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It is well-known that the search algorithms A* and Iterative Deepening A* (IDA*) can fail to solve state-space tasks optimally due to time and memory limits. The former typically fails in memory-restricted scenarios and the latter in time-restricted scenarios. Therefore, several algorithms were proposed to solve state-space tasks optimally using less memory than A* and less time than IDA*, such as A*+IDA*, a hybrid memory-restricted algorithm that combines A* and IDA*. In this paper, we present a hybrid memory-restricted algorithm that combines Partial Expansion A* (PEA*) and IDA*. This new algorithm has two phases, the same structure as the A*+IDA* algorithm. The first phase of PEA*+IDA* runs PEA* until it reaches a memory limit, and the second phase runs IDA* without duplicate detection on each node of PEA*&#39;s Open. First, we present a model that shows how PEA*+IDA* can perform better than A*+IDA* although pure PEA* usually makes more expansions than pure A*. Later, we perform an experimental evaluation using three memory limits and show that, compared to A*+IDA* on classical planning domains, PEA*+IDA* has higher coverage and expands fewer nodes. Finally, we experimentally analyze both algorithms and show that having higher F-limits and better priority-queue composition given by PEA* have a considerable impact on the performance of the algorithms.

AAAI 2022

PEA*+IDA*: An Improved Hybrid Memory-Restricted Algorithm

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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-26 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.<br><br>

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

It is well-known that the search algorithms A* and Iterative Deepening A* (IDA*) can fail to solve state-space tasks optimally due to time and memory limits. The former typically fails in memory-restricted scenarios and the latter in time-restricted scenarios. Therefore, several algorithms were proposed to solve state-space tasks optimally using less memory than A* and less time than IDA*, such as A*+IDA*, a hybrid memory-restricted algorithm that combines A* and IDA*. In this paper, we present a hybrid memory-restricted algorithm that combines Partial Expansion A* (PEA*) and IDA*. This new algorithm has two phases, the same structure as the A*+IDA* algorithm. The first phase of PEA*+IDA* runs PEA* until it reaches a memory limit, and the second phase runs IDA* without duplicate detection on each node of PEA*'s Open. First, we present a model that shows how PEA*+IDA* can perform better than A*+IDA* although pure PEA* usually makes more expansions than pure A*. Later, we perform an experimental evaluation using three memory limits and show that, compared to A*+IDA* on classical planning domains, PEA*+IDA* has higher coverage and expands fewer nodes. Finally, we experimentally analyze both algorithms and show that having higher F-limits and better priority-queue composition given by PEA* have a considerable impact on the performance of the algorithms.

technical paper

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. 

The one-shot multi-object tracking, which integrates object detection and ID embedding extraction into a unified network, has achieved groundbreaking results in recent years. However, current one-shot trackers solely rely on single-frame detections to predict candidate bounding boxes, which may be unreliable when facing disastrous visual degradation, e.g., motion blur, occlusions. Once a target bounding box is mistakenly classified as background by the detector, the temporal consistency of its corresponding tracklet will be no longer maintained. In this paper, we set out to restore the bounding boxes misclassified as ``fake background'' by proposing a re-check network. The re-check network innovatively expands the role of ID embedding from data association to motion forecasting by effectively propagating previous tracklets to the current frame with a small overhead. Note that the propagation results are yielded by an independent and efficient embedding search, preventing the model from over-relying on detection results. Eventually, it helps to reload the ``fake background'' and repair the broken tracklets. Building on a strong baseline CSTrack, we construct a new one-shot tracker and achieve favorable gains by 70.7 âž¡ 76.4, 70.6 âž¡ 76.3 MOTA on MOT16 and MOT17, respectively. It also reaches a new state-of-the-art MOTA and IDF1 performance. Code is released at https://github.com/JudasDie/SOTS.

One More Check: Making "Fake Background'' Be Tracked Again

The increasing demand for analyzing the insights in sports has stimulated a line of productive studies from a variety of perspectives, e.g., health state monitoring, outcome prediction. In this paper, we focus on objectively judging what and where to return strokes, which is still unexplored in turn-based sports. By formulating stroke forecasting as a sequence prediction task, existing works can tackle the problem but fail to model information based on the characteristics of badminton. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Position-aware Fusion of Rally Progress and Player Styles framework (ShuttleNet) that incorporates rally progress and information of the players by two modified encoder-decoder extractors. Moreover, we design a fusion network to integrate rally contexts and contexts of the players by conditioning on information dependency and different positions. Extensive experiments on the badminton dataset demonstrate that ShuttleNet significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and also empirically validates the feasibility of each component in ShuttleNet. On top of that, we provide an analysis scenario for the stroke forecasting problem.

ShuttleNet: Position-Aware Fusion of Rally Progress and Player Styles for Stroke Forecasting in Badminton

We propose a novel scene flow estimation approach to capture and infer 3D motions from point clouds. Estimating 3D motions for point clouds is challenging, since a point cloud is unordered and its density is significantly non-uniform. Such unstructured data poses difficulties in matching corresponding points between point clouds, leading to inaccurate flow estimation. We propose a novel architecture named Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network (SCTN) that equips the sparse convolution with the transformer. Specifically, by leveraging the sparse convolution, SCTN transfers irregular point cloud into locally consistent flow features for estimating spatially consistent motions within an object/local object part. We further propose to explicitly learn point relations using a point transformer module, different from exiting methods. We show that the learned relation-based contextual information is rich and helpful for matching corresponding points, benefiting scene flow estimation. In addition, a novel loss function is proposed to adaptively encourage flow consistency according to feature similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves a new state of the art in scene flow estimation. Our approach achieves an error of 0.038 and 0.037 (EPE3D) on FlyingThings3D and KITTI Scene Flow respectively, which significantly outperforms previous methods by large margins.

SCTN: Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network for Scene Flow Estimation

We present a machine learning system that can quantify fine art paintings with a set of visual elements and principles of art. The formal analysis is fundamental for understanding art, but developing such a system is challenging. Paintings have high visual complexities, but it is also difficult to collect enough training data with direct labels. To resolve these practical limitations, we introduce a novel mechanism, called proxy learning, which learns visual concepts in paintings through their general relation to styles. This framework does not require any visual annotation, but only uses style labels and a general relationship between visual concepts and style. In this paper, we propose a novel proxy model and reformulate four pre-existing methods in the context of proxy learning.  Through quantitative and qualitative comparison, we evaluate these methods and compare their effectiveness in quantifying the artistic visual concepts, where the general relationship is estimated by language models; GloVe or BERT. The language modeling is a practical and scalable solution requiring no labeling, but it is inevitably imperfect. We demonstrate how the new proxy model is robust to the imperfection, while the other methods are sensitively affected by it.

Proxy Learning of Visual Concepts of Fine Art Paintings from Styles through Language Models

Generally, humans are more skilled at perceiving differences between high-quality (HQ) and low-quality (LQ) images than directly judging the quality of a single LQ image. This situation also applies to image quality assessment (IQA). Although recent no-reference (NR-IQA) methods have made great progress to predict image quality free from the reference image, they still have the potential to achieve better performance since HQ image information is not fully exploited. In contrast, full-reference (FR-IQA) methods tend to provide more reliable quality evaluation, but its practicability is affected by the requirement for pixel-level aligned reference images. To address this, we firstly propose the content-variant reference method via knowledge distillation (CVRKD-IQA). Specifically, we use non-aligned reference (NAR) images to introduce various prior distributions of high-quality images. The comparisons of distribution differences between HQ and LQ images can help our model better assess the image quality. Further, the knowledge distillation transfers more HQ-LQ distribution difference information from the FR-teacher to the NAR-student and stabilizing CVRKD-IQA performance. Moreover, to fully mine the local-global combined information, while achieving faster inference speed, our model directly processes multiple image patches from the input with the MLP-mixer. Cross-dataset experiments verify that our model can outperform all NAR/NR-IQA SOTAs, even reach comparable performance than FR-IQA methods on some occasions. Since the content-variant and non-aligned reference HQ images are easy to obtain, our model can support more IQA applications with its robustness to content variations. Our code is available: https://github.com/guanghaoyin/CVRKD-IQA.

Content-Variant Reference Image Quality Assessment via Knowledge Distillation

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently received explosive popularity, but the huge computational cost is still a severe issue. Since the computation complexity of ViT is quadratic with respect to the input sequence length, a mainstream paradigm for computation reduction is to reduce the number of tokens. Existing designs include structured spatial compression that uses a progressive shrinking pyramid to reduce the computations of large feature maps, and unstructured token pruning that dynamically drops redundant tokens. However, the limitation of existing token pruning lies in two folds: 1) the incomplete spatial structure caused by pruning is not compatible with structured spatial compression that is commonly used in modern deep-narrow transformers; 2) it usually requires a time-consuming pre-training procedure. To tackle the limitations and expand the applicable scenario of token pruning, we present Evo-ViT, a self-motivated slow-fast token evolution approach for vision transformers. Specifically, we conduct unstructured instance-wise token selection by taking advantage of the simple and effective global class attention that is native to vision transformers. Then, we propose to update the selected informative tokens and uninformative tokens with different computation paths, namely, slow-fast updating. Since slow-fast updating mechanism maintains the spatial structure and information flow, Evo-ViT can accelerate vanilla transformers of both flat and deep-narrow structures from the very beginning of the training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the computational cost of vision transformers while maintaining comparable performance on image classification. For example, our method accelerates DeiT-S by over 60% throughput while only sacrificing 0.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, outperforming current token pruning methods on both accuracy and efficiency.

Evo-ViT: Slow-Fast Token Evolution for Dynamic Vision Transformer

3D hand pose estimation from single depth is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and has wide applications. However, the existing methods still can not achieve satisfactory hand pose estimation results due to view variation and occlusion of human hand. In this paper, we propose a new virtual view selection and fusion module for 3D hand pose estimation from single depth. We propose to automatically select multiple virtual viewpoints for pose estimation and fuse the results of all and find this empirically delivers accurate and robust pose estimation. In order to select most effective virtual views for pose fusion, we evaluate the virtual views based on the confidence of virtual views using a light-weight network via network distillation. Experiments on three main benchmark datasets including NYU, ICVL and Hands2019 demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts on NYU and ICVL, and achieves very competitive performance on Hands2019-Task1, and our proposed virtual view selection and fusion module is both effective for 3D hand pose estimation.

Efficient Virtual View Selection for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Image composition targets at inserting a foreground object into a background image. Most previous image composition methods focus on adjusting the foreground to make it compatible with background while ignoring the shadow effect of foreground on the background. In this work, we focus on generating plausible shadow for the foreground object in the composite image. First, we contribute a real-world shadow generation dataset DESOBA by generating synthetic composite images based on paired real images and deshadowed images.  Then, we propose a novel shadow generation network SGRNet, which consists of a shadow mask prediction stage and a shadow filling stage. In the shadow mask prediction stage, foreground and background information are thoroughly interacted to generate foreground shadow mask. In the shadow filling stage, shadow parameters are predicted to fill the shadow area. Extensive experiments on our DESOBA dataset and real composite images demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/bcmi/Object-Shadow-Generation- Dataset-DESOBA.

Shadow Generation for Composite Image in Real-World Scenes

Gaze estimation methods learn eye gaze from facial features. However, among rich information in the facial image, real gaze-relevant features only correspond to subtle changes in eye region, while other gaze-irrelevant features like illumination, personal appearance and even facial expression may affect the learning in an unexpected way. This is a major reason why existing methods show significant performance degradation in cross-domain/dataset evaluation. In this paper, we tackle the cross-domain problem in gaze estimation. Different from common domain adaption methods, we propose a domain generalization method to improve the cross-domain performance without touching target samples. The domain generalization is realized by gaze feature purification. We eliminate gaze-irrelevant factors such as illumination and identity to improve the cross-domain performance. We design a plug-and-play self-adversarial framework for the gaze feature purification. The framework enhances not only our baseline but also existing gaze estimation methods directly and significantly. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose domain generalization methods in gaze estimation. Our method achieves not only state-of-the-art performance among typical gaze estimation methods but also competitive results among domain adaption methods. The code is released in https://github.com/yihuacheng/PureGaze.

PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

Advanced face swapping methods have achieved appealing results. However, most of these methods have many parameters and computations, which makes it challenging to apply them in real-time applications or deploy them on edge devices like mobile phones. In this work, we propose a lightweight Identity-aware Dynamic Network (IDN) for subject-agnostic face swapping by dynamically adjusting the model parameters according to the identity information. In particular, we design an efficient Identity Injection Module (IIM) by introducing two dynamic neural network techniques, including the weights prediction and weights modulation. Once the IDN is updated, it can be applied to swap faces given any target image or video. The presented IDN contains only 0.50M parameters and needs 0.33G FLOPs per frame, making it capable for real-time video face swapping on mobile phones. In addition, we introduce a knowledge distillation-based method for stable training, and a loss reweighting module is employed to obtain better synthesized results. Finally, our method achieves comparable results with the teacher models and other state-of-the-art methods.

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