Canada

Multi-agent perception (MAP) allows autonomous systems to understand complex environments by interpreting data from multiple sources. This paper investigates intermediate collaboration for MAP with a specific focus on exploring &quot;good&quot; properties of collaborative view (i.e., post-collaboration feature) and its underlying relationship to individual views (i.e., pre-collaboration features), which were treated as an opaque procedure by most existing works. We propose a novel framework named CMiMC (Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Collaborative Perception) for intermediate collaboration. The core philosophy of CMiMC is to preserve discriminative information of individual views in the collaborative view by maximizing mutual information between pre- and post-collaboration features while enhancing the efficacy of collaborative views by minimizing the loss function of downstream tasks. In particular, we define multi-view mutual information (MVMI) for intermediate collaboration that evaluates correlations between collaborative views and individual views on both global and local scales. We establish CMiMNet based on multi-view contrastive learning to realize estimation and maximization of MVMI, which assists the training of a collaborative encoder for voxel-level feature fusion. We evaluate CMiMC on V2X-Sim 1.0, it improves the SOTA average precision by 3.08% and 4.44% at 0.5 and 0.7 IoU (Intersection-over-Union) thresholds, respectively. In addition, CMiMC can reduce communication volume to 1/32 while achieving performance comparable to SOTA. The code is released at https://github.com/anonymous4aaai/CMiMC.git.

AAAI 2024

What Makes Good Collaborative Views? Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Multi-Agent Perception

coordination and collaboration

multiagent learning

mechanism design

Multi-agent perception (MAP) allows autonomous systems to understand complex environments by interpreting data from multiple sources. This paper investigates intermediate collaboration for MAP with a specific focus on exploring "good" properties of collaborative view (i.e., post-collaboration feature) and its underlying relationship to individual views (i.e., pre-collaboration features), which were treated as an opaque procedure by most existing works. We propose a novel framework named CMiMC (Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Collaborative Perception) for intermediate collaboration. The core philosophy of CMiMC is to preserve discriminative information of individual views in the collaborative view by maximizing mutual information between pre- and post-collaboration features while enhancing the efficacy of collaborative views by minimizing the loss function of downstream tasks. In particular, we define multi-view mutual information (MVMI) for intermediate collaboration that evaluates correlations between collaborative views and individual views on both global and local scales. We establish CMiMNet based on multi-view contrastive learning to realize estimation and maximization of MVMI, which assists the training of a collaborative encoder for voxel-level feature fusion. We evaluate CMiMC on V2X-Sim 1.0, it improves the SOTA average precision by 3.08% and 4.44% at 0.5 and 0.7 IoU (Intersection-over-Union) thresholds, respectively. In addition, CMiMC can reduce communication volume to 1/32 while achieving performance comparable to SOTA. The code is released at https://github.com/anonymous4aaai/CMiMC.git.

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. 

Learning 3D  representation plays a critical role in masked autoencoder (MAE) based pre-training methods for point cloud, including single-modal and cross-modal based MAE. Specifically, although cross-modal MAE methods learn strong 3D representations via the auxiliary of other modal knowledge, they often suffer from heavy computational burdens and heavily rely on massive cross-modal data pairs that are often unavailable, which hinders their applications in practice. Instead, single-modal methods with solely point clouds as input are preferred in real applications due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, such methods easily suffer from limited 3D representations with global random mask input. To learn compact 3D representations, we propose a simple yet effective Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders (Point-FEMAE), which mainly consists of a global branch and a local branch to capture latent semantic features. Specifically, to learn more compact features, a share-parameter Transformer encoder is introduced to extract point features from the global and local unmasked patches obtained by global random and local block mask strategies, followed by a specific decoder to reconstruct. Meanwhile, to further enhance features in the local branch, we propose a Local Enhancement Module with local patch convolution to perceive fine-grained local context at larger scales. Our method significantly improves the pre-training efficiency compared to cross-modal alternatives, and extensive downstream experiments underscore the state-of-the-art effectiveness, particularly outperforming our baseline (Point-MAE) by 5.16%, 5.00%, and 5.04% in three variants of ScanObjectNN, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/AAAI24-PointFEMAE.

Towards Compact 3D Representations via Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders

The field of few-shot learning (FSL) has shown promising results in scenarios where training data is limited, but its vulnerability to backdoor attacks remains largely unexplored. We first explore this topic by first evaluating the performance of the existing backdoor attack methods on few-shot learning scenarios. Unlike in standard supervised learning, existing backdoor attack methods failed to perform an effective attack in FSL due to two main issues. Firstly, the model tends to overfit to either benign features or trigger features, causing a tough trade-off between attack success rate and benign accuracy. Secondly, due to the small number of training samples, the dirty label or visible trigger in the support set can be easily detected by victims, which reduces the stealthiness of attacks. It seemed that FSL could survive from backdoor attacks.  However, in this paper, we propose the \textbf{Few-shot Learning Backdoor Attack (FLBA)} to show that FSL can still be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first generate a trigger to maximize the gap between poisoned and benign features. It enables the model to learn both benign and trigger features, which solves the problem of overfitting. To make it more stealthy, we hide the trigger by optimizing two types of imperceptible perturbation, namely attractive and repulsive perturbation, instead of attaching the trigger directly. Once we obtain the perturbations, we can poison all samples in the benign support set into a hidden poisoned support set and fine-tune the model on it. Our method demonstrates a high Attack Sucess Rate (ASR) in FSL tasks with different few-shot learning paradigms while preserving clean accuracy and maintaining stealthiness. This study reveals that few-shot learning still suffers from backdoor attacks, and its security should be given attention.

Does Few-Shot Learning Suffer from Backdoor Attacks?

Uncertainty in gaze estimation manifests in two aspects: 1) low-quality images caused by occlusion, blurriness, inconsistent eye movements, or even non-face images; 2) uncorrected labels resulting from the misalignment between the labeled and actual gaze points during the annotation process. Allowing these uncertainties to participate in training hinders the improvement of gaze estimation.  To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose an effective solution, named Suppressing Uncertainty in Gaze Estimation (SUGE), which introduces a novel triplet-label consistency measurement to estimate and reduce the uncertainties. Specifically, for each training sample, we propose to estimate a novel ``neighboring label'' calculated by a linearly weighted projection from the neighbors to capture the similarity relationship between image features and their corresponding labels, which can be incorporated with the predicted pseudo label and ground-truth label for uncertainty estimation. By modeling such triplet-label consistency, we can largely reduce the negative effects of unqualified images and wrong labels through our designed sample weighting and label correction strategies. Experimental results on the gaze estimation benchmarks indicate that our proposed SUGE achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Suppressing Uncertainty in Gaze Estimation

Few-shot Class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is a challenging task in machine learning that aims to recognize new classes from a limited number of instances while preserving the ability to classify previously learned classes without retraining the entire model. This presents challenges in updating the model with new classes using limited training data, particularly in balancing acquiring new knowledge while retaining the old. We propose a novel method named Multiple Mxing Self-Distillation (M2SD) during the training phase to address these issues. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch structure that facilitates the expansion of the entire feature space to accommodate new classes. Furthermore, we introduce a feature enhancement component that can pass additional enhanced information back to the base network by self-distillation, resulting in improved classification performance upon adding new classes. After training, we discard both structures, leaving only the primary network to classify new class instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance over previous state-of-the-art methods.

M2SD:Multiple Mixing Self-Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

In statistics and machine learning, logistic regression is a widely-used supervised learning technique primarily employed for binary classification tasks. When the number of observations greatly exceeds the number of predictor variables, we present a simple, randomized sampling-based algorithm for logistic regression problem that guarantees high-quality approximations to both the estimated probabilities and the overall discrepancy of the model. Our analysis builds upon two simple structural conditions that boil down to randomized matrix multiplication, a fundamental and well-understood primitive of randomized numerical linear algebra. We analyze the properties of estimated probabilities of logistic regression when leverage scores are used to sample observations, and prove that accurate approximations can be achieved with a sample whose size is much smaller than the total number of observations. To further validate our theoretical findings, we conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations. Overall, our work sheds light on the potential of using randomized sampling approaches to efficiently approximate the estimated probabilities in logistic regression, offering a practical and computationally efficient solution for large-scale datasets.

A Provably Accurate Randomized Sampling Algorithm for Logistic Regression

Image editing approaches with diffusion models have been rapidly developed, yet their applicability are subject to requirements such as specific editing types (e.g., foreground or background object editing, style transfer), multiple conditions (e.g., mask, sketch, caption), and time consuming fine-tuning of diffusion models. For alleviating these limitations and realizing efficient real image editing, we propose a novel editing technique that only requires an input image and target text for various editing types including non-rigid edits without fine-tuning diffusion model. Our method contains three novelties: (I) Target-text Inversion Schedule (TTIS) is designed to fine-tune the input target text embedding to achieve fast image reconstruction without image caption and acceleration of convergence. (II) Progressive Transition Scheme applies progressive linear interpolation between target text embedding and its fine-tuned version to generate transition embedding for maintaining non-rigid editing capability. (III) Balanced Attention Module (BAM) balances the tradeoff between textual description and image semantics. By the means of combining self-attention map from reconstruction process and cross-attention map from transition process, the guidance of target text embeddings in diffusion process is optimized. In order to demonstrate editing capability, effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed BARET, we have conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments. Moreover, results derived from user study and ablation study further prove the superiority over other methods.

BARET: Balanced Attention Based Real Image Editing Driven by Target-Text Inversion | VIDEO

Recently there is a growing focus on graph data, and multi-view graph clustering has become a popular area of research interest. Most of the existing methods are only applicable to homophilous graphs, yet the extensive real-world graph data can hardly fulfill the homophily assumption, where the connected nodes tend to belong to the same class. Several studies have pointed out that the poor performance on heterophilous graphs is actually due to the fact that conventional graph neural networks (GNNs), which are essentially low-pass filters, discard information other than the low-frequency information on the graph. Nevertheless, on certain graphs, particularly heterophilous ones, neglecting high-frequency information and focusing solely on low-frequency information impedes the learning of node representations. To break this limitation, our motivation is to perform graph filtering that is closely related to the homophily degree of the given graph, with the aim of fully leveraging both low-frequency and high-frequency signals to learn distinguishable node embedding. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hybrid Graph Filter for Multi-View Graph Clustering (AHGFC). Specifically, a graph joint process and graph joint aggregation matrix are first designed by using the intrinsic node features and adjacency relationship, which makes the low and high-frequency signals on the graph more distinguishable. Then we design an adaptive hybrid graph filter that is related to the homophily degree, which learns the node embedding based on the graph joint aggregation matrix. After that, the node embedding of each view is weighted and fused into a consensus embedding for the downstream task. Experimental results show that our proposed model performs well on six datasets containing homophilous and heterophilous graphs.

Homophily-Related: Adaptive Hybrid Graph Filter for Multi-View Graph Clustering | VIDEO

Point-based cell detection (PCD), which pursues high-performance cell sensing under low-cost data annotation, has garnered increased attention in computational pathology community. Unlike mainstream PCD methods that rely on intermediate density map representations, the Point-to-Point network (P2PNet) has recently emerged as an end-to-end solution for PCD, demonstrating impressive cell detection accuracy and efficiency. Nevertheless, P2PNet is limited to decoding from a single-level feature map due to the scale-agnostic property of point proposals, which is insufficient to leverage multi-scale information. Moreover, the spatial distribution of pre-set point proposals is biased from that of cells, leading to inaccurate cell localization. To lift these limitations, we present DPA-P2PNet in this work. The proposed method directly extracts multi-scale features for decoding according to the coordinates of point proposals on hierarchical feature maps. On this basis, we further devise deformable point proposals to mitigate the positional bias between proposals and potential cells to promote cell localization. Inspired by practical pathological diagnosis that usually combines high-level tissue structure and low-level cell morphology for accurate cell classification, we propose a multi-field-of-view (mFoV) variant of DPA-P2PNet to accommodate additional large FoV images with tissue information as model input. Finally, we execute the first self-supervised pre-training on immunohistochemistry histopathology image data and evaluate the suitability of four representative self-supervised methods on the PCD task. Experimental results on three benchmarks and a large-scale and real-world interval dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed models over the state-of-the-art counterparts. Codes and pre-trained weights are available at \url{https://github.com/windygoo/DPA-P2PNet}.

DPA-P2PNet: Deformable Proposal-Aware P2PNet for Accurate Point-Based Cell Detection

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods assume that labeled
data, unlabeled data and test data are from the same distribution. Open-set semi-supervised learning (Open-set SSL) con-
siders a more practical scenario, where unlabeled data and
test data contain new categories (outliers) not observed in
labeled data (inliers). Most previous works focused on out-
lier detection via binary classifiers, which suffer from insufficient scalability and inability to distinguish different types
of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel framework,
Adaptive Negative Evidential Deep Learning (ANEDL) to
tackle these limitations. Concretely, we first introduce evidential deep learning (EDL) as an outlier detector to quantify
different types of uncertainty, and design different uncertainty
metrics for self-training and inference. Furthermore, we propose a novel adaptive negative optimization strategy, making
EDL more tailored to the unlabeled dataset containing both
inliers and outliers. As demonstrated empirically, our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods
across four datasets.

ANEDL: Adaptive Negative Evidential Deep Learning for Open-Set Semi-supervised Learning

Recently, there has been a growing interest in 3D CNN-based stereo matching methods due to their remarkable accuracy. However, the $O(n^3)$ complexity of 3D convolution makes it challenging to strike a balance between accuracy and speed. Notably, explicit 3D volumes contain considerable redundancy. In this study, we delve into more compact 2D implicit network to eliminate redundancy and boost real-time performance. However, simply replacing explicit 3D networks with 2D implicit networks causes issues that can lead to performance degradation, including the loss of structural information, the quality decline of inter-image information, as well as the inaccurate regression caused by low-level features. To address these issues, we first integrate intra-image information to fuse with inter-image information, facilitating propagation guided by structural cues. Subsequently, we introduce the Fast Multi-scale Score Volume (FMSV) and Confidence Based Filtering (CBF) to efficiently acquire accurate multi-scale, noise-free inter-image information. Furthermore, combined with the Residual Context-aware Upsampler (RCU), our Intra-Inter Fusing network is meticulously designed to enhance information transmission on both feature-level and disparity-level, thereby enabling accurate and robust regression. Experimental results affirm the superiority of our network in terms of both speed and accuracy compared to all other fast methods.

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Towards Compact 3D Representations via Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders

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