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It is a consensus that small models perform quite poorly under the paradigm of self-supervised contrastive learning. Existing methods usually adopt a large off-the-shelf model to transfer knowledge to the small one via distillation. Despite their effectiveness, distillation-based methods may not be suitable for some resource-restricted scenarios due to the huge computational expenses of deploying a large model. In this paper, we study the issue of training self-supervised small models without distillation signals. We first evaluate the representation spaces of the small models and make two non-negligible observations: (i) the small models can complete the pretext task without overfitting despite their limited capacity and (ii) they universally suffer the problem of over clustering. Then we verify multiple assumptions that are considered to alleviate the over-clustering phenomenon. Finally, we combine the validated techniques and improve the baseline performances of five small architectures with considerable margins, which indicates that training small self-supervised contrastive models is feasible even without distillation signals. The code is available at https://github.com/WOWNICE/ssl-small.

AAAI 2022

On the Efficacy of Small Self-Supervised Contrastive Models without Distillation Signals

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Bias mitigation in machine learning models is imperative, yet challenging. While several approaches have been proposed, one view towards mitigating bias is through adversarial learning. A discriminator is used to identify the bias attributes such as gender, age or race in question. This discriminator is used adversarially to ensure that it cannot distinguish the bias attributes. The main drawback in such a model is that it directly introduces a trade-off with accuracy as the features that the discriminator deems to be sensitive for discrimination of bias could be correlated with classification. In this work we solve the problem. We show that a biased discriminator can actually be used to improve this bias-accuracy tradeoff. Specifically, this is achieved by using a feature masking approach using the discriminator's gradients. We ensure that the features favoured for the bias discrimination are de-emphasized and the unbiased features are enhanced during classification. We show that this simple approach works well to reduce bias as well as improve accuracy significantly. We evaluate the proposed model on standard benchmarks. We improve the accuracy of the adversarial methods while maintaining or even improving the unbiasness and also outperform several other recent methods.

Gradient Based Activations for Accurate Bias-Free Learning

We consider the problem of acquiring causal representations and concepts in a reinforcement learning setting. 
 Our approach defines a causal variable as being both manipulable by a policy, and able to predict the outcome. 
 We thereby obtain a parsimonious causal graph in which interventions occur at the level of policies.
 The approach avoids defining a generative model of the data, prior pre-processing, or learning the transition kernel of the Markov decision process. 
 Instead, causal variables and policies are determined by maximizing a new optimization target inspired by mediation analysis, which differs from the expected return. 
 The maximization is accomplished using a generalization of Bellman's equation which is shown to converge, and the method finds meaningful causal representations in a simulated environment.

Reinforcement Learning of Causal Variables Using Mediation Analysis

Generalizable person re-identification aims to learn a model with only several labeled source domains that can perform well on unseen domains. Without access to the unseen domain, the feature statistics of the batch normalization (BN) layer learned from a limited number of source domains is doubtlessly biased for unseen domain. This would mislead the feature representation learning for unseen domain and deteriorate the generalizaiton ability of the model. In this paper, we propose a novel Debiased Batch Normalization via Gaussian Process approach (GDNorm) for generalizable person re-identification, which models the feature statistic estimation from BN layers as a dynamically self-refining Gaussian process to alleviate the bias to unseen domain for improving the generalization. Specifically, we establish a lightweight model with multiple set of domain-specific BN layers to capture the discriminability of individual source domain, and learn the corresponding parameters of the domain-specific BN layers. These parameters of different source domains are employed to deduce a Gaussian process. We randomly sample several paths from this Gaussian process served as the BN estimations of potential new domains outside of existing source domains, which can further optimize these learned parameters from source domains, and estimate more accurate Gaussian process by them in return, tending to real data distribution. Even without a large number of source domains, GDNorm can still provide debiased BN estimation by using the mean path of the Gaussian process, while maintaining low computational cost during testing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GDNorm effectively improves the generalization ability of the model on unseen domain.

Debiased Batch Normalization via Gaussian Process for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Large deformations of organs, caused by diverse shapes and nonlinear shape changes, pose a significant challenge for medical image registration. Traditional registration methods need to iteratively optimize an objective function via a specific deformation model along with meticulous parameter tuning, but which have limited capabilities in registering images with large deformations. While deep learning-based methods can learn the complex mapping from input images to their respective deformation field, it is regression-based and is prone to be stuck at local minima, particularly when large deformations are involved. To this end, we present Stochastic Planner-Actor-Critic (spac), a novel reinforcement learning-based framework that performs step-wise registration. The key notion is warping a moving image successively by each time step to finally align to a fixed image. Considering that it is challenging to handle high dimensional continuous action and state spaces in the conventional reinforcement learning (RL) framework, we introduce a new concept `Plan' to the standard Actor-Critic model, which is of low dimension and can facilitate the actor to generate a tractable high dimensional action. The entire framework is based on unsupervised training and operates in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate our method on several 2D and 3D medical image datasets, some of which contain large deformations. Our empirical results highlight that our work achieves consistent, significant gains and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Stochastic Planner-Actor-Critic for Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration

Graph neural networks (GNNs), has been widely used for supervised learning tasks in graphs reaching state-of-the-art results. However, little work was dedicated to creating unbiased GNNs, i.e., where the classification is uncorrelated with sensitive attributes, such as race or gender. Some ignore the sensitive attributes or optimize for the criteria of statistical parity for fairness. However, it has been shown that neither approaches ensure fairness, but rather cripple the utility of the prediction task.
In this work, we present a GNN framework that allows optimizing representations for the notion of Equalized Odds fairness criteria. The architecture is composed of three components: (1) a GNN classifier predicting the utility class, (2) a sampler learning the distribution of the sensitive attributes of the nodes given their labels. It generates samples fed into a (3) discriminator that discriminates between true and sampled sensitive attributes using a novel ``permutation loss'' function. Using these components, we train a model to neglect information regarding the sensitive attribute only with respect to its label. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to optimize GNNs for the equalized odds criteria. We evaluate our classifier over several graph datasets and sensitive attributes and show our algorithm reaches state-of-the-art results.

EqGNN: Equalized Node Opportunity in Graphs

Spectral graph convolution is extremely time-consuming for large graphs, thus existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) reconstruct the kernel by a polynomial, which is (almost) fixed. To extract features from the graph data by learning kernels, Low-pass Collaborative Filter Network (LCFN) was proposed as a new paradigm with trainable kernels. However, there are two demerits of LCFN: (1) The hypergraphs in LCFN are constructed by mining 2-hop connections of the user-item bipartite graph, thus 1-hop connections are not used, resulting in serious information loss. (2) LCFN follows the general network structure of GCNs, which is suboptimal. To address these issues, we utilize the bipartite graph to define the graph space directly and explore the best network structure based on experiments. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Codes are available on https://github.com/Wenhui-Yu/LCFN.

Low-Pass Graph Convolutional Network for Recommendation

We focus on the confounding bias between language and location in the visual grounding pipeline, where we find that the bias is the major visual reasoning bottleneck. For example, the grounding process is usually a trivial languagelocation association without visual reasoning, e.g., grounding any language query containing sheep to the nearly central regions, due to that most queries about sheep have ground-truth locations at the image center. First, we frame the visual grounding pipeline into a causal graph, which shows the causalities among image, query, target location and underlying confounder. Through the causal graph, we know how to break the grounding bottleneck: deconfounded visual grounding. Second, to tackle the challenge that the confounder is unobserved in general, we propose a confounder-agnostic approach called: Referring Expression Deconfounder (RED), to remove the confounding bias. Third, we implement RED as a simple language attention, which can be applied in any grounding method. On popular benchmarks, RED improves various state-of-the-art grounding methods by a significant margin. Code is available at: https://github.com/JianqiangH/Deconfounded_VG.

Deconfounded Visual Grounding

Recently, transformer-based image segmentation methods have achieved notable success against previous solutions. While for video domains, how to effectively model temporal context with the attention of object instances across frames remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose an online video instance segmentation framework with a novel instance-aware temporal fusion method. We first leverage the representation, \ie, a latent code in the global context (instance code) and CNN feature maps to represent instance- and pixel-level features. Based on this representation, we introduce a cropping-free temporal fusion approach to model the temporal consistency between video frames. Specifically, we encode global instance-specific information in the instance code and build up inter-frame contextual fusion with hybrid attentions between the instance codes and CNN feature maps. Inter-frame consistency between the instance codes is further enforced with order constraints. By leveraging the learned hybrid temporal consistency, we are able to directly retrieve and maintain instance identities across frames, eliminating the complicated frame-wise instance matching in prior methods. Extensive experiments have been conducted on popular VIS datasets, i.e. Youtube-VIS-19/21. Our model achieves the best performance among all online VIS methods. Notably, our model also eclipses all offline methods when using the ResNet-50 backbone.

Hybrid Instance-Aware Temporal Fusion for Online Video Instance Segmentation

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been attached great importance due to the distinctive properties of low power consumption, biological plausibility, and adversarial robustness. The most effective way to train deep SNNs is through ANN-to-SNN conversion, which have yielded the best performance in deep network structure and large-scale datasets. However, there is a trade-off between accuracy and latency. In order to achieve high precision as original ANNs, a long simulation time is needed to match the firing rate of a spiking neuron with the activation value of an analog neuron, which impedes the practical application of SNN. In this paper, we aim to achieve high-performance converted SNNs with extremely low latency (fewer than 32 time-steps). We start by theoretically analyzing ANN-to-SNN conversion and show that scaling the thresholds does play a similar role as weight normalization. Instead of introducing constraints that facilitate ANN-to-SNN conversion at the cost of model capacity, we applied a more direct way by optimizing the initial membrane potential to reduce the conversion loss in each layer. Besides, we demonstrate that optimal initialization of membrane potentials can implement expected error-free ANN-to-SNN conversion. We evaluate our algorithm on the CIFAR-10 dataset and CIFAR-100 dataset and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, using fewer time-steps. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 93.38% on CIFAR-10 with 16 time-steps. Moreover, our method can be applied to other ANN-SNN conversion methodologies and remarkably promote performance when the time-steps is small.

Optimized Potential Initialization for Low-Latency Spiking Neural Networks

We present Neural Marionette, an unsupervised approach that discovers the skeletal structure from a dynamic sequence and learns to generate diverse motions that are consistent with the observed motion dynamics. Given a video stream of point cloud observation of an articulated body under arbitrary motion, our approach discovers the unknown low-dimensional skeletal relationship that can effectively represent the movement. Then the discovered structure is utilized to encode the motion priors of dynamic sequences in a latent structure, which can be decoded to the relative joint rotations to represent the full skeletal motion. Our approach works without any prior knowledge of the underlying motion or skeletal structure, and we demonstrate that the discovered structure is even comparable to the hand-labeled ground truth skeleton in representing a 4D sequence of motion. The skeletal structure embeds the general semantics of possible motion space that can generate motions for diverse scenarios. We verify that the learned motion prior is generalizable to the multi-modal sequence generation, interpolation of two poses, and motion retargeting to a different skeletal structure.

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Gradient Based Activations for Accurate Bias-Free Learning

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Gradient Based Activations for Accurate Bias-Free Learning

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Collaborative Enhancement of Large and Small Models for Question Answering via Dual Knowledge Transfer

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