Canada

Linear Array Pushbroom (LAP) imaging technology is widely used in the realm of remote sensing. However, images acquired through LAP always suffer from distortion and blur because of camera jitter. Traditional methods for restoring LAP images, such as algorithms estimating the point spread function (PSF), exhibit limited performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a Jitter-Aware Restoration Network (JARNet), to remove the distortion and blur in two stages. In the first stage, we formulate an Optical Flow Correction (OFC) block to refine the optical flow of the degraded LAP images, resulting in pre-corrected images where most of the distortions are alleviated. In the second stage, for further enhancement of the pre-corrected images, we integrate two jitter-aware techniques within the Spatial and Frequency Residual (SFRes) block: 1) introducing Coordinate Attention (CoA) to the SFRes block in order to capture the jitter state in orthogonal direction; 2) manipulating image features in both spatial and frequency domains to leverage local and global priors. Additionally, we develop a data synthesis pipeline, which applies Continue Dynamic Shooting Model (CDSM) to simulate realistic degradation in LAP images. Both the proposed JARNet and LAP image synthesis pipeline establish a foundation for addressing this intricate challenge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed two-stage method outperforms state-of-the-art image restoration models. Code is available at https://github.com/JHW2000/JARNet.

AAAI 2024

Deep Linear Array Pushbroom Image Restoration: A Degradation Pipeline and Jitter-Aware Restoration Network

low level & physics-based vision

image & video synthesis

computational photography

technical paper

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.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/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. 

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) such as MiniGPT-4 and LLaVA have demonstrated the capability of understanding images and achieved remarkable performance in various visual tasks. Despite their strong abilities in recognizing common objects due to extensive training datasets, they lack specific domain knowledge and have a weaker understanding of localized details within objects, which hinders their effectiveness in the Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) task. On the other hand, most existing IAD methods only provide anomaly scores and necessitate the manual setting of thresholds to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples, which restricts their practical implementation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of LVLM to address the IAD problem and propose AnomalyGPT, a novel IAD approach based on LVLM. We generate training data by simulating anomalous images and producing corresponding textual descriptions for each image. We also employ an image decoder to provide fine-grained semantic and design a prompt learner to fine-tune the LVLM using prompt embeddings. Our AnomalyGPT eliminates the need for manual threshold adjustments, thus directly assesses the presence and locations of anomalies. Additionally, AnomalyGPT supports multi-turn dialogues and exhibits impressive few-shot in-context learning capabilities. With only one normal shot, AnomalyGPT achieves the state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 86.1%, an image-level AUC of 94.1%, and a pixel-level AUC of 95.3% on the MVTec-AD dataset.

AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models | VIDEO

Depth uncertainty is a core challenge in 3D human pose estimation, especially when the camera parameters are unknown. Previous methods try to reduce the impact of depth uncertainty by multi-view and/or multi-frame feature fusion to utilize more spatial and temporal information. However, they generally lead to marginal improvements and their performance still cannot match the camera-parameter-required methods. The reason is that their handcrafted fusion schemes cannot fuse the features flexibly, e.g., the multi-view and/or multi-frame features are fused separately. Moreover, the diverse and complicated fusion schemes make the principle for developing effective fusion schemes unclear and also raises an open problem that whether there exist more simple and elegant fusion schemes. To address these issues, this paper proposes an extremely concise unified feature fusion transformer (FusionFormer) with minimized handcrafted design for 3D pose estimation. FusionFormer fuses both the multi-view and multi-frame features in a unified fusion scheme, in which all the features are accessible to each other and thus can be fused flexibly.   Experimental results on several mainstream datasets demonstrate that FusionFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. To our best knowledge, this is the first camera-parameter-free method to outperform the existing camera-parameter-required methods, revealing the tremendous potential of camera-parameter-free models. These impressive experimental results together with our concise feature fusion scheme resolve the above open problem. Another appealing feature of FusionFormer we observe is that benefiting from its effective fusion scheme, we can achieve impressive performance with smaller model size and less FLOPs.

FusionFormer: A Concise Unified Feature Fusion Transformer for 3D Pose Estimation

Sequential recommendation is a crucial task in understanding users' evolving interests and predicting their future behaviors.  While existing approaches on sequence or graph modeling to learn interaction sequences of users have shown promising performance, how to effectively exploit temporal information and deal with the uncertainty noise in evolving user behaviors is still quite challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning method for Sequential Recommendation (TGCL4SR) which leverages not only local interaction sequences but also global temporal graphs to comprehend item correlations and analyze user behaviors from a temporal perspective. Specifically, we first devise a Temporal Item Transition Graph (TITG) to fully leverage global interactions to understand item correlations, and augment this graph by dual transformations based on neighbor sampling and time disturbance. Accordingly, we design a Temporal item Transition graph Convolutional network (TiTConv) to capture temporal item transition patterns in TITG. Then, a novel Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning (TGCL) mechanism is designed to enhance the uniformity of representations between augmented graphs from identical sequences. For local interaction sequences, we design a temporal sequence encoder to incorporate time interval embeddings into the architecture of Transformer. At the training stage, we take maximum mean discrepancy and TGCL losses as auxiliary objectives. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness of TGCL4SR against state-of-the-art baselines of sequential recommendation.

Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Animal visual perception is an important technique for automatically monitoring animal health, understanding animal behaviors, and assisting animal-related research. However, it is challenging to design a deep learning-based perception model that can freely adapt to different animals across various perception tasks, due to the varying poses of a large diversity of animals, lacking data on rare species, and the semantic inconsistency of different tasks. We introduce UniAP, a novel Universal Animal Perception model that leverages few-shot learning to enable cross-species perception among various visual tasks. Our proposed model takes support images and labels as prompt guidance for a query image. Images and labels are processed through a Transformer-based encoder and a lightweight label encoder, respectively. Then a matching module is designed for aggregating information between prompt guidance and the query image, followed by a multi-head label decoder to generate outputs for various tasks. By capitalizing on the shared visual characteristics among different animals and tasks, UniAP enables the transfer of knowledge from well-studied species to those with limited labeled data or even unseen species. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UniAP through comprehensive experiments in pose estimation, segmentation, and classification tasks on diverse animal species, showcasing its ability to generalize and adapt to new classes with minimal labeled examples.

UniAP: Towards Universal Animal Perception in Vision via Few-Shot Learning

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and thus contains various quality sentences. Therefore, Wikipedia includes some poor-quality edits, which are often marked up by other editors. While editors' reviews enhance the credibility of Wikipedia, it is hard to check all edited text. Assisting in this process is very important, but a large and comprehensive dataset for studying it does not currently exist. Here, we propose WikiSQE, the first large-scale dataset for sentence quality estimation in Wikipedia. Each sentence is extracted from the entire revision history of English Wikipedia, and the target quality labels were carefully investigated and selected. WikiSQE has about 3.4 M sentences with 153 quality labels. In the experiment with automatic classification using competitive machine learning models, sentences that had problems with citation, syntax/semantics, or propositions were found to be more difficult to detect. In addition, by performing human annotation, we found that the model we developed performed better than the crowdsourced workers. WikiSQE is expected to be a valuable resource for other tasks in NLP.

WikiSQE: A Large-Scale Dataset for Sentence Quality Estimation in Wikipedia

The tradeoff between performance and inference speed is critical for practical applications. Architecture reparameterization obtains better tradeoffs and it is becoming an increasingly popular ingredient in modern convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, its quantization performance is usually too poor to deploy (e.g. more than 20% top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet) when INT8 inference is desired. In this paper, we dive into the underlying mechanism of this failure, where the original design inevitably enlarges quantization error. We propose a simple, robust, and effective remedy to have a quantization-friendly structure that also enjoys reparameterization benefits. Our method greatly bridges the gap between INT8 and FP32 accuracy for RepVGG. Without bells and whistles, the top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet is reduced within 2% by standard post-training quantization. Extensive experiments on detection and semantic segmentation tasks verify its generalization.

Make RepVGG Greater Again: A Quantization-Aware Approach

Existing works on goal recognition design (GRD) consider the underlying domain as a classical planning domain and apply modifications to the domain to minimize the worst case distinctiveness. In this paper, we propose replacing existing modifications with \emph{blocks}, which group several closely related modifications together such that a block can modify a region in the search space with respect to some design constraints. Moreover, there could be blocks within blocks such that the design space becomes hierarchical for modifications at different levels of granularity. We present 1) a new version of pruned-reduce, a successful pruning rule for GRD, for block-level GRD, and 2) a new pruning rule for pruning some branches in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical design space. Our experiments show that searching in hierarchical design spaces greatly speeds up the redesign process.

Block-Level Goal Recognition Design

Cell type identification plays a vital role in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis. Although many deep embedded methods to cluster scRNA-seq data have been proposed, they still fail in elucidating the intrinsic properties of cells and genes. Here, we present a novel end-to-end deep graph clustering model for single-cell transcriptomics data based on unsupervised Gene-cell Collective representation learning and Optimal Transport (scGCOT) which integrates both cell and gene correlations. Specifically, scGCOT learns the latent embedding of cells and genes simultaneously and reconstructs the cell graph, the gene graph, and the gene expression count matrix. A zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model is estimated via the reconstructed count matrix to capture the essential properties of scRNA-seq data. By leveraging the optimal transport-based joint representation alignment, scGCOT learns the clustering process and the latent representations through a mutually supervised self optimization strategy. Extensive experiments with 14 competing methods on 15 real scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate the competitive edges of scGCOT.

Unsupervised Gene-Cell Collective Representation Learning with Optimal Transport | VIDEO

Quantization has emerged as a promising direction for model compression. Recently, data-free quantization has been widely studied as a promising method to avoid privacy concerns, which synthesizes images as an alternative to real training data. Existing methods use classification loss to ensure the reliability of the synthesized images. Unfortunately, even if these images are well-classified by the pre-trained model, they still suffer from low semantics and homogenization issues. Intuitively, these low-semantic images are sensitive to perturbations, and the pre-trained model tends to have inconsistent output when the generator synthesizes an image with low semantics. To this end, we propose Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis (RIS), a simple but effective method to enrich the semantics of synthetic images and improve image diversity, further boosting the performance of data-free compression tasks. Concretely, we first introduce perturbations on input and model weight, then define the inconsistency metrics at feature and prediction levels before and after perturbations. On the basis of inconsistency on two levels, we design a robustness optimization objective to eliminate low-semantic images. Moreover, we also make our approach diversity-aware by forcing the generator to synthesize images with small correlations. With RIS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for various settings on data-free quantization and can be extended to other data-free compression tasks.

Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis for Data-Free Quantization

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

Deep Linear Array Pushbroom Image Restoration: A Degradation Pipeline and Jitter-Aware Restoration Network

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AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models | VIDEO

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