Canada

In recent years, with the popularity of social media applications, massive digital images are available online, which brings great convenience to image recreation. However, the use of unauthorized image materials in multi-source composite images is still inadequately regulated, which may cause significant loss and discouragement to the copyright owners of the source image materials. Ideally, deep watermarking techniques could provide a solution for protecting these copyrights based on their encoder-noise-decoder training strategy. Yet existing image watermarking schemes, which are mostly designed for single images, cannot well address the copyright protection requirements in this scenario, since the multi-source image composing process commonly includes distortions that are not well investigated in previous methods, e.g., the extreme downsizing.
To meet such demands, we propose MuST, a multi-source tracing robust watermarking scheme, whose architecture includes a multi-source image detector and minimum external rectangle operation for multiple watermark resynchronization and extraction. Furthermore, we constructed an image material dataset covering common image categories and designed the simulation model of the multi-source image composing process as the noise layer. Experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of MuST in tracing sources of image materials from the composite images compared with SOTA watermarking methods, which could maintain the extraction accuracy above 98% to trace the sources of at least 3 different image materials while keeping the average PSNR of watermarked image materials higher than 42.51 dB. We released our code on https://github.com/MrCrims/MuST

AAAI 2024

MuST: Robust Image Watermarking for Multi-Source Tracing

cv: applications

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. 

Image super-resolution is a fundamentally ill-posed problem because multiple valid high-resolution images exist for one low-resolution image. Super-resolution methods based on diffusion probabilistic models can deal with the ill-posed nature by learning the distribution of high-resolution images conditioned on low-resolution images, avoiding the problem of blurry images in PSNR-oriented methods. However, existing diffusion-based super-resolution methods have high time consumption with the use of iterative sampling, while the quality and consistency of generated images are less than ideal due to problems like color shifting. In this paper, we propose Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model with Probability Flow Sampling (ECDP) for image super-resolution. To reduce the time consumption, we design a continuous-time conditional diffusion model for image super-resolution, which enables the use of probability flow sampling for efficient generation. Additionally, to improve the consistency of generated images, we propose a hybrid parametrization for the denoiser network, which interpolates between the data-predicting parametrization and the noise-predicting parametrization for different noise scales. Moreover, we design an image quality loss as a complement to the score matching loss of diffusion models, further improving the consistency and quality of super-resolution. Extensive experiments on DIV2K, ImageNet, and CelebA demonstrate that our method achieves higher super-resolution quality than existing diffusion-based image super-resolution methods while having lower time consumption. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yuan-Yutao/ECDP.

Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model with Probability Flow Sampling for Image Super-resolution

This research addresses the challenge of developing a universal deepfake detector that can effectively identify unseen deepfake images despite limited training data.  Existing frequency-based paradigms have relied on frequency-level artifacts introduced during the up-sampling in GAN pipelines to detect forgeries. However, the rapid advancements in synthesis technology have led to specific artifacts for each generation model. Consequently, these detectors have exhibited a lack of proficiency in learning the frequency domain and tend to overfit to the artifacts present in the training data, leading to suboptimal performance on unseen sources. To address this issue, we introduce a novel frequency-aware approach called FreqNet, centered around frequency domain learning, specifically designed to enhance the generalizability of deepfake detectors. Our method forces the detector to continuously focus on high-frequency information, exploiting high-frequency representation of features across spatial and channel dimensions. Additionally, we incorporate a straightforward frequency domain learning module to learn source-agnostic features. It involves convolutional layers applied to both the phase spectrum and amplitude spectrum between the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (iFFT). Extensive experimentation involving 17 GANs demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing state-of-the-art performance (+9.8\%) while requiring fewer parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/FreqNet-DeepfakeDetection.

Frequency-Aware Deepfake Detection: Improving Generalizability through Frequency Space Domain Learning

Dynamic community detection methods often lack effective mechanisms to ensure  temporal consistency, hindering the analysis of network evolution. In this paper, we propose a novel deep graph clustering framework with temporal consistency regularization on inter-community structures, inspired by the concept of minimal network topological changes within short intervals. Specifically, to address the representation collapse problem, we first introduce MFC, a matrix factorization-based deep graph clustering algorithm that preserves node embedding. Based on static clustering results, we construct probabilistic community networks and compute their persistence homology, a robust topological measure, to assess structural similarity between them. Moreover, a novel neural network regularization TopoReg is introduced to ensure the preservation of topological similarity between inter-community structures over time intervals. Our approach enhances temporal consistency and clustering accuracy on real-world datasets with both fixed and varying numbers of communities. It is also a pioneer application of TDA in temporally persistent community detection, offering an insightful contribution to field of network analysis.

Learning Persistent Community Structures in Dynamic Networks via Topological Data Analysis

The prompt-based method has been proven effective in improving the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on sentence-level few-shot tasks. However, when applying prompting to token-level tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), specific templates need to be designed, and all possible segments of the input text need to be enumerated. These methods have high computational complexity in both training and inference processes, making them difficult to apply in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we redefine the NER task as a Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task and incorporate prompting into the MRC framework. Specifically, we sequentially insert boundary markers for various entity types into the templates and use these markers as anchors during the inference process to differentiate entity types. In contrast to the traditional multi-turn question-answering extraction in the MRC framework, our method can extract all spans of entity types in one round. Furthermore, we propose word-based template and example-based template that enhance the MRC framework's perception of entity start and end positions while significantly reducing the manual effort required for template design. It is worth noting that in cross-domain scenarios, PMRC does not require redesigning the model architecture and can continue training by simply replacing the templates to recognize entity types in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in low-resource settings, achieving an average performance improvement of +5.2% in settings where access to source domain data is limited. Particularly, on the ATIS dataset with a large number of entity types and 10-shot setting, PMRC achieves a performance improvement of +15.7%. Moreover, our method achieves a decoding speed 40.56 times faster than the template-based cloze-style approach.

PMRC: Prompt-Based Machine Reading Comprehension for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

In Autonomous Driving (AD), real-time perception is a critical component responsible for detecting surrounding objects to ensure safe driving. While researchers have extensively explored the integrity of AD perception due to its safety and security implications, the aspect of availability (real-time performance) or latency has received limited attention. Existing works on latency-based attack have focused mainly on object detection, i.e., a component in camera-based AD perception, overlooking the entire camera-based AD perception, which hinders them to achieve effective system-level effects, such as vehicle crashes. In this paper, we present SlowTrack, a novel framework for generating adversarial attacks to increase the execution time of camera-based AD perception. We propose a novel two-stage attack strategy along with the three new loss function designs. Our evaluation is conducted on four popular camera-based AD perception pipelines, and the results demonstrate that SlowTrack significantly outperforms existing latency-based attacks while maintaining comparable imperceptibility levels. Furthermore, we perform the evaluation on Baidu Apollo, an industry-grade full-stack AD system, and LGSVL, a production-grade AD simulator, with two scenarios to compare the system-level effects of SlowTrack and existing attacks. Our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the vehicle crash rate of SlowTrack is around 95% on average while existing works only have around 30%. To enhance physical-world realizability, we propose a method to generate adversarial patches that achieve similar attack effects.

SlowTrack: Increasing the Latency of Camera-Based Perception in Autonomous Driving Using Adversarial Examples

The core of pointly-supervised panoptic segmentation is estimating accurate dense pseudo labels from sparse point labels to train the panoptic head. Previous works generate pseudo labels mainly based on hand-crafted rules, such as connecting multiple points into polygon masks, or assigning the label information of labeled pixels to unlabeled pixels based on the artificially defined traversing distance. The accuracy of pseudo labels is limited by the quality of the hand-crafted rules (polygon masks are rough at object contour regions, and the traversing distance error will result in wrong pseudo labels). To overcome the limitation of hand-crafted rules, we estimate pseudo labels with a fully data-driven pseudo label branch, which is optimized by point labels end-to-end and predicts more accurate pseudo labels than previous methods. We also train an auxiliary semantic branch with point labels, it assists the training of the pseudo label branch by transferring semantic segmentation knowledge through shared parameters. Experiments on Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our approach is effective and shows state-of-the-art performance compared with related works. Codes are available at  https://github.com/BraveGroup/FDD.

Fully Data-Driven Pseudo Label Estimation for Pointly-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation | VIDEO

GraIL and its variants have shown their promising capacities for inductive relation reasoning on knowledge graphs. However, the uni-directional message-passing mechanism hinders such models from exploiting hidden mutual relations between entities in directed graphs. Besides, the enclosing subgraph extraction in most GraIL-based models restricts the model from extracting enough discriminative information for reasoning. Consequently, the expressive ability of these models is limited. To address the problems, we propose a novel GraIL-based framework, termed MINES, by introducing a Message Intercommunication mechanism on the Neighbor-Enhanced Subgraph. Concretely, the message intercommunication mechanism is designed to capture the omitted hidden mutual information. It introduces bi-directed information interactions between connected entities by inserting an undirected/bi-directed GCN layer between uni-directed RGCN layers. Moreover, inspired by the success of involving more neighbors in other graph-based tasks, we extend the neighborhood area beyond the enclosing subgraph to enhance the information collection for inductive relation reasoning. Extensive experiments prove the promising capacity of the proposed MINES from various aspects, especially for the superiority, effectiveness, and transfer ability.

MINES: Message Intercommunication for Inductive Relation Reasoning over Neighbor-Enhanced Subgraphs

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is the key technology in many applications for providing insights into human behavior and anticipating human future motions. Most existing empirical models are explicitly formulated by observed human behaviors using explicable mathematical terms with deterministic nature, while recent work has focused on developing hybrid models combined with learning-based techniques for powerful expressiveness while maintaining explainability. However, the deterministic nature of the learned steering behaviors from the empirical models limits the models' practical performance. To address this issue, this work proposes the social conditional variational autoencoder (SocialCVAE) for predicting pedestrian trajectories, which employs a CVAE to explore behavioral uncertainty in human motion decisions. SocialCVAE learns socially reasonable motion randomness by utilizing a socially explainable interaction energy map as the CVAE's condition, which illustrates the future occupancy of each pedestrian's local neighborhood area. The energy map is generated using an energy-based interaction model, which anticipates the energy cost (i.e., repulsion intensity) of pedestrians' interactions with neighbors. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including 25 scenes demonstrate that SocialCVAE significantly improves prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods, with up to 16.85% improvement in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 69.18% improvement in Final Displacement Error (FDE).

SocialCVAE: Predicting Pedestrian Trajectory via Interaction Conditioned Latents

Modeling complementary relationships greatly helps recommender systems to accurately and promptly recommend the subsequent items when one item is purchased. Unlike traditional similar relationships, items with complementary relationships may be purchased successively (such as iPhone and Airpods Pro), and they not only share relevance but also exhibit dissimilarity. Since the two attributes are opposites, modeling complementary relationships is challenging. Previous attempts to exploit these relationships have either ignored or oversimplified the dissimilarity attribute, resulting in ineffective modeling and an inability to balance the two attributes. Since Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can capture the relevance and dissimilarity between nodes in the spectral domain, we can leverage spectral-based GNNs to effectively understand and model complementary relationships. 
In this study, we present a novel approach called Spectral-based Complementary Graph Neural Networks (SComGNN) that utilizes the spectral properties of complementary item graphs. We make the first observation that complementary relationships consist of low-frequency and mid-frequency components, corresponding to the relevance and dissimilarity attributes, respectively. Based on this spectral observation, we design spectral graph convolutional networks with low-pass and mid-pass filters to capture the low-frequency and mid-frequency components. Additionally, we propose a two-stage attention mechanism to adaptively integrate and balance the two attributes. Experimental results on four e-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, with SComGNN significantly outperforming existing baseline models.

Spectral-Based Graph Neutral Networks for Complementary Item Recommendation

As Federated Learning (FL) gains prominence in distributed machine learning applications, achieving fairness without compromising predictive performance becomes paramount. The data being gathered from distributed clients in an FL environment often leads to class imbalance. In such scenarios, balanced accuracy rather than accuracy is the true representation of model performance. However, most state-of-the-art fair FL methods report accuracy as the measure of performance,  which can lead to misguided interpretations of the model's effectiveness to mitigate discrimination. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first attempt towards achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between balanced accuracy and fairness in a federated environment (FairTrade). By utilizing multi-objective optimization, the framework negotiates the intricate balance between model's balanced accuracy and fairness. The framework's agnostic design adeptly accommodates both statistical and causal fairness notions, ensuring its adaptability across diverse FL contexts. We provide empirical evidence of our framework's efficacy through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets and comparisons with six baselines. The empirical results underscore the potential of our framework in improving the trade-off between fairness and balanced accuracy in FL applications.

MuST: Robust Image Watermarking for Multi-Source Tracing

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Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model with Probability Flow Sampling for Image Super-resolution

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