United States

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has gained significant attention due to the potential of deep learning to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. NCO has been widely applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSPs) with the current focus predominantly on deterministic problems. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based scenario processing module (SPM) to extend NCO methods for solving stochastic JSPs. Our approach explicitly incorporates stochastic information by an attention mechanism that captures the embedding of sampled scenarios (i.e., an approximation of stochasticity). Fed with the embedding, the base neural network is intervened by the attended scenarios, which accordingly learns an effective policy under stochasticity. We also propose a training paradigm that works harmoniously with either the expected makespan or Value-at-Risk objective. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing learning and non-learning methods for the flexible JSP problem with stochastic processing times on a variety of instances. In addition, our approach holds significant generalizability to varied numbers of scenarios and disparate distributions.

AAAI 2025

Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Stochastic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems

planning scheduling and learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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.



We propose SoundBrush, a model that uses sound as a brush to edit and manipulate visual scenes. We extend the generative capabilities of the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) to incorporate audio information for editing visual scenes. Inspired by existing image-editing works, we frame this task as a supervised learning problem and leverage various off-the-shelf models to construct a sound-paired visual scene dataset for training. This richly generated dataset enables SoundBrush to learn to map audio features into the textual space of the LDM, allowing for visual scene editing guided by diverse in-the-wild sound. Unlike existing methods, SoundBrush can accurately manipulate the overall scenery or even insert sounding objects to best match the audio inputs while preserving the original content. Furthermore, by integrating with novel view synthesis techniques, our framework can be extended to edit 3D scenes, facilitating sound-driven 3D scene manipulation.

SoundBrush: Sound as a Brush for Visual Scene Editing

Deep learning models with large-scale backbones have been increasingly adopted to tackle complex visual question answering (VQA) problems in real settings. While providing powerful learning capacities to handle the high-dimensional and multimodal VQA data, these models tend to suffer from the memorization effect leading to overconfident predictions. This can significantly limit their applicability in critical domains (e.g., medicine, cyber-security, and public safety), where confidently wrong predictions may lead to severe consequences. In this work, we propose to perform novel low-rank network factorization, resulting in much better-calibrated networks. These low-rank factorized networks are then aggregated into an ensemble guided by a generalized focal loss to further improve the overall performance and calibration. The overall framework, referred to as the Generalized focal Loss Ensemble of low-rank Networks (GLEN), is an important step toward developing well-calibrated VQA models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our low-rank factorization-based ensemble technique towards calibrating VQA models, theoretically demonstrate that the generalized focal loss provides a more balanced bias-variance trade-off, which guarantees to lower the confidence of the incorrect predictions. Extensive experimentation conducted on benchmark datasets and comparison on various VQA models shows that GLEN leads to much better calibration over both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data without sacrificing the VQA accuracy.

GLEN: Generalized Focal Loss Ensemble of Low-Rank Networks for Calibrated Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we propose a new benchmark called "Archaeological Piece Grouping." In the field of archaeology, it is common for broken archaeological pieces, such as artifact fragments, to be mixed. Archaeologists often spend significant time distinguishing these pieces and categorizing them into different groups. Our benchmark introduces a novel, comprehensive dataset named ArcPie, along with new evaluation metrics for this task. Additionally, we propose a new framework called "3D Probabilistic Graph Search" (3DPGS) to address the problem of grouping mixed archaeological pieces. This framework includes a relation network designed to learn the relationships among all the input 3D pieces. Utilizing the relationships learned, our framework generates a probabilistic matching graph that describes the affinity of any two pieces. We also introduce a novel search algorithm to identify groups according to this matrix. Our framework significantly outperforms other baselines. We commit to releasing our code and dataset if our paper is accepted.

3DPGS: 3D Probabilistic Graph Search for Archaeological Piece Grouping

Wearable Human Action Recognition (wHAR) uses motion sensor data to identify human movements, which is essential for mobile and wearable devices. However, traditional wHAR systems are only trained on a limited set of activities. Hence, they fail to generalize to diverse human motions, prompting Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL). Existing ZSL methods for wHAR focus solely on augmenting labels, such as representing them as attribute matrices, images, videos, or text. We propose ZeroHAR that enhances ZSL by not just focusing on activity labels, but by augmenting motion data with sensor context features. Our approach incorporates information about the sensor type, the Cartesian axis of the data, and the sensor's body position, providing the model with crucial spatial and biomechanical insights. This helps the model generalize better to new actions. First, we train the model by aligning the latent space of the motion time-series with its corresponding sensor context, while distancing it from unrelated sensor contexts. Finally, we train the model using the target activity descriptions. We tested our method against eight baselines on five benchmark HAR datasets with various sensors, placements, and activities. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 262% in the zero-shot setting.

ZeroHAR: Sensor Context Augments Zero-Shot Wearable Action Recognition

Traditional multi-agent path finding (MAPF) methods try to compute entire start-goal paths which are collision free. However, computing an entire path can take too long for MAPF systems where agents need to replan fast. Methods that address this typically employ a ``windowed" approach and only try to find collision free paths for a small windowed timestep horizon. This adaptation comes at the cost of incompleteness; all current windowed approaches can become stuck in deadlock or livelock. Our main contribution is to introduce our framework, WinC-MAPF, for Windowed MAPF that enables completeness. Our framework uses heuristic update insights from single-agent real-time heuristic search algorithms as well as agent independence ideas from MAPF algorithms. We also develop Single-Step CBS (SS-CBS), an instantiation of this framework using a novel modification to CBS.
We show how SS-CBS, which only plans a single step and updates heuristics, can effectively solve tough scenarios where existing windowed approaches fail.

Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees

Adversarial patches pose a significant threat to computer vision models' integrity, decreasing the accuracy of various tasks, including object detection (OD).
Most existing OD defenses exhibit a trade-off between enhancing the model's adversarial robustness and maintaining its performance on benign images. 
We propose KDAT (knowledge distillation with adversarial tuning), a novel mechanism that enhances the robustness of an OD model without compromising its performance on benign images or its inference time.
Our method combines the knowledge distillation (KD) technique with the adversarial tuning concept to teach the model to match the predictions of adversarial images with those of their corresponding benign ones.
To match these predictions, we designed four unique loss components, allowing the student model to effectively distill the knowledge of different features from various parts of the teacher model.
Our extensive evaluation on the COCO and INRIA datasets demonstrates KDAT's ability to improve the performance of Faster R-CNN and DETR on benign images by 2-4 mAP% and adversarial examples by 10-15 mAP%, outperforming other state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses.
Furthermore, our additional physical evaluation on the Superstore dataset demonstrates KDAT's SOTA adversarial robustness against printed patches (improvement of 22 mAP% compared to the undefended model).

KDAT: Inherent Adversarial Robustness via Knowledge Distillation with Adversarial Tuning for Object Detection Models

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architecture have shown outstanding performance across numerous real-world tasks. However, the autoregressive nature of these models makes the inference process slow and costly. 
Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising solution, leveraging a smaller auxiliary model to draft future tokens, which are then validated simultaneously by the larger model, achieving a speed-up of $1$-$2\times$. Although speculative decoding matches the same distribution as multinomial sampling, multinomial sampling itself is prone to suboptimal outputs, where as beam sampling is widely recognized for producing higher-quality results by maintaining multiple candidate sequences at each step.
This paper explores the novel integration of speculative decoding with beam sampling. However, there are four key challenges: (1) how to generate multiple sequences from the larger model's distribution given drafts sequences from the small model; (2) how to dynamically optimize the number of beams to balance efficiency and accuracy; (3) how to efficiently verify the multiple drafts in parallel; and (4) how to address the extra memory costs inherent in beam sampling.
To address these challenges, we propose dynamic-width speculative beam decoding (\method{}). Specifically, we first introduce a novel draft and verification scheme that generates multiple sequences following the large model's distribution based on beam sampling trajectories from the small model. Then, we introduce an adaptive mechanism to dynamically tune the number of beams based on the context, optimizing efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, we extend tree-based parallel verification to handle multiple trees simultaneously, accelerating the verification process. Finally, we illustrate a simple modification to our algorithm to mitigate the memory overhead of beam sampling.
Experimental results show that our approach achieves a $1.5$-$1.9\times$ speed-up and $1.8$-$2.5\times$ lower energy consumption compared to beam sampling, with no loss in downstream performance. Moreover, it can produce significantly higher-quality outputs than speculative decoding, while maintaining similar time, memory, and energy costs. In summary, our method offers a more efficient and effective inference process for LLMs.

Dynamic-Width Speculative Beam Decoding for LLM Inference

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), possessing millions or billions of parameters, typically require large text and image datasets for effective fine-tuning. However, collecting data from various sites, especially in healthcare, is challenging due to strict privacy regulations. An alternative is to fine-tune these foundation models on end-user devices, such as in medical clinics and hospitals, without sending data to a server. These local clients typically have limited computing power and small datasets, which are not enough for fully fine-tuning large VLMs on their own. A naive solution to these scenarios is to leverage parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies such as adapters and apply federated learning (FL) algorithms to combine the learned adapter weights, thereby respecting the resource limitations and data privacy of the clients. However, this approach does not fully leverage the knowledge from multiple adapters trained on diverse data distributions and for diverse tasks. The adapters are adversely impacted by data heterogeneity and task heterogeneity across clients resulting in sub-optimal convergence. To this end, we propose a novel framework called FedPIA that improves upon the naive combinations of FL and PEFT by introducing Permutation and Integration of the local Adapters in the server and global Adapters in the clients exploiting Wasserstein barycenters for improved blending of client-specific and client-agnostic knowledge. This layerwise permutation helps to bridge the gap in the parameter space of local and global adapters before integration. We conduct over 2000 client-level experiments utilizing 48 medical image datasets across five different medical vision-language FL task settings encompassing visual question answering as well as image and report-based multi-label disease detection. Our experiments involving diverse client settings, ten different modalities, and two VLM backbones demonstrate that FedPIA consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art PEFT-FL baselines.

FedPIA – Permuting and Integrating Adapters Leveraging Wasserstein Barycenters for Finetuning Foundation Models in Multi-Modal Federated Learning

Recent advancements in self-supervised denoising have made it possible to train models without needing a large amount of noisy-clean image pairs. A significant development in this area is the use of blind-spot networks (BSNs) which use a single noisy image as a training pair, masking some input information to prevent noise transmission to the network output. Researchers have shown that BSNs are capable of reconstructing clean pixels from various types of independent pixel-wise degradations, such as synthetic additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). However, unlike synthetic noise, real noise often contains highly correlated components that can induce noise transmission and reduce the performance of BSNs. To address the spatial correlation of real noise, we propose the Adjacent Pixel Replacer (APR), which decorrelates noise without a downsampling process that is widely adopted in previous research. The dissimilarity between our APR-generated pair operates as relatively different noise components during training. Hence, it enables the BSN to block noise transmission while utilizing clean information effectively. As a result, BSN can refer to more dense information to reconstruct the corresponding center pixel. We also propose Recharged Distillation (RD) to enhance high-frequency textures without additional network modifications. This method refines clean information selectively from recharged noisy pixels during distillation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art self-supervised denoising methods in real sRGB space.

APR-RD: Complemental Two Steps for Self-Supervised Real Image Denoising

The scalability of instructable agents in robotics or gaming is often hindered by limited data that pairs instructions with agent trajectories. However, large datasets of unannotated trajectories containing sequences of various agent behaviour (play trajectories) are often available. In a semi-supervised setup, we explore methods to extract labelled segments from play trajectories. The goal is to augment a small annotated dataset of instruction-trajectory pairs to improve the performance of an instruction-following policy trained downstream via imitation learning. Utilising recent video segmentation models, we extract labelled segments assuming little variation in segment length. To address the constraint of segment length, we propose Play Segmentation (PS), a probabilistic model that finds maximum likely segmentations of extended subsegments, while only being trained on single instruction segments. Our results in a game environment and simulated robotic gripper setting underscore the importance of segmentation; randomly sampled segments diminish performance, while incorporating relabelled groundtruth segments improves policy performance. Adding labelled segments from PS improves policy performance to the level of a policy trained on twice the amount of labelled data.

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