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Recent lightweight image captioning models using retrieved data mainly focus on text prompts. However, previous works only utilize the retrieved text as text prompts, and the visual information relies only on the CLIP visual embedding. Because of this issue, there is a limitation that the image descriptions inherent in the prompt are not sufficiently reflected in the visual embedding space. To tackle this issue, we propose ViPCap, a novel retrieval text-based visual prompt for lightweight image captioning. ViPCap leverages the retrieved text with image information as visual prompts to enhance the ability of the model to capture relevant visual information. By mapping text prompts into the CLIP space and generating multiple randomized Gaussian distributions, our method leverages sampling to explore randomly augmented distributions and effectively retrieves the semantic features that contain image information. These retrieved features are integrated into the image and designated as the visual prompt, leading to performance improvements on datasets such as COCO, Flickr30k, and NoCaps. Experimental results demonstrate that ViPCap significantly outperforms prior lightweight captioning models in efficiency and effectiveness, demonstrating the potential for a plug-and-play solution.

AAAI 2025

ViPCap: Retrieval Text-Based Visual Prompts for Lightweight Image Captioning

mult modal vision

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.

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

AAAI 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. 

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.



Blind image super-resolution (blind SR) aims to restore a high-resolution (HR) image from a low-resolution (LR) image with unknown degradation. Many existing methods explicitly estimate degradation information from various LR images. However, in most cases, image degradations are independent of image content. Their estimations may be influenced by the image content resulting in inaccuracy. Unlike existing works, we design a dual-encoder for degradation representation (DEDR) to preclude the influence of image content from LR images. This benefits in extracting the intrinsic degradation representation more accurately. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work that estimates degradation representation through filtering out image content. Based on the degradation representation extracted by DEDR, we present a novel framework, named \textbf{degradation representation aware transform network (DRAT)} for blind SR. We propose global degradation aware (GDA) blocks to propagate degradation information across spatial and channel dimensions, in which a degradation representation transform module (DRT) is introduced to render features degradation-aware, thereby enhancing the restoration of LR images. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets (including Gaussian 8, DIV2KRK, and real-world datasets) under large scaling factors with complex degradations. The experimental results demonstrate that DRAT surpasses state-of-the-art supervised kernel estimation and unsupervised degradation prediction methods. The code will be released on GitHub.

Unsupervised Degradation Representation Aware Transform for Real-World Blind Image Super-Resolution

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become increasingly popular for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with minimal resources. However, traditional methods that serve multiple LoRA models independently result in redundant computation and low GPU utilization. This paper addresses these inefficiencies by introducing Dynamic Operator Optimization (Dop), an advanced automated optimization technique designed to dynamically optimize the Segmented Gather Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SGMV) operator based on specific scenarios. SGMV's unique design enables batching GPU operations for different LoRA models, significantly improving computational efficiency. The Dop approach leverages a Search Space Constructor to create a hierarchical search space, dividing the program space into high-level structural sketches and low-level implementation details, ensuring diversity and flexibility in operator implementation. Furthermore, an Optimization Engine refines these implementations using evolutionary search, guided by a cost model that estimates program performance. This iterative optimization process ensures that SGMV implementations can dynamically adapt to different scenarios to maintain high performance. We demonstrate that Dop can improve throughput by 1.30-1.46 times in a state-of-the-art multi-tenant LoRA serving.

Dynamic Operator Optimization for Efficient Multi-Tenant LoRA Model Serving

As artificial intelligence advances rapidly, particularly with the advent of GANs and diffusion models, the accuracy of Image Inpainting Localization (IIL) has become increasingly challenging. Current IIL methods face two main challenges: a tendency towards overconfidence, leading to incorrect predictions; and difficulty in detecting subtle tampering boundaries in inpainted images. In response, we propose a new paradigm that treats IIL as a conditional mask generation task utilizing diffusion models. Our method, InpDiffusion, utilizes the denoising process enhanced by the integration of image semantic conditions to progressively refine predictions. During denoising, we employ edge conditions and introduce a novel edge supervision strategy to enhance the model's perception of edge details in inpainted objects. Balancing the diffusion model's stochastic sampling with edge supervision of tampered image regions mitigates the risk of incorrect predictions from overconfidence and prevents the loss of subtle boundaries that can result from overly stochastic processes. Furthermore, we propose an innovative Dual-stream Multi-scale Feature Extractor (DMFE) for extracting multi-scale features, enhancing feature representation by considering both semantic and edge conditions of the inpainted images. Extensive experiments across challenging datasets demonstrate that the InpDiffusion significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in IIL tasks, while also showcasing excellent generalization capabilities and robustness.

InpDiffusion: Image Inpainting Localization via Conditional Diffusion Models

In the pursuit of efficient vision architectures, substantial efforts have been devoted to optimizing operator efficiency. Depth-wise separable operators, such as DWConv, are find cheap in both FLOPs and parameters. As a result, they are increasingly incorporated into efficient backbones, trading for deeper and wider architectures to enhance performance. However, separable operators are not really fast on devices due to the discontinuous memory access requirements. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FreeNets}, a family of simple and efficient backbones that free the separable operation to further accelerate the running speed. We introduce sparse sampling mixers (S2-Mixer) to supersede existing separable token mixers. The S2-Mixer samples multiple segments of partially continuous signals across spatial and channel dimensions for convolutional processing, achieving extremely fast on-device speed. The sparse sampling also enables S2-Mixer to capture long-range pixel relationships from dynamic receptive fields. Furthermore, we introduce a Shift Feed-Forward Network (ShiftFFN) as a faster alternative to existing channel mixers. It utilizes a shift neck architecture that aggregates global information to shift features, enabling faster channel mixing while incorporating global pixel information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeNet offers a superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to the latest efficient models. On ImageNet-1k, FreeNet-S4 outperforms the leading model, FastViT-SA12, by 1.0\% in top-1 accuracy, while running 1.3$\times$ faster on GPU and 1.7$\times$ faster on Mobile.

FreeNet: Liberating Depth-Wise Separable Operations for Building Faster Mobile Vision Architectures

Current benchmarks for video segmentation aim to segment and track objects; however, they are limited to annotating
only salient objects (i.e., foreground instances). As a result, despite their impressive architectural designs, previous works
have struggled to adapt to real-world scenarios, since current benchmarks only handle salient objects. We believe that developing a new video segmentation dataset aimed at tracking multi-granularity segmentation target in the video scene is necessary for the research community. In this work, we aim to generate new video segmentation dataset that is annotated for both salient and non-salient masks. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale, densely annotated Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation(MUG-VOS) dataset that includes various types and granularities of mask annotations. We automatically collected a training set that assists in tracking both salient and non-salient objects, and we also curated a human-annotated test set for reliable evaluation. As a result, Memory-based Mask Propagation Model(MMPM) trained on MUG-VOS dataset leads to the best performance on MUG-VOS dataset among the existing video object segmentation methods and Segment Anything Model(SAM)-based video segmentation methods. The project page with MUG-VOS dataset and code will be made available soon.

Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation

The importance of time series forecasting drives continuous research and the development of new approaches to tackle this problem. Typically, these methods are introduced through empirical studies that frequently claim superior accuracy for the proposed approaches. Nevertheless, concerns are rising about the reliability and generalizability of these results due to limitations in experimental setups. This paper addresses a critical limitation: the number and representativeness of the datasets used.
We investigate the impact of dataset selection bias, particularly the practice of cherry-picking datasets, on the performance evaluation of forecasting methods. Through empirical analysis with a diverse set of benchmark datasets, our findings reveal that cherry-picking datasets can significantly distort the perceived performance of methods, often exaggerating their effectiveness.
Furthermore, our results demonstrate that by selectively choosing just four datasets — what most studies report — 46\% of methods could be deemed best in class, and 77\% could rank within the top three. Additionally, recent deep learning-based approaches show high sensitivity to dataset selection, whereas classical methods exhibit greater robustness.
Our study highlights the critical need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that more accurately reflect real-world scenarios. Adopting such frameworks will ensure the development of robust and reliable forecasting methods.

Cherry-Picking in Time Series Forecasting: How to Select Datasets to Make Your Model Shine

Networked time series are time series on a graph, one for each node, with applications in traffic and weather monitoring. Graph neural networks are natural candidates for networked time series imputation and have recently outperformed existing alternatives such as recurrent and generative models for time series imputation as they utilize a relational inductive bias for imputation. However, existing GNN-based approaches fail to capture the higher-order topological structure between sensors, which are shaped by recurring substructures in the graph, referred to as temporal motifs. In addition, it remains uncertain which motifs are the most pivotal motifs guiding the imputation task in networked time series. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a graph neural network designed to leverage motif structures within the network by employing weighted motif adjacency matrices to capture higher-order neighborhood information. In particular, (1) we design a motif-wise multi-view attention module that explicitly captures various higher-order structures along with an attention mechanism that automatically assigns high weights to informative ones in order to maximize the use of higher-order information. (2) We introduce a gated fusion module by merging gated recurrent networks and graph convolutional networks to capture the spatial and temporal dependency in order to reflect the intricate impacts of temporal and spatial influence. Experimental results demonstrate that when compared to state-of-the-art models for time-series imputation tasks, our proposed model can reduce the error by around 19\%.

Motif-aware Graph Neural Networks for Networked Time Series Imputation

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) have emerged as an efficient framework for representing and learning complex probability distributions. Nevertheless, the existing body of research on PCs predominantly concentrates on data-driven parameter learning, often neglecting the potential of knowledge-intensive learning, a particular issue in data-scarce/knowledge-rich domains such as healthcare. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel unified framework that can systematically integrate diverse domain knowledge into the parameter learning process of PCs. Experiments on several benchmarks as well as real world datasets show that our proposed framework can both effectively and efficiently leverage domain knowledge to achieve superior performance compared to purely data-driven learning approaches.

A Unified Framework for Human-Allied Learning of Probabilistic Circuits

Time series data is essential in various applications, including climate modeling, healthcare monitoring, and financial analytics. Understanding the contextual information associated with real-world time series data is often essential for accurate and reliable event predictions. In this paper, we introduce TimeCAP, a time-series processing framework that creatively employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as contextualizers of time series data, extending their typical usage as predictors. Specifically, it incorporates two independent LLM agents: one generates a textual summary that captures the context of the time series, while the other uses this enriched summary to make more informed predictions. In addition, TimeCAP employs a multi-modal encoder that synergizes with the LLM agents, enhancing predictive performance through mutual augmentation of inputs with in-context examples. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeCAP outperforms state-of-the-art time series event prediction methods, including those utilizing LLMs as predictors, achieving an average improvement of 28.75% in F1 score.

TimeCAP: Learning to Contextualize, Augment, and Predict Time Series Events with Large Language Model Agents

Advancements in hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units and neural processing units, have significantly propelled computer vision research. The vision transformer (ViT), leveraging the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism, has surpassed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in accuracy but faces challenges in mobile and edge deployment due to its large size and computational demands. In addition, as privacy concerns push for on-device training, research on quantization methods for ViTs, particularly gradient quantization, has gained attention. Unlike CNNs, ViTs face challenges due to outliers and a complex loss landscape. To address this, we propose a gradient quantization framework that stabilizes training by adapting quantization points based on interquartile ranges and constructing an outlier-robust loss function. Additionally, we employ a scaling method to align quantized gradients with original gradients and adaptively assign the learning rate based on quantization error analysis. When quantizing weights, activations, and gradients to INT8, our method improves performance by 0.52\% and 0.21\% over DeiT-Base and Swin-Base, respectively, and achieves near parity with MobileViT-S with only a 0.09\% accuracy drop. Furthermore, a 2.06$\times$ speedup was observed when applying our framework to MobileViT in a CUDA 11.8 environment.

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