United States

Face retouching aims to remove facial imperfections from image and videos while at the same time preserving face attributes. The existing methods are designed to perform non-interactive end-to-end retouching, while the ability to interact with users is highly demanded in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose RetouchGPT, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide the interactive retouching process. Towards this end, we design an instruction-driven imperfection prediction module to accurately identify imperfections by integrating textual and visual features. To learn imperfection prompts, we further incorporate a LLM-based embedding module to fuse multi-modal conditioning information. The prompt-based feature modification is performed in each transformer block, such that the imperfection features are suppressed and replaced with the features of normal skin progressively. Extensive experiments have been performed to verify effectiveness of our design elements and demonstrate that RetouchGPT is a useful tool for interactive face retouching and achieves superior performance over state-of-the-arts.

AAAI 2025

RetouchGPT: LLM-based Interactive High-Fidelity Face Retouching via Imperfection Prompting

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.



Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an approach for solving cognitive information processing and a variety of learning tasks using data represented as high-dimensional vectors. The technique has a rigorous mathematical backing, and is easy to implement in energy-efficient and highly parallel hardware like FPGAs and "processing-in-memory'' architectures. The success of HDC based machine learning approaches is heavily dependent on the mapping of raw data to high-dimensional space. In this work, we propose NysHD, a new method for constructing this mapping that is based on the Nyström method from the literature on kernel approximation. Our approach provides a simple recipe to turn any user-defined positive-semidefinite similarity function into an equivalent mapping in HDC. There is a vast literature on the design of such functions for learning problems.  Our approach provides a mechanism to import them into the HDC setting, expanding the types of problems that can be tackled using HDC. Empirical evaluation against existing HDC encoding methods shows that NysHD can achieve, on average, 11% and 17% better classification accuracy on graph and string datasets respectively.

Bridging the Gap Between Hyperdimensional Computing and Kernel Methods via the Nyström Method

Machine learning (ML) models have been shown to leak private information from their training datasets. Differential Privacy (DP), typically implemented through the differential private stochastic gradient descent algorithm (DP-SGD), has become the standard solution to bound leakage from the models. Despite recent improvements, DP-SGD-based approaches for private learning still usually struggle in the high privacy ($\varepsilon\leq 1$) and low data regimes, and when the private training datasets are imbalanced. To overcome these limitations, we propose Differentially Private Prototype Learning (DPPL) as a new paradigm for private transfer learning. DPPL leverages publicly pre-trained encoders to extract features from private data and generates DP prototypes that represent each private class in the embedding space and can be publicly released for inference. Since our DP prototypes can be obtained from only a few private training data points and without iterative noise addition, they offer high-utility predictions and strong privacy guarantees even under the notion of pure DP. We additionally show that privacy-utility trade-offs can be further improved when leveraging the public data beyond pre-training of the encoder: in particular, we can privately sample our DP prototypes from the publicly available data points used to train the encoder. Our experimental evaluation with four state-of-the-art encoders, four vision datasets, and under different data and imbalancedness regimes demonstrate DPPL's high performance under strong privacy guarantees in challenging private learning setups.

Differentially Private Prototypes for Imbalanced Transfer Learning

Hubs are a few points that frequently appear in the $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) of many other points in a high-dimensional data set.
The hubs' effects, called the *hubness phenomenon*, degrade the performance of $k$NN based models in high dimensions.
We present *SamHub*, a simple sampling approach to efficiently identify hubs with theoretical guarantees. 
Apart from previous works based on approximate $k$NN indexes, SamHub is generic and applicable to any distance measure with negligible additional memory footprint. 
Empirically, by sampling only 10% of points, SamHub runs significantly faster and offers higher accuracy than existing hubness detection methods on many real-world data sets under dot product, L1, L2, and dynamic time warping distances.
Ablation studies of SamHub on improving $k$-NN-based classification show the potential of SamHub for other high-dimensional data analysis tasks.

On Finding Hubs in High Dimensions with Sampling

Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) are primarily based on Transformers. However, existing Transformer-based 3D HPE backbones often encounter a trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. To resolve the above dilemma, in this work, we leverage recent advances in state space models and utilize Mamba for high-quality and efficient long-range modeling. Nonetheless, Mamba still faces challenges in precisely exploiting local dependencies between joints. To address these issues, we propose a new attention-free hybrid spatiotemporal architecture named Hybr**i**d **Ma**mba-**GC**N (Pose Magic). This architecture introduces local enhancement with GCN by capturing relationships between neighboring joints, thus producing new representations to complement Mamba's outputs. By adaptively fusing representations from Mamba and GCN, Pose Magic demonstrates superior capability in learning the underlying 3D structure. To meet the requirements of real-time inference, we also provide a fully causal version. Extensive experiments show that Pose Magic achieves new SOTA results ($\downarrow 0.9 mm$) while saving $74.1\\%$ FLOPs. In addition, Pose Magic exhibits optimal motion consistency and the ability to generalize to unseen sequence lengths.

Pose Magic: Efficient and Temporally Consistent Human Pose Estimation with a Hybrid Mamba-GCN Network

Transferable adversarial examples are known to cause threats in practical, black-box attack scenarios. A notable approach to improving transferability is using integrated gradients (IG), originally developed for model interpretability. In this paper, we find that, however, existing IG-based attacks have limited transferability due to their naive adoption of IG in model interpretability. To address this limitation, we focus on the IG integration path and refine it in three aspects: multiplicity, monotonicity, and diversity, supported by theoretical analyses. We propose the Multiple Monotonic Diversified Integrated Gradients (MuMoDIG) attack, which can generate highly transferable adversarial examples on different CNN and ViT models and defenses. Experimental results validate that MuMoDIG outperforms the latest IG-based attack by up to 37.3\% and other state-of-the-art attacks by 8.4\%. In general, our study reveals that migrating established techniques to improve transferability may require non-trivial efforts.

Improving Integrated Gradient-based Transferable Adversarial Examples by Refining the Integration Path

Incremental object detection (IOD) is a challenging task that requires detection models to continuously learn from newly arriving data. This work focuses on incremental learning for vision-language detectors (VLDs), an under explored domain. Existing research typically adopts a local alignment paradigm to avoid label conflicts, where different tasks are learned separately without interaction. However, we reveal that this practice fails to effectively preserve the semantic structure. Specifically, aligned relationships between objects and texts would collapse when handling novel categories, ultimately leading to catastrophic forgetting. Though knowledge distillation (KD) is a common approach for tackling this, traditional KD performs poorly when directly applied to VLDs, as for different phases, a natural knowledge gap exists in both encoding and decoding processes. To address above issues, we propose a novel method called Global alignment and Correspondence Distillation (GCD). Differently, we first integrate knowledge across phases within the same embedding space to construct global semantic structure. We then enable effective knowledge distillation in VLDs through a semantic correspondence mechanism, ensuring consistent proposal generation and decoding. On the top of that, we distill teacher model’s informative predictions and topological relationships to maintain stable local semantic structure. Extensive experiments on COCO 2017 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving new state-of-the-art in various IOD scenarios.

GCD: Advancing Vision-Language Models for Incremental Object Detection via Global Alignment and Correspondence Distillation

Mesh watermark embeds secret messages in 3D meshes and decodes the message from watermarked meshes for ownership verification. Current watermarking methods directly hide secret messages in vertex and face sets of meshes. However, mesh is a discrete representation that uses vertex and face sets to describe a continuous signal, which can be discretized in other discrete representations with different vertex and face sets. This raises the question of whether the watermark can still be verified on the different discrete representations of the watermarked mesh. We conduct this research in an attack-then-defense manner by proposing a novel function space mesh watermark removal attack FuncEvade and then mitigating it through function space mesh watermarking FuncMark. In detail, FuncEvade generates a different discrete representation of a watermarked mesh by extracting it from the signed distance function of the watermarked mesh. We observe that the generated mesh can evade ALL previous watermarking methods. FuncMark mitigates FuncEvade by watermarking signed distance function through message-guided deformation. Such deformation can survive isosurfacing and thus be inherited by the extracted meshes for further watermark decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FuncEvade achieves 100% evasion rate among all previous watermarking methods while achieving only 0.3% evasion rate on FuncMark. Besides, our FuncMark performs similarly on other metrics compared to state-of-the-art mesh watermarking methods.

Mesh Watermark Removal Attack and Mitigation: A Novel Perspective of Function Space

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer groundbreaking advancements in recommender systems through superior text analysis and decision-making support. However, integrating LLMs into recommender systems still suffers from the problems of  identifier uninterpretability and lack of transparency. To address these issues and fully leverage the capabilities of LLMs, we propose a chain of thought (CoT) based recommendation  framework called CoT4Rec which employs LLMs as data enhancers for user preference analysis. Initially, we design a CoT reasoning strategy that can derive more behaviorally-aligned user preference features by clustering users’ historical interactions. Subsequently, we propose a two-stage recommendation model that not only makes full use of the world knowledge embedded in LLMs but also generates a logically transparent reasoning path. By integrating a user preference analyzer early in the recommendation pipeline, the model deeply analyzes users' historical interactions, helping to enhance the personalization and transparency of the recommender system. CoT4Rec demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models in recommendation tasks across four public datasets, achieving improvements ranging from 2.2% to 12.2%. The source code is available at https://github.com/815382636/CoT4Rec.

CoT4Rec: Revealing User Preferences through Chain of Thought for Recommender Systems

Multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has received considerable attention in recent years. Existing MUFS methods for processing unlabeled incomplete multi-view data, where some samples are missing in certain views, first impute the missing values and then perform feature selection on the completed dataset. However, treating imputation and feature selection as two separate processes overlooks their potential interactions. The graph-guided local structure gleaned from feature selection can aid in imputation, which in turn can enhance the feature selection performance. Additionally, most similarity graph-based MUFS methods suffer from high computational costs. To address these problems, we propose a novel MUFS method, termed Tensorial Incomplete Multi-view unsupErvised Feature Selection (TIME-FS). TIME-FS unifies missing value recovery, discriminative feature selection, and low-dimensional representation learning within a joint framework through matrix decomposition. Then, TIME-FS conducts  CP decomposition on tensor data formed by the low-dimensional representations of different views to learn a consistent anchor graph across views and a view-preference weight matrix, both of which simultaneously guide missing view imputation and feature selection. Furthermore, an efficient algorithm with low time complexity and rapid convergence is proposed to solve TIME-FS. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of TIME-FS over state-of-the-art methods.

TIME-FS: Joint Learning of Tensorial Incomplete Multi-View Unsupervised Feature Selection and Missing-View Imputation

Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising way for accurate session-based recommendation (SBR), but they demand substantial computational time and memory. Knowledge distillation (KD)-based methods can alleviate these issues by transferring the knowledge to a small student, which trains a student based on the predictions of a cumbersome teacher. However, these methods encounter difficulties for LLM-based KD in SBR. 1) It is expensive to make LLMs predict for all instances in KD. 2) LLMs may make ineffective predictions for some instances in KD, e.g., incorrect predictions for hard instances or similar predictions as existing recommenders for easy instances. In this paper, we propose an active LLM-based KD method in SBR, contributing to sustainable AI. To efficiently distill knowledge from LLMs with limited cost, we propose to extract a small proportion of instances predicted by LLMs. Meanwhile, for a more effective distillation, we propose an active learning strategy to extract instances that are as effective as possible for KD from a theoretical view. Specifically, we first formulate gains based on potential effects (e.g., effective, similar, and incorrect predictions by LLMs) and difficulties (e.g., easy or hard to fit) of instances for KD. Then, we propose to maximize the minimal gains of distillation to find the optimal selection policy for active learning, which can largely avoid extracting ineffective instances in KD. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for SBR.

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Bridging the Gap Between Hyperdimensional Computing and Kernel Methods via the Nyström Method

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