates state-of-the-art reflection removal performance.

FIRM: Flexible Interactive Reflection ReMoval

Diffusion Models have emerged as powerful generative models for high-quality image synthesis, with many subsequent image editing techniques based on them. However, the ease of text-based image editing introduces significant risks, such as malicious editing for scams or intellectual property infringement. Previous works have attempted to safeguard images from diffusion-based editing by adding imperceptible perturbations. These methods are costly and specifically target prevalent Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), while Pixel-domain Diffusion Models (PDMs) remain largely unexplored and robust against such attacks. Our work addresses this gap by proposing a novel attacking framework with a feature representation attack loss that exploits vulnerabilities in denoising UNets and a latent optimization strategy to enhance the naturalness of protected images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in attacking dominant PDM-based editing methods (e.g., SDEdit) while maintaining reasonable protection fidelity and robustness against common defense methods. Additionally, our framework is extensible to LDMs, achieving comparable performance to existing approaches.

Pixel Is Not a Barrier: An Effective Evasion Attack for Pixel-Domain Diffusion Models

Precise measurements from sensors are crucial, but the data are usually collected from low-cost, low-tech systems, which are often inaccurate. Thus, they require further calibrations. To that end, we first identify three requirements for effective calibration under practical low-tech sensor conditions. Based on the requirements, we develop a model called TESLA, Transformer for effective sensor calibration utilizing logarithmic-binned attention. TESLA uses a high performance deep learning model, Transformers, to calibrate and capture non-linear components. At its core, it employs logarithmic binning, to minimize attention complexity. TESLA achieves fast and consistent real-time calibration, even with longer sequences and finer-grained time series in hardware-constrained systems. Experiments show that TESLA outperforms existing novel deep learning and newly crafted linear models in accuracy, calibration speed, and energy efficiency.

Real-Time Calibration Model for Low-Cost Sensor in Fine-Grained Time Series

Real-world optimization problems often involve complex objective functions with costly evaluations. While Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian processes is effective for these challenges, it suffers in high-dimensional spaces due to performance degradation from limited function evaluations. To overcome this, simplification techniques like dimensionality reduction have been employed, yet they often rely on assumptions about the problem characteristics, potentially underperforming when these assumptions do not hold. trust-region-based methods, which avoid such assumptions, focus on local search but risk stagnation in local optima. In this study, we propose a novel acquisition function, regional expected improvement (REI), designed to enhance trust-region-based BO in medium to high-dimensional settings. REI identifies regions likely to contain the global optimum, improving performance without relying on specific problem characteristics. We provide a theoretical proof that REI effectively identifies optimal trust regions and empirically demonstrate that incorporating REI into trust-region-based BO outperforms conventional BO and other high-dimensional BO methods in medium to high-dimensional real-world problems.

Regional Expected Improvement for Efficient Trust Region Selection in High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization

Early detection of fake news is crucial to mitigate its negative impact. Current research in fake news detection often utilizes the difference between real and fake news regarding the support degree from reliable sources. However, it has overlooked their different semantic outlier degrees among unreliable source information during the same period. Since fake news often serves ideological propaganda, unreliable sources usually publish a lot of information with the same propaganda idea during the same period, making it less likely to be a semantic outlier. To leverage this difference, we propose the Reliable-Unreliable Source Reference (RUSR) Fake News Early Detection Method. RUSR introduces the publication background for detected news, which consists of related news with common main objects of description and slightly earlier publication from both reliable and unreliable sources. Furthermore, we develop a strongly preference-driven support degree evaluation model and a two-hop semantic outlier degree evaluation model, which respectively mitigate the interference of news with weak validation effectiveness and the tightness degree of semantic cluster. The designed redistribution module and expanding range relative time encoding are adopted by both models, respectively optimizing their extreme intermediate results during early training and expressing the relevance of news implied by their release time gap. Finally, we present a multi-model mutual benefit and collaboration framework that enables the multi-model mutual benefit of generalization in training and multi-perspective prediction of news authenticity in inference. Experiments on our newly constructed dataset demonstrate the superiority of RUSR.

Contradicted in Reliable, Replicated in Unreliable: Dual-Source Reference for Fake News Early Detection

Deep generative models are proficient in generating realistic data but struggle with producing rare samples in low density regions due to their scarcity of training datasets and issues like mode collapse.
While recent methods aim to improve the fidelity of generated samples, they often reduce diversity and coverage by ignoring rare and novel samples. This study proposes a novel approach for generating diverse rare samples from high-resolution image datasets with pretrained GANs. Our method employs gradient-based optimization of latent vectors within a multi-objective framework and utilizes normalizing flows for density estimation on the feature space. This enables the generation of varied rare images, with controllable parameters for rareness, diversity, and similarity to a reference image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively across various datasets and GANs without retraining or fine-tuning the pretrained GANs.

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LiteSearch: Efficient Tree Search with Dynamic Exploration Budget for Math Reasoning

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