Canada

Social media platforms are being increasingly used by malicious actors to share unsafe content, such as images depicting sexual activity, cyberbullying, and self-harm. Consequently, major platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) and human moderation to obfuscate such images to make them safer. Two critical needs for obfuscating unsafe images is that an accurate rationale for obfuscating image regions must be provided, and the sensitive regions should be obfuscated (e.g. blurring) for users&#39; safety. This process involves addressing two key problems: (1) the reason for obfuscating unsafe images demands the platform to provide an accurate rationale that must be grounded in unsafe image-specific attributes, and (2) the unsafe regions in the image must be minimally obfuscated while still depicting the safe regions. In this work, we address these key issues by first performing visual reasoning by designing a visual reasoning model (VLM) conditioned on pre-trained unsafe image classifiers to provide an accurate rationale grounded in unsafe image attributes, and then proposing a counterfactual explanation algorithm that minimally identifies and obfuscates unsafe regions for safe viewing, by first utilizing an unsafe image classifier attribution matrix to guide segmentation for a more optimal subregion segmentation followed by an informed greedy search to determine the minimum number of subregions required to modify the classifier&#39;s output based on attribution score. Extensive experiments on uncurated data from social networks emphasize the efficacy of our proposed method. We make our code available at: https://github.com/SecureAIAutonomyLab/ModeratorBLIP

AAAI 2024

Image Safeguarding: Reasoning with Conditional Vision Language Model and Obfuscating Unsafe Content Counterfactually

app: social networks

cv: language and vision

explainable ml

ml: transparent

interpretable

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
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you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Social media platforms are being increasingly used by malicious actors to share unsafe content, such as images depicting sexual activity, cyberbullying, and self-harm. Consequently, major platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) and human moderation to obfuscate such images to make them safer. Two critical needs for obfuscating unsafe images is that an accurate rationale for obfuscating image regions must be provided, and the sensitive regions should be obfuscated (e.g. blurring) for users' safety. This process involves addressing two key problems: (1) the reason for obfuscating unsafe images demands the platform to provide an accurate rationale that must be grounded in unsafe image-specific attributes, and (2) the unsafe regions in the image must be minimally obfuscated while still depicting the safe regions. In this work, we address these key issues by first performing visual reasoning by designing a visual reasoning model (VLM) conditioned on pre-trained unsafe image classifiers to provide an accurate rationale grounded in unsafe image attributes, and then proposing a counterfactual explanation algorithm that minimally identifies and obfuscates unsafe regions for safe viewing, by first utilizing an unsafe image classifier attribution matrix to guide segmentation for a more optimal subregion segmentation followed by an informed greedy search to determine the minimum number of subregions required to modify the classifier's output based on attribution score. Extensive experiments on uncurated data from social networks emphasize the efficacy of our proposed method. We make our code available at: https://github.com/SecureAIAutonomyLab/ModeratorBLIP

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.

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. 

Video-language pre-training models have recently achieved remarkable results on various multi-modal downstream tasks. However, most of these models rely on contrastive learning or masking modeling to align global features across modalities, neglecting the local associations between video frames and text tokens. This limits the model’s ability to perform fine-grained matching and generalization, especially for tasks that selecting segments in long videos based on query texts. To address this issue, we propose a novel stitching and matching pre-text task for video-language pre-training that encourages fine-grained interactions between modalities. Our task involves stitching video frames or sentences into longer sequences and predicting the positions of cross-model queries in the stitched sequences. The individual frame and sentence representations are thus aligned via the stitching and matching strategy, encouraging the fine-grained interactions between videos and texts. in the stitched sequences for the cross-modal query. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks covering text-to-video retrieval, video question answering, and video captioning. Our results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on these tasks. Moreover, our model can adapt well to the fine-grained moment retrieval, achieving substantial improvement over existing methods.

Stitching Segments and Sentences towards Generalization in Video-Text Pre-training

The current research direction in generative models, such as the recently developed GPT4, aims to find relevant knowledge information for multimodal and multilingual inputs to provide answers. Under these research circumstances, the demand for multilingual evaluation of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, a representative task of multimodal systems, has increased. Accordingly, we propose a bilingual outside-knowledge VQA (BOK-VQA) dataset in this study that can be extended to multilingualism. The proposed data include 17K images, 17K question-answer pairs for both Korean and English and 280K instances of knowledge information related to question-answer content. We also present a framework that can effectively inject knowledge information into a VQA system by pretraining the knowledge information of BOK-VQA data in the form of graph embeddings. Finally, through in-depth analysis, we demonstrated the actual effect of the knowledge information contained in the constructed training data on VQA.

BOK-VQA: Bilingual outside Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering via Graph Representation Pretraining

We present a new zero-order optimization method called Minibatch Stochastic Three Points (MiSTP), specifically designed to solve stochastic unconstrained minimization problems when only an approximate evaluation of the objective function is possible. MiSTP is an extension of the Stochastic Three Point Method (STP) proposed by Bergou, Gorbunov, and Richtárik (2020). The key innovation of MiSTP is that it selects the next point solely based on the objective function approximation, without relying on its exact evaluation. At each iteration, MiSTP generates a random search direction and compares the approximations of the objective function at the current point, the randomly generated direction and its opposite. The best of these three points is chosen as the next iterate. We analyze the worst-case complexity of MiSTP in the convex and non-convex cases and demonstrate that it matches the most accurate complexity bounds known in the literature for zero-order optimization methods. We perform extensive numerical evaluations to assess the computational efficiency of MiSTP and compare its performance to other state-of-the-art methods by testing it on several machine learning tasks. The results show that MiSTP outperforms or has comparable performance against state-of-the-art methods indicating its potential for a wide range of practical applications.

Minibatch Stochastic Three Points Method for Unconstrained Smooth Minimization

Zero-Shot Object Counting~(ZSOC) aims to count referred instances of arbitrary classes in a query image without human-annotated exemplars. To deal with ZSOC, preceding studies proposed a two-stage pipeline: discovering exemplars and counting. However, there remains a challenge of vulnerability to error propagation of the sequentially designed two-stage process. In this work, we propose an one-stage baseline, Visual-Language Baseline (VLBase), exploring the implicit association of the semantic-patch embeddings of CLIP. Subsequently, we extend the VLBase to Visual-language Counter (VLCounter) by incorporating three modules devised to tailor VLBase for object counting. First, we introduce Semantic-conditioned Prompt Tuning (SPT) within the image encoder to acquire target-highlighted representations. Second, Learnable Affine Transformation (LAT) is employed to translate the semantic-patch similarity map to be appropriate for the counting task. Lastly, we transfer the layer-wisely encoded features to the decoder through Segment-aware Skip Connection (SaSC) to keep the generalization capability for unseen classes. Through extensive experiments on FSC147, CARPK, and PUCPR+, we demonstrate the benefits of our end-to-end framework, VLCounter. Code is available at https://github.com/seunggu0305/VLCounter

VLCounter: Text-Aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting

Safety is the primary priority of autonomous driving. Nevertheless, no published dataset currently supports the direct and explainable safety evaluation for autonomous driving. In this work, we propose DeepAccident, a large-scale dataset generated via a realistic simulator containing diverse accident scenarios that frequently occur in real-world driving. The proposed DeepAccident dataset includes 57K annotated frames and 285K annotated samples, approximately 7 times more than the large-scale nuScenes dataset with 40k annotated samples. In addition, we propose a new task, end-to-end motion and accident prediction, which can be used to directly evaluate the accident prediction ability for different autonomous driving algorithms. Furthermore, for each scenario, we set four vehicles along with one infrastructure to record data, thus providing diverse viewpoints for accident scenarios and enabling V2X (vehicle-to-everything) research on perception and prediction tasks. Finally, we present a baseline V2X model named V2XFormer that demonstrates superior performance for motion and accident prediction and 3D object detection compared to the single-vehicle model.

DeepAccident: A Motion and Accident Prediction Benchmark for V2X Autonomous Driving | VIDEO

Information diffusion models on networks are at the forefront of AI research. The dynamics of such models typically follow stochastic models from epidemiology, used to model not only infections but various phenomena, including the behavior of computer viruses and viral marketing campaigns. A core question in this setting is how to efficiently detect the most influential vertices in the host graph such that the infection survives the longest. In processes that incorporate re-infection of the vertices, such as the SIS process, theoretical studies identify parameter thresholds where the survival time of the process rapidly transitions from logarithmic to super-polynomial. These results contradict the intuition that the starting configuration is relevant, since the process will always either die out fast or survive almost indefinitely. A shortcoming of these results is that models incorporating short-term immunity (or creative advertisement fatigue) have not been subjected to such a theoretical analysis so far.

We reduce this gap in the literature by studying the SIRS process, a more realistic model, which besides re-infection additionally incorporates short-term immunity. On complex network models, we identify parameter regimes for which the process survives exponentially long, and we get a tight threshold for random graphs. Underlying these results is our main technical contribution, showing a threshold behavior for the survival time of the SIRS process on graphs with large expander subgraphs, such as social network models.

The Irrelevance of Influencers: Information Diffusion with Re-Activation and Immunity Lasts Exponentially Long on Social Network Models

The application of mixture-of-experts (MoE) is gaining popularity due to its ability to improve model's performance.  In an MoE structure, the gate layer plays a significant role in distinguishing and routing input features to different experts. This enables each expert to specialize in processing their corresponding sub-tasks. However, the gate's routing mechanism also gives rise to "narrow vision": the individual MoE's expert fails to use more samples in learning the allocated subtask, which in turn limits the MoE to further improve its generalization ability. To effectively address this, we propose a method called Mixture-of-Distilled-Expert (MoDE), which applies moderate mutual distillation among experts to enable each expert to pick up more features learned by other experts and gain more accurate perceptions on their allocated sub-tasks. We conduct plenty experiments including tabular, NLP and CV datasets, which shows MoDE's effectiveness, universality and robustness. Furthermore, we develop a parallel study through innovatively constructing "expert probing", to experimentally prove why MoDE works: moderate distilling knowledge from other experts can improve each individual expert's test performances on their assigned tasks, leading to MoE's overall performance improvement.

MoDE: A Mixture-of-Experts Model with Mutual Distillation among the Experts

Recently decades have witnessed the empirical success of framing Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings via language models. However, language model-based KG embeddings are usually deployed as static artifacts, which makes them difficult to modify post-deployment without undergoing re-training after deployment. To address this issue, we propose a new task of editing language model-based KG embeddings in this paper. This task is designed to facilitate rapid, data-efficient updates to KG embeddings without compromising the performance of other aspects. We build four new datasets: E-FB15k237, A-FB15k237, E-WN18RR, and A-WN18RR, and evaluate several knowledge editing baselines demonstrating the limited ability of previous models to handle the proposed challenging task. We further propose a simple yet strong baseline dubbed KGEditor, which utilizes additional parametric layers of the hyper network to edit/add facts. Our comprehensive experimental results reveal that KGEditor excels in updating specific facts without impacting the overall performance, even when faced with limited training resources Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/AnonymousForPapers/DeltaKG.

Editing Language Model-Based Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Scene text recognition is inherently a vision-language task. However, previous works have predominantly focused either on extracting more robust visual features or designing better language modeling. How to effectively and jointly model vision and language to mitigate heavy reliance on a single modality remains a problem. In this paper, aiming to enhance vision-language reasoning in scene text recognition, we present a balanced, unified and synchronized vision-language reasoning network (BUSNet). Firstly, revisiting the image as a language by balanced concatenation along length dimension alleviates the issue of over-reliance on vision or language. Secondly, BUSNet learns an ensemble of unified external and internal vision-language model with shared weight by masked modality modeling (MMM). Thirdly, a novel vision-language reasoning module (VLRM) with synchronized vision-language decoding capacity is proposed. Additionally, BUSNet achieves improved performance through iterative reasoning, which utilizes the vision-language prediction as a new language input. Extensive experiments indicate that BUSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on several mainstream benchmark datasets and more challenge datasets for both synthetic and real training data compared to recent outstanding methods. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/jjwei66/BUSNet.

Image as a Language: Revisiting Scene Text Recognition via Balanced, Unified and Synchronized Vision-Language Reasoning Network | VIDEO

As a kind of 3D data, RGB-D images have been extensively used in object tracking, 3D reconstruction, remote sensing mapping, and other tasks. In the realm of computer vision, the significance of RGB-D images is progressively growing. However, the existing learning-based image compression methods usually process RGB images and depth images separately, which cannot entirely exploit the redundant information between the modalities, limiting the further improvement of the Rate-Distortion performance. With the goal of overcoming the defect, in this paper, we propose a learning-based dual-branch RGB-D image compression framework. Compared with traditional RGB domain compression scheme, a YUV domain compression scheme is presented for spatial redundancy removal. In addition, Intra-Modality Attention (IMA) and Cross-Modality Attention (CMA) are introduced for modal redundancy removal. For the sake of benefiting from cross-modal prior information, Context Prediction Module (CPM) and Context Fusion Module (CFM) are raised in the conditional entropy model which makes the context probability prediction more accurate. The experimental results demonstrate our method outperforms existing image compression methods in two RGB-D image datasets. Compared with BPG, our proposed framework can achieve up to 15% bit rate saving for RGB images.

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