United States

Bit Flip Attacks (BFAs) are a well-established class of adversarial attacks, originally developed for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within the computer vision domain. Most recently, these attacks have been extended to target Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), revealing significant vulnerabilities. This new development naturally raises questions about the best strategies to defend GNNs against BFAs, a challenge for which no solutions currently exist. Given the applications of GNNs in critical fields, any defense mechanism must not only maintain network performance, but also verifiably restore the network to its pre-attack state. Verifiably restoring the network to its pre-attack state also eliminates the need for costly evaluations on test data to ensure network quality. We offer first insights into the effectiveness of existing honeypot- and hashing-based defenses against BFAs adapted from the computer vision domain to GNNs, and characterize the short comings of these approaches. To overcome their limitations, we propose Crossfire, a hybrid approach that exploits weight sparsity and  ombines hashing and honeypots with bit-level correction of out-of-distribution (OOD) weight elements to restore network integrity. Crossfire is retraining-free and does not require labeled data. Averaged over 2,160 experiments on six benchmark datasets, Crossfire offers a 21.8% higher probability than its competitors of reconstructing a GNN attacked by a BFA to its pre-attack state. These experiments cover up to 55 bit flips from various attacks. Moreover, it im proves post-repair prediction quality by 10.85%. Computational and storage overheads are negligible compared to the inherent complexity of even the simplest GNNs.

AAAI 2025

Crossfire: An Elastic Defense Framework for Graph Neural Networks Under Bit Flip Attacks

graph based machine learning

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.



Edit-based approaches for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) have attracted volume attention due to their outstanding explanations of the correction process and rapid inference. Through our exploring the characteristics of the generalized and specific knowledge learned for GEC, we discover efficiently training GEC system with satisfactory generalization capacity prefers more generalized knowledge rather than specific knowledge. Current gradient-based methods for training GEC system, however, usually prioritize minimizing training loss over generalization loss. This paper proposes the strategy of Adjusting Learning Rate Based on Memory Rate to optimize of Adjusting Learning Rate Based on Memory Rate to optimize the edit-based GEC scorer (ALRMR-GEC). Specifically, we introduce the memory rate, a novel metric, to provide an explicit indicator for the model’s state of learning generalized and specific knowledge, which can effectively guide GEC system to timely adjust the learning rate. Extensive experiments, conducted by optimizing the published editscorer (Sorokin 2022) on BEA2019 dataset, have shown our ALRMR-GEC significantly enhances the model generalization ability with stable and satisfactory performance irrespective of the initial learning rate selection. Also, our method can accelerate the training over tenfold faster in certain cases. Finally, the experiments indicate the memory rate induced in our ALRMR-GEC surpasses the gradient as a more informative metric to guide the GEC editscorer to learn more generalized knowledge. Our code will be released as soon as possible.

ALRMR-GEC: Adjusting Learning Rate Based on Memory Rate to Optimize the Edit Scorer for Grammatical Error Correction

The insufficient generalization of adaptive moment estimation (Adam) has hindered its broader application. Recent studies have shown that flat minima in loss landscapes are highly associated with improved generalization.  Inspired by the filtering effect of integration operations on high-frequency signals, we propose multiple integral Adam (MIAdam), a novel optimizer that integrates a multiple integral term into Adam. This multiple integral term effectively filters out sharp minima encountered during optimization, guiding the optimizer towards flatter regions and thereby enhancing generalization capability. We provide a theoretical explanation for the improvement in generalization through the diffusion theory framework and analyze the impact of the multiple integral term on the optimizer's convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that MIAdam not only enhances generalization and robustness against label noise but also maintains the rapid convergence characteristic of Adam, outperforming Adam and its variants in state-of-the-art benchmarks.

A Method for Enhancing Generalization of Adam by Multiple Integrations

In this work, we extend the concept of the $p$-mean welfare objective from social choice theory (Moulin 2004) to study $p$-mean regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. The $p$-mean regret, defined as the difference between the optimal mean among the arms and the $p$-mean of the expected rewards, offers a flexible framework for evaluating bandit algorithms, enabling algorithm designers to balance fairness and efficiency by adjusting the parameter $p$. Our framework encompasses both average cumulative regret and Nash regret as special cases.

We introduce a simple, unified UCB-based algorithm (Explore-Then-UCB) that achieves novel $p$-mean regret bounds. Our algorithm consists of two phases: a carefully calibrated uniform exploration phase to initialize sample means, followed by the UCB1 algorithm of (Auer et al. 2002). Under mild assumptions, we prove that our algorithm achieves a $p$-mean regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{T^{\frac{1}{2|p|}}}}\right)$ for all $p \leq -1$, where $k$ represents the number of arms and $T$ the time horizon. When $-1<p<0$, we achieve a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{k^{1.5}}{T^{\frac{1}{2}}}}\right)$. For the range $0< p \leq 1$, we achieve a $p$-mean regret scaling as $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{T}}\right)$, which matches the previously established lower bound up to logarithmic factors (Auer et al. 1995). This result stems from the fact that the $p$-mean regret of any algorithm is at least its average cumulative regret for $p \leq 1$.
In the case of Nash regret (the limit as $p$ approaches zero), our unified approach differs from prior work (Barman et al. 2023), which requires a new Nash Confidence Bound algorithm. Notably, we achieve the same regret bound up to constant factors using our more general method.

p-Mean Regret for Stochastic Bandits

Knowledge distillation transfers "dark knowledge" from a large teacher model to a smaller student model, yielding a highly efficient network. 
To improve network's generalization ability, existing works use a larger temperature coefficient for knowledge distillation. Nevertheless, these methods may lower the target category's confidence and lead to ambiguous recognition of similar samples. To mitigate this issue, some studies introduce intra-batch distillation to reduce prediction discrepancy. However, these methods overlook the inconsistency between background information and the target category, which may increase prediction bias due to noise disturbance. Additionally, label imbalance from random sampling and batch size can undermine network generalization reliability. To tackle these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective Intra-class Knowledge Distillation (IKD) method that facilitates knowledge sharing within the same class to ensure consistent predictions. First, we initialize the matrix and the vector to store logits and class counts provided by the teacher, respectively. Then, in the first epoch, we calculate the sum of logits and sample counts per class and perform KD to prevent knowledge omission. Finally, in subsequent training, we update the matrix to obtain the average logits and compute the KL divergence between the student's output and the updated matrix according to the label index. This process ensures intra-class consistency and improves the student's performance. Furthermore, this method theoretically reduces prediction bias by ensuring intra-class consistency. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets validate the superiority of IKD. The code will be made publicly available.

Debiased Distillation for Consistency Regularization

Dense video captioning aims to detect and describe all events in untrimmed videos. This paper presents a dense video captioning network called Multi-Concept Cyclic Learning (MCCL), which aims to: (1) detect multiple concepts at the frame level, using these concepts to enhance video features and provide temporal event cues; (2) design cyclic co-learning between the generator and the localizer within the captioning network to promote semantic perception and event localization. Specifically, we perform weakly supervised concept detection for each frame, and the detected concept embeddings are integrated into the video features to provide event cues. Additionally, video-level concept contrastive learning is introduced to obtain more discriminative concept embeddings. In the captioning network, we establish a cyclic co-learning strategy where the generator guides the localizer for event localization through semantic matching, while the localizer enhances the generator’s event semantic perception through location matching, making semantic perception and event localization mutually beneficial. MCCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness and interpretability.

Exploring Temporal Event Cues for Dense Video Captioning in Cyclic Co-Learning

Growing customer demand for smart solutions in robotics and augmented reality has attracted considerable attention to 3D object detection from point clouds. Yet, existing indoor datasets taken individually are too small and insufficiently diverse to train a powerful and general 3D object detection model. In the meantime, more general approaches utilizing foundation models are still inferior in quality to those based on supervised training for a specific task.
In this work, we propose UniDet3D, a simple yet effective 3D object detection model, which is trained on a mixture of indoor datasets and is capable to work in various indoor environments. By unifying different label spaces, UniDet3D enables learning a strong representation across multiple datasets through a supervised joint training scheme. The proposed network architecture is built upon a vanilla transformer encoder, making it easy to run, customize and extend the prediction pipeline for practical use. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniDet3D obtains significant gains over existing 3D object detection methods in 6 indoor benchmarks: ScanNet (+1.1 $mAP_{50}$), S3DIS (+9.1 $mAP_{50}$), ARKitScenes (+19.4 $mAP_{25}$), MultiScan (+14.3 $mAP_{50}$), 3RScan (+3.2 $mAP_{50}$), and ScanNet++ (+2.7 $mAP_{50}$).

UniDet3D: Multi-dataset Indoor 3D Object Detection

In recent years, visually-rich document understanding has attracted increasing attention. Transformer-based pre-trained models have become the mainstream approach, yielding significant performance gains in this field. However, the self-attention mechanism's quadratic computational complexity hinders their efficiency and ability to process long documents. In this paper, we present DocMamba, a novel framework based on the state space model. It is designed to reduce computational complexity to linear while preserving global modeling capabilities. To further enhance its effectiveness in document processing, we introduce the Segment-First Bidirectional Scan (SFBS) to capture contiguous semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that DocMamba achieves new state-of-the-art results on downstream datasets such as FUNSD, CORD, and SORIE, while significantly improving speed and reducing memory usage. Notably, experiments on the HRDoc confirm DocMamba's potential for length extrapolation. The code is included in the supplementary material and will also be available online.

DocMamba: Efficient Document Pre-training with State Space Model

Text-video retrieval (TVR) has seen substantial advancements in recent years, fueled by the utilization of pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, achieving accurate matching in TVR remains challenging due to inherent disparities between video and textual modalities and irregularities in data representation. In this paper, we propose Text-Video-ProxyNet (TV-ProxyNet), a novel framework designed to decompose the conventional 1-to-$N$ relationship of TVR into $N$ distinct 1-to-1 relationships. By replacing a single text query with a series of text proxies, TV-ProxyNet not only broadens the query scope but also achieves a more precise expansion. Each text proxy is crafted through a refined iterative process, controlled by mechanisms we term as the director and dash, which regulate the proxy's direction and distance relative to the original text query. This setup not only facilitates more precise semantic alignment but also effectively manages the disparities and noise inherent in multimodal data. Our experiments on three representative video-text retrieval benchmarks, MSRVTT, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet Captions, demonstrate the effectiveness of TV-ProxyNet. The results show an improvement of 2.0\% to 3.3\% in R@1 over the baseline. TV-ProxyNet achieved state-of-the-art performance on MSRVTT and ActivityNet Captions, and a 2.0\% improvement on DiDeMo compared to existing methods, validating our approach's ability to enhance semantic mapping and reduce error propensity.

Text Proxy: Decomposing Retrieval from a 1-to-$N$ Relationship into $N$ 1-to-1 Relationships for Text-Video Retrieval

As the global population ages and the incidence of chronic diseases rises, the demand for early detection of abnormal medical conditions is increasing. Traditional health monitoring methods often require significant resources and specialized personnel, limiting their widespread use. Leveraging advancements in AI technologies, this study proposes a non-invasive method for detecting abnormal medical conditions from image data. A multi-modal perception framework is introduced, integrating features from various modalities, including facial expressions and body postures, to enhance detection accuracy. The framework employs a Cascaded Squeeze-Excitation (CSE) module, consisting of Adaptive and Multi-modal Squeeze-Excitation components, to capture complex feature dependencies and improve cross-modal performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showing improved performance over existing methods. Additionally, a new dataset encompassing a wide range of medical conditions has been released, providing a valuable resource for future research in this domain.

MMPF: Multi-Modal Perception Framework for Abnormal Medical Condition Detection

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is an emerging information extraction (IE) task, aiming to simultaneously extract entity spans, types, and corresponding visual regions of entities from given sentence-image pairs data. Recent unified methods employing machine reading comprehension or sequence generation-based frameworks show limitations in this difficult task. The former, utilizing human-designed queries, struggles to differentiate ambiguous entities, such as Jordan (Person) and off-White x Jordan (Shoes). The latter, following the one-by-one decoding order, suffers from exposure bias issues. We maintain that these works misunderstand the relationships of multimodal entities. To tackle these, we propose a novel unified framework named Multi-grained Query-guided Set Prediction Network (MQSPN) to learn appropriate relationships at intra-entity and inter-entity levels. Specifically, MQSPN consists of a Multi-grained Query Set (MQS) and a Multimodal Set Prediction Network (MSP). MQS explicitly aligns entity regions with entity spans by employing a set of learnable queries to strengthen intra-entity connections. Based on distinct intra-entity modeling, MSP reformulates GMNER as a set prediction, guiding models to establish appropriate inter-entity relationships from a global matching perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a query-guided Fusion Net (QFNet) to work as a glue network between MQS and MSP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in widely used benchmarks. Our code is available at Supplementary Material.

Premium content

Next from AAAI 2025

ALRMR-GEC: Adjusting Learning Rate Based on Memory Rate to Optimize the Edit Scorer for Grammatical Error Correction

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES