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During the preceding biennium, vision-language pre-training has achieved noteworthy success on several downstream tasks. Nevertheless, acquiring high-quality image-text pairs, where the pairs are entirely exclusive of each other, remains a challenging task, and noise exists in the commonly used datasets. To address this issue, we propose SoftCLIP, a novel approach that relaxes the strict one-to-one constraint and achieves a soft cross-modal alignment by introducing a softened target, which is generated from the fine-grained intra-modal self-similarity. The intra-modal guidance is indicative to enable two pairs have some local similarities and model many-to-many relationships between the two modalities. Besides, since the positive still dominates in the softened target distribution, we disentangle the negatives in the distribution to further boost the relation alignment with the negatives in the cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SoftCLIP. In particular, on ImageNet zero-shot classification task, using CC3M/CC12M as pre-training dataset, SoftCLIP brings a top-1 accuracy improvement of 6.8\%/7.2\% over the CLIP baseline.

AAAI 2024

SoftCLIP: Softer Cross-Modal Alignment Makes CLIP Stronger

soft target

clip

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. 

Differing from traditional semi-supervised learning, class-imbalanced semi-supervised learning presents two distinct challenges: (1) The imbalanced distribution of training samples leads to model bias towards certain classes, and (2) the distribution of unlabeled samples is unknown and potentially distinct from that of labeled samples, which further contributes to class bias in the pseudo-labels during the training. To address these dual challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Twice Class Bias Correction (TCBC). We begin by utilizing an estimate of the class distribution from the participating training samples to correct the model, enabling it to learn the posterior probabilities of samples under a class-balanced prior. This correction serves to alleviate the inherent class bias of the model. Building upon this foundation, we further estimate the class bias of the current model parameters during the training process. We apply a secondary correction to the model's pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, aiming to make the assignment of pseudo-labels across different classes of unlabeled samples as equitable as possible. Through extensive experimentation on CIFAR10/100-LT, STL10-LT, and the sizable long-tailed dataset SUN397, we provide conclusive evidence that our proposed TCBC method reliably enhances the performance of class-imbalanced semi-supervised learning.

Twice Class Bias Correction for Imbalanced Semi-supervised Learning

Neural style transfer (NST) has evolved significantly in recent years. Yet, despite its rapid progress and advancement, existing NST methods either struggle to transfer aesthetic information from a style effectively or suffer from high computational costs and inefficiencies in feature disentanglement due to using pre-trained models. This work proposes a lightweight but effective model, AesFA---Aesthetic Feature-Aware NST. The primary idea is to decompose the image via its frequencies to better disentangle aesthetic styles from the reference image while training the entire model in an end-to-end manner to exclude pre-trained models at inference completely. To improve the network's ability to extract more distinct representations and further enhance the stylization quality, this work introduces a new aesthetic feature: contrastive loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show the approach not only outperforms recent NST methods in terms of stylization quality, but it also achieves faster inference. Codes are available at https://github.com/Sooyyoungg/AesFA.

AesFA: An Aesthetic Feature-Aware Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer

Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging and realistic task that extends beyond the scope of standard Object Detection task. It involves detecting both known and unknown objects while integrating learned knowledge for future tasks. However, the level of "unknownness" varies significantly depending on the context. For example, a tree is typically considered part of the background in a self-driving scene, but it may be significant in a household context. We argue that this contextual information should already be embedded within the known classes. In other words, there should be a semantic or latent structure relationship between the known and unknown items to be discovered. Motivated by this observation, we propose Hyp-OW, a method that learns and models hierarchical representation of known items through a SuperClass Regularizer. Leveraging this representation allows us to effectively detect unknown objects using a similarity distance-based relabeling module. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hyp-OW, achieving improvement in both known and unknown detection (up to 6 percent). These findings are particularly pronounced in our newly designed benchmark, where a strong hierarchical structure exists between known and unknown objects.

Hyp-OW: Exploiting Hierarchical Structure Learning with Hyperbolic Distance Enhances Open World Object Detection

Addressing Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) Segmentation and Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (ZS3) is challenging, necessitating segmenting unseen classes. Existing strategies adapt the class-agnostic Mask2Former (CA-M2F) tailored to specific tasks. However, these methods cater to singular tasks, demand training from scratch, and we demonstrate certain deficiencies in CA-M2F, which affect performance. We propose the Class-Agnostic Structure-Constrained Learning (CSL), a plug-in framework that can integrate with existing methods, thereby embedding structural constraints and achieving performance gain, including the unseen, specifically OOD, ZS3, and domain adaptation (DA) tasks. There are two schemes for CSL to integrate with existing methods (1) by distilling knowledge from a base teacher network, enforcing constraints across training and inference phrases, or (2) by leveraging established models to obtain per-pixel distributions without retraining, appending constraints during the inference phase. Our soft assignment and mask split methodologies enhance OOD object segmentation. Empirical evaluations demonstrate CSL's prowess in boosting the performance of existing algorithms spanning OOD segmentation, ZS3, and DA segmentation, consistently transcending the state-of-art across all three tasks.

CSL: Class-Agnostic Structure-Constrained Learning for Segmentation including the Unseen

Lane detection is the cornerstone of autonomous driving. Although existing methods have achieved promising results, there are still limitations in addressing challenging scenarios such as abnormal weather, occlusion, and curves. These scenarios with low visibility usually require to rely on the broad information of the entire scene provided by global semantics and local texture information to predict the precise position and shape of the lane lines. In this paper, we propose a Global Semantic Enhancement Network for lane detection, which involves a complete set of systems for feature extraction and global features transmission. Traditional methods for global feature extraction usually require deep convolution layer stacks. However, this approach of obtaining global features solely through a larger receptive field not only fails to capture precise global features but also leads to an overly deep model, which results in slow inference speed. To address these challenges, we propose a novel operation called the Global feature Extraction Module (GEM). Additionally, we introduce the Top Layer Auxiliary Module (TLAM) as a channel for feature distillation, which facilitates a bottom-up transmission of global features. Furthermore, we introduce two novel loss functions: the Angle Loss, which account for the angle between predicted and ground truth lanes, and the Generalized Line IoU Loss function that considers the scenarios where significant deviations occur between the prediction of lanes and ground truth in some harsh conditions. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method exhibits remarkable superiority over the current state-of-the-art techniques for lane detection.

GSENet:Global Semantic Enhancement Network for Lane Detection | VIDEO

The de-occlusion problem, involving extracting clear background images by removing foreground occlusions, holds significant practical importance but poses considerable challenges. Most current research predominantly focuses on generating discrete images from calibrated camera arrays, but this approach often struggles with dense occlusions and fast motions due to limited perspectives and motion blur. To overcome these limitations, an effective solution requires the integration of multi-view visual information. The spike camera, as an innovative neuromorphic sensor, shows promise with its ultra-high temporal resolution and dynamic range. In this study, we propose a novel approach that utilizes a single spike camera for continuous multi-view imaging to address occlusion removal. By rapidly moving the spike camera, we capture a dense stream of spikes from occluded scenes. Our model, SpkOccNet, processes these spikes by integrating multi-view spatial-temporal information via long-short-window feature extractor (LSW) and employs a novel cross-view mutual attention-based module (CVA) for effective fusion and refinement. Additionally, to facilitate research in occlusion removal, we introduce the S-OCC dataset, which consists of real-world spike-based data. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and generalization capabilities of our model in effectively removing dense occlusions across diverse scenes. Public project page: https://github.com/Leozhangjiyuan/SpikeDeOcclusion.

Transient Glimpses: Unveiling Occluded Backgrounds through the Spike Camera

Personalized federated learning is a new paradigm to address heterogeneous problems ({e.g.}~issues with {non-i.i.d.~}data) in federated learning. However, existing personalized federated learning methods lack standards for how personalized and shared parts of the models are designed. Sometimes, manual design can even lead to worse performance than non-personalization. As a result, we propose a new algorithm for personalized federated neural architecture search, called PerFedRLNAS, to automatically personalize the architectures and weights of models on each client. With such an algorithm, we can solve the issues of low efficiency as well as failure to adapt to new search spaces in previous federated neural architecture search work. We further show that with automatically assigning different client architectures can solve heterogeneity of data distribution, efficiency and memory in federated learning.  In our experiments, we empirically show that our framework shows much better performance with respect to personalized accuracy and overall time compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, PerFedRLNAS has a good generalization ability to new clients, and is easy to be deployed in practice.

PerFedRLNAS: One-for-All Personalized Federated Neural Architecture Search

Perceptual quality assessment of user generated content (UGC) videos is challenging due to the requirement of large scale human annotated videos for training. In this work, we address this challenge by first designing a self-supervised Spatio-Temporal Visual Quality Representation Learning (ST-VQRL) framework to generate robust quality aware features for videos. Then, we propose a dual-model based Semi Supervised Learning (SSL) method specifically designed for the Video Quality Assessment (SSL-VQA) task, through a novel knowledge transfer of quality predictions between the two models. Our SSL-VQA method uses the ST-VQRL backbone to produce robust performances across various VQA datasets including cross-database settings, despite being learned with limited human annotated videos. Our model improves the state-of-the-art performance when trained only with limited data by around 10%, and by around 15% when unlabelled data is also used in SSL. Source codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Shankhanil006/SSL-VQA.

Knowledge Guided Semi-supervised Learning for Quality Assessment of User Generated Videos

Recently the prompt-based models have become popular across various language and vision tasks. In this work, we perform few-shot keypoint detection (FSKD) by detecting any keypoints in a query image, given the prompts formed by support images and keypoints. FSKD can be applied to detecting keypoints and poses of diverse animal species. In order to maintain flexibility of detecting varying number of keypoints, existing FSKD approaches modulate query feature map per support keypoint, then detect the corresponding keypoint from each modulated feature via a detection head. Such a modulation-detection separate design would scale up model into heavy yet slow one when the number of keypoints increases. To overcome this issue, we design a novel light-weight detector which combines modulation and detection into one step, with the goal of reducing the computational cost without the drop of performance. Moreover, to bridge the large domain shift of keypoints between seen and unseen species, we propose mean feature based contrastive learning that aligns/separates mean features of the same/different type, resulting in better keypoint representations. Compared to the state of the art, our light-weight detector reduces the number of parameters by 50\%, training/test time by 50\%, and achieves 5.62\% accuracy gain on 1-shot novel keypoint detection in the Animal pose dataset. Our model is also robust to the number of keypoints and saves much memory when evaluating a large number of keypoints (\eg, 1000) per episode.

Detect Any Keypoints: An Efficient Light-Weight Few-Shot Keypoint Detector

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a challenging vision task that aims to detect individual objects within a single frame and associate them across multiple frames. Recent MOT approaches can be categorized into two-stage tracking-by-detection (TBD) methods and one-stage joint detection and tracking (JDT) methods. Despite the success of these approaches, they also suffer from common problems, such as harmful global or local inconsistency, poor trade-off between robustness and model complexity, and lack of flexibility in different scenes within the same video. In this paper we propose a simple but robust framework that formulates object detection and association jointly as a consistent denoising diffusion process from paired noise boxes to paired ground-truth boxes. This novel progressive denoising diffusion strategy substantially augments the tracker's effectiveness, enabling it to discriminate between various objects. During the training stage, paired object boxes diffuse from paired ground-truth boxes to random distribution, and the model learns detection and tracking simultaneously by reversing this noising process. In inference, the model refines a set of paired randomly generated boxes to the detection and tracking results in a flexible one-step or multi-step denoising diffusion process. Extensive experiments on three widely used MOT benchmarks, including MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack, demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RainBowLuoCS/DiffusionTrack.

SoftCLIP: Softer Cross-Modal Alignment Makes CLIP Stronger

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Twice Class Bias Correction for Imbalanced Semi-supervised Learning

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