United States

As data and computational resources continue to expand, incorporating a variety of knowledge during the pre-training phase enhances large models, providing them with strong zero-shot capabilities. Due to the alignment of modal features by visual language models, zero-shot image captioning no longer necessitates pre-training on paired image-text labeled data, enabling accurate text description generation for images not encountered before. While recent research focuses on methods utilizing entity retrieval as anchors to bridge the gap between different modalities, these approaches often fall short of thoroughly analyzing the impact of entity retrieval recall on the zero-shot generation capabilities. To address this issue, we propose MERCap, a zero-shot image captioning method employing Multi-type Entity representation Retrieval.  More specifically, we first approximate image representation using the CLIP representation of text and Gaussian noise to address the modality gap. Then, we train a GPT-2 decoder to reconstruct text using entities as hard prompts and CLIP representations as soft prompts. Additionally, we construct a domain-specific entity set, assigning multiple representations to each entity and refining their representation vectors through contrastive learning. During inference, we retrieve entities and input them into the decoder to generate corresponding captions. Extensive experiments validate that our approach is efficient, achieving a new state-of-the-art level in cross-domain captioning and demonstrating strong competitiveness in in-domain captioning compared to existing methods.

AAAI 2025

Zero-Shot Image Captioning with Multi-type Entity Representations

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/)

AAAI 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. 

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.



In the rapidly developing field of automatic text generation and understanding, the quality of input data has been shown to be a key factor affecting the efficiency and accuracy of large language model (LLM) output. With the advent of advanced tools such as ChatGPT, input refinement work has mainly focused on prompt engineering. However, existing methods are often too dependent on specific contexts and are easily affected by individual expert experience and potential biases, limiting their wide applicability in diverse real-world applications. To address this problem, this study develops an Reinforced Token-Level Input Refinement, called RTLIR. We choose to optimize the input data at the fine-grained level of tokens, cleverly preserving the original text structure. Operationally, each state is defined by the token set of the current text, and each action is a binary decision process to decide whether to retain a specific token information. The agent automatically calculates and determines the selection proba- bility of each token based on the current state, thereby opti- mizing the entire decision process. Through continuous exploration and learning, the agent can autonomously learn to identify the key inputs that have the greatest impact on the generation results and achieve refinement of the input data. In addition, we encapsulate RTLIR as a modular function that can be widely applied to various tasks and models, providing plug-and-play functionality. Experimental results show that RTLIR improves the performance of LLM in various input scenarios and tasks, with an average accuracy increase of 6%.

Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Reinforced Token-Level Input Refinement for Large Language Models

Federated Learning (FL) has received much attention in recent years. However, although clients are not required to share their data in FL, the global model itself can implicitly remember clients' local data. Therefore, it’s necessary to effectively remove the target client's data from the FL global model to ease the risk of privacy leakage and implement ``the right to be forgotten". Federated Unlearning (FU) has been considered a promising solution to remove data without full retraining. But the model utility easily suffers significant reduction during unlearning due to the gradient conflicts. Furthermore, when conducting the post-training to recovery the model utility, it’s prone to move back and revert what have already been unlearned. To address these issues, we propose Federated Unlearning with Orthogonal Steepest Descent (FedOSD). We first design an unlearning cross entropy loss to overcome the convergence issue of the gradient ascent. A steepest descent direction for unlearning is then calculated in the condition of being non-conflicting with other clients’ gradients and closest to the target client's gradient. This benefits to efficiently unlearn and mitigate the model utility reduction. After unlearning, we recover the model utility by maintaining the achievement of unlearning. Finally, extensive experiments in several FL scenarios verify that FedOSD outperforms the SOTA FU algorithms in terms of unlearning and the model utility.

Federated Unlearning with Gradient Descent and Conflict Mitigation

Predicting unknown drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for improving medication safety. Previous efforts in DDI prediction have typically focused on binary classification or predicting DDI categories, with the absence of explanatory insights that could enhance trust in these predictions. In this work, we propose to generate natural language explanations for DDI predictions, enabling the model to reveal the underlying pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics mechanisms simultaneously as making the prediction. To do this, we have collected DDI explanations from DDInter and DrugBank and developed various models for extensive experiments and analysis. Our models can provide accurate explanations for unknown DDIs between known drugs. This paper contributes new tools to the field of DDI prediction and lays a solid foundation for further research on generating explanations for DDI predictions.

ExDDI: Explaining Drug-Drug Interaction Predictions with Natural Language

Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) is crucial in extensive practical applications, such as environmental monitoring, medical EEG analysis, and action recognition. Real-world time series datasets typically exhibit complex dynamics. To capture this complexity, RNN-based, CNN-based, Transformer-based, and hybrid models have been proposed. Unfortunately, current deep learning-based methods often neglect the simultaneous construction of local features and global dependencies at different time scales, lacking sufficient feature extraction capabilities to achieve satisfactory classification accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multiscale Periodic Time Series Network (MPTSNet), which integrates multiscale local patterns and global correlations to fully exploit the inherent information in time series. Recognizing the multi-periodicity and complex variable correlations in time series, we use the Fourier transform to extract primary periods, enabling us to decompose data into multiscale periodic segments. Leveraging the inherent strengths of CNN and attention mechanism, we introduce the PeriodicBlock, which adaptively captures local patterns and global dependencies while offering enhanced interpretability through attention integration across different periodic scales. The experiments on UEA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MPTSNet outperforms 21 existing advanced baselines in the MTSC tasks.

MPTSNet: Integrating Multiscale Periodic Local Patterns and Global Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Sequential recommendation aims to capture the temporal dependencies of items in a user's historical interactions and make recommendations based on this. Previous generative methods addressed the issue of data not directly reflecting user preference uncertainty by modeling the distribution of latent item representations. Diffusion model (DM)-based methods have achieved significant success due to their high-quality distribution generation and stable training. However, they lack satisfactory user sequence representations to guide the generation process, impacting recommendation performance. Moreover, these methods overlook the drawback of slow inference speed, severely limiting their practical value. To obtain effective generative guidance signals and accelerate the recommendation process, we propose DAE4Rec. In this approach, a Graph Autoencoder (GAE) is used to obtain interpretable item node representations, revealing global transitions of items that previous methods struggled to uncover. Then, use it to construct a generative guidance signal with lower coupling and variance for the diffusion model. Additionally, by employing a non-Markov chain derived from the forward diffusion process, it is the first to implement a 'skip-step' reverse diffusion process in diffusion model-based methods. And a creatively designed compensator is used to bridge the performance gap caused by 'skip-step'. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DAE4Rec outperforms other state-of-the-art generative sequential recommenders.

Enhancing Diffusion Model with Auxiliary Information Mining-Exploration and Efficient Sampling Mechanism for Sequential Recommendation

Smart contracts, closely intertwined with cryptocurrency transactions, have sparked widespread concerns about considerable
financial losses of security issues. To counteract this, a variety of tools have been developed to identify vulnerability
in smart contract. However, they fail to overcome two challenges at the same time when faced with smart contract
bytecode: (i) strong interference caused by enormous non-relevant instructions; (ii) missing semantics of bytecode
due to incomplete data and control flow dependencies. In this paper, we propose a multi-teacher based bytecode vulnerability
detection method, namely Multi-Teacher Vulnerability Hunter (MTVHunter), which delivers effective denoising
and missing semantic to bytecode under multi-teacher guidance. Specifically, we first propose an instruction denoising
teacher to eliminate noise interference by abstract vulnerability pattern and further reflect in contract embeddings. Secondly,
we design a novel semantic complementary teacher with neuron distillation, which effectively extracts necessary
semantic from source code to replenish the bytecode. Particularly, the proposed neuron distillation accelerate this semantic filling by turning the knowledge transition into a regression task. We conduct experiments on 229,178 real-world smart contracts that concerns four types of common vulnerabilities.
Extensive experiments show MTVHunter achieves significantly
performance gains over state-of-the-art approaches.

MTVHunter: Smart Contracts Vulnerability Detection Based on Multi-Teacher Knowledge Translation

Spatial-temporal forecasting is crucial and widely applicable in various domains such as traffic, energy, and climate. Benefiting from the abundance of unlabeled spatial-temporal data, self-supervised methods are increasingly adapted to learn spatial-temporal representations. However, it encounters three key challenges: 1) the difficulty in selecting reliable negative pairs due to the homogeneity of variables, hindering contrastive learning methods; 2) overlooking spatial correlations across variables over time; 3) limitations of efficiency and scalability in exist self-supervised learning methods. To tackle these, we propose a lightweight representation-learning model ST-ReP, integrating current value reconstruction and future value prediction into the pre-training framework for spatial-temporal forecasting. And we design a new spatial-temporal encoder to model fine-grained relationships. Moreover, multi-time scale analysis is incorporated into the self-supervised loss to enhance predictive capability. Experimental results across diverse domains demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses pre-training-based baselines, showcasing its ability to learn compact and semantically enriched representations while exhibiting superior scalability.

ST-ReP: Learning Predictive Representations Efficiently for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to identify anomalies in new classes of images, and it's vital in industry and other fields. Most current methods are based on the multi-modal models CLIP and SAM, which have prior knowledge to assist model training, but they are highly dependent on the input of the prompts and their accuracy. We found that some diffusion model-based anomaly detection methods generate a large amount of semantic information and are very valuable for the ZSAD task. Therefore, we propose a diffusion model based on the zero-shot anomaly detection method, DZAD, and no additional prompt input is required. First, we propose the first diffusion-based zero-shot anomaly detection framework, which uses the proposed multi-timestep noise features extraction method to achieve anomaly detection in the denoising process of a latent space diffusion model with a semantic-guided (SG) network. Second, based on the detection results, we proposed a two-branch feature extractor for anomaly maps at different scales. Third, based on the difference between the anomaly detection task and other general image detection tasks, we propose a noise feature weight function for the diffusion model in the zero-shot anomaly detection task. Comparing with 7 recently state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on MVTec AD and VisA datasets and analysis of the role of each component in ablation studies. The experiments demonstrate the validity of the method beyond the existing methods.

DZAD: Diffusion-based Zero-shot Anomaly Detection

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients, such as mobile phones and IoT devices, to collaboratively train a global machine learning model while keeping their data localized. However, recent studies have revealed that the training phase of FL is vulnerable to reconstruction attacks, such as attribute inference attacks (AIA), where adversaries exploit  exchanged messages and auxiliary public information to uncover sensitive attributes of targeted clients. While these attacks have been extensively studied in the context of classification tasks, their impact on regression tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing novel model-based AIAs specifically designed for regression tasks in FL environments. Our approach considers scenarios where adversaries can either eavesdrop on exchanged messages or directly interfere with the training process. We benchmark our proposed attacks against state-of-the-art methods using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate a significant increase in reconstruction accuracy, particularly in heterogeneous client datasets, a common scenario in FL. The efficacy of our model-based AIAs makes them better candidates for empirically quantifying privacy leakage for federated regression tasks.

Attribute Inference Attacks for Federated Regression Tasks

The identification of the financial characteristics of indus-
try sectors has a large importance in accounting audit, al-
lowing auditors to prioritize the most important area during
audit. Existing company classification standards such as the
Standard Industry Classification (SIC) code allow to map a
company to a category based on its activity and products. In
this paper, we explore the potential of machine learning al-
gorithms and language models to analyze the relationship be-
tween those categories and companies’ financial statements.
We propose a supervised company classification methodol-
ogy and analyze several types of representations for financial
statements. Existing works address this task using solely nu-
merical information in financial records. Our findings show
that beyond numbers, textual information occurring in finan-
cial records can be leveraged by language models to match
the performance of dedicated decision tree-based classifiers,
while providing better explainability and more generic ac-
counting representations. We think this work can serve as a
preliminary work towards semi-automatic auditing. The mod-
els, code, and a preprocessed dataset will be made publicly
available for further research.

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