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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.

AAAI 2025

FIRM: Flexible Interactive Reflection ReMoval

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.



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.

Diverse Rare Sample Generation with Pretrained GANs

Human skeleton-based action recognition has long been an indispensable aspect of artificial intelligence. Current state-of-the-art methods tend to consider only the dependencies between connected skeletal joints, limiting their ability to capture non-linear dependencies between physically distant joints. Moreover, most existing approaches distinguish action classes by estimating the probability density of motion representations, yet the high-dimensional nature of human motions invokes inherent difficulties in accomplishing such measurements. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from two directions: (1) We propose a novel dependency refinement approach that explicitly models dependencies between any pair of joints, effectively transcending the limitations imposed by joint distance. (2) We further propose a framework that utilizes the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion to differentiate action classes without being affected by data dimensionality, and mathematically derive learning objectives guaranteeing precise recognition. Empirically, our approach sets the state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and Northwestern-UCLA datasets. Our code is anonymously released and is included in the supplementary.

Skeleton-based Action Recognition with Non-linear Dependency Modeling and Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion

Novel view synthesis is a critical task in autonomous driving. Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has shown success in generating novel views, it faces challenges in maintaining high-quality rendering when viewpoints deviate significantly from the training set. This difficulty primarily stems from complex lighting conditions and geometric inconsistencies in texture-less regions. To address these issues, we propose an attention-based illumination model that leverages light fields from neighboring views, enhancing the realism of synthesized images. Additionally, we propose a geometry optimization method using planar homography to improve geometric consistency in texture-less regions. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in synthesis quality for large-deviation viewpoints, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Novel View Synthesis Under Large-Deviation Viewpoint for Autonomous Driving

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning among decentralized clients while safeguarding the privacy of their local data. Existing studies on FL typically assume offline labeled data available at each client when the training starts. Nevertheless, the training data in practice often arrive at clients in a streaming fashion without ground-truth labels. Given the expensive annotation cost, it is critical to identify a subset of informative samples for labeling on clients. However, selecting samples locally while accommodating the global training objective presents a challenge unique to FL. In this work, we tackle this conundrum by framing the data querying process in FL as a collaborative decentralized decision-making problem and proposing an effective solution named LeaDQ, which leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. In particular, under the implicit guidance from global information, LeaDQ effectively learns the local policies for distributed clients and steers them towards selecting samples that can enhance the global model's accuracy. Extensive simulations on image and text tasks show that LeaDQ advances the model performance in various FL scenarios, outperforming the benchmarking algorithms.

Learn How to Query from Unlabeled Data Streams in Federated Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely used in a variety of fields because of their great potential in representing graph-structured data. However, lacking of rigours uncertainty estimations limits their application in high-stakes. Conformal Prediction (CP) can produce statistically guaranteed uncertainty estimates by using the classifier's probability estimates to obtain prediction sets, which contains the true class with a user-specified probability. In this paper, we propose a Rank-based CP framework to GNNs (RCP-GNN) for reliable uncertainty estimates. By exploiting rank information of the classifier's outcome, prediction sets with desired coverage rate can be efficiently constructed. The strategy of CP during training with differentiable rank-based conformal loss function is further explored to adapt prediction sets according to graph topology. In this way, the composition of prediction sets can be guided by the aiming of jointly reducing inefficiency and probability estimation errors. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show that our model achieves any predefined target marginal coverage while significantly reducing the prediction set size (inefficiency) compared with baselines.

Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks Through Rank-Based Conformal Prediction

Masked autoencoders (MAEs) have recently demonstrated effectiveness in tabular data imputation. However, due to the inherent heterogeneity of tabular data, the uniform random masking strategy commonly used in MAEs can disrupt the distribution of missingness, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a proportional masking strategy for masked autoencoders. Specifically, we first compute the statistics of missingness based on the observed proportions in the dataset, and then generate masks that align with these statistics, ensuring that the distribution of missingness is preserved after masking. Furthermore, we argue that simple MLP-based token mixing offers competitive or often superior performance compared to attention mechanisms while being more computationally efficient, especially given the heterogeneity of tabular data. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed proportional masking strategy across various missing data patterns in tabular datasets.
Code will be released.

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