United States

Story visualization has gained increasing attention in artificial intelligence. However, existing methods still struggle with maintaining a balance between character identity preservation and text-semantics alignment, largely due to a lack of detailed semantic modeling of the story scene. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph, namely Character Graph (**CG**), which comprehensively represents various story-related knowledge, including the characters, the attributes related to characters, and the relationship between characters.
We then introduce StoryWeaver, an image generator that achieve Customization via Character Graph (**C-CG**), capable of consistent story visualization with rich text semantics. To further improve the multi-character generation performance, we incorporate knowledge-enhanced spatial guidance (**KE-SG**) into StoryWeaver to precisely inject character semantics into generation. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted using a new benchmark called TBC-Bench. The experiments confirm that our StoryWeaver excels not only in creating vivid visual story plots but also in accurately conveying character identities across various scenarios with considerable storage efficiency, *e.g.*, achieving an average increase of +9.03\% DINO-I and +13.44\% CLIP-T. Furthermore, ablation experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed module. Codes and datasets are released anonymously at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StoryWeaver-C8A4.

AAAI 2025

StoryWeaver: A Unified World Model for Knowledge-Enhanced Story Character Customization

language and vision

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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.



Rapid advancements in medical image segmentation performance have been significantly driven by the development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). These models follow the discriminative pixel-wise classification learning paradigm and often have limited ability to generalize across diverse medical imaging datasets. In this manuscript, we introduce Generative Medical Segmentation (GMS), a novel approach leveraging a generative model to perform image segmentation. Concretely, GMS employs a robust pre-trained vision foundation model to extract latent representations for images and corresponding ground truth masks, followed by a model that learns a mapping function from the image to the mask in the latent space. Once trained, the model generates an estimated segmentation mask using the pre-trained vision foundation model to decode the predicted latent representation back into the image space. The design of GMS leads to fewer trainable parameters in the model which reduces the risk of overfitting and enhances its generalization capability. Our experimental analysis across five public datasets in different medical imaging domains demonstrates GMS outperforms existing discriminative and generative segmentation models. Furthermore, GMS is able to generalize well across datasets from different centers within the same imaging modality. Our experiments suggest GMS offers a scalable and effective solution for medical image segmentation. GMS implementation and trained model weights are available at xxx.

Generative Medical Segmentation

Open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation aims to segment and classify everything in diverse scenes across an unbounded vocabulary. Existing methods typically employ two-stage or single-stage framework. The two-stage framework involves cropping the image multiple times using masks generated by a mask generator, followed by feature extraction, while the single-stage framework relies on a heavyweight mask decoder to make up for the lack of spatial position information through self-attention and cross-attention in multiple stacked Transformer blocks. Both methods incur substantial computational overhead, thereby hindering the efficiency of model inference. To fill the gap in efficiency, we propose EOV-Seg, a novel single-stage, shared, efficient, and spatial-aware framework designed for open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation. Specifically, EOV-Seg innovates in two aspects. First, a Vocabulary-Aware Selection (VAS) module is proposed to improve the semantic comprehension of visual aggregated features and alleviate the feature interaction burden on the mask decoder. Second, we introduce a Two-way Dynamic Embedding Experts (TDEE), which efficiently utilizes the spatial awareness capabilities of ViT-based CLIP backbone. To the best of our knowledge, EOV-Seg is the first open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation framework towards efficiency, which runs faster and achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, with COCO training only, EOV-Seg achieves 24.2 PQ, 31.6 mIoU, and 12.7 FPS on the ADE20K dataset for panoptic and semantic segmentation tasks and the inference time of EOV-Seg is 4~21 times faster than state-of-the-art methods. Especially, equipped with ResNet-50 backbone, EOV-Seg runs 25 FPS with only 71M parameters on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The code will be public.

EOV-Seg: Efficient Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation

Few-shot-learning (FSL) commonly requires a model to identify images (queries) that belong to classes unseen during training, based on a few labeled samples of the new classes (support set) as reference. So far, plenty of algorithms involve training data augmentation to improve the generalization capability of FSL models, but outlier queries or support images during inference can still pose great generalization challenges.
In this work, to reduce the bias caused by the outlier samples, we generate additional test-class samples by combining original samples with suitable train-class samples via a generative image combiner. Then, we obtain averaged features via an augmentor, which leads to more typical representations through the averaging. We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, e.g., obtaining a test accuracy improvement proportion of around 10\% (e.g., from 46.86\% to 53.28\%) for trained FSL models. Importantly, given pretrained image combiner, our method is training-free for off-the-shelf FSL models, whose performance can be improved without extra datasets nor further training of the models themselves. Codes are publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FSL-Rectifier-4DC4}.

FSL-Rectifier: Rectify Outliers in Few-Shot Learning via Test-Time Augmentation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success across various tasks, but ensuring reliable uncertainty estimates, known as model calibration, is crucial for their safe and effective deployment. Modern DNNs often suffer from overconfidence, leading to miscalibration. We propose a novel post-hoc calibration method called feature clipping (FC) to address this issue. FC involves clipping feature values to a specified threshold, effectively increasing entropy in high calibration error samples while maintaining the information in low calibration error samples. This process reduces the overconfidence in predictions, improving the overall calibration of the model. Our extensive experiments on datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, and models including CNNs and transformers, demonstrate that FC consistently enhances calibration performance. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis that validates the effectiveness of our method. As the first calibration technique based on feature modification, feature clipping offers a novel approach to improving model calibration, showing significant improvements over both post-hoc and train-time calibration methods and pioneering a new avenue for feature-based model calibration.

Feature Clipping for Uncertainty Calibration

Generating high-quality whole-body human object interaction motion sequences is becoming increasingly important in various fields such as animation, VR/AR, and robotics. The main challenge of this task lies in determining the level of involvement of each hand given the complex shapes of objects in different sizes and their different motion trajectories, while ensuring strong grasping realism and guaranteeing the coordination of movement in all body parts. Contrasting with existing work, which either generates human interaction motion sequences without detailed hand grasping poses or only models a static grasping pose, we propose a simple yet effective framework that jointly models the relationship between the body, hands, and the given object motion sequences within a single diffusion model. To guide our network in perceiving the object's spatial position and learning more natural grasping poses, we introduce novel contact-aware losses and incorporate a data-driven, carefully designed guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method and generates plausible whole-body motion sequences. We will release our code upon acceptance.

DiffGrasp: Whole-Body Grasping Synthesis Guided by Object Motion Using a Diffusion Model

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable synthesis quality and  diversity in generating co-speech gestures. However, the computationally intensive sampling steps associated with diffusion models hinder their practicality in real-world applications. Hence,  we present DIDiffGes, for a Decoupled Semi-Implicit Diffusion model-based framework, that can synthesize high-quality, expressive gestures from speech using only a few sampling steps. Our approach leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to enable large-step sampling for diffusion model. We decouple gesture data into body and hands distributions and further decompose them into marginal and conditional distributions. GANs model the marginal distribution implicitly, while L2 reconstruction loss learns the conditional distributions exciplictly. This strategy enhances GAN training stability and ensures expressiveness of generated full-body gestures. Our framework also learns to denoise root noise conditioned on local body representation, guaranteeing stability and realism. DIDiffGes can generate gestures from speech with just 10 sampling steps, without compromising quality and expressiveness, reducing the number of sampling steps by a factor of 100 compared to existing methods. Our user study reveals that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in human likeness, appropriateness, and style correctness.

DIDiffGes: Decoupled Semi-Implicit Diffusion Models for Real-time Gesture Generation from Speech

Nighttime Semantic Segmentation (NSS) is essential to many cutting-edge vision applications. However, existing technologies overly rely on massive labeled data, whose annotation is time-consuming and laborious. In this paper, we pioneer a new task focusing on exploring the potential of training strategy and framework design with limited annotation to achieve a high-performance Nighttime Semantic Segmentation. Insufficient information at very low labeling budgets can easily lead to under-optimization or overfitting of the model. Our solution comprises two main components: i) a novel region-based active sampling strategy called Contextual-Aware Region Query (CARQ), which identifies highly informative target nighttime regions for labeling; and ii) an innovative Fragmentation Synergy Active Domain Adaptation framework (FS-ADA), which progressively broadcasts the limited annotation to the unlabeled regions, achieving high performance with a minimal annotation budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art UDA-NSS and ADA-SS methods across four day-to-nighttime benchmarks, while with strong generalization to foggy, rainy, and snowy scenes. In particular only with 1% target nighttime data annotation, our method is on par with the mainstream fully-supervised methods.

The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast: Extremely Low-Budget, High-Performance Nighttime Semantic Segmentation

Subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) customization has drawn significant interest in academia and industry. This task enables pre-trained models to generate novel images based on unique subjects. Existing studies adopt a self-reconstructive perspective, focusing on capturing all details of a single image, which will misconstrue the specific image's irrelevant attributes (e.g., view, pose, and background) as the subject intrinsic attributes. This misconstruction leads to both overfitting or underfitting of irrelevant and intrinsic attributes of the subject, i.e., these attributes are over-represented or under-represented simultaneously, causing a trade-off between similarity and controllability. In this study, we argue an ideal subject representation can be achieved by a cross-differential perspective, i.e., decoupling subject intrinsic attributes from irrelevant attributes via contrastive learning,  which allows the model to focus more on intrinsic attributes through intra-consistency  (features of the same subject are spatially closer) and inter-distinctiveness (features of different subjects have distinguished differences). Specifically, we propose CustomContrast, a novel framework, which includes a Multilevel Contrastive Learning (MCL) paradigm and a Multimodal Feature Injection (MFI) Encoder. The MCL paradigm is used to extract intrinsic features of subjects from high-level semantics to low-level appearance through crossmodal semantic contrastive learning and multiscale appearance contrastive learning.  To facilitate contrastive learning, we introduce the MFI encoder to capture cross-modal representations. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of CustomContrast in subject similarity and text controllability.

CustomContrast: A Multilevel Contrastive Perspective for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Customization

Geo-entity resolution involves linking records that refer to the same entities across different spatial datasets, which underpins location-based services. Given the varying quality and reliability of geospatial data, this task is known to be challenging, as directly comparing the semantic-centric representations of two entities is no longer reliable. To robustify geo-entity resolution in this context, the main research question is how to effectively extend the current semantics-centric representations of geo-entity with geographical context from its spatial neighbors. Existing methods consider names from neighbor entities, but they struggle to fully utilize the unaligned neighbor attributes. In this paper, we investigate the representation of geographical context for robust geo-entity resolution and propose two adaptations that efficiently leverage unaligned geo-entity attributes across spatial neighbors: (1) A plugin module, namely Unaligned Message-Passing layer (UMP), that propagates unaligned neighbor features to integrate geo-context into the token embeddings output by language model; (2) a contextualized pretraining framework (CP) that allows the former to leverage unlabelled geo-entity data. Experiments show that our method surpasses the baseline methods, achieving higher F1 scores on 8 real-world geo-datasets in terms of robustness, with an improvement of up to 7.9%. The ablation study further justifies our proposal.

Unaligned Message-Passing and Contextualized-Pretraining for Robust Geo-Entity Resolution

Existing learning-based stereo image codec adopt sophisticated transformation with simple entropy models derived from single image codecs to encode latent representations. However, those entropy models struggle to effectively capture the spatial-disparity characteristics inherent in stereo images, which leads to suboptimal rate-distortion results. In this paper, we propose a stereo image compression framework, named CAMSIC. CAMSIC independently transforms each image to latent representation and employs a powerful decoder-free Transformer entropy model to capture both spatial and disparity dependencies, by introducing a novel content-aware masked image modeling (MIM) technique. Our content-aware MIM facilitates efficient bidirectional interaction between prior information and estimated tokens, which naturally obviates the need for an extra Transformer decoder. Experiments show that our stereo image codec achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance on two stereo image datasets Cityscapes and InStereo2K with fast encoding and decoding speed.

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