United States

Deep metric learning aims to learn a feature space that models the similarity between images, and feature normalization is a critical step for boosting performance. However directly optimizing L2-normalized softmax loss cause the network to fail to converge. Therefore some SOTA approaches appends a scale layer after the inner product to relieve the convergence problem, but it incurs a new problem that it’s difficult to learn the best scaling parameters. In this letter, we look into the characteristic of softmax-based approaches and propose a novel learning objective function Stop-Gradient Softmax Loss (SGSL) to solve the convergence problem in softmax-based deep metric learning with L2-normalization. In addition, we found a useful trick named Remove the last BN-ReLU (RBR). It removes the last BN-ReLU in the backbone to reduce the learning burden of the model. Experimental results on four public image retrieval benchmarks show that our proposed approach outperforms most existing approaches, i.e., our approach achieves 76.4% on CUB-200-2011 and 94.7% on
CARS196 which outperforms other approaches at least 4.2% and 4.6% on Recall@1.

AAAI 2023

Stop-Gradient Softmax Loss for Deep Metric Learning

image retrival

softmax

metric learning

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/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.

Images taken in low light conditions typically contain distracting noise, and eliminating such noise is a crucial computer vision problem. Additional photos captured with a camera flash can guide an image denoiser to preserve edges since the flash images often contain fine details with reduced noise. Nonetheless, a denoiser can be misled by inconsistent flash images, which have image structures (e.g., edges) that do not exist in no-flash images. Unfortunately, this disparity frequently occurs as the flash/no-flash pairs are taken in different light conditions. We propose a learning-based technique that robustly fuses the image pairs while considering their inconsistency. Our framework infers consistent flash image patches locally, which have similar image structures with the ground truth, and denoises no-flash images using the inferred ones via a combination model. We demonstrate that our technique can produce more robust results than state-of-the-art methods, given various flash/no-flash pairs with inconsistent image structures. The source code is available at https://github.com/CGLab-GIST/RIDFnF.

Robust Image Denoising of No-Flash Images Guided by Consistent Flash Images

Image harmonization aims to produce visually harmonious composite images by adjusting the foreground appearance to be compatible with the background. When the composite image has photographic foreground and painterly background, the task is called painterly image harmonization. There are only few works on this task, which are either time-consuming or weak in generating well-harmonized results. In this work, we propose a novel painterly harmonization network consisting of a dual-domain generator and a dual-domain discriminator, which harmonizes the composite image in both spatial domain and frequency domain. The dual-domain generator performs harmonization by using AdaIN modules in the spatial domain and our proposed ResFFT modules in the frequency domain. The dual-domain discriminator attempts to distinguish the inharmonious patches based on the spatial feature and frequency feature of each patch, which can enhance the ability of generator in an adversarial manner. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of our method.

Painterly Image Harmonization in Dual Domains

We propose a novel complete algorithm for multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) called lazy constraints addition search for MAPF (LaCAM). MAPF is a problem of finding collision-free paths for multiple agents on graphs and is the foundation of multi-robot coordination. LaCAM uses a two-level search to find solutions quickly, even with hundreds of agents or more. At the low-level, it searches constraints about agents' locations. At the high-level, it searches a sequence of all agents' locations, following the constraints specified by the low-level. Our exhaustive experiments reveal that LaCAM is comparable to or outperforms state-of-the-art sub-optimal MAPF algorithms in a variety of scenarios, regarding success rate, planning time, and solution quality of sum-of-costs.

LaCAM: Search-Based Algorithm for Quick Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Recommender systems have been widely used in recent years. By exploiting historical user-item interactions, recommender systems can model personalized potential interests of users and have been widely applied to a wide range of scenarios. Despite the impressive performance, most of them may be subject to unwanted biases related to sensitive attributes (e.g., race and gender), leading to unfairness. An intuitive idea to alleviate this problem is to ensure that there is no mutual information between recommendation results and sensitive attributes. However, keeping independence conditions solely achieves fairness improvement while causing an obvious degradation of recommendation accuracy, which is not a desired result. To this end, in this paper, we re-define recommendation fairness with a novel two-fold mutual information objective. In concerned details, we define fairness as mutual information minimization between embeddings and sensitive information, and mutual information maximization between embeddings and non-sensitive information. Then, a flexible \textbf{Fair}  \textbf{M}utual \textbf{I}nformation (\textbf{FairMI}) framework is designed to achieve this goal. FairMI first employs a sensitive attribute encoder to capture sensitive information in the data. Then, based on results from the sensitive attribute encoder, an interest encoder is developed to generate sensitive-free  embeddings, which is expected to contain rich non-sensitive information of input data.Moreover, we propose novel mutual information (upper/lower) bounds with contrastive information estimation for model optimization. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FairMI in reducing unfairness and improving recommendation accuracy simultaneously.

Fair Representation Learning for Recommendation: A Mutual Information Perspective

Most existing methods realize 3D instance segmentation by extending those models used for 3D object detection or 3D semantic segmentation. However, these non-straightforward methods suffer from two drawbacks: 1) Imprecise bounding boxes or unsatisfactory semantic predictions limit the performance of the overall 3D instance segmentation framework. 2) Existing method requires a time-consuming intermediate step of aggregation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end 3D instance segmentation method based on Superpoint Transformer, named as SPFormer. It groups potential features from point clouds into superpoints, and directly predicts instances through query vectors without relying on the results of object detection or semantic segmentation. The key step in this framework is a novel query decoder with transformers that can capture the instance information through the superpoint cross-attention mechanism and generate the superpoint masks of the instances. Through bipartite matching based on superpoint masks, SPFormer can implement the network training without the intermediate aggregation step, which accelerates the network. Extensive experiments on ScanNetv2 and S3DIS benchmarks verify that our method is concise yet efficient. Notably, SPFormer exceeds compared state-of-the-art methods by 4.3% on ScanNetv2 hidden test set in terms of mAP and keeps fast inference speed (247ms per frame) simultaneously. Code is available at https://github.com/sunjiahao1999/SPFormer.

Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation

Multivariate time series (MTS) analysis and forecasting are crucial in many real-world applications, such as smart traffic management and weather forecasting. However, most existing work either focuses on short sequence forecasting or makes predictions predominantly with time domain features, which is not effective at removing noises with irregular frequencies in MTS. Therefore, we propose WaveForM, an end-to-end graph enhanced Wavelet learning framework for long sequence FORecasting of MTS. WaveForM first utilizes Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to represent MTS in the wavelet domain, which captures both frequency and time domain features with a sound theoretical basis. To enable the effective learning in the wavelet domain, we further propose a graph constructor, which learns a global graph to represent the relationships between MTS variables, and graph-enhanced prediction modules, which utilize dilated convolution and graph convolution to capture the correlations between time series and predict the wavelet coefficients at different levels. Extensive experiments on five real-world forecasting datasets show that our model can achieve considerable performance improvement over different prediction lengths against the most competitive baseline of each dataset.

WaveForM: Graph Enhanced Wavelet Learning for Long Sequence Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series

Learning a categorical distribution comes with its own set of challenges. A successful approach taken by state-of-the-art works is to cast the problem in a continuous domain to take advantage of the impressive performance of the generative models for continuous data. Amongst them are the recently emerging diffusion probabilistic models, which have the observed advantage of generating high-quality samples. Recent advances for categorical generative models have focused on log likelihood improvements. In this work, we propose a generative model for categorical data based on diffusion models with a focus on high-quality sample generation, and propose sampled-based evaluation methods. The efficacy of our method stems from performing diffusion in the continuous domain while having its parameterization informed by the structure of the categorical nature of the target distribution. Our method of evaluation highlights the capabilities and limitations of different generative models for generating categorical data, and includes experiments on synthetic and real-world protein datasets.

Diffusing Gaussian Mixtures for Generating Categorical Data

This paper addresses zero-shot slot filling, which tries to build a system that can generalize to unseen slot types without any training data. The key to zero-shot slot-filling is to match the tokens from the utterance with the semantic definition of the slot without training data in the target domain. This paper tackles this problem by devising a scheme to fully leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs). To this end, we propose a new prompting scheme that utilizes both learnable tokens and slot names to guide the model to focus on the relevant text spans for a given slot. Furthermore, we use attention values between tokens to form a feature descriptor for each token, which is motivated by the fact that the attention value in a PLM naturally characterizes various relationships, e.g., syntactic or semantic, between tokens. By further consolidating those features with an additional transformer-based aggregation module, we create a simple-but-effective zero-shot slot filling system that can achieve significantly better performance than the previous methods, as demonstrated by our experimental studies.

Zero-shot Slot Filling with Slot-Prefix Prompting and Attention Relationship Descriptor

We propose a new paradigm for Belief Change in which the new information is represented as sets of models, while the agent's body of knowledge is represented as a finite set of formulae, that is, a finite base. The focus on finiteness is crucial when we consider limited agents and reasoning algorithms. Moreover, having the input as arbitrary set of models is more general than the usual treatment of formulas as input. In this setting, we define new Belief Change operations akin to traditional expansion and contraction, and we identify the rationality postulates that emerge due to the finite representability requirement. We also analyse different logics concerning compatibility with our framework.

Finite Based Contraction and Expansion via Models

An evaluation criterion for safe and trustworthy deep learning is how well the invariances captured by representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) are shared with humans. We identify challenges in measuring these invariances. Prior works used gradient-based methods to generate identically represented inputs (IRIs), ie, inputs which have identical representations (on a given layer) of a neural network, and thus capture invariances of a given network. One necessary criterion for a network's invariances to align with human perception is for its IRIs look 'similar' to humans. Prior works, however, have mixed takeaways; some argue that later layers of DNNs do not learn human-like invariances (\cite{jenelle2019metamers}) yet others seem to indicate otherwise (\cite{mahendran2014understanding}). We argue that the loss function used to generate IRIs can heavily affect takeaways about invariances of the network and is the primary reason for these conflicting findings. We propose an adversarial regularizer on the IRI generation loss that finds IRIs that make any model appear to have very little shared invariance with humans. Based on this evidence, we argue that there is scope for improving models to have human-like invariances, and further, to have meaningful comparisons between models one should use IRIs generated using the regularizer-free loss. We then conduct an in-depth investigation of how different components (eg architectures, training losses, data augmentations) of the deep learning pipeline contribute to learning models that have good alignment with humans. We find that architectures with residual connections trained using a (self-supervised) contrastive loss with $\ell_p$ ball adversarial data augmentation tend to learn invariances that are most aligned with humans. Code: github.com/nvedant07/Human-NN-Alignment

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Robust Image Denoising of No-Flash Images Guided by Consistent Flash Images

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Self-Adjust Softmax

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