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Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliable deployment of deep models in real-world scenarios. Recently, from the perspective of over-parameterization, a series of methods leveraging weight sparsification techniques have shown promising performance. These methods typically focus on selecting important parameters for in-distribution (ID) data to reduce the negative impact of redundant parameters on OOD detection. However, we empirically find that these selected parameters may behave overconfidently toward OOD data and hurt OOD detection. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective post-hoc method called Instance-aware Test Pruning (ITP), which performs OOD detection by considering both coarse-grained and fine-grained levels of parameter pruning. Specifically, ITP first estimates the class-specific parameter contribution distribution by exploring the ID data. By using the contribution distribution, ITP conducts coarse-grained pruning to eliminate redundant parameters. More importantly, ITP further adopts a fine-grained test pruning process based on the right-tailed Z-score test, which can adaptively remove instance-level overconfident parameters. Finally, ITP derives OOD scores from the pruned model to achieve more reliable predictions. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ITP, which reduces the average FPR95 by 5.54\% on the commonly used CIFAR-100 benchmark compared to current weight sparsification techniques. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ITP-5FE3.

AAAI 2025

ITP: Instance-Aware Test Pruning for Out-of-Distribution Detection

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.



Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated superior performance in subject-driven image generation. Identity(ID) preserving image generation, as a subtask of subject-image generation, aims to generate customized images for specific human identity and has broad application potential. However, this task remains challenging due to the requirement for high ID fidelity and precise detail preservation. Additionally, generating high-quality context alongside the human ID presents another challenge, as existing methods struggle to achieve both high ID fidelity and satisfactory context simultaneously. To address the issues of insufficient ID fidelity, we introduced a simple yet effective test-time fine-tuning approach. Specifically, we propose an attribute-driven training method that establishes global-level and local-level tasks to learn the global face feature and fine-grained attribute features, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a novel ID-context decoupling framework that decouples image context generation from human ID generation, ensuring the quality of contextual content as well as facilitating the learning ID information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method and showcase its capabilities across various applications.

FaceA-Net: Facial Attribute-driven ID Preserving Image Generation Network

Incomplete multi-view multi-label classification aims to accurately predict labels for each sample in the face of some missing views. Moreover, it also encounters problems brought by redundant views. In this paper, we make the first attempt to take advantage of diffusion models to address the missing view problem and design a strategy to identify and remove redundant views. Specifically, we train a diffusion model conditioned on the pseudo-labels to recover information of missing views. The learned diffusion model can carry data distribution knowledge in training split to the data. Regarding redundant identification strategy, it is designed by considering both the additional information of views and the classification difficulty level of samples. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets, and the proposed method achieves favorable performance against several state-of-the-art methods on the multi-view multi-label classification task.

Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Diffusion-Guided Redundancy Removal

Sometimes we use a neural network to learn predictions, which are then used to compute a downstream quantity of interest. For instance, we could learn a step-by-step dynamics model and then use it to infer a utility function for decision making. Given limited training data, neither the neural network’s prediction nor the downstream quantity of interest will be exact. Quantifying the overall epistemic uncertainty in the downstream quantity of interest can be helpful. For instance we could use the uncertainty of the utility function from the example above to incorporate a safety margin or to perform active learning. We show that epistemic uncertainty of such quantities of interest can be estimated conveniently using gradients. In comparison to popular related approaches, such as ensemble methods, our method exhibits similar results while requiring fewer computational resources.

General Uncertainty Estimation with Delta Variances

Training graph neural networks (GNNs) for graph representation has received increasing concerns due to its outstanding performance in the link prediction and node classification tasks, but it incurs much time and storage for tackling large-scale graphs. To alleviate this issue, graph condensation has been emerged to condense the large graph into a small but highly-informative graph, while achieving comparable performance of GNNs trained on the small graph and large graph. However, existing works mainly focus on the gradient or distribution matching under GNN training trajectories to condense simple link structures, while overlooking the structure matching for condensing signed graph that exist conflict links and structural balance among nodes. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel $\textbf{S}$tructure balance and $\textbf{G}$radient matching-based $\textbf{S}$igned $\textbf{G}$raph $\textbf{C}$ondensation (SGSGC) method for condensing signed graph with node attributes, conflict links and structural balance into informative smaller ones. Specifically, we first propose a structure-balanced matching to match the structural balance between the original and condensed signed graph, and then combine it with the gradient matching to condense signed graph for the link sign prediction task, while preserving both conflicting link structures and node attributes. Moreover, we use the feature smoothing and the graph sparsification techniques to improve the robustness and time for the GNN training, respectively. Finally, a bi-level optimization technique is proposed to simultaneously find the optimal node attributes and conflict structure of the condensed graph. Experiments on six datasets demonstrate that SGSGC achieves excellent performance. On Epinions, 94\% test accuracy of training on the original signed graph, while reducing their graph size by 99.95\% - 99.99\%, and there exist 2.24\% – 6.26\% accuracy improvements for link sign prediction compared to the state-of-the-arts.

Structure Balance and Gradient Matching-based Signed Graph Condensation

Despite the advancements of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) in various tasks, they struggle with fine-grained temporal understanding tasks, such as Dense Video Captioning (DVC). DVC is a complicated task of describing all events within a video while also temporally locating each event in a video, which integrates multiple fine-grained tasks, including video segmentation, video captioning, and temporal video grounding.
Previous VideoLLMs attempt to solve DVC in a single step, failing to utilize their reasoning capability.
Moreover, previous loss used for training VideoLLMs does not fully reflect evaluation metrics, therefore providing supervision not directly aligned to target tasks.
To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework named VidChain comprised of Chain-of-Tasks (CoTasks) and Metric-based Direct Preference Optimization (M-DPO).
CoTasks decompose a complex task into a sequence of sub-tasks, allowing VideoLLMs to leverage their reasoning capabilities more effectively.
M-DPO aligns a VideoLLM with evaluation metrics, providing fine-grained supervision to each task that is well-aligned with metrics.
Applied to two different VideoLLMs, VidChain consistently improves their fine-grained video understanding, thereby outperforming previous VideoLLMs on two different DVC benchmarks and also on the temporal video grounding task.

VidChain: Chain-of-Tasks with Metric-based Direct Preference Optimization for Dense Video Captioning

Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized clients to collaboratively train a global model under the orchestration of a central server. However, the iterative exchange of model parameters between the server and clients imposes heavy communication burdens, risks potential privacy leakage, and even precludes collaboration among heterogeneous clients. Distillation-based FL tackles these challenges by exchanging low-dimensional model outputs rather than model parameters, yet it relies heavily on a task-relevant auxiliary dataset that is often not available in practice. Data-free FL attempts to overcome this limitation by training a server-side generator to directly synthesize task-specific data samples for knowledge transfer. However, the update rule of the generator requires clients to share on-device models for white-box access, which greatly compromises the advantages of distillation-based FL. This motivates us to explore a data-free and black-box FL framework via Zeroth-order Gradient Estimation (FedZGE), which estimates the gradients after flowing through on-device models in a black-box optimization manner to complete the training of the generator in terms of fidelity, transferability, diversity, and equilibrium, without involving any auxiliary data or sharing any model parameters, thus combining the advantages of both distillation-based FL and data-free FL. Experiments on large-scale image classification datasets and network architectures demonstrate the superiority of FedZGE in terms of data heterogeneity, model heterogeneity, communication efficiency, and privacy protection. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedZGE-B6A3.

Data-Free Black-Box Federated Learning via Zeroth-Order Gradient Estimation

Posters serve an essential function in marketing and advertising by improving visual communication and brand visibility, thus significantly contributing to industrial design. With the latest developments in controllable T2I diffusion models, research interest has surged in text rendering within synthesized images. Although text rendering accuracy has seen advancements, automatic poster generation remains a relatively untapped area. This paper presents an automatic poster generation framework featuring text rendering capabilities through the use of LLMs. Our framework employs a triple-cross attention mechanism based on alignment learning to achieve precise text placement within detailed contextual backgrounds. Moreover, it supports adjustable fonts, varying image resolutions, and poster rendering with textual prompts in both English and Chinese. Additionally, we present a comprehensive bilingual image-text dataset, GlyphDraw-3M, comprising 3 million image-text pairs, each with OCR annotations and resolutions exceeding 1024. Our method utilizes the SDXL architecture, and extensive experiments confirm its ability to generate posters with intricate and context-rich backgrounds.

GlyphDraw2: Automatic Generation of Complex Glyph Posters with Diffusion Models and Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of various natural language processing tasks, including text-to-SQL. Current LLM-based text-to-SQL schemes mainly focus on improving the understanding of natural language questions (NLQs) or refining the quality of generated SQLs. While these strategies are effective, they often address specific, nuanced aspects. In contrast, humans approach text-to-SQL with a holistic view, applying transitional logical reasoning across multiple steps to arrive at the final answer. We believe LLMs can leverage human cognitive processes to achieve greater accuracy in text-to-SQL. In this paper, we present CogSQL, a framework featuring a suite of tailored models and strategies aimed at replicating human cognitive processes for enhanced LLM-based text-to-SQL. CogSQL consists of three key modules: (1) SQL preparation: we employ a coarse-to-fine schema linking and syntax keyword prediction, akin to how human recall and align key concepts for better understanding. (2) SQL generation: we introduce a concept-enhanced chain-of-thought prompting, enhancing NLQ interpretation and SQL composition of LLMs, similar to humans drafting SQL query. (3) SQL correction: we develop NLQ consistency and result consistency techniques to correct various errors, mirroring how humans evaluate and refine reasoning. We conduct extensive experiments using diverse benchmarks and LLMs. The results and analysis verify the effectiveness and generalizability of CogSQL.

CogSQL: A Cognitive Framework for Enhancing Large Language Models in Text-to-SQL Translation

Contrastive learning is a paradigm for learning representations from unlabelled data and several recent works have claimed that such models effectively learn spectral embeddings and show relations between (wide) contrastive models and kernel principal component analysis (PCA). However, it is not known if trained contrastive models indeed correspond to kernel methods or PCA. In this work, we analyze the training dynamics of two-layer contrastive models, with non-linear activation, and answer when these models are close to PCA or kernel methods. It is well known in the supervised setting that neural networks are equivalent to neural tangent kernel (NTK) machines, and that the NTK of infinitely wide networks remains constant during training. We provide the first constancy results of NTK for contrastive losses, and present a nuanced picture: NTK of wide networks remains almost constant for cosine similarity based contrastive losses, but not for losses based on dot product similarity. We further study the training dynamics of contrastive models with orthogonality constraints on output layer, which is implicitly assumed in works relating contrastive learning to spectral embedding. Our deviation bounds suggest that representations learned by contrastive models are close to the principal components of a certain matrix computed from random features.

When Can We Approximate Wide Contrastive Models with Neural Tangent Kernels and Principal Component Analysis?

Charts are widely used for data visualization across various fields, including education, research, and business. Chart Question Answering (CQA) is an emerging task focused on the automatic interpretation and reasoning of data presented in charts. However, chart images are inherently difficult to interpret, and chart-related questions often involve complex logical and numerical reasoning, which hinders the performance of existing models. This paper introduces VProChart, a novel framework designed to address these challenges in CQA by integrating a lightweight Visual Perception Alignment Agent (VPAgent) and a Programmatic Solution Reasoning approach. VPAgent aligns and models chart elements based on principles of human visual perception, enhancing the understanding of chart context. The Programmatic Solution Reasoning approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to transform natural language reasoning questions into structured solution programs, facilitating precise numerical and logical reasoning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets such as ChartQA and PlotQA demonstrate that VProChart significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting its capability in understanding and reasoning with charts.

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