Canada

Although recent methods in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have achieved success in segmenting rainy or snowy scenes by improving consistency, they face limitations when dealing with more challenging scenarios like foggy and night scenes. We argue that these prior methods excessively focus on weather-specific features in adverse scenes, which exacerbates the existing domain gaps.
To address this issue, we propose a new metric to evaluate the severity of all adverse scenes and offer a novel perspective that enables task unification across all adverse scenarios. Our method focuses on Severity, allowing our model to learn more consistent features and facilitate domain distribution alignment, thereby alleviating domain gaps. Unlike the vague descriptions of consistency in previous methods, we introduce Cross-domain Consistency, which is quantified using the Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) to measure the distance between the source and target domains. Specifically, our unified model consists of two key modules: the Merging Style Augmentation Module (MSA) and the Severity Perception Mask Module (SPM). The MSA module transforms all adverse scenes into augmented scenes, effectively eliminating weather-specific features and enhancing Cross-domain Consistency. The SPM module incorporates a Severity Perception mechanism, guiding a Mask operation that enables our model to learn highly consistent features from the augmented scenes. Our unified framework, named PASS (Parsing All adverSe Scenes), achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on widely-used benchmarks for all adverse scenes. Notably, the performance of PASS is superior to Semi-Unified models and even surpasses weather-specific models.

AAAI 2024

Parsing All Adverse Scenes: Severity-Aware Semantic Segmentation with Mask-Enhanced Cross-Domain Consistency

unsupervised & self-supervised learning

segmentation

domain adaptation

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

Exposure correction aims to enhance images suffering from improper exposure to achieve satisfactory visual effects. Despite recent progress, existing methods generally mitigate either overexposure or underexposure in input images, and they still struggle to handle images with mixed exposure, \emph{i.e.}, one image incorporates both overexposed and underexposed regions. The mixed exposure distribution is non-uniform and leads to varying representation, which makes it challenging to address in a unified process. In this paper, we introduce an effective Region-aware Exposure Correction Network (RECNet) that can handle mixed exposure by adaptively learning and bridging different regional exposure representations. Specifically, to address the challenge posed by mixed exposure disparities, we develop a region-aware de-exposure module that effectively translates regional features of mixed exposure scenarios into an exposure-invariant feature space. Simultaneously, as de-exposure operation inevitably reduces discriminative information, we introduce a mixed-scale restoration unit that integrates exposure-invariant features and unprocessed features to recover local information. To further achieve a uniform exposure distribution in the global image, we propose an exposure contrastive regularization strategy under the constraints of intra-regional exposure consistency and inter-regional exposure continuity. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority and generalization of our proposed method.

Region-Aware Exposure Consistency Network for Mixed Exposure Correction

We propose a novel Dynamic Context-Guided Upsampling (DCGU) module for video super-resolution (VSR) that leverages temporal context guidance to achieve efficient and effective arbitrary-scale VSR. While most VSR research focuses on backbone design,  the importance of the upsampling part is often overlooked. Existing methods rely on pixelshuffle-based upsampling, which has limited capabilities in handling arbitrary upsampling scales. Recent attempts to replace pixelshuffle-based modules with implicit neural function-based and filter-based approaches suffer from slow inference speeds and limited representation capacity, respectively. To overcome these limitations, our DCGU module predicts non-local sampling locations and content-dependent filter weights, enabling efficient and effective arbitrary-scale VSR.  Our proposed multi-granularity location search (MGLS) module efficiently identifies non-local sampling locations across the entire low-resolution (LR) grid, while the temporal bilateral filter modulation (TBFM) module integrates content information with the filter weight to enhance textual details.  Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of performance and speed on arbitrary-scale VSR.

Arbitrary-Scale Video Super-resolution Guided by Dynamic Context

Graph neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved great success in designing architectures for graph data processing.However, distribution shifts pose great challenges for graph NAS, since the optimal searched architectures for the training graph data may fail to generalize to the unseen test graph data. The sole prior work tackles this problem by customizing architectures for each graph instance through learning graph structural information, but failed to consider data augmentation during training, which has been proven by existing works to be able to improve generalization.In this paper, we propose Data-augmented Curriculum Graph Neural Architecture Search (DCGAS), which learns an architecture customizer with good generalizability to data under distribution shifts. Specifically, we design an embedding-guided data generator, which can generate sufficient graphs for training to help the model better capture graph structural information. In addition, we design a two-factor uncertainty-based curriculum weighting strategy, which can evaluate the importance of data in enabling the model to learn key information in real-world distribution and reweight them during training. Experimental results on synthetic datasets and real datasets with distribution shifts demonstrate that our proposed method learns generalizable mappings and outperforms existing methods.

Data-Augmented Curriculum Graph Neural Architecture Search under Distribution Shifts | VIDEO

While vision-language pre-trained models (VL-PTMs) have advanced multimodal research in recent years, their mastery in a few languages like English restricts their applicability in broader communities. To this end, there is an increasing interest in developing multilingual VL models via a joint-learning setup, which, however, could be unrealistic due to expensive costs and data availability. In this work, we propose to extend VL-PTMs' language capacity by continual language learning (CLL), where a model needs to update its linguistic knowledge incrementally without suffering from catastrophic forgetting (CF). We begin our study by introducing a model dubbed CLL-CLIP, which builds upon CLIP, a prevailing VL-PTM that has acquired image-English text alignment. Specifically, CLL-CLIP contains an expandable token embedding layer to handle linguistic differences. It solely trains token embeddings to improve memory stability and is optimized under cross-modal and cross-lingual objectives to learn the alignment between images and multilingual texts. To alleviate CF raised by covariate shift and lexical overlap, we further propose a novel approach that ensures the identical distribution of all token embeddings during initialization and regularizes token embedding learning during training. We construct a CLL benchmark covering 36 languages based on MSCOCO and XM3600 datasets and then evaluate multilingual image-text retrieval performance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CLL-CLIP and show that our approach can boost CLL-CLIP, e.g., by 6.7% in text-to-image average Recall@1 on XM3600, and improve various state-of-the-art methods consistently. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yangbang18/CLFM.

Embracing Language Inclusivity and Diversity in CLIP through Continual Language Learning

Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) has emerged as a prominent solution to address the limitations of digital imaging in representing varied exposure levels. Despite its advancements, the field grapples with challenges, notably the reliance on manual designs for network structures and loss functions, and the constraints of utilizing simulated reference images as ground truths. Consequently, current methodologies often suffer from color distortions and exposure artifacts, further complicating the quest for authentic image representation. In addressing these challenges, this paper presents a Hybrid-Supervised Dual-Search approach for MEF, dubbed HSDS-MEF, which introduces a bi-level optimization search scheme for automatic design of both network structures and loss functions. More specifically, we harness a unique dual research mechanism rooted in a novel weighted structure refinement architecture search. Besides, a hybrid supervised contrast constraint seamlessly guides and integrates with searching process, facilitating a more adaptive and comprehensive search for optimal loss functions. We realize the state-of-the-art performance in comparison to various competitive schemes, yielding a 10.61% and 4.38% improvement in Visual Information Fidelity (VIF)
for general and no-reference scenarios, respectively, while providing results with high contrast, rich details and colors.

Hybrid-Supervised Dual-Search: Leveraging Automatic Learning for Loss-Free Multi-Exposure Image Fusion

In the domain of scene graph generation, modeling commonsense as a single-prototype representation has been typically employed to facilitate the recognition of infrequent predicates. However, a fundamental challenge lies in the large intra-class variations of the visual appearance of predicates, resulting in subclasses within a predicate class. Such a challenge typically leads to the problem of misclassifying diverse predicates due to the rough predicate space clustering. In this paper, inspired by cognitive science, we maintain multi-prototype representations for each predicate class, which can accurately find the multiple class centers of the predicate space. Technically, we propose a novel multi-prototype learning framework consisting of three main steps: prototype-predicate matching, prototype updating, and prototype space optimization. We first design a triple-level optimal transport to match each predicate feature within the same class to a specific prototype. In addition, the prototypes are updated using momentum updating to find the class centers according to the matching results. Finally, we enhance the inter-class separability of the prototype space through iterations of the inter-class separability loss and intra-class compactness loss. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Visual Genome dataset.

Multi-Prototype Space Learning for Commonsense-Based Scene Graph Generation

Large-scale pre-training has proven to be an effective method for improving performance across different tasks. Current person search methods use ImageNet pre-trained models for feature extraction, yet it is not an optimal solution due to the gap between the pre-training task and person search task (as a downstream task). Therefore, in this paper, we focus on pre-training for person search, which involves detecting and re-identifying individuals simultaneously. Although labeled data for person search is scarce, datasets for two sub-tasks person detection and re-identification are relatively abundant. To this end, we propose a hybrid pre-training framework specifically designed for person search using sub-task data only. It consists of a hybrid learning paradigm that handles data with different kinds of supervisions, and an intra-task alignment module that alleviates domain discrepancy under limited resources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that investigates how to support full-task pre-training using sub-task data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-trained model can achieve significant improvements across diverse protocols, such as person search method, fine-tuning data, pre-training data and model backbone. For example, our model improves ResNet50 based NAE by 10.3% relative improvement w.r.t. mAP. Our code and pre-trained models are released for plug-and-play usage to the person search community (https://github.com/personsearch/PretrainPS).

Divide and Conquer: Hybrid Pre-training for Person Search | VIDEO

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly employed in collaborative friend recommendation systems. Nevertheless, recent studies reveal a notable performance gap, particularly for users with limited connections, commonly known as \textit{tail users}, in contrast to their counterparts with abundant connections (\textit{head users}). Uniformly treating head and tail users poses two challenges for tail user preference learning: \textit{(C1) Label Sparsity}, as tail users typically possess limited labels; and \textit{(C2) Neighborhood Sparsity}, where tail users exhibit sparse observable friendships, leading to distinct preference distributions and performance degradation compared to head users. In response to these challenges, we introduce Tail-STEAK, an innovative framework that combines self-training with enhanced knowledge distillation for tail user representation learning. To address \textit{(C1)}, we present Tail-STEAK$_{base}$, a two-stage self-training framework. In the first stage, only head users and their accurate connections are utilized for training, while pseudo links are generated for tail users in the second stage. To tackle \textit{(C2)}, we propose two data augmentation-based self-knowledge distillation pretext tasks. These tasks are seamlessly integrated into different stages of Tail-STEAK$_{base}$, culminating in the comprehensive Tail-STEAK framework. Extensive experiments, conducted on state-of-the-art GNN-based friend recommendation models, substantiate the efficacy of Tail-STEAK in significantly improving tail user performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/antman9914/Tail-STEAK.

Tail-STEAK: Improve Friend Recommendation for Tail Users via Self-Training Enhanced Knowledge Distillation | VIDEO

The artificial neuron (N-N) model-based networks have accomplished extraordinary success for various vision tasks. However, as a simplification of the mammal neuron model, their structure is locked during training, resulting in overfitting and over-parameters. The astrocyte, newly explored by biologists, can adaptively modulate neuronal communication by inserting itself between neurons. The communication, between the astrocyte and neuron, is bidirectionally and shows the potential to alleviate issues raised by unidirectional communication in the N-N model. In this paper, we first elaborate on the artificial Multi-Astrocyte-Neuron (MA-N) model, which enriches the functionality of the artificial neuron model. Our MA-N model is formulated at both astrocyte- and neuron-level that mimics the bidirectional communication with temporal and joint mechanisms. Then, we construct the MA-Net network with the MA-N model, whose neural connections can be continuously and adaptively modulated during training. Experiments show that our MA-Net advances new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks while significantly reducing its parameters by connection optimization.

MA-Net: Rethinking Neural Unit in the Light of Astrocytes | VIDEO

The representative k-median problem generalizes the classical clustering formulations in that it partitions the data points into several disjoint demographic groups and poses a lower-bound constraint on the number of opened facilities from each group, such that all the groups are fairly represented by the opened facilities. Due to its simplicity, the local-search heuristic that optimizes an initial solution by iteratively swapping at most a constant number of closed facilities for the same number of opened ones (denoted by the O(1)-swap heuristic) has been frequently used in the representative k-median problem. Unfortunately, despite its good performance exhibited in experiments, whether the O(1)-swap heuristic has provable approximation guarantees for the case where the number of groups is more than 2 remains an open question for a long time. As an answer to this question, we show that the O(1)-swap heuristic
(1) is guaranteed to yield a constant-factor approximation solution if the number of groups is a constant, and
(2) has an unbounded approximation ratio otherwise.
Our main technical contribution is a new approach for theoretically analyzing local-search heuristics, which derives the approximation ratio of the O(1)-swap heuristic via linearly combining the increased clustering costs induced by a set of  hierarchically organized swaps.

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