Canada

Illumination variation has been a long-term challenge in real-world facial expression recognition (FER). Under uncontrolled or non-visible light conditions, near-infrared (NIR) can provide a simple and alternative solution to obtain high-quality images and supplement the geometric and texture details that are missing in the visible (VIS) domain. Due to the lack of large-scale NIR facial expression datasets, directly extending VIS FER methods to the NIR spectrum may be ineffective. Additionally, previous heterogeneous image synthesis methods are restricted by low controllability without prior task knowledge. To tackle these issues, we present the first approach, called for NIR-FER Stochastic Differential Equations (NFER-SDE), that transforms face expression appearance between heterogeneous modalities to the overfitting problem on small-scale NIR data. NFER-SDE can take the whole VIS source image as input and, together with domain-specific knowledge, guide the preservation of modality-invariant information in the high-frequency content of the image. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that NFER-SDE significantly improves the performance of NIR FER and achieves state-of-the-art results on the only two available NIR FER datasets, Oulu-CASIA and Large-HFE.

AAAI 2024

Multi-Energy Guided Image Translation with Stochastic Differential Equations for Near-Infrared Facial Expression Recognition

cognitive modeling & cognitive systems (cms) -> cms: social cognition and interaction

application domains (app) -> app: humanities & computational social science

cognitive modeling & cognitive systems (cms) -> cms: affective computing

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. 

While generic person re-identification has made remarkable improvement in recent years, these methods are designed under the assumption that the entire body of the person is available. This assumption brings about a significant performance degradation when suffering from occlusion caused by various obstacles in real-world applications. To address this issue, data-driven strategies have emerged to enhance the model's robustness to occlusion. Following the random erasing paradigm, these strategies typically employ randomly generated noise to supersede randomly selected image regions to simulate obstacles. However, the random strategy is not sensitive to location and content, meaning they cannot mimic real-world occlusion cases in application scenarios. To overcome this limitation and fully exploit the real scene information in datasets, this paper proposes a more intuitive and effective data-driven strategy named Saliency-Guided Patch Transfer (SPT). Combined with the vision transformer, SPT divides person instances and background obstacles using salient patch selection. By transferring person instances to different background obstacles, SPT can easily generate photo-realistic occluded samples. Furthermore, we propose an occlusion-aware Intersection over Union (OIoU) with mask-rolling to filter the more suitable combination and a class-ignoring strategy to achieve more stable processing. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on occluded and holistic person re-identification benchmarks demonstrate that SPT provides a significant performance gain among different ViT-based ReID algorithms on occluded ReID.

Occluded Person Re-identification via Saliency-Guided Patch Transfer

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), the leading cause of blindness in diabetic patients, is diagnosed by the condition of retinal multiple lesions. As a difficult task in medical image segmentation, DR multi-lesion segmentation faces the main concerns as follows. On the one hand, retinal lesions vary in location, shape, and size. On the other hand, because some lesions occupy only a very small part of the entire fundus image, the high proportion of background leads to difficulties in lesion segmentation. To solve the above problems, we propose a heterogeneous-aware convolutional network (HACDR-Net) that composes heterogeneous cross-convolution, heterogeneous modulated deformable convolution, and optional near-far-aware convolution. Our network introduces an adaptive aggregation module to summarize the heterogeneous feature maps and get diverse lesion areas in the heterogeneous receptive field along the channels and space. In addition, to solve the problem of the highly imbalanced proportion of focal areas, we design a new medical image segmentation loss function, Noise Adjusted Loss (NALoss). NALoss balances the predictive feature distribution of background and lesion by jointing Gaussian noise and hard example mining, thus enhancing awareness of lesions. We conduct the experiments on the public datasets IDRiD and DDR, and the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods. The code is open-sourced on github.com/xqh180110910537/HACDR-Net.

HACDR-Net: Heterogeneous-Aware Convolutional Network for Diabetic Retinopathy Multi-Lesion Segmentation

Adapting the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for direct image super-resolution is wasteful, given that a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can recover the main low-frequency content. Therefore, we present ResDiff, a novel Diffusion Probabilistic Model based on Residual structure for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). ResDiff utilizes a combination of a CNN, which restores primary low-frequency components, and a DPM, which predicts the residual between the ground-truth image and the CNN predicted image. In contrast to the common diffusion-based methods that directly use LR space to guide the noise towards HR space, ResDiff utilizes the CNN’s initial prediction to direct the noise towards the residual space between HR space and CNN-predicted space, which not only accelerates the generation process but also acquires superior sample quality. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss function for CNN is introduced to facilitate its restoration, and a frequency-domain guided diffusion is designed for DPM on behalf of predicting high-frequency details. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResDiff outperforms previous diffusion based methods in terms of shorter model convergence time, superior generation quality, and more diverse samples.

ResDiff: Combining CNN and Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution

We present a novel computational approach to resolving conflicts among norms by nonmonotonic normative reasoning (in constrained I/O logics). Our approach extends standard sequent-based proof systems and makes them more adequate to nonmonotonic reasoning by adding to the sequents annotations that keep track of what is known about the defeasible status of the derived sequents. This makes transparent the reasons according to which norms should be applicable or inapplicable, and accordingly the sequents that make use of such norms are accepted or retracted. We also show that this proof theoretic method has tight links to the semantics of formal argumentation frameworks. The outcome of this paper is thus a threefold characterization result that relates, in the context of nonmonotonic normative reasoning, three traditional ingredients of AI-based reasoning methods: maximally consistent sets of premises (in constrained I/O logics), derived sequents (which are accepted in corresponding annotated sequent calculi), and logical arguments (that belong to the grounded extensions of the induced logical argumentation frameworks).

Defeasible Normative Reasoning: A Proof-Theoretic Integration of Logical Argumentation | VIDEO

Multi-task learning deals with multiple related tasks simultaneously by sharing knowledge. In a typical deep multi-task learning model, all tasks use the same feature space and share the latent knowledge. If the tasks are weakly correlated or some features are negatively correlated, sharing all knowledge often leads to negative knowledge transfer among. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a Fisher sparse multi-task learning method. It can obtain a sparse sharing representation for each task. In such a way, tasks share features on a sparse subspace. Our method can ensure that the knowledge transferred among tasks is beneficial. Specifically, we first propose a sparse deep multi-task learning model, and then introduce Fisher sparse module into traditional deep multi-task learning to learn the sparse variables of task. By alternately updating the neural network parameters and sparse variables, a sparse sharing representation can be learned for each task. In addition, in order to reduce the computational overhead, an heuristic method is used to estimate the Fisher information of neural network parameters. Experimental results show that, comparing with other methods, our proposed method can improve the performance for all tasks, and has high sparsity in multi-task learning.

Learning Multi-Task Sparse Representation Based on Fisher Information

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

GridFormer: Point-Grid Transformer for Surface Reconstruction

Offline meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods, which adapt to unseen target tasks with prior experience, are essential in robot control tasks. Current methods typically utilize task contexts and skills as prior experience, where task contexts are related to the information within each task and skills represent a set of temporally extended actions for solving subtasks. However, these methods still suffer from limited performance when adapting to unseen target tasks, mainly because the learned prior experience lacks generalization, i.e., they are unable to extract effective prior experience from meta-training tasks by exploration and learning of continuous latent spaces. We propose a framework called decoupled meta-reinforcement learning (DCMRL), which (1) contrastively restricts the learning of task contexts through pulling in similar task contexts within the same task and pushing away different task contexts of different tasks, and (2) utilizes a Gaussian quantization variational autoencoder (GQ-VAE) for clustering the Gaussian distributions of the task contexts and skills respectively, and decoupling the exploration and learning processes of their spaces. These cluster centers which serve as representative and discrete distributions of task context and skill are stored in task context codebook and skill codebook, respectively. DCMRL can acquire generalizable prior experience and achieve effective adaptation to unseen target tasks during the meta-testing phase. Experiments in the navigation and robot manipulation continuous control tasks show that DCMRL is more effective than previous meta-RL methods with more generalizable prior experience.

Decoupling Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Task Contexts and Skills | VIDEO

Lightweight creation of 3D digital avatars is a highly desirable but challenging task. With only sparse videos of a person under unknown illumination, we propose a method to create relightable and animatable neural avatars, which can be used to synthesize photorealistic images of humans under novel viewpoints, body poses, and lighting. The key challenge here is to disentangle the geometry, material of the clothed body, and lighting, which becomes more difficult due to the complex geometry and shadow changes caused by body motions.  To solve this ill-posed problem, we propose novel techniques to better model the geometry and shadow changes.  For geometry change modeling, we propose an invertible deformation field, which helps to solve the inverse skinning problem and leads to better geometry quality. To model the spatial and temporal varying shading cues, we propose a pose-aware part-wise light visibility network to estimate light occlusion. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our approach reconstructs high-quality geometry and generates realistic shadows under different body poses. Code and data are available at https://wenbin-lin.github.io/RelightableAvatar-page.

Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatars from Videos

Image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing onto a specific person. A significant challenge is arbitrarily matched clothing and person lack corresponding ground truth to supervised learning. A recent pioneering work leveraged an improved cycleGAN to enable one network to generate the desired image for another network during training. However, there is no difference in the result distribution before and after the clothing changes. Therefore, using two different networks is unnecessary and may even increase the difficulty of convergence. Furthermore, the introduced human parsing used to provide body structure information in the input will also have a negative impact on the try-on result. How to employ a single network for supervised learning while eliminating human parsing? To tackle these issues, we present a Cycle mapping Virtual Try-On Network (CycleVTON), which can produce photo-realistic try-on results by using a cycle mapping framework without the parser. In particular, we introduce a flow constraint loss to achieve supervised learning of arbitrarily matched clothing and person as inputs to the deformer, thus naturally mimicking the interaction between clothing and the human body. Additionally, we design a skin generation strategy that can adapt to the shape of the target clothing by dynamically adjusting the skin region, i.e., by first removing and then filling skin areas. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

CycleVTON: A Cycle Mapping Framework for Parser-Free Virtual Try-On

Recently, the cross-modal pretraining model has been employed to produce meaningful pseudo-labels to supervise the training of an image clustering model. However, numerous erroneous alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model could produce poor-quality pseudo labels and degrade clustering performance. To solve the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel Multi-level Cross-modal Alignment method to improve the alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model for downstream tasks, by building a smaller but better semantic space and aligning the images and texts in three levels, i.e., instance-level, prototype-level, and semantic-level. Theoretical results show that our proposed method converges, and suggests effective means to reduce the expected clustering risk of our method. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets clearly show the superiority of our new method.

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Multi-Energy Guided Image Translation with Stochastic Differential Equations for Near-Infrared Facial Expression Recognition

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Occluded Person Re-identification via Saliency-Guided Patch Transfer

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