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AAAI 2023

THMA: Tencent HD map AI System for Creating HD Map Annotations

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sensor networks & smart cities

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cv: vision for robotics & autonomous driving

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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. 
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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

Low-light video enhancement (LLVE) is an important yet challenging task with many applications such as photographing and autonomous driving. Unlike single image low-light enhancement, most LLVE methods utilize temporal information from adjacent frames to restore the color and remove the noise of the target frame. However, these algorithms, based on the framework of multi-frame alignment and enhancement, may produce multi-frame fusion artifacts when encountering extreme low light or fast motion. In this paper, inspired by the low latency and high dynamic range of events, we use synthetic events from multiple frames to guide the enhancement and restoration of low-light videos. Our method contains three stages: 1) event synthesis and enhancement, 2) event and image fusion, and 3) low-light enhancement. In this framework, we design two novel modules (event-image fusion transform and event-guided dual branch) for the second and third stages, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing low-light video or single image enhancement approaches on both synthetic and real LLVE datasets.

Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance

Existing space-time video super-resolution (ST-VSR) methods fail to achieve high-quality reconstruction since they fail to fully explore the spatial-temporal correlations, long-range components in particular. Although the recurrent structure for ST-VSR adopts bidirectional propagation to aggregate information from the entire video, collecting the temporal information between the past and future via one-stage representations inevitably loses the long-range relations. To alleviate the limitation, this paper proposes an immediate storeand-fetch network to promote long-range correlation learning, where the stored information from the past and future can be refetched to help the representation of the current
frame. Specifically, the proposed network consists of two modules: a backward recurrent module (BRM) and a forward recurrent module (FRM). The former first performs backward inference from future to past, while storing future super-resolution (SR) information for each frame. Following that, the latter performs forward inference from past to future to super-resolve all frames, while storing past SR information for each frame. Since FRM inherits SR information from BRM, therefore, spatial and temporal information from the entire video sequence is immediately stored and fetched, which allows drastic improvement for ST-VSR. Extensive experiments both on ST-VSR and space video super-resolution
(S-VSR) as well as time video super-resolution (T-VSR) have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.

Store and Fetch Immediately: Everything Is All You Need for Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

In this paper, we propose Stochastic Knowledge Distillation (SKD) to obtain compact BERT-style language model dubbed SKDBERT. In each distillation iteration, SKD samples a teacher model from a pre-defined teacher team, which consists of multiple teacher models with multi-level capacities, to transfer knowledge into student model in an one-to-one manner. Sampling distribution plays an important role in SKD. We heuristically present three types of sampling distributions to assign appropriate probabilities for multi-level teacher models. SKD has two advantages: 1) it can preserve the diversities of multi-level teacher models via stochastically sampling single teacher model in each distillation iteration, and 2) it can also improve the efficacy of knowledge distillation via multi-level teacher models when large capacity gap exists between the teacher model and the student model. Experimental results on GLUE benchmark show that SKDBERT reduces the size of a BERT$_{\rm BASE}$ model by 40% while retaining 99.5% performances of language understanding and being 100% faster. 

SKDBERT: Compressing BERT via Stochastic Knowledge Distillation

Given a set X of n points in a metric space, the problem of diversity maximization is to extract a set S of k points from X so that the diversity of S is maximized. This problem is essential in AI-related fields, such as web search, databases, recommender systems, and data mining. Although there have been extensive studies of this problem, these studies assume that X is clean. This usually does not hold, because real-world datasets usually contain outliers. The state-of-the-art algorithm for the diversity maximization problem is based on furthest point retrieval, which is too sensitive to outliers. We therefore address the problem of diversity maximization with outliers and propose two algorithms with performance guarantee. The first algorithm runs in O((k+z)n) time, guarantees 1/2-approximation, and returns no outliers, where z is the number of outliers. The second algorithm runs in O(kz) time (which is independent of n), guarantees 1/6(1+epsilon)-approximation, and returns no outliers with constant probability. We conduct experiments on real datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.

Diversity Maximization in the Presence of Outliers

Few-shot object detection, expecting detectors to detect novel classes with a few instances, has made conspicuous progress. However, the prototypes extracted by existing meta-learning based methods still suffer from insufficient representative information and lack awareness of query images, which cannot be adaptively tailored to different query images. Firstly, only the support images are involved for extracting prototypes, resulting in scarce perceptual information of query images. Secondly, all pixels of all support images are treated equally when aggregating features into prototype vectors, thus the salient objects are overwhelmed by the cluttered background. In this paper, we propose an Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration (ICPE) method to generate specific and representative prototypes for each query image. Concretely, a conditional information coupling module is introduced to couple information from the query branch to the support branch, strengthening the query-perceptual information in support features. Besides, we design a prototype dynamic aggregation module that dynamically adjusts intra-image and inter-image aggregation weights to highlight the salient information useful for detecting query images. Experimental results on both Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in almost all settings.

Breaking Immutable: Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration for Few-Shot Object Detection

We offer a method for one-shot mask-guided image synthesis that allows controlling manipulations of a single image by inverting a quasi-robust classifier equipped with strong regularizers. Our proposed method, entitled MAGIC, leverages structured gradients from a pre-trained quasi-robust classifier to better preserve the input semantics while preserving its classification accuracy, thereby guaranteeing credibility in the synthesis.
Unlike current methods that use complex primitives to supervise the process or use attention maps as a weak supervisory signal, MAGIC aggregates gradients over the input, driven by a guide binary mask that enforces a strong, spatial prior. MAGIC implements a series of manipulations with a single framework achieving shape and location control, intense non-rigid shape deformations, and copy/move operations in the presence of repeating objects and gives users firm control over the synthesis by requiring to simply specify binary guide masks. 
Our study and findings are supported by various qualitative comparisons with the state-of-the-art on the same images sampled from ImageNet and quantitative analysis using machine perception along with a user survey of 100+ participants that endorse our synthesis quality.

MAGIC: Mask-Guided Image Synthesis by Inverting a Quasi-Robust Classifier

Generalizing a deep learning model to new domains is crucial for computer-aided medical diagnosis systems. Most existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods have made significant progress in reducing the domain distribution gap through adversarial training. However, these methods may still produce overconfident but erroneous results on unseen target images. This paper proposes a new unsupervised domain adaptation framework for cross-modality medical image segmentation. Specifically, We first introduce two data augmentation approaches to generate two sets of semantics-preserving augmented images. Based on the model's predictive consistency on these two sets of augmented images, we identify reliable and unreliable pixels. We then perform a selective entropy constraint: we minimize the entropy of reliable pixels to increase their confidence while maximizing the entropy of unreliable pixels to reduce their confidence. Based on the identified reliable and unreliable pixels, we further propose an adaptive semantic alignment module which performs class-level distribution adaptation by minimizing the distance between same class prototypes between domains, where unreliable pixels are removed to derive more accurate prototypes. We have conducted extensive experiments on the cross-modality cardiac structure segmentation task. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison algorithms. Our code will be released soon.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation by Selective Entropy Constraints and Adaptive Semantic Alignment

Most of the recent research in semi-supervised object detection follows the pseudo-labeling paradigm evolved from the semi-supervised image classification task. However, the training paradigm of the two-stage object detector inevitably makes the pseudo-label learning process for unlabeled images full of bias. Specifically, the IoU matching scheme used for selecting and labeling candidate boxes is based on the assumption that the matching source~(ground truth) is accurate enough in terms of the number of objects, object position and object category. Obviously, pseudo-labels generated for unlabeled images cannot satisfy such a strong assumption, which makes the produced training proposals extremely unreliable and thus severely spoil the follow-up training. To de-bias the training proposals generated by the pseudo-label-based IoU matching, we propose a general framework -- De-biased Teacher, which abandons both the IoU matching and pseudo labeling processes by directly generating favorable training proposals for consistency regularization between the weak/strong augmented image pairs. Moreover, a distribution-based refinement scheme is designed to eliminate the scattered class predictions of significantly low values for higher efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed De-biased Teacher consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Source codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/De-biased-Teracher.

De-biased Teacher: Rethinking IoU Matching for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Generation-based methods have captured most of the recent attention in Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) research. However, existing literature ignores the core of this type of method and brings limited improvements in a tortuous way. In this paper, we attempt to deconstruct the generator-classifier framework and provide guidance for its improvement and extension. We first decompose the generator-learned unseen class distribution into class-level distribution and instance-level distribution. By empirically analyzing the role of these two types of distributions in solving the GZSL problem, we generalize the focus of the generation-based approach as (i) Generator learning upon attribute generalization; and (ii) learning classifier with partly biased data. We propose a simple method based on the analysis. Without complex designs, the proposed method outperforms SotAs on four public ZSL datasets, demonstrating the validity of the proposed deconstruction. The proposed method is still effective even without a generative model, which is a step toward simplifying the generator-classifier structure. Codes are available on https://github.com/cdb342/DGZ.

Deconstructed Generation-Based Zero-Shot Model

Missing values are unavoidable in many applications of machine learning and present challenges both during training and at test time. When variables are missing in recurring patterns, fitting separate pattern submodels have been proposed as a solution. However, fitting models independently does not make efficient use of all available data. Conversely, fitting a single shared model to the full data set relies on imputation which often leads to biased results when missingness depends on unobserved factors. We propose an alternative approach, called sharing pattern submodels, which i) makes predictions that are robust to missing values at test time, ii) maintains or improves the predictive power of pattern submodels, and iii) has a short description, enabling improved interpretability. Parameter sharing is enforced through sparsity-inducing regularization which we prove leads to consistent estimation. Finally, we give conditions for when a sharing model is optimal, even when both missingness and the target outcome depend on unobserved variables. Classification and regression experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that our models achieve a favorable tradeoff between pattern specialization and information sharing.

THMA: Tencent HD map AI System for Creating HD Map Annotations

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