Canada

Low-light images frequently occur due to unavoidable environmental influences or technical limitations, such as insufficient lighting or limited exposure time. To achieve better visibility for visual perception, low-light image enhancement is usually adopted. Besides, lossy image compression is vital for meeting the requirements of storage and transmission in computer vision applications. To touch the above two practical demands, current solutions can be categorized into two sequential manners: ``Compress before Enhance (CbE)&#39;&#39; or ``Enhance before Compress (EbC)&#39;&#39;. However, both of them are not suitable since: (1) Error accumulation in the individual models plagues sequential solutions. Especially, once low-light images are compressed by existing general lossy image compression approaches, useful information (e.g., texture details) would be lost resulting in a dramatic performance decrease in low-light image enhancement. (2) Due to the intermediate process, the sequential solution introduces an additional burden resulting in low efficiency. We propose a novel joint solution to simultaneously achieve a high compression rate and good enhancement performance for low-light images with much lower computational cost and fewer model parameters. We design an end-to-end trainable architecture, which includes the main enhancement branch and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) aware branch. Experimental results show that our proposed joint solution achieves a significant improvement over different combinations of existing state-of-the-art sequential ``Compress before Enhance&#39;&#39; or ``Enhance before Compress&#39;&#39; solutions for low-light images, which would make lossy low-light image compression more meaningful. The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/CaiShilv/Joint-IC-LL.

AAAI 2024

Make Lossy Compression Meaningful for Low-Light Images

dmkm: data compression

cv: applications

image compression

Low-light images frequently occur due to unavoidable environmental influences or technical limitations, such as insufficient lighting or limited exposure time. To achieve better visibility for visual perception, low-light image enhancement is usually adopted. Besides, lossy image compression is vital for meeting the requirements of storage and transmission in computer vision applications. To touch the above two practical demands, current solutions can be categorized into two sequential manners: ``Compress before Enhance (CbE)'' or ``Enhance before Compress (EbC)''. However, both of them are not suitable since: (1) Error accumulation in the individual models plagues sequential solutions. Especially, once low-light images are compressed by existing general lossy image compression approaches, useful information (e.g., texture details) would be lost resulting in a dramatic performance decrease in low-light image enhancement. (2) Due to the intermediate process, the sequential solution introduces an additional burden resulting in low efficiency. We propose a novel joint solution to simultaneously achieve a high compression rate and good enhancement performance for low-light images with much lower computational cost and fewer model parameters. We design an end-to-end trainable architecture, which includes the main enhancement branch and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) aware branch. Experimental results show that our proposed joint solution achieves a significant improvement over different combinations of existing state-of-the-art sequential ``Compress before Enhance'' or ``Enhance before Compress'' solutions for low-light images, which would make lossy low-light image compression more meaningful. The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/CaiShilv/Joint-IC-LL.

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. 

Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to sequence generation models enables the direct optimization of long-term rewards (\textit{e.g.,} BLEU and human feedback), but typically requires large-scale sampling over a space of action sequences. This is a computational challenge as presented by the practice of sequence generation problems, such as machine translation, where we often deal with a large action space (\textit{e.g.,} a vocabulary) and a long action sequence (\textit{e.g.,} a translation). In this work, we introduce two-stage sampling and dynamic sampling approaches to improve the sampling efficiency during training sequence generation models via RL. We experiment with our approaches on the traditional sequence generation tasks, including machine translation and abstractive summarization. Furthermore, we evaluate our approaches in RL from human feedback (RLHF) through training a large language model using the reward model.  Experimental results show that the efficient sampling-based RL, referred to as ESRL, can outperform all baselines in terms of both training efficiency and memory consumption. Notably, ESRL yields consistent performance gains over the strong REINFORCE, minimum risk training, and proximal policy optimization methods.

ESRL: Efficient Sampling-Based Reinforcement Learning for Sequence Generation

Existing generative adversarial network (GAN) based conditional image generative models typically produce fixed output for the same conditional input, which is unreasonable for highly subjective tasks, such as large-mask image inpainting or style transfer. On the other hand, GAN-based diverse image generative methods require retraining/fine-tuning the network or designing complex noise injection functions, which is computationally expensive, task-specific, or struggle to generate high-quality results. Given that many deterministic conditional image generative models have been able to produce high-quality yet fixed results, we raise an intriguing question: is it possible for pre-trained deterministic conditional image generative models to generate diverse results without changing network structures or parameters? To answer this question, we re-examine the conditional image generation tasks from the perspective of adversarial attack and propose a simple and efficient plug-in projected gradient descent (PGD) like method for diverse and controllable image generation. The key idea is attacking the pre-trained deterministic generative models by adding a micro perturbation to the input condition. In this way, diverse results can be generated without any adjustment of network structures or fine-tuning of the pre-trained models. In addition, we can also control the diverse results to be generated by specifying the attack direction according to a reference text or image. Our work opens the door to applying adversarial attack to low-level vision tasks, and experiments on various conditional image generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Attack Deterministic Conditional Image Generative Models for Diverse and Controllable Generation

Deep neural network (DNN) models have been proven vulnerable to backdoor attacks. One trend of backdoor attacks is developing more invisible and dynamic triggers to make attacks stealthier. However, these invisible and dynamic triggers can be inadvertently mitigated by some widely used passive denoising operations, such as image compression, making the efforts under this trend questionable. Another trend is to exploit the full potential of backdoor attacks by proposing new triggering paradigms, such as hibernated or opportunistic backdoors. In line with these trends, our work investigates the first conditional backdoor attack, where the backdoor is activated by a specific condition rather than pre-defined triggers. Specifically, we take the JPEG compression as our condition and jointly optimize the compression operator and the target model's loss function, which can force the target model to accurately learn the JPEG compression behavior as the triggering condition. In this case, besides the conditional triggering feature, our attack is also stealthy and robust to denoising operations. Extensive experiments on the MNIST, GTSRB and CelebA verify our attack's effectiveness, stealthiness and resistance to existing backdoor defenses and denoising operations. As a new triggering paradigm, the conditional backdoor attack brings a new angle for assessing the vulnerability of DNN models, and conditioned over JPEG compression magnifies its threat due to the universal usage of JPEG.

Conditional Backdoor Attack via JPEG Compression

Multi-camera perception tasks have gained significant attention in the field of autonomous driving. However, existing frameworks based on Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS) in the multi-camera setting cannot produce suitable dense 3D features due to the projection nature and uncontrollable densification process. To resolve this problem, we propose to regulate intermediate dense 3D features with the help of volume rendering. Specifically, we employ volume rendering to process the dense 3D features to obtain corresponding 2D features (e.g., depth maps, semantic maps), which are supervised by associated labels in the training. This manner regulates the generation of dense 3D features on the feature level, providing appropriate dense and unified features for multiple perception tasks. Therefore, our approach is termed Vampire, stands for ``Volume rendering As Multi-camera Perception Intermediate feature REgulator''. Experimental results on the Occ3D and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that Vampire facilitates fine-grained and appropriate extraction of dense 3D features, and is competitive with existing SOTA methods across diverse downstream perception tasks like 3D occupancy prediction, LiDAR segmentation and 3D objection detection, while utilizing moderate GPU resources. We provide a video demonstration in the supplementary materials and Codes are available at github.com/cskkxjk/Vampire.

Regulating Intermediate 3D Features for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving

Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models are the bedrock of contemporary point cloud processing. However, their complex network architectures obscure the source of their strength. We first develop an “abstraction and refinement” (ABS-REF) view for the neural modeling of point clouds. This view elucidates that whereas the early models focused on the ABS stage, the more recent techniques devise sophisticated REF stages to attain performance advantage in point cloud processing. We then borrow the concept of “positional encoding” from  transformer literature, and propose a High-dimensional Positional Encoding (HPE) module, which can be  readily deployed to MLP based architectures. We leverage our module to develop a suite of HPENet, which are MLP networks that follow ABS-REF paradigm, albeit with a sophisticated HPE based REF stage. The developed technique is extensively evaluated for 3D object classification, object part segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection. We establish new state-of-the-art results of 87.6 mAcc on ScanObjectNN for object classification, and 85.5 class mIoU on ShapeNetPart for object part segmentation, and 72.7 and 78.7 mIoU on Area-5 and 6-fold experiments with S3DIS for semantic segmentation. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/zouyanmei/HPENet.

Improved MLP Point Cloud Processing with High-Dimensional Positional Encoding

Graph anomaly detection is crucial for identifying nodes that deviate from regular behavior within graphs, benefiting various domains such as fraud detection  and social network. Although existing reconstruction-based methods have achieved considerable success, they may face the \textit{Anomaly Overfitting} and \textit{Homophily Trap} problems caused by the abnormal patterns in the graph, breaking the assumption that normal nodes are often better reconstructed than abnormal ones. Our observations indicate that models trained on graphs with fewer anomalies exhibit higher detection performance. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel two-stage framework called Anomaly-Denoised Autoencoders for Graph Anomaly Detection (ADA-GAD). In the first stage, we design a learning-free anomaly-denoised augmentation method to generate graphs with reduced anomaly levels. We pretrain graph autoencoders on these augmented graphs at multiple levels, which enables the graph autoencoders to capture normal patterns. In the next stage, the decoders are retrained for detection on the original graph, benefiting from the multi-level representations learned in the previous stage. Meanwhile, we propose the node anomaly distribution regularization to further alleviate \textit{Anomaly Overfitting}. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

ADA-GAD: Anomaly-Denoised Autoencoders for Graph Anomaly Detection

This work establishes the first framework of federated $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit, where different clients face heterogeneous local objective functions defined on the same domain and are required to collaboratively figure out the global optimum. We propose the first federated algorithm for such problems, named \texttt{Fed-PNE}. By utilizing the topological structure of the global objective inside the hierarchical partitioning and the weak smoothness property, our algorithm achieves sublinear cumulative regret with respect to both the number of clients and the evaluation budget. Meanwhile, it only requires logarithmic communications between the central server and clients, protecting the client privacy. Experimental results on synthetic functions and real datasets validate the advantages of \texttt{Fed-PNE} over various centralized and federated baseline algorithms.

Federated X-armed Bandit

Customized text-to-image generation, which aims to learn user-specified concepts with a few images, has drawn significant attention recently. However, existing methods usually suffer from overfitting issues and entangle the subject-unrelated information (e.g., background and pose) with the learned concept, limiting the potential to compose concept into new scenes. To address these issues, we propose the DETEX, a novel approach that learns the disentangled concept embedding for flexible customized text-to-image generation. Unlike conventional methods that learn a single concept embedding from the given images, our DETEX represents each image using multiple word embeddings during training, i.e., a learnable image-shared subject embedding and several image-specific subject-unrelated embeddings. To decouple irrelevant attributes (i.e., background and pose) from the subject embedding, we further present several attribute mappers that encode each image as several image-specific subject-unrelated embeddings. To encourage these unrelated embeddings to capture the irrelevant information, we incorporate them with corresponding attribute words and propose a joint training strategy to facilitate the disentanglement. During inference, we only use the subject embedding for image generation, while selectively using image-specific embeddings to retain image-specified attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the subject embedding obtained by our method can faithfully represent the target concept, while showing superior editability compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made published available.

Decoupled Textual Embeddings for Customized Image Generation

Point cloud completion referring to completing 3D shapes from partial 3D point clouds is a fundamental problem for 3D point cloud analysis tasks. Benefiting from the development of deep neural networks, researches on point cloud completion have made great progress in recent years. However, the explicit local region partition like kNNs involved in existing methods makes them sensitive to the density distribution of point clouds. Moreover, it serves limited receptive fields that prevent capturing features from long-range context information. To solve the problems, we leverage the cross-attention and self-attention mechanisms to design novel neural network for point cloud completion with implicit local region partition. Two basic units Geometric Details Perception (GDP) and Self-Feature Augment (SFA) are proposed to establish the structural relationships directly among points in a simple yet effective way via attention mechanism. Then based on GDP and SFA, we construct a new framework with popular encoder-decoder architecture for point cloud completion. The proposed framework, namely PointAttN, is simple, neat and effective, which can precisely capture the structural information of 3D shapes and predict complete point clouds with detailed geometry. Experimental results demonstrate that our PointAttN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple challenging benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/ohhhyeahhh/PointAttN

PointAttN: You Only Need Attention for Point Cloud Completion | VIDEO

The next generation of machine intelligence requires the capability of continual learning to acquire new knowledge without forgetting the old one while conserving limited computing resources. 
Spiking neural networks (SNNs), compared to artificial neural networks (ANNs), have more characteristics that align with biological neurons, which may be helpful as a potential gating function for knowledge maintenance in neural networks. Inspired by the selective sparse activation principle of context gating in biological systems, we present a novel SNN model with selective activation to achieve continual learning. The trace-based K-Winner-Take-All (K-WTA) and variable threshold components are designed to form the sparsity in selective activation in spatial and temporal dimensions of spiking neurons, which promotes the subpopulation of neuron activation to perform specific tasks. As a result, continual learning can be maintained by routing different tasks via different populations of neurons in the network. The experiments are conducted on MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets under the class incremental setting. The results show that the proposed SNN model achieves competitive performance similar to and even surpasses the other regularization-based methods deployed under traditional ANNs.

Make Lossy Compression Meaningful for Low-Light Images

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