United States

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) in the wild has been shown to be beneficial to support improved vision-based text recognition from low-resolution imagery. An intuitive way to enhance STISR performance is to explore the well-structured and repetitive layout characteristics of text and exploit these as prior knowledge to guide model convergence. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based graph attention method to embed patch-wise text layout contexts into image feature representations for high-resolution text image reconstruction in an implicit and elegant manner. We introduce a non-local group-wise attention module to extract text features which are then enhanced by a cascaded channel attention module and a novel gradient-based graph attention module in order to obtain more effective representations by exploring correlations of regional and local patch-wise text layout properties. Extensive experiments on the benchmark TextZoom dataset convincingly demonstrate that our method supports excellent text recognition and outperforms the current state-of-the-art in STISR. The source code is available at https://github.com/xyzhu1/TSAN.

AAAI 2023

Gradient-Based Graph Attention for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

low level & physics-based vision

computer vision

language and vision

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).

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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

Fair classification is an emerging and important research topic in machine learning community. Existing methods usually formulate the fairness metrics as additional inequality constraints, and then embed them into the original objective. This makes fair classification problems unable to be effectively tackled by some solvers specific to unconstrained optimization. Although many new tailored algorithms have been designed to attempt to overcome this limitation, they often increase additional computation burden and cannot cope with all types of fairness metrics. To address these challenging issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method for fair classification. 
Specifically, we theoretically
demonstrate that all types of fairness with linear and non-linear covariance functions can be transferred to two virtual samples, which makes the existing state-of-the-art classification solvers be applicable to these cases. Meanwhile, we  generalize the proposed method to multiple fairness constraints. We take SVM as an example to show the effectiveness of our new idea. 
Empirically, we test the proposed method on real-world datasets and all results confirm its excellent performance.

Faster Fair Machine via Transferring Fairness Constraints to Virtual Samples

Figure skating scoring is challenging because it requires judging players’ technical moves as well as coordination with the background music. Most learning-based methods struggle for two reasons: 1) each move in figure skating changes quickly, hence simply applying traditional frame sampling will lose a lot of valuable information, especially in 3 to 5 minutes lasting videos; 2) prior methods rarely considered the critical audio-visual relationship in their models. Due to these reasons, we introduce a novel architecture, named Skating-Mixer. It extends the MLP framework into a multimodal fashion and effectively learns long-term representations through our designed memory recurrent unit (MRU). Aside from the model, we collected a high-quality audio-visual FS1000 dataset, which contains over 1000 videos on 8 types of programs with 7 different rating metrics, overtaking other datasets in both quantity and diversity. Experiments show the proposed method achieves SOTAs over all major metrics on the public Fis-V and our FS1000 dataset. In addition, we include an analysis applying our method to the recent competitions in Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, proving our method has strong applicability.

Skating-Mixer: Long-term Sport Audio-Visual Modeling with MLPs

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) aims to detect action instances given only video-level labels. To address the challenge, recent methods commonly employ a two-branch framework, consisting of a class-aware branch and a class-agnostic branch. In principle, the two branches are supposed to produce the same actionness activation. However, we observe that there are actually many inconsistent activation regions. These inconsistent regions usually contain some challenging segments whose semantic information (action or background) is ambiguous. In this work, we propose a novel Actionness Inconsistency-guided Contrastive Learning (AICL) method which utilizes the consistent segments to boost the representation learning of the inconsistent segments. Specifically, we first define the consistent and inconsistent segments by comparing the predictions of two branches and then construct positive and negative pairs between consistent segments and inconsistent segments for contrastive learning. In addition, to avoid the trivial case where there is no consistent sample, we introduce an action consistency constraint to control the difference between the two branches. We conduct extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.2, and ActivityNet v1.3 datasets, and the results show the effectiveness of AICL with state-of-the-art performance.

Actionness Inconsistency-guided Contrastive Learning for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

Research in model-based reinforcement learning has made significant progress in recent years. Compared to single-agent settings, the exponential dimension growth of the joint state-action space in multi-agent systems dramatically increases the complexity of the environment dynamics, which makes it infeasible to learn an accurate global model and thus necessitates the use of agent-wise local models. However, during multi-step model rollouts, the prediction of one local model can affect the predictions of other local models in the next step. As a result, local prediction errors can be propagated to other localities and eventually give rise to considerably large global errors. Furthermore, since the models are generally used to predict for multiple steps, simply minimizing one-step prediction errors regardless of their long-term effect on other models may further aggravate the propagation of local errors. To this end, we propose Models as AGents (MAG), a multi-agent model optimization framework that reversely treats the local models as multi-step decision making agents and the current policies as the dynamics during the model rollout process. In this way, the local models are able to consider the multi-step mutual affect between each other before making predictions. Theoretically, we show that the objective of MAG is approximately equivalent to maximizing a lower bound of the true environment return. Experiments on the challenging StarCraft II benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of MAG.

Models as Agents: Optimizing Multi-Step Predictions of Interactive Local Models in Model-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

With the increases in computational power and advances in machine learning, data-driven learning-based methods have gained significant attention in solving PDEs. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged and succeeded in various forward and inverse PDE problems thanks to their excellent properties, such as flexibility, mesh-free solutions, and unsupervised training. However, their slower convergence speed and relatively inaccurate solutions often limit their broader applicability in many science and engineering domains. This paper proposes a new kind of data-driven PDEs solver, physics-informed cell representations (PIXEL), elegantly combining classical numerical methods and learning-based approaches. We adopt a grid structure from the numerical methods to improve accuracy and convergence speed and overcome the spectral bias presented in PINNs. Moreover, the proposed method enjoys the same benefits in PINNs, e.g., using the same optimization frameworks to solve both forward and inverse PDE problems and readily enforcing PDE constraints with modern automatic differentiation techniques. We provide experimental results on various challenging PDEs that the original PINNs have struggled with and show that PIXEL achieves fast convergence speed and high accuracy. Project page: https://namgyukang.github.io/PIXEL/

PIXEL: Physics-Informed Cell Representations for Fast and Accurate PDE Solvers

Next POI recommendation plays an important role of the movement trajectory prediction task, and is at the core of various location applications. It predicts user's next location by combining the historical trajectory information. Most existing methods directly use historical trajectory to construct various graphs to assist sequential models to complete this task. However, due to the extremely sparsity in users' check-in data, it is difficult to capture the potential relations between POIs by directly using these check-in data. To this end, we propose SNPM (Sequence-based Neighbour search and Prediction Model). In this model, the RotatE knowledge graph embedding and spectral clustering methods are used to extract the relationships implied in check-in data between POIs, and construct the POI similarity graph. Further,we enhance the model's generalized representation of POI's general features by aggregating similar POI. Considering that the context is typically rich and valuable when making Next POI predictions, the sequence model selects which POIs to aggregate not only depends on the current state, but also needs to consider the previous location sequence. Therefore, we pre-train a sequence-based, dynamic neighbor search model (SDNS) to find the Similarity Neighbourhood and proposed a multi-step dependency prediction Model (MSDP) inspired by RotatE, which explicts leverage information from previous states. We evaluate our proposed model on two real world datasets and the experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms existing solutions.

Next POI Recommendation with Dynamic Graph and Explicit Dependency

Cold-start problem is one of the most challenging problems for recommender systems. One promising solution to this problem is cross-domain recommendation (CDR) which leverages rich information from an auxiliary source domain to improve the performance of recommender system in the target domain. In particular, the family of embedding and mapping methods for CDR is very effective, which explicitly learn a mapping function from source embeddings to target embeddings to transfer user’s preferences. Recent works usually transfer an overall source embedding by modeling a common or personalized preference bridge for all users. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user’s multiple interests in auxiliary source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called reinforced multi-interest transfer for CDR (REMIT). Specifically, we first construct a heterogeneous information network and employ different meta-path based aggregations to get user’s multiple interests in source domain, then transform different interest embeddings with different meta-generated personalized bridge functions for each user. To better coordinate the transformed user interest embeddings and the item embedding in target domain, we systematically develop a reinforced method to dynamically assign weights to transformed interests for different training instances and optimize the performance of target model. In addition, the REMIT is a general framework that can be applied upon various base models in target domain. Our extensive experimental results on large real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance and compatibility of REMIT.

REMIT: Reinforced Multi-Interest Transfer for Cross-domain Recommendation

Reconstructing a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from several multi-exposed Low Dynamic Range images is a challenging task, especially in the presence of camera motion and object motion. Though existing models using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made much progress, challenges still exist, e.g., ghosting effects. Transformers, originating from the natural language processing field, have shown success in computer vision tasks, thanks to their ability to address a large receptive field even within a single layer. In this paper, we propose a Transformer model for HDR imaging. Our pipeline includes three steps: alignment, reconstruction, and enhancement. The key component is the HDR transformer module. Through experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins on several popular public datasets.

Improving Dynamic HDR Imaging with Fusion Transformer

The Extract-generate framework has been a classic approach for text summarization. As pretrained language models struggling with long-input summarization for their high memory cost, extract-generate framework regains researchers' interests. However, the cost of its effectiveness in dealing with long-input summarization is the loss of context information. In this paper, we present a context-aware extract-generate framework (CAEG) for long-input text summarization. It focuses on preserving both local and global context information in an extract-generate framework with little cost, and can be applied to most of existing extract-generate summarization models. CAEG generates a set of context-related text spans called context prompts for each text snippet and use them to transfer the context information from the extractor and generator. To find such context prompts, we propose to capture the context information based on the interpretation of the extractor, where the text spans having the highest contribution to the extraction decision are considered as containing the richest context information. We evaluate our approach on both long-document and long-dialogue summarization datasets: arXiv and QMSum. The experiment results show that CAEG achieves the-state-of-art result on QMSum and outperforms other extract-generate based models in arXiv. 

Preserve Context Information for Extract-Generate Long-Input Summarization Framework

Despite the remarkable progress of image captioning, existing captioners typically lack the controllable capability to generate desired image captions, e.g., describing the image in a rough or detailed manner, in a factual or emotional view, etc. In this paper, we show that a unified model is qualified to perform well in diverse domains and freely switch among multiple styles. Such a controllable capability is achieved by embedding the prompt learning into the image captioning framework. To be specific, we design a set of prompts to fine-tune the pre-trained image captioner. These prompts allow the model to absorb stylized data from different domains for joint training, without performance degradation in each domain. Furthermore, we optimize the prompts with learnable vectors in the continuous word embedding space, avoiding the heuristic prompt engineering and meanwhile exhibiting superior performance. In the inference stage, our model is able to generate desired stylized captions by choosing the corresponding prompts. Extensive experiments verify the controllable capability of the proposed method. Notably, we achieve outstanding performance on two diverse image captioning benchmarks including COCO Karpathy split and TextCaps using a unified model.

Gradient-Based Graph Attention for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

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Faster Fair Machine via Transferring Fairness Constraints to Virtual Samples

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