United States

Video surveillance systems are crucial components for ensuring public safety and management in smart city.
As a fundamental task in video surveillance, text-to-image person retrieval aims to retrieve the target person from an image gallery that best matches the given text description. 
Most existing text-to-image person retrieval methods are trained in a supervised manner that requires sufficient labeled data in the target domain. 
However, it is common in practice that only unlabeled data is available in the target domain due to the difficulty and cost of data annotation, which limits the generalization of existing methods in practical application scenarios.
To address this issue, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method, termed Graph-Based Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation (GCKD), to learn the cross-modal feature representation for text-to-image person retrieval in a cross-dataset scenario.
The proposed GCKD method consists of two main components.
Firstly, a graph-based multi-modal propagation module is designed to bridge the cross-domain correlation among the visual and textual samples.
Secondly, a contrastive momentum knowledge distillation module is proposed to learn the cross-modal feature representation using the online knowledge distillation strategy.
By jointly optimizing the two modules, the proposed method is able to achieve efficient performance for cross-dataset text-to-image person retrieval. 
Extensive experiments on three publicly available text-to-image person retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GCKD method, which consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

AAAI 2025

Graph-Based Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Dataset Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

sensor networks

internet of things

smart cities

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

technical paper

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.



Recently, Gaussian Splatting has sparked a new trend in the field of computer vision. Apart from novel view synthesis, it has also been extended to the area of multi-view reconstruction. The latest methods facilitate complete, detailed surface reconstruction while ensuring fast training speed. However, these methods still require dense input views, and their output quality significantly degrades with sparse views. We observed that the Gaussian primitives tend to overfit the few training views, leading to noisy floaters and incomplete reconstruction surfaces. In this paper, we present an innovative sparse-view reconstruction framework that leverages intra-view depth and multi-view feature consistency to achieve remarkably accurate surface reconstruction. Specifically, we utilize monocular depth ranking information to supervise the consistency of depth distribution within patches and employ a smoothness loss to enhance the continuity of the distribution. To achieve finer surface reconstruction, we optimize the absolute position of depth through multi-view projection features. Extensive experiments on DTU and BlendedMVS demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a speedup of 60x to 200x, achieving swift and fine-grained mesh reconstruction without the need for costly pre-training.

FatesGS: Fast and Accurate Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction Using Gaussian Splatting with Depth-Feature Consistency

Understanding causal relations in dynamic systems is essential in epidemiology. While causal inference methods have been extensively studied, they often rely on fully specified causal graphs, which may not always be available in complex dynamic systems. Partially specified causal graphs, such as summary causal graphs (SCGs), provide a simplified representation of causal relations, omitting temporal information and focusing on high-level causal structures. This simplification introduces new challenges concerning the types
of queries of interest: macro queries, which involve relationships between clusters represented as vertices in the graph, and micro queries, which pertain to relationships between variables that are not directly visible through the vertices of the graph. In this paper, we first clearly distinguish between macro conditional independencies and micro conditional independencies and between macro total effects and micro total
effects. Then, we demonstrate the soundness and completeness of the d-separation to identify macro conditional independencies in SCGs. Furthermore, we establish that the do-calculus is sound and complete for identifying macro total effects in SCGs. Finally, we give a graphical characterization for the non-identifiability of macro total effects in SCGs.

Identifying Macro Conditional Independencies and Macro Total Effects in Summary Causal Graphs with Latent Confounding

Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) significantly enhances the zero-shot capabilities of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). While coding data is known to boost LLM reasoning abilities during pretraining, its role in activating internal reasoning capacities during IFT remains understudied. This paper investigates a key question: How does coding data impact LLMs' reasoning capacities during IFT stage? To explore this, we thoroughly examine the impact of coding data across different coding data proportions, model families, sizes, and reasoning domains, from various perspectives. Specifically, we create three IFT datasets with increasing coding data proportions, fine-tune six LLM backbones across different families and scales on these datasets, evaluate the tuned models' performance across twelve tasks in three reasoning domains, and analyze the outcomes from three broad-to-granular perspectives: overall, domain-level, and task-specific.
Our holistic analysis provides valuable insights into each perspective. First, coding data tuning enhances the overall reasoning capabilities of LLMs across different model families and scales. Moreover, while the impact of coding data varies by domain, it shows consistent trends within each domain across different model families and scales. Additionally, coding data generally provides comparable task-specific benefits across model families, with optimal proportions in IFT datasets being task-dependent.

Unveiling the Impact of Coding Data Instruction Fine-Tuning on Large Language Models Reasoning

We introduce a novel method for assessing agent teamwork based on their spatial coordination. Our approach models the influence of spatial proximity on team formation and sustained spatial dominance over adversaries using a Multi-agent Markov Decision Process. We develop an algorithm to derive efficient teamwork strategies by combining Monte Carlo Tree Search and linear programming. When applied to team defence in football (soccer) using real-world data, our approach reduces opponent threat by 21\%, outperforming optimised individual behaviour by 6\%. Additionally, our model enhances the predictive accuracy of future attack locations and provides deeper insights compared to existing teamwork models that do not explicitly consider the spatial dynamics of teamwork.

Optimising Spatial Teamwork under Uncertainty

Index tracking is a popular passive investment strategy aimed at optimizing portfolios, but fully replicating an index can lead to high transaction costs. To address this, partial replication have been proposed. However, the cardinality constraint renders the problem non-convex, non-differentiable, and often NP-hard, leading to the use of heuristic or neural network-based methods, which can be non-interpretable or have NP-hard complexity. To overcome these limitations, We propose a Differentiable Cardinality Constraint ($\textbf{DCC}$) for index tracking and introduce a floating-point precision-aware method ($\textbf{DCC}_{fpp}$) to address implementation issues. We theoretically prove our methods calculate cardinality accurately and enforce actual cardinality with polynomial time complexity, and we identify hyperparameter that ensure accurate results. Our method applied to mathematical method outperforms baseline methods across various datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the identified hyperparameter.

DCC: Differentiable Cardinality Constraints for Partial Index Tracking

Multi-agent systems must learn to communicate and understand interactions between agents to achieve cooperative goals in partially observed tasks. However, existing approaches lack a dynamic directed communication mechanism and rely on global states, thus diminishing the role of communication in centralized training. Thus, we propose the transformer-based graph coarsening network (TGCNet), a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm. TGCNet learns the topological structure of a dynamic directed graph to represent the communication policy and integrates graph coarsening networks to approximate the representation of global state during training. It also utilizes the transformer decoder for feature extraction during execution. Experiments on multiple cooperative MARL benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance compared to popular MARL algorithms. Further ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our dynamic directed graph communication mechanism and graph coarsening networks.

Bridging Training and Execution via Dynamic Directed Graph-Based Communication in Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP), providing versatile capabilities across various applications. However, their application to complex, domain-specific tasks, such as cyber-security, often faces substantial challenges. In this study, we introduce SecKnowledge and CyberPal.AI to address these challenges and train security-expert LLMs.
SecKnowledge is a domain-knowledge-driven cyber-security instruction dataset, meticulously designed using years of accumulated expert knowledge in the domain through a multi-phase generation process. CyberPal.AI refers to a family of LLMs fine-tuned using SecKnowledge, aimed at building security-specialized LLMs capable of answering and following complex security-related instructions. 
Additionally, we introduce SecKnowledge-Eval, a comprehensive and diverse cyber-security evaluation benchmark, composed of an extensive set of cyber-security tasks we specifically developed to assess LLMs in the field of cyber-security, along with other publicly available security benchmarks.
Our results show a significant average improvement of up to 24% over the baseline models, underscoring the benefits of our expert-driven instruction dataset generation process.
These findings contribute to the advancement of AI-based cyber-security applications, paving the way for security-expert LLMs that can enhance threat-hunting and investigation processes.

CyberPal.AI: Empowering LLMs with Expert-Driven Cybersecurity Instructions

Recently, there has been considerable exploration of methods for generating 3D point clouds, which is crucial for numerous 3D vision applications. Though conditional generation methods showing a promising performance, it depends on the additional paired label. On the other hand, unconditional generation methods usually fail to annotate the generated 3D point cloud. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-conditional architecture that trains on unlabeled data and then generates high-quality labeled 3D point clouds. Specifically, we design a module to extract geometry and view features, and then use a feature fusion module to integrate them as a substitute for label embedding in conditional point cloud generation. Then the point cloud generator is trained using the fused features. LPCG also harnesses CLIP to handle the view features of point clouds for generating label information. Besides, we train two feature diffusion modules to capture the essence of multimodal features and obtain diverse fused features for use as conditions in generating point clouds. Experiments on the ShapeNet dataset demonstrate that LPCG achieves state-of-the-art performance for single class generation . Our experimental results show that the accuracy of our generated label annotations reaches around 97.44\% for a two-class generation task.

LPCG: A Self-conditional Architecture for Labeled Point Cloud Generation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to inherit source domain knowledge from the well-learned model and optimize it to adapt target data distribution. SFDA methods are suitable for medical image segmentation task due to its data-privacy protection and achieve promising performances. However, cross-domain distribution shift makes it difficult for the adapted model to provide accurate decisions on several hard instances and negatively affects model generalization. To overcome this limitation, a novel method `supportive negatives spectral augmentation' (SNSA) is presented in this work. Concretely, SNSA includes the instance selection mechanism to automatically discover a few hard samples for which source model produces incorrect predictions. And, active learning strategy is adopted to re-calibrate their predictive masks. Moreover, SNSA deploys the spectral augmentation between hard instances and others to encourage source model to gradually capture and adapt the attributions of target distribution. Considerable experimental studies demonstrate that annotating merely 4%~5% of negative instances from the target domain significantly improves segmentation performance over previous methods. The code of our SNSA is available in the supplementary materials.

Supportive Negatives Spectral Augmentation for Source-Free Cross-Domain Segmentation

Edge computing-based video analytics faces data drift issues due to the occurrence of unseen objects or scenes in ever-changing environments. To maintain accuracy, continuous learning (CL) retrains stale models periodically with newly obtained data. However, it leads to unaffordable costs, as we must keep labeling drift data and retraining models. Regarding this concern, we first investigate video patterns across multiple cameras within an area and reveal significant data redundancies. We find that many of the same objects can be captured by multiple edge cameras or appear many times on the same edges. Our quantitative findings suggest that selecting a subset of high-quality data for CL is preferable over using a larger quantity. Yet, existing efforts for data acquisition have only focused on a single static dataset. These methods are not suitable for multi-edge video analytics scenarios, where videos are captured from multiple sources with non-iid data distribution. Hence, we propose a multi-edge collaborative active video acquisition (AVA) framework to collaboratively learn a reinforced video acquisition strategy to identify informative video frames from multiple edge nodes that best enhance model accuracy, avoiding redundancy across edges. Extensive experiments on three video datasets demonstrate that, our method achieves comparable performance to full-set video training while utilizing only 20\% of the data in classification tasks. In object detection tasks, our methods can maintain productive accuracy with a reduction of nearly 70\% in training video frames. All implementation codes will be publicly available after peer reviews.

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Next from AAAI 2025

FatesGS: Fast and Accurate Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction Using Gaussian Splatting with Depth-Feature Consistency

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