Canada

Variational quantum algorithm (VQA) derives advantages from its error resilience and high flexibility in quantum resource requirements, rendering it broadly applicable in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era. As the performance of VQA highly relies on the structure of the parameterized quantum circuit, it is worthwhile to propose quantum architecture search (QAS) algorithms to automatically search for high-performance circuits. Nevertheless, existing QAS methods are time-consuming, requiring circuit training to assess circuit performance. This study pioneers training-free QAS by utilizing two training-free proxies to rank quantum circuits, in place of the expensive circuit training employed in conventional QAS. Taking into account the precision and computational overhead of the path-based and expressibility-based proxies, we devise a two-stage progressive training-free QAS (TF-QAS). Initially, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are employed for circuit representation, and a zero-cost proxy based on the number of paths in the DAG is designed to filter out a substantial portion of unpromising circuits. Subsequently, an expressibility-based proxy, finely reflecting circuit performance, is employed to identify high-performance circuits from the remaining candidates. These proxies evaluate circuit performance without circuit training, resulting in a remarkable reduction in computational cost compared to current training-based QAS methods. Simulations on three VQE tasks demonstrate that TF-QAS achieves a substantial enhancement of sampling efficiency ranging from 5 to 57 times compared to state-of-the-art QAS, while also being 6 to 17 times faster.

AAAI 2024

Training-Free Quantum Architecture Search

quantum architecture search

variational quantum algorithm

quantum machine learning

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. 

Crime prediction is a crucial yet challenging task within urban computing, which benefits public safety and resource optimization. Over the years, various models have been proposed, and spatial-temporal hypergraph learning models have recently shown outstanding performances. However, three correlations underlying crime are ignored, thus hindering the performance of previous models. Specifically, there are two spatial correlations and one temporal correlation, i.e., (1) co-occurrence of different types of crimes (type spatial correlation), (2) the closer to the crime center, the more dangerous it is around the neighborhood area (neighbor spatial correlation), and (3) the closer between two timestamps, the more relevant events are (hawkes temporal correlation). To this end, we propose Hawkes-enhanced Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Contrastive Learning framework (HCL), which mines the aforementioned correlations via two specific strategies. Concretely, contrastive learning strategies are designed for two spatial correlations, and hawkes process modeling is adopted for temporal correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising capacities of HCL from four aspects, i.e., superiority, transferability, effectiveness, and sensitivity.

Hawkes-Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Contrastive Learning Based on Criminal Correlations

Learning correspondences aims to find correct correspondences (inliers) from the initial correspondence set with an uneven correspondence distribution and a low inlier rate, which can be regarded as graph data. Recent advances usually use graph neural networks (GNNs) to build a single type of graph or simply stack local graphs into the global one to complete the task. But they ignore the complementary relationship between different types of graphs, which can effectively capture potential relationships among sparse correspondences. To address this problem, we propose MGNet to effectively combine multiple complementary graphs. To obtain information integrating implicit and explicit local graphs, we construct local graphs from implicit and explicit aspects and combine them effectively, which is used to build a global graph. Moreover, we propose Graph Soft Degree Attention (GSDA) to make full use of all sparse correspondence information at once in the global graph, which can capture and amplify discriminative features.  Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in different visual tasks. The code is provided in https://github.com/DAILUANYUAN/MGNet-2024AAAI.

MGNet: Learning Correspondences via Multiple Graphs

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to transfer knowledge from seen state-object pairs to novel unseen pairs. In this process, visual bias caused by the diverse interrelationship of state-object combinations blurs their visual features, hindering the learning of distinguishable class prototypes. Prevailing methods concentrate on disentangling states and objects directly from visual features, disregarding potential enhancements that could arise from a data viewpoint. Experimentally, we unveil the results caused by the above problem closely approximate the long-tailed distribution. As a solution, we transform CZSL into a proximate class imbalance problem. We mathematically deduce the role of class prior within the long-tailed distribution in CZSL. Building upon this insight, we incorporate visual bias caused by compositions into the classifier's training and inference by estimating it as a proximate class prior. This enhancement encourages the classifier to acquire more discernible class prototypes for each composition, thereby achieving more balanced predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach elevates the model's performance to the state-of-the-art level, without introducing additional parameters.

Revealing the Proximate Long-Tail Distribution in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Video instance segmentation on mobile devices is an important yet very challenging edge AI problem. It mainly suffers from (1) heavy computation and memory costs for frame-by-frame pixel-level instance perception and (2) complicated heuristics for tracking objects. To address those issues, we present MobileInst, a lightweight and mobile-friendly framework for video instance segmentation on mobile devices. Firstly, MobileInst adopts a mobile vision transformer to extract multi-level semantic features and presents an efficient query-based dual-transformer instance decoder for mask kernels and a semantic-enhanced mask decoder to generate instance segmentation per frame. Secondly, MobileInst exploits simple yet effective kernel reuse and kernel association to track objects for video instance segmentation. Further, we propose temporal query passing to enhance the tracking ability for kernels. We conduct experiments on COCO and YouTube-VIS datasets to demonstrate the superiority of MobileInst and evaluate the inference latency on one single CPU core of Snapdragon@778G Mobile Platform, without other methods of acceleration. On the COCO dataset, MobileInst achieves 31.2 mask AP and 433 ms on the mobile CPU, which reduces the latency by 50% compared to the previous SOTA. For video instance segmentation, MobileInst achieves 35.0 AP on YouTube-VIS 2019 and 30.1 AP on YouTube-VIS 2021. Code will be available to facilitate real-world applications and future research.

MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile

Action segmentation serves as a pivotal component in comprehending videos, encompassing the learning of a sequence of semantically consistent action units known as actoms. Conventional methodologies tend to require a significant consumption of time for both training and learning phases. This paper introduces an innovative unsupervised framework for action segmentation in video, characterized by its fast learning capability and absence of mandatory training. The core idea involves splitting the video into distinct actoms, which are then merging together based on shared actions. The key challenge here is to prevent the inadvertent creation of singular actoms that attempt to represent multiple actions during the splitting phase. Additionally, it is crucial to avoid situations where actoms associated with the same action are incorrectly grouped into multiple clusters during the merging phase. In this paper, we present a method for calculating the similarity between adjacent frames under a subspace assumption. Then, we employ a local minimum searching procedure, which effectively splits the video into coherent actoms aligned with their semantic meaning and provides us an action segmentation proposal. Subsequently, we calculate a spatio-temporal similarity between actoms, followed by developing a merging process to merge actoms representing identical actions within the action segmentation proposals. Our approach is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Besides, our method also achieves the optimal balance between accuracy and learning time when compared to existing unsupervised techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/y66y/SaM.

Unsupervised Action Segmentation via Fast Learning of Semantically Consistent Actoms

Image animation aims to bring static images to life according to driving videos and create engaging visual content that can be used for various purposes such as animation, entertainment, and education. Recent unsupervised methods utilize affine and thin-plate spline transformations based on keypoints to transfer the motion in driving frames to the source image. However, limited by the expressive power of the transformations used, these methods always produce poor results when the gap between the motion in the driving frame and the source image is large. To address this issue, we propose to model motion from the source image to the driving frame in highly-expressive diffeomorphism spaces. Firstly, we introduce Continuous Piecewise-Affine based (CPAB) transformation to model the motion and present a well-designed inference algorithm to generate CPAB transformation from control keypoints. Secondly, we propose a SAM-guided keypoint semantic loss to further constrain the keypoint extraction process and improve the semantic consistency between the corresponding keypoints on the source and driving images. Finally, we design a structure alignment loss to align the structure-related features extracted from driving and generated images, thus helping the generator generate results that are more consistent with the driving action. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against state-of-the-art competitors quantitatively and qualitatively. Code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/DevilPG/AAAI2024-CPABMM.

Continuous Piecewise-Affine Based Motion Model for Image Animation

Video Motion Magnification (VMM) aims to break the resolution limit of human visual perception capability and reveal the imperceptible minor motion that contains valuable information in the macroscopic domain. However, challenges arise in this task due to photon noise inevitably introduced by photographic devices and spatial inconsistency in amplification, leading to flickering artifacts in static fields and motion blur and distortion in dynamic fields in the video. Existing methods focus on explicit motion modeling without emphasizing prioritized denoising during the motion magnification process. This paper proposes a novel dynamic filtering strategy to achieve static-dynamic field adaptive denoising. Specifically, based on Eulerian theory, we separate texture and shape to extract motion representation through inter-frame shape differences, expecting to leverage these subdivided features to solve this task finely. Then, we introduce a novel dynamic filter that eliminates noise cues and preserves critical features in the motion magnification and amplification generation phases. Overall, our unified framework, EulerMormer, is a pioneering effort to first equip with Transformer in learning-based VMM. The core of the dynamic filter lies in a global dynamic sparse cross-covariance attention mechanism that explicitly removes noise while preserving vital information, coupled with a multi-scale dual-path gating mechanism that selectively regulates the dependence on different frequency features to reduce spatial attenuation and complement motion boundaries. We demonstrate extensive experiments that EulerMormer achieves more robust video motion magnification from the Eulerian perspective, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/EulerMormer.

EulerMormer: Robust Eulerian Motion Magnification via Dynamic Filtering within Transformer

3D occupancy prediction is an emerging task that aims to estimate the occupancy states and semantics of 3D scenes using multi-view images. However, image-based scene perception encounters significant challenges in achieving accurate prediction due to the absence of geometric priors. In this paper, we address this issue by exploring cross-modal knowledge distillation in this task, i.e., we leverage a stronger multi-modal model to guide the visual model during training. In practice, we observe that directly applying features or logits alignment, proposed and widely used in bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception, does not yield satisfactory results. To overcome this problem, we introduce RadOcc, a Rendering assisted distillation paradigm for 3D Occupancy prediction. By employing differentiable volume rendering, we generate depth and semantic maps in perspective views and propose two novel consistency criteria between the rendered outputs of teacher and student models. Specifically, the depth consistency loss aligns the termination distributions of the rendered rays, while the semantic consistency loss mimics the intra-segment similarity guided by vision foundation models (VLMs). Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving various 3D occupancy prediction approaches, e.g., our proposed methodology enhances our baseline by 2.2% in the metric of mIoU and achieves 50% in Occ3D benchmark.

RadOcc: Learning Cross-Modality Occupancy Knowledge through Rendering Assisted Distillation | VIDEO

The emergence of text-driven motion synthesis technique provides animators with great potential to create efficiently. However, in most cases, textual expressions only contain general and qualitative motion descriptions, while lack fine depiction and sufficient intensity, leading to the synthesized motions that either (a) semantically compliant but uncontrollable over specific pose details, or (b) even deviates from the provided descriptions, bringing animators with undesired cases. In this paper, we propose DiffKFC, a conditional diffusion model for text-driven motion synthesis with KeyFrames Collaborated, enabling realistic generation with collaborative and efficient dual-level control: coarse guidance at semantic level, with only few keyframes for direct and fine-grained depiction down to body posture level. Unlike existing inference-editing diffusion models that incorporate conditions without training, our conditional diffusion model is explicitly trained and can fully exploit correlations among texts, keyframes and the diffused target frames. To preserve the control capability of discrete and sparse keyframes, we customize dilated mask attention modules where only partial valid tokens participate in local-to-global attention, indicated by the dilated keyframe mask. Additionally, we develop a simple yet effective smoothness prior, which steers the generated frames towards seamless keyframe transitions at inference. Extensive experiments show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of semantic fidelity, but more importantly, is able to satisfy animator requirements through fine-grained guidance without tedious labor.

Enhanced Fine-Grained Motion Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Synthesis | VIDEO

Byzantine machine learning has garnered considerable attention in light of the unpredictable faults that can occur in large-scale distributed learning systems. The key to secure resilience against Byzantine machines in distributed learning is resilient aggregation mechanisms. Although abundant resilient aggregation rules have been proposed, they are designed in ad-hoc manners, imposing extra barriers on comparing, analyzing, and improving the rules across performance criteria. This paper studies near-optimal aggregation rules using clustering in the presence of outliers. Our outlier-robust clustering approach utilizes geometric properties of the update vectors provided by workers. Our analysis show that constant approximations to the 1-center and 1-mean clustering problems with outliers provide near-optimal resilient aggregators for metric-based criteria, which have been proven to be crucial in the homogeneous and heterogeneous cases respectively. In addition, we discuss two contradicting types of attacks under which no single aggregation rule is guaranteed to improve upon the naive average. Based on the discussion, we propose a two-phase resilient aggregation framework. We run experiments for image classification using a non-convex loss function. The proposed algorithms outperform previously known aggregation rules by a large margin with both homogeneous and heterogeneous data distributions among non-faulty workers.

Training-Free Quantum Architecture Search

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Hawkes-Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Contrastive Learning Based on Criminal Correlations

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