Canada

Recently, probabilistic predictive coding that directly models the conditional distribution of latent features across successive frames for temporal redundancy removal has yielded promising results.  Existing methods using a single-scale Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) must devise complex networks for conditional probability estimation in latent space, neglecting multiscale characteristics of video frames. Instead, this work proposes hierarchical probabilistic predictive coding, for which hierarchal VAEs are carefully designed to characterize multiscale latent features as a family of flexible priors and posteriors to predict the probabilities of future frames. Under such a hierarchical structure, lightweight networks are sufficient for prediction. The proposed method outperforms representative learned video compression models on common testing videos and demonstrates computational friendliness with much less memory footprint and faster encoding/decoding. Extensive experiments on adaptation to temporal patterns also indicate the better generalization of our hierarchical predictive mechanism. Furthermore, our solution is the first to enable progressive decoding that is favored in networked video applications with packet loss.

AAAI 2024

Deep Hierarchical Video Compression

mining of spatial

temporal or spatio-temporal data

computer vision

data compression

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.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/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. 

technical paper

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model that has revolutionised image segmentation. To apply SAM to surgical instrument segmentation, a common approach is to locate precise points or boxes of instruments and then use them as prompts for SAM in a zero-shot manner. However, we observe two problems with this naive pipeline: (1) the domain gap between natural objects and surgical instruments leads to inferior generalisation of SAM; and (2) SAM relies on precise point or box locations for accurate segmentation, requiring either extensive manual guidance or a well-performing specialist detector for prompt preparation, which leads to a complex multi-stage pipeline. To address these problems, we introduce SurgicalSAM, a novel end-to-end efficient-tuning approach for SAM to effectively integrate surgical-specific information with SAM’s pre-trained knowledge for improved generalisation. Specifically, we propose a lightweight prototype-based class prompt encoder for tuning, which directly generates prompt embeddings from class prototypes and eliminates the use of explicit prompts for improved robustness and a simpler pipeline. In addition, to address the low inter-class variance among surgical instrument categories, we propose contrastive prototype learning, further enhancing the discrimination of the class prototypes for more accurate class prompting. The results of extensive experiments on both EndoVis2018 and EndoVis2017 datasets demonstrate that SurgicalSAM achieves state-of-the-art performance while only requiring a small number of tunable parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/wenxi-yue/SurgicalSAM.

SurgicalSAM: Efficient Class Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation

With the rise of real-time rendering and the evolution of display devices, there is a growing demand for post-processing methods that offer high-resolution content in a high frame rate. Existing techniques often suffer from quality and latency issues due to the disjointed treatment of frame supersampling and extrapolation. In this paper, we  recognize the shared context and mechanisms between frame supersampling and extrapolation, and present a novel framework, Space-time Supersampling (STSS). By integrating them into a unified framework, STSS can improve the overall quality with lower latency. To implement an efficient architecture, we treat the aliasing and warping holes unified as reshading regions and put forth two key components to compensate the regions, namely Random Reshading Masking (RRM) and Efficient Reshading Module (ERM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior visual fidelity compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Notably, the performance is achieved within only 4ms, saving up to 75\% of time against the conventional two-stage pipeline that necessitates 17ms.

Low-Latency Space-Time Supersampling for Real-Time Rendering

Learning scene semantics that can be well generalized to foggy conditions is important for safety-crucial applications such as autonomous driving. 
Existing methods need both annotated clear images and foggy images to train a curriculum domain adaptation model.
Unfortunately, these methods can only generalize to the target foggy domain that has seen in the training stage, but the foggy domains vary a lot in both urban-scene styles and fog styles.
In this paper, we propose to learn scene segmentation well generalized to foggy-scenes under the domain generalization setting, which does not involve any foggy images in the training stage and can generalize to any arbitrary unseen foggy scenes. 
We argue that an ideal segmentation model that can be well generalized to foggy-scenes need to simultaneously enhance the content, de-correlate the urban-scene style and de-correlate the fog style. 
As the content (e.g., scene semantic) rests more in low-frequency features while the style of urban-scene and fog rests more in high-frequency features, we propose a novel bi-directional wavelet guidance (BWG) mechanism to realize the above three objectives in a divide-and-conquer manner. 
With the aid of Haar wavelet transformation,
the low frequency component is concentrated on the content enhancement self-attention, while the high frequency component is shifted to the style and fog self-attention for de-correlation purpose.
It is integrated into existing mask-level Transformer segmentation pipelines in a learnable fashion.
Large-scale experiments are conducted on four foggy-scene segmentation datasets under a variety of interesting settings.
The proposed method significantly outperforms existing directly-supervised, curriculum domain adaptation and domain generalization segmentation methods. 
Source code is available at https://github.com/BiQiWHU/BWG.

Learning Generalized Segmentation for Foggy-Scenes by Bi-directional Wavelet Guidance

Early smoke segmentation (ESS) enables the accurate identification of smoke sources, facilitating the prompt extinguishing of fires and preventing large-scale gas leaks. But ESS poses greater challenges than conventional object and regular smoke segmentation due to its small scale and transparent appearance, which can result in high miss detection rate and low precision. To address these issues, a Focus and Separation Network (FoSp) is proposed. We first introduce a Focus module employing bidirectional cascade which guides low-resolution and high-resolution features towards mid-resolution to locate and determine the scope of smoke, reducing the miss detection rate. Next, we propose a Separation module that separates smoke images into a pure smoke foreground and a smoke-free background, enhancing the contrast between smoke and background fundamentally, improving segmentation precision. Finally, a Domain Fusion module is developed to integrate the distinctive features of the two modules which can balance recall and precision to achieve high F_beta. Futhermore, to promote the development of ESS, we introduce a high-quality real-world dataset called SmokeSeg, which contains more small and transparent smoke than the existing datasets. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance on three available smoke segmentation datasets: SYN70K (mIoU: 83.00%), SMOKE5K (F_beta: 81.6%) and SmokeSeg (F_beta: 72.05%). The code can be found at https://github.com/LujianYao/FoSp.

FoSp: Focus and Separation Network for Early Smoke Segmentation

Human motion generation aims to produce plausible human motion sequences according to various conditional inputs, such as text or audio. Despite the feasibility of existing methods in generating motion based on short prompts and simple motion patterns, they encounter difficulties when dealing with long prompts or complex motions.
The challenges are two-fold: 1) the scarcity of human motion-captured data for long prompts and complex motions. 2) the high diversity of human motions in the temporal domain and the substantial divergence of distributions from conditional modalities, leading to a many-to-many mapping problem when generating motion with complex and long texts. 
In this work, we address these gaps by 1) elaborating the first dataset pairing long textual descriptions and 3D complex motions (HumanLong3D), and 2) proposing an autoregressive motion diffusion model (AMD). Specifically, AMD integrates the text prompt at the current timestep with the text prompt and action sequences at the previous timestep as conditional information to predict the current action sequences in an iterative manner.
Furthermore, we present its generalization for X-to-Motion with “No Modality Left Behind”, enabling for the first time the generation of high-definition and high-fidelity human motions based on user-defined modality input.

AMD: Autoregressive Motion Diffusion | VIDEO

We introduce a new amortized likelihood ratio estimator for likelihood-free simulation-based inference (SBI). Our estimator is simple to train and estimates the likelihood ratio using a single forward pass of the neural estimator. Our approach directly computes the likelihood ratio between two competing parameter sets which is different from the previous approach of comparing two neural network output values. We refer to our model as the direct neural ratio estimator (DNRE). As part of introducing the DNRE, we derive a corresponding Monte Carlo estimate of the posterior. We benchmark our new ratio estimator and compare to previous ratio estimators in the literature. We show that our new ratio estimator often outperforms these previous approaches. As a further contribution, we introduce a new derivative estimator for likelihood ratio estimators that enables us to compare likelihood-free Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with random-walk Metropolis-Hastings (MH). We show that HMC is equally competitive, which has not been previously shown. Finally, we include a novel real-world application of SBI by using our neural ratio estimator to design a quadcopter. Code is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/dnre.

Direct Amortized Likelihood Ratio Estimation

Real-world text can be damaged by corrosion issues caused by environmental or human factors, which hinder the preservation of the complete styles of texts, e.g., texture and structure. These corrosion issues, such as graffiti signs and incomplete signatures, bring difficulties in understanding the texts, thereby posing significant challenges to downstream applications, e.g., scene text recognition and signature identification. Notably, current inpainting techniques often fail to adequately address this problem and have difficulties restoring accurate text images along with reasonable and consistent styles. Formulating this as an open problem of text image inpainting, this paper aims to build a benchmark to facilitate its study. In doing so, we establish two specific text inpainting datasets which contain scene text images and handwritten text images, respectively. Each of them includes images revamped by real-life and synthetic datasets, featuring pairs of original images, corrupted images, and other assistant information. On top of the datasets, we further develop a novel neural framework, Global Structure-guided Diffusion Model (GSDM), as a potential solution. Leveraging the global structure of the text as a prior, the proposed GSDM develops an efficient diffusion model to recover clean texts. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated by thorough empirical study, including a substantial boost in both recognition accuracy and image quality. These findings not only highlight the effectiveness of our method but also underscore its potential to enhance the broader field of text image understanding and processing. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/blackprotoss/GSDM.

Text Image Inpainting via Global Structure-Guided Diffusion Models

As the size of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow, model compression without sacrificing accuracy has become a crucial challenge for deployment. In this paper, we propose a new post-quantization method called norm tweaking that achieves high precision at a very low bit range while being cost-efficient, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods like GTPQ.  We draw the insight from the fact that simply rectifying the quantized activation distribution to match its float counterpart readily restores accuracy for LLMs. To do so, we carefully generate calibration data for better generalization and tweak the weights of normalization layers with channel-wise distance loss. Extensive experiments are conducted on various LLMs to show that our method outperforms GPTQ in 4-bit and even 2-bit quantization, where our 2-bit models even reach the same level of accuracy as float one on some models like GLM-130B and OPT-66B. Our simple and effective approach makes it more practical for real-world applications.

Norm Tweaking: High-Performance Low-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models

The explosive growth of video traffic on today's Internet promotes the rise of Neural-enhanced Video Streaming (NeVS), which effectively improves the rate-distortion trade-off by employing a cheap neural super-resolution model for quality enhancement on the receiver side. Missing by existing work, we reveal that the NeVS pipeline may suffer from a practical threat, where the crucial codec component (i.e., encoder for compression and decoder for restoration) can trigger adversarial attacks in a man-in-the-middle manner to significantly destroy video recovery performance and finally incurs the malfunction of downstream video perception tasks. In this paper, we are the first attempt to inspect the vulnerability of NeVS and discover a novel adversarial attack, called codec hijacking, where the injected invisible perturbation conspires with the malicious encoding matrix by reorganizing the spatial-temporal bit allocation within the bitstream size budget. Such a zero-day vulnerability makes our attack hard to defend because there is no visual distortion on the recovered videos until the attack happens. More seriously, this attack can be extended to diverse enhancement models, thus exposing a wide range of video perception tasks under threat. Evaluation based on state-of-the-art video codec benchmark illustrates that our attack significantly degrades the recovery performance of NeVS over previous attack methods. The damaged video quality finally leads to obvious malfunction of downstream tasks with over 75% success rate. We hope to arouse public attention on codec hijacking and its defence.

On the Robustness of Neural-Enhanced Video Streaming against Adversarial Attacks

Federated learning is a distributed collaborative machine learning paradigm that has gained strong momentum in recent years. In federated learning, a central server periodically coordinates models with clients and aggregates the models trained locally by clients without necessitating access to local data. Despite its potential, the implementation of federated learning continues to encounter several challenges, predominantly the slow convergence that is largely due to data heterogeneity. The slow convergence becomes particularly problematic in cross-device federated learning scenarios where clients may be strongly limited by computing power and storage space, and hence counteracting methods that induce additional computation or memory cost on the client side such as auxiliary objective terms and larger training iterations can be impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel federated aggregation strategy, TurboSVM-FL, that poses no additional computation burden on the client side and can significantly accelerate convergence for federated classification task, especially when clients are "lazy" and train their models solely for few epochs for next global aggregation. TurboSVM-FL extensively utilizes support vector machine to conduct selective aggregation and max-margin spread-out regularization on class embeddings. We evaluate TurboSVM-FL on multiple datasets including FEMNIST, CelebA, and Shakespeare using user-independent validation with non-iid data distribution. Our results show that TurboSVM-FL can significantly outperform existing popular algorithms on convergence rate and reduce communication rounds while delivering better test metrics including accuracy, F1 score, and MCC. Our implementation TurboSVM-FL and instructions for reproducing experiments can be found in our GitHub repository.

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