United States

The application of solutions to time-varying problems is crucial for predicting changes in human body shape over time. While recurrent neural networks have made significant strides in this area, their reliance on centralized processing leads to challenges such as model silos and data isolation. Consequently, distributed artificial intelligence systems, such as federated learning, have emerged to facilitate dynamic collaboration among different models; however, they still depend on a central server, posing significant risks to system security and efficiency. Furthermore, traditional FL primarily supports homogeneous models and lacks effective solutions for interactions among heterogeneous models. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called the Dynamic Collaboration of Heterogeneous Models (DCHM), which leverages a consortium blockchain network to enhance the credibility of the overall model and facilitate effective coordination among diverse models. Additionally, we introduce a Distributed Hierarchical Aggregation (DHA) algorithm that enables permissioned nodes within each group to aggregate local model results and share these with all permissionless nodes for standardized processing. Following several iterative cycles, permissioned nodes conduct a secondary integration of local results to produce a global outcome. Experimental results demonstrate that DCHM excels in efficiency when analyzing the time-varying nature of body shape changes.

AAAI 2025

DCHM: Dynamic Collaboration of Heterogeneous Models for Analyzing Time-Varying Body Shape Changes Using a Blockchain-Based Framework

face gesture pose

biometrics

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.



Scene-level point cloud registration is very challenging when considering dynamic foregrounds. Existing indoor datasets mostly assume rigid motions, so the trained models cannot robustly handle scenes with non-rigid motions. On the other hand, non-rigid datasets are mainly object-level, so the trained models cannot generalize well to complex scenes. This paper presents HybridReg, a new approach to 3D point cloud registration, learning uncertainty mask to account for hybrid motions: rigid for backgrounds and non-rigid/rigid for instance-level foregrounds. First, we build a scene-level 3D registration dataset, namely HybridMatch, designed specifically with strategies to arrange diverse deforming foregrounds in a controllable manner. Second, we account for different motion types and formulate a mask-learning module to alleviate the interference of deforming outliers. Third, we exploit a simple yet effective negative log-likelihood loss to adopt uncertainty to guide the feature extraction and correlation computation. To our best knowledge, HybridReg is the first work that exploits hybrid motions for robust point cloud registration. Extensive experiments show HybridReg's strengths, leading it to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both widely-used indoor and outdoor datasets. Code and dataset will be released to facilitate future research.

HybridReg: Robust 3D Point Cloud Registration with Hybrid Motions

In vision transformers, position embedding (PE) plays a crucial role in capturing the order of tokens. However, in vision transformer structures, there is a limitation in the expressiveness of PE due to the structure where position embedding is simply added to the token embedding. A layer-wise method that delivers PE to each layer and applies independent LNs for token embedding and PE has been adopted to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we identify the conflicting result that occurs in a layer-wise structure when using the global average pooling (GAP) method instead of the class token. To overcome this problem, we propose MPVG, which maximizes the effectiveness of PE in a layer-wise structure with GAP. Specifically, we identify that PE counterbalances token embedding values at each layer in a layer-wise structure. Furthermore, we recognize that the counterbalancing role of PE is insufficient in the layer-wise structure, and we address this by maximizing the effectiveness of PE through MPVG. Through experiments, we demonstrate that PE performs a counterbalancing role and that maintaining this counterbalancing directionality significantly impacts vision transformers. As a result, the experimental results show that MPVG outperforms existing methods across vision transformers on various tasks.

Maximizing the Position Embedding for Vision Transformers with Global Average Pooling

Despite the impressive progress of multimodal generative models, generating sound solely from text poses challenges in ensuring comprehensive scene depiction and temporal alignment.
Meanwhile, video-to-audio generation limits the flexibility to prioritize sound synthesis for specific objects within the scene.
To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel video-and-text-to-audio generation method, called ReWaS, where video serves as a conditional control for a text-to-audio generation model.
Especially, our method estimates the structural information of sound (namely, energy) from the video while receiving key content cues from a user prompt.
We employ a well-performing text-to-audio model to consolidate the video control, which is much more efficient for training multimodal diffusion models with massive triplet-paired (audio-video-text) data.
In addition, by separating the generative components of audio, it becomes a more flexible system that allows users to freely adjust the energy, surrounding environment, and primary sound source according to their preferences.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows superiority in terms of quality, controllability, and training efficiency.
Our demo is available at https://rewas-tv2a.github.io/.

Read, Watch and Scream! Sound Generation from Text and Video

Benefiting from their powerful generative capabilities, pretrained diffusion models have garnered significant attention for real-world image super-resolution (Real-SR). Existing diffusion-based SR approaches typically utilize semantic information from degraded images and restoration prompts to activate prior for producing realistic high-resolution images. However, general-purpose pretrained diffusion models, not designed for restoration tasks, often have suboptimal prior, and manually defined prompts may fail to fully exploit the generated potential. To address these limitations, we introduce RAP-SR, a novel restoration prior enhancement approach in pretrained diffusion models for Real-SR. First, we develop the High-Fidelity Aesthetic Image Dataset (HFAID), curated through a Quality-Driven Aesthetic Image Selection Pipeline (QDAISP). Our dataset not only surpasses existing ones in fidelity but also excels in aesthetic quality. Second, we propose the Restoration Priors Enhancement Framework, which includes Restoration Priors Refinement (RPR) and Restoration-Oriented Prompt Optimization (ROPO) modules. RPR refines the restoration prior using the HFAID, while ROPO optimizes the unique restoration identifier, improving the quality of the resulting images. RAP-SR effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose models and the demands of Real-SR by enhancing restoration prior. Leveraging the plug-and-play nature of RAP-SR, our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing diffusion-based SR methods, boosting their performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate its broad applicability and state-of-the-art results.

RAP-SR: RestorAtion Prior Enhancement in Diffusion Models for Realistic Image Super-Resolution

We introduce a biologically plausible RL framework for solving tasks in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). 
The proposed algorithm combines three integral parts: (1) A Meta-RL architecture, resembling the mammalian basal ganglia; (2) A biologically plausible reinforcement learning algorithm, exploiting temporal difference learning and eligibility traces to train the policy and the value-function; (3) An online automatic differentiation algorithm for computing the gradients with respect to parameters of a shared recurrent network backbone. Our experimental results show that the method is capable of solving a diverse set of partially observable reinforcement learning tasks. The algorithm we call real-time recurrent reinforcement learning (RTRRL) serves as a model of learning in biological neural networks, mimicking reward pathways in the basal ganglia.

Real-Time Recurrent Reinforcement Learning

We present VQTalker, a Vector Quantization-based framework for multilingual talking head generation that addresses the challenges of lip synchronization and natural motion across diverse languages. Our approach is grounded in the phonetic principle that human speech comprises a finite set of distinct sound units (phonemes) and corresponding visual articulations (visemes), which often share commonalities across languages. We introduce a facial motion tokenizer based on Group Residual Finite Scalar Quantization (GRFSQ), which creates a discretized representation of facial features. This method enables comprehensive capture of facial movements while improving generalization to multiple languages, even with limited training data. Building on this quantized representation, we implement a coarse-to-fine motion generation process that progressively refines facial animations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in both video-driven and speech-driven scenarios, particularly in multilingual settings. Notably, our method achieves high-quality results at a resolution of $512 \times 512$  pixels while maintaining a lower bitrate of approximately 11 kbps. Our work opens new possibilities for cross-lingual talking face generation.

VQTalker: Towards Multilingual Talking Avatars through Facial Motion Tokenization

Deciphering visual content from fMRI sheds light on the human vision system, but data scarcity and noise limit brain decoding model performance. Traditional approaches rely on subject-specific models, which are sensitive to training sample size. In this paper, we address data scarcity by proposing shallow subject-specific adapters to map cross-subject fMRI data into unified representations. A shared deep decoding model then decodes these features into the target feature space. We use both visual and textual supervision for multi-modal brain decoding and integrate high-level perception decoding with pixel-wise reconstruction guided by high-level perceptions. Our extensive experiments reveal several interesting insights: 1) Training with cross-subject fMRI benefits both high-level and low-level decoding models; 2) Merging high-level and low-level information improves reconstruction performance at both levels; 3) Transfer learning is effective for new subjects with limited training data by training new adapters; 4) Decoders trained on visually-elicited brain activity can generalize to decode imagery-induced activity, though with reduced performance.

See Through Their Minds: Learning Transferable Brain Decoding Models from Cross-Subject fMRI

Weakly supervised phrase grounding tasks aim to learn alignments between phrases and regions with coarse image-caption match information. One branch of previous methods established pseudo-label relationships between phrases and regions based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm combined with contrastive learning. However, adopting a simplified batch-level local update (partial) of pseudo-labels in E-step is sub-optimal, while extending it to global update requires inefficiently numerous computations. In addition, their failure to consider potential false negative examples in contrastive loss negatively impacts the effectiveness of M-step optimization. To address these issues, we propose a Momentum Pseudo Labeling (MPL) method, which efficiently uses a momentum model to synchronize global pseudo-label updates on the fly with model parameter updating. Additionally, we explore potential relationships between phrases and regions from non-matching image-caption pairs and convert these false negative examples to positive ones in contrastive learning. Our approach achieved SOTA performance on 3 commonly used grounding datasets for weakly supervised phrase grounding tasks.

Momentum Pseudo-Labeling for Weakly Supervised Phrase Grounding

Mean field games (MFGs) tractably model behavior in large agent populations. The literature on learning MFG equilibria typically focuses on finding Nash equilibria (NE), which assume perfectly rational agents and are hence implausible in many realistic situations.
To overcome these limitations, we incorporate bounded rationality into MFGs by leveraging the well-known concept of quantal response equilibria (QRE). Two novel types of MFG QRE enable the modeling of large agent populations where individuals only noisily estimate the true objective. We also introduce a second source of bounded rationality to MFGs by restricting agents' planning horizon. The resulting novel receding horizon (RH) MFGs are combined with QRE and existing approaches to model different aspects of bounded rationality in MFGs.
We formally define MFG QRE and RH MFGs and compare them to existing equilibrium concepts such as entropy-regularized NE. Subsequently, we design generalized fixed point iteration and fictitious play algorithms to learn QRE and RH equilibria. After a theoretical analysis, we give different examples to evaluate the capabilities of our learning algorithms and outline practical differences between the equilibrium concepts.

Bounded Rationality Equilibrium Learning in Mean Field Games

With the pervasive deployment of Machine Learning (ML) models in real-world applications, verifying and auditing properties of ML models have become a central concern.  In this work, we focus on three properties: robustness, individual fairness, and group fairness. We discuss two approaches for auditing ML model properties: estimation with and without reconstruction of the target model under audit. Though the first approach is studied in the literature, the second approach remains unexplored. For this purpose, we develop a new framework that quantifies different properties in terms of the Fourier coefficients of the ML model under audit but does not parametrically reconstruct it. We propose the Active Fourier Auditor (AFA), which queries sample points according to the Fourier coefficients of the ML model, and further estimates the properties. We derive high probability error bounds on AFA's estimates, along with the worst-case lower bounds on the sample complexity to audit them. Numerically we demonstrate on multiple datasets and models that AFA is more accurate and sample-efficient to estimate the properties of interest than the baselines.

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DCHM: Dynamic Collaboration of Heterogeneous Models for Analyzing Time-Varying Body Shape Changes Using a Blockchain-Based Framework

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HybridReg: Robust 3D Point Cloud Registration with Hybrid Motions

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DCHM: Dynamic Collaboration of Heterogeneous Models for Analyzing Time-Varying Body Shape Changes Using a Blockchain-Based Framework

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HybridReg: Robust 3D Point Cloud Registration with Hybrid Motions

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