Canada

The &quot;lifting from 2D pose&quot; method has been the dominant approach to 3D Human Pose Estimation (3DHPE) due to the powerful visual analysis ability of 2D pose estimators. Widely known, there exists a depth ambiguity problem when estimating solely from 2D pose, where one 2D pose can be mapped to multiple 3D poses. Intuitively, the rich semantic and texture information in images can contribute to a more accurate &quot;lifting&quot; procedure. Yet, existing research encounters two primary challenges. Firstly, the distribution of image data in 3D motion capture datasets is too narrow because of the laboratorial environment, which leads to poor generalization ability of methods trained with image information. Secondly, effective strategies for leveraging image information are lacking. In this paper, we give new insight into the cause of poor generalization problems and the effectiveness of image features. Based on that, we propose an advanced framework. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages. First, we enable the keypoints to query and select the beneficial features from all image patches. To reduce the keypoints attention to inconsequential background features, we design a novel Pose-guided Transformer Layer, which adaptively limits the updates to unimportant image patches. Then, through a designed Adaptive Feature Selection Module, we prune less significant image patches from the feature map. In the second stage, we allow the keypoints to further emphasize the retained critical image features. This progressive learning approach prevents further training on insignificant image features. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Human3.6M dataset and the MPI-INF-3DHP dataset.

AAAI 2024

Lifting by Image – Leveraging Image Cues for Accurate 3D Human Pose Estimation

cv: biometrics

gesture & pose

cv: 3d computer vision

face

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

The "lifting from 2D pose" method has been the dominant approach to 3D Human Pose Estimation (3DHPE) due to the powerful visual analysis ability of 2D pose estimators. Widely known, there exists a depth ambiguity problem when estimating solely from 2D pose, where one 2D pose can be mapped to multiple 3D poses. Intuitively, the rich semantic and texture information in images can contribute to a more accurate "lifting" procedure. Yet, existing research encounters two primary challenges. Firstly, the distribution of image data in 3D motion capture datasets is too narrow because of the laboratorial environment, which leads to poor generalization ability of methods trained with image information. Secondly, effective strategies for leveraging image information are lacking. In this paper, we give new insight into the cause of poor generalization problems and the effectiveness of image features. Based on that, we propose an advanced framework. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages. First, we enable the keypoints to query and select the beneficial features from all image patches. To reduce the keypoints attention to inconsequential background features, we design a novel Pose-guided Transformer Layer, which adaptively limits the updates to unimportant image patches. Then, through a designed Adaptive Feature Selection Module, we prune less significant image patches from the feature map. In the second stage, we allow the keypoints to further emphasize the retained critical image features. This progressive learning approach prevents further training on insignificant image features. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Human3.6M dataset and the MPI-INF-3DHP dataset.

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 language model-based explainable recommendation (LLM-based ER) systems can provide remarkable human-like explanations and have widely received attention from researchers. However, the original LLM-based ER systems face three low-quality problems in their generated explanations, i.e., lack of personalization, inconsistency, and questionable explanation data. To address these problems, we propose a novel LLM-based ER model denoted as LLM2ER to serve as a backbone and devise two innovative explainable quality reward models for fine-tuning such a backbone in a reinforcement learning paradigm, ultimately yielding a fine-tuned model denoted as LLM2ER-EQR, which can provide high-quality explanations. LLM2ER-EQR can generate personalized, informative, and consistent high-quality explanations learned from questionable-quality explanation datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can generate fluent, diverse, informative, and highly personalized explanations.

Fine-Tuning Large Language Model Based Explainable Recommendation with Explainable Quality Reward | VIDEO

RGBT tracking has been widely used in various fields such as robotics, surveillance processing, and autonomous driving. Existing RGBT trackers fully explore the spatial information between the template and the search region and locate the target based on the appearance matching results. However, these RGBT trackers have very limited exploitation of temporal information, either ignoring temporal information or exploiting it through online sampling and training. The former struggles to cope with the object state changes, while the latter neglects the correlation between spatial and temporal information. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a novel Temporal Adaptive RGBT Tracking framework, named as TATrack. TATrack has a spatio-temporal two-stream structure and captures temporal information by an online updated template, where the two-stream structure refers to the multi-modal feature extraction and cross-modal interaction for the initial template and the online update template respectively. TATrack contributes to comprehensively exploit spatio-temporal information and multi-modal information for target localization. In addition, we design a spatio-temporal interaction (STI) mechanism that bridges two branches and enables cross-modal interaction to span longer time scales. Extensive experiments on three popular RGBT tracking benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while running at real-time speed.

Temporal Adaptive RGBT Tracking with Modality Prompt

Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Response Generation (KRG) can facilitate informative and fidelity dialogues using external knowledge. Prior monolingual works can only use the knowledge of the corresponding native language. Thus, due to the prohibitive costs of collecting and constructing external knowledge bases, the limited scale of accessible external knowledge always constrains the ability of KRG, especially in low-resource language scenarios.  To this end, we propose a new task, Multi-Source Multilingual Knowledge-Grounded Response Generation (MMKRG), which simultaneously uses multiple knowledge sources of different languages. We notice that simply combining knowledge of different languages is inefficient due to the Cross-Conflict  issue and Cross-Repetition issue. Thus, we propose a novel approach MMK-BART, which uses a simple but elegant Estimate-Cluster-Penalize mechanism to overcome the mentioned issues and adopts the multilingual language model mBART as the backbone. Meanwhile, based on the recent multilingual corpus XDailyDialog, we propose an MMKRG dataset MMK-DailyDialog, which has been aligned to the large-scale multilingual commonsense knowledge base ConceptNet and supports four languages (English, Chinese, German, and Italian). Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our dataset and approach in monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual scenarios.

Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Response Generation with Multi-Source Multilingual Commonsense Knowledge

This paper focuses on addressing the issue of image demoireing. Unlike the large volume of existing studies that rely on learning from paired real data, we attempt to learn a demoireing model from unpaired real data, i.e., moire images associated with irrelevant clean images. The proposed method, referred to as Unpaired Demoireing (UnDeM), synthesizes pseudo moire images from unpaired datasets, generating pairs with clean images for training demoireing models. To achieve this, we divide real moire images into patches and group them in compliance with their moire complexity. We introduce a novel moire generation framework to synthesize moire images with diverse moire features, resembling real moire patches, and details akin to real moire-free images. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive denoise method to eliminate the low-quality pseudo moire images that adversely impact the learning of demoireing models. We conduct extensive experiments on the commonly-used FHDMi and UHDM datasets. Results manifest that our UnDeM performs better than existing methods when using existing demoireing models such as MBCNN and ESDNet-L.

Learning Image Demoireing from Unpaired Real Data

Despite having achieved remarkable success for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), deep neural networks are susceptible to spurious correlations between input features and output labels, leading to poor robustness. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel Counterfactual-Enhanced Information Bottleneck framework (called CEIB), which extends the information bottleneck (IB) to a factual-counterfactual balancing setting to learn a more robust model, with the help of counterfactual data augmentation. Concretely, we first devise a multi-pattern prompting method, which utilizes the large language model (LLM) to generate high-quality counterfactual samples. Then, we employ the information bottleneck principle and separate the mutual information into factual and counterfactual parts. In this way, we can balance the predictive information of these two parts to learn effective yet robust representations for the ABSA task. Extensive experiments on five benchmark ABSA datasets demonstrate that our CEIB method achieves overall better prediction performance and robustness than the state-of-the-art baselines. Code and data to reproduce the results in this paper is available at: https://github.com/shesshan/CEIB.

Counterfactual-Enhanced Information Bottleneck for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Hands are the main medium when people interact with the world. Generating proper 3D motion for hand-object interaction is vital for applications such as virtual reality and robotics. Although grasp tracking or object manipulation synthesis can produce coarse hand motion, this kind of motion is inevitably noisy and full of jitter. To address this problem, we propose a data-driven method for coarse motion refinement. First, we design a hand-centric representation to describe the dynamic spatial-temporal relation between hands and objects. Compared to the object-centric representation, our hand-centric representation is straightforward and does not require an ambiguous projection process that converts object-based prediction into hand motion. Second, to capture the dynamic clues of hand-object interaction, we propose a new architecture that models the spatial and temporal structure in a hierarchical manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods by a noticeable margin.

Hand-Centric Motion Refinement for 3D Hand-Object Interaction via Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Modeling

Although neural models have achieved remarkable performance, they still encounter doubts due to the intransparency. To this end, model prediction explanation is attracting more and more attentions. However, current methods rarely incorporate external knowledge and still suffer from three limitations: (1) Neglecting concept completeness. Merely selecting concepts may not sufficient for prediction. (2) Lacking concept fusion. Failure to merge semantically-equivalent concepts. (3) Difficult in manipulating model behavior. Lack of verification for explanation on original model. To address these issues, we propose a novel knowledge-aware neuron interpretation framework to explain model predictions for image scene classification. Specifically, for concept completeness, we present core concepts of a scene based on knowledge graph, ConceptNet, to gauge the completeness of concepts. Our method, incorporating complete concepts, effectively provides better prediction explanations compared to baselines. Furthermore, for concept fusion, we introduce a knowledge graph-based method known as Concept Filtering, which produces over 23% point gain on neuron behaviors for neuron interpretation. At last, we propose Model Manipulation, which aims to study whether the core concepts based on ConceptNet could be employed to manipulate model behavior. The results show that core concepts can effectively improve the performance of original model.

Knowledge-Aware Neuron Interpretation for Scene Classification

Collaborative learning (CL) is a distributed learning framework that aims to protect user privacy by allowing users to jointly train a model by sharing their gradient updates only. However, gradient inversion attacks (GIAs), which recover users' training data from shared gradients, impose severe privacy threats to CL.  Existing defense methods adopt different techniques, e.g., differential privacy, cryptography, and perturbation defenses, to defend against the GIAs. Nevertheless, all current defense methods suffer from a poor trade-off between privacy, utility, and efficiency. To mitigate the weaknesses of existing solutions, we propose a novel defense method, Dual Gradient Pruning (DGP), based on gradient pruning, which can improve communication efficiency while preserving the utility and privacy of CL. Specifically, DGP slightly changes gradient pruning with a stronger privacy guarantee. And DGP can also significantly improve communication efficiency with a theoretical analysis of its convergence and generalization. Our extensive experiments show that DGP can effectively defend against the most powerful GIAs and reduce the communication cost without sacrificing the model's utility.

Revisiting Gradient Pruning: A Dual Realization for Defending against Gradient Attacks

We propose a generalized method for boosting the generalization ability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) while fine-tuning on downstream few-shot tasks. The idea is realized by exploiting out-of-distribution (OOD) detection to predict whether a sample belongs to a base distribution or a novel distribution and then using the score generated by a dedicated competition based scoring function to fuse the zero-shot and few-shot classifier. The fused classifier is dynamic, which will bias towards the zero-shot classifier if a sample is more likely from the distribution pre-trained on, leading to improved base-to-novel generalization ability. Our method is performed only in test stage, which is applicable to boost existing methods without time-consuming re-training. Extensive experiments show that even weak distribution detectors can still improve VLMs' generalization ability. Specifically, with the help of OOD detectors, the harmonic mean of CoOp and ProGrad increase by 2.6 and 1.5 percentage points over 11 recognition datasets in the base-to-novel setting.

Weak Distribution Detectors Lead to Stronger Generalizability of Vision-Language Prompt Tuning

Recently, lots of works that incorporate external lexicon information into character-level Chinese named entity recognition(NER) to overcome the lackness of natural delimiters of words, have achieved many advanced performance. However, obtaining and maintaining high-quality lexicons is costly, especially in special domains. In addition, the entity boundary bias caused by high mention coverage in some boundary characters poses a significant challenge to the generalization of NER models but receives little attention in the existing literature. To address these issues, we propose SENCR, a Span Enhanced Two-stage Network with Counterfactual Rethinking for Chinese NER, that contains a boundary detector for boundary supervision, a convolution-based type classifier for better span representation and a counterfactual rethinking(CR) strategy for debiased boundary detection in inference. The proposed boundary detector and type classifier are jointly trained with the same contextual encoder and then the trained boundary detector is debiased by our proposed CR strategy without modifying any model parameters in the inference stage. Extensive experiments on four Chinese NER datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

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