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Variational Inference (VI) has gained popularity as a flexible approximate inference scheme for computing posterior distributions in Bayesian models. Original VI methods use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to construct variational objectives. However, KL divergence has zero-forcing behavior and is completely agnostic to the metric of the underlying data distribution, resulting in bad approximations. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new variational objective by using Optimal Transport (OT) distance, which is a metric-aware divergence, to measure the difference between approximate posteriors and priors. The superior performance of OT distance enables us to learn more accurate approximations. We further enhance the objective by gradually including the OT term using a hyperparameter $\lambda$ for over-parameterized models. We develop a Variational inference method with OT (VOT) which presents a gradient-based black-box framework for solving Bayesian models, even when the density function of approximate distribution is not available. We provide the consistency analysis of approximate posteriors and demonstrate the practical effectiveness on Bayesian neural networks and variational autoencoders.

AAAI 2024

Generalized Variational Inference via Optimal Transport | VIDEO

deep generative models & autoencoders; reasoning under uncertainty: bayesian networks

machine learning: bayesian learning

stochastic optimization

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. 

Correspondence pruning aims to establish reliable correspondences between two related images and recover relative camera motion. Existing approaches often employ a progressive strategy to handle the local and global contexts, with a prominent emphasis on transitioning from local to global, resulting in the neglect of interactions between different contexts. To tackle this issue, we propose a parallel context learning strategy that involves acquiring bilateral consensus for the two-view correspondence pruning task. In our approach, we design a distinctive self-attention block to capture global context and parallel process it with the established local context learning module, which enables us to simultaneously capture both local and global consensuses. By combining these local and global consensuses, we derive the required bilateral consensus. We also introduce a recalibration block, reducing the influence of erroneous consensus information and enhancing the robustness of the model. The culmination of our efforts is the Bilateral Consensus Learning Network (BCLNet), which efficiently estimates camera pose and identifies inliers (true correspondences). Extensive experiments results demonstrate that our network not only surpasses state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets but also showcases robust generalization abilities across various feature extraction techniques. Noteworthily, BCLNet obtains 3.98\% mAP5$^{\circ}$ gains over the second-best method on unknown outdoor dataset, and obviously accelerates model training speed. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/guobaoxiao/BCLNet.

BCLNet: Bilateral Consensus Learning for Two-View Correspondence Pruning

Gaze object prediction aims to predict the location and category of the object that is watched by a human. Previous gaze object prediction works use CNN-based object detectors to predict the object's location. However, we find that Transformer-based object detectors can predict more accurate object location for dense objects in retail scenarios. Moreover, the long-distance modeling capability of the Transformer can help to build relationships between the human head and the gaze object, which is important for the GOP task. To this end,  this paper introduces Transformer into the fields of gaze object prediction and proposes an end-to-end Transformer-based gaze object prediction method named TransGOP. Specifically, TransGOP uses an off-the-shelf Transformer-based object detector to detect the location of objects and designs a Transformer-based gaze autoencoder in the gaze regressor to establish long-distance gaze relationships. Moreover, to improve gaze heatmap regression, we propose an object-to-gaze cross-attention mechanism to let the queries of the gaze autoencoder learn the global-memory position knowledge from the object detector. Finally, to make the whole framework end-to-end trained, we propose a Gaze Box loss to jointly optimize the object detector and gaze regressor by enhancing the gaze heatmap energy in the box of the gaze object. Extensive experiments on the GOO-Synth and GOO-Real datasets demonstrate that our TransGOP achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tracks, i.e., object detection, gaze estimation, and gaze object prediction. Our code will be available at https://github.com/chenxi-Guo/TransGOP.git.

TransGOP: Transformer-Based Gaze Object Prediction

Traffic flow forecasting is a classical spatio-temporal data mining problem with many real-world applications. Recently, various methods based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been proposed for the problem and achieved impressive prediction performance. However, we argue that the majority of existing methods disregarding the importance of certain nodes (referred to as pivotal nodes) that naturally exhibit extensive connections with multiple other nodes. Predicting on pivotal nodes poses a challenge due to their complex spatio-temporal dependencies compared to other nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN-based method called Spatio-Temporal Pivotal Graph Neural Networks (STPGNN) to address the above limitation. We introduce a pivotal node identification module for identifying pivotal nodes. We propose a novel pivotal graph convolution module, enabling precise capture of spatio-temporal dependencies centered around pivotal nodes. Moreover, we propose a parallel framework capable of extracting spatio-temporal traffic features on both pivotal and non-pivotal nodes. Experiments on seven real-world traffic datasets verify our proposed method's effectiveness and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Spatio-Temporal Pivotal Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting | VIDEO

Car detection is an important task that serves as a crucial prerequisite for many automated driving functions. The large variations in lighting/weather conditions and vehicle densities of the scenes pose significant challenges to existing car detection algorithms to meet the highly accurate perception demand for safety, due to the unstable/limited color information, which impedes the extraction of meaningful/discriminative features of cars. In this work, we present a novel learning-based car detection method that leverages trichromatic linear polarization as an additional cue to disambiguate such challenging cases. A key observation is that polarization, characteristic of the light wave, can robustly describe intrinsic physical properties of the scene objects in various imaging conditions and is strongly linked to the nature of materials for cars (e.g., metal, rubber, and glass) and their surrounding environment (e.g., soil, asphalt, and trees), thereby providing reliable and discriminative features for robust car detection in challenging scenes. To exploit polarization information in car detection, we first construct a pixel-aligned RGB-Polarization car detection dataset, which we subsequently employ to train a novel multimodal fusion network. Our car detection network dynamically integrates RGB and polarization features in a request-and-complement manner and can explore the intrinsic material properties of cars across the whole learning samples. We extensively validate our method and demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods. Experimental results also show that polarization is a powerful cue for car detection.

Exploiting Polarized Material Cues for Robust Car Detection | VIDEO

Modeling continuous-time dynamics on graphs constitutes a foundational challenge, and uncovering inter-component correlations within complex systems holds promise for enhancing the efficacy of dynamic modeling. The fusion of graph neural networks with ordinary differential equations has showcased commendable performance in this domain. However, the prevailing method disregards the crucial signed information intrinsic to graphs, impeding their capacity to accurately capture real-world phenomena and leading to subpar outcomes.

In response, we introduce a novel approach: a signed graph ordinary differential equation, adeptly addressing the limitations associated with capturing signed information. Our proposed solution boasts both flexibility and efficiency, seamlessly integrating within diverse graph-based dynamic modeling frameworks. To substantiate its effectiveness, we seamlessly integrate our devised strategies into three preeminent paradigms—graph neural ordinary differential equations, graph neural controlled differential equations, and graph recurrent neural networks baselines. Rigorous assessments encompass three intricate dynamic scenarios from physics and biology, as well as scrutiny across four authentic real-world traffic datasets. Remarkably outperforming the trio of baselines, empirical results underscore the substantial performance enhancements facilitated by our proposed approach.

Signed Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation for Modeling Continuous-Time Dynamics

While self-supervised graph pretraining techniques have shown promising results in various domains, their application still experiences challenges of limited topology learning, human knowledge dependency, and incompetent multi-level interactions. To address these issues, we propose a novel solution, Dual-level Graph self-supervised Pretraining with Motif discovery (DGPM), which introduces a unique dual-level pretraining structure that orchestrates node-level and subgraph-level pretext tasks. Unlike prior approaches, DGPM autonomously uncovers significant graph motifs through an edge pooling module, aligning learned motif similarities with graph kernel-based similarities. A cross-matching task enables sophisticated node-motif interactions and novel representation learning. Extensive experiments on 15 datasets validate DGPM's effectiveness and generalizability, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in unsupervised representation learning and transfer learning settings. The autonomously discovered motifs demonstrate the potential of DGPM to enhance robustness and interpretability.

Empowering Dual-Level Graph Self-Supervised Pretraining with Motif Discovery

Rearrangement operations form the crux of interactions between humans and their environment. The ability to generate natural, fluid sequences of this operation is of essential value in AR/VR and CG. Bridging a gap in the field, our study introduces FAVOR: a novel dataset for Full-body AR-driven Virtual Object Rearrangement that uniquely employs motion capture systems and AR eyeglasses. Comprising 3k diverse motion rearrangement sequences and 7.17 million interaction data frames, this dataset breaks new ground in research data. We also present a pipeline FAVORITE for producing digital human rearrangement motion sequences guided by instructions. Experimental results, both qualitative and quantitative, suggest that this dataset and pipeline deliver high-quality motion sequences. Our dataset, code, and appendix are available at https://kailinli.github.io/FAVOR.

FAVOR: Full-Body AR-Driven Virtual Object Rearrangement Guided by Instruction Text

It is well-known that image quality assessment usually meets with the problem of perception-distortion (p-d) tradeoff. The existing deep image super-resolution (SR) methods either focus on high fidelity with pixel-level objectives or high perception with generative models. The emergence of diffusion
model paves a fresh way for image restoration, which has the potential to offer a brand-new solution for p-d trade-off. We experimentally observed that the perceptual quality and distortion change in an opposite direction with the increase of sampling steps. In light of this property, we propose an adaptive skip diffusion model (SkipDiff), which aims to achieve high-fidelity perceptual image SR with fewer sampling steps. Specifically, it decouples the sampling procedure into coarse skip approximation and fine skip refinement stages. A coarse-grained skip diffusion is first performed as a high-fidelity prior to obtaining a latent approximation of the full diffusion. Then, a fine-grained skip diffusion is followed to further refine the latent sample for promoting perception, where the fine time steps are adaptively learned by deep reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, this approach also enables faster sampling of diffusion model through skipping the intermediate denoising process to shorten the effective steps of the computation. Extensive experimental results show that our SkipDiff achieves superior perceptual quality with plausible reconstruction accuracy and a faster sampling speed. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaotongtt/SkipDiff.

SkipDiff: Adaptive Skip Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Perceptual Image Super-resolution

Speech signals are inherently complex as they encompass both global acoustic characteristics and local semantic information. However, in the task of target speech extraction, certain elements of global and local semantic information in the reference speech, which are irrelevant to speaker identity, can lead to speaker confusion within the speech extraction network. To overcome this challenge, we propose a self-supervised disentangled representation learning method. Our approach tackles this issue through a two-phase process, utilizing a reference speech encoding network and a global information disentanglement network to gradually disentangle the speaker identity information from other irrelevant factors. We exclusively employ the disentangled speaker identity information to guide the speech extraction network. Moreover, we introduce the adaptive modulation Transformer to ensure that the acoustic representation of the mixed signal remains undisturbed by the speaker embeddings. This component incorporates speaker embeddings as conditional information, facilitating natural and efficient guidance for the speech extraction network. Experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of our meticulously crafted approach, showcasing a substantial reduction in the likelihood of speaker confusion.

Self-Supervised Disentangled Representation Learning for Robust Target Speech Extraction

Conventional Federated Domain Adaptation (FDA) approaches usually demand an abundance of assumptions, which makes them significantly less feasible for real-world situations and introduces security hazards. This paper relaxes the assumptions from previous FDAs and studies a more practical scenario named Universal Federated Domain Adaptation (UFDA). It only requires the black-box model and the label set information of each source domain, while the label sets of different source domains could be inconsistent, and the target-domain label set is totally blind. Towards a more effective solution for our newly proposed UFDA scenario, we propose a corresponding methodology called Hot-Learning with Contrastive Label Disambiguation (HCLD). It particularly tackles UFDA's domain shifts and category gaps problems by using one-hot outputs from the black-box models of various source domains. Moreover, to better distinguish the shared and unknown classes, we further present a cluster-level strategy named Mutual-Voting Decision (MVD) to extract robust consensus knowledge across peer classes from both source and target domains. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance for our UFDA scenario with much fewer assumptions, compared to previous methodologies with comprehensive additional assumptions.

Generalized Variational Inference via Optimal Transport | VIDEO

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BCLNet: Bilateral Consensus Learning for Two-View Correspondence Pruning

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Generalized Variational Inference via Optimal Transport | VIDEO

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BCLNet: Bilateral Consensus Learning for Two-View Correspondence Pruning

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