Canada

Benefiting from instrumental global dependency modeling of self-attention (SA), transformer-based approaches have become the pivotal choices for numerous downstream visual reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering (VQA)
and referring expression comprehension (REC). However, some studies have recently suggested that SA tends to suffer from rank-collapse thereby inevitably leads to representation degradation as the transformer layer goes deeper. Inspired by social network theory, we attempt to make an analogy between social behavior and regional information interaction in SA, and harness two crucial phenomenon of structural hole and degree centrality in social network to explore the possible optimization on SA learning, which naturaly deduces two plug-and-play social-like modules. Based on structural hole, the former module allows to make information interaction in SA more structured, which effectively avoids redundant information aggregation and global feature homogenization for better rank remedy, followed by latter module to comprehensively characterize and refine the representation discrimination via considering degree centrality of regions and transitivity of relations. Without bells and whistles, our model outperforms a bunch of baselines by a noticeable margin when considering our social-like prior on five benchmarks in VQA and REC tasks, and a series of explanatory results are showcased to sufficiently reveal the social-like behaviors in SA.

AAAI 2024

Exploiting the Social-Like Prior in Transformer for Visual Reasoning

social-like prior

visual reasoning

transformer

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. 

Most of existing correspondence pruning methods only concentrate on gathering the context information as much as possible while neglecting effective ways to utilize such information. In order to tackle this dilemma, in this paper we propose a novel Graph Context Transformation Network (GCT-Net) enhancing context information to conduct consensus guidance for progressive correspondence pruning. Specifically, we design the Graph Context Enhance Transformer which first generates the graph network and then transforms it into multi-branch graph contexts. Moreover, it employs self-attention and cross-attention to magnify characteristics of each graph context for emphasizing the unique as well as shared essential information. To further apply the recalibrated graph contexts to the global domain, we propose the Graph Context Guidance Transformer. This module adopts a confident-based sampling strategy to temporarily screen high-confidence vertices for guiding accurate classification by searching global consensus between screened vertices and remaining ones. The extensive experimental results on outlier removal and relative pose estimation clearly demonstrate the superior performance of GCT-Net compared to state-of-the-art methods across outdoor and indoor datasets. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/guobaoxiao/GCT-Net.

Graph Context Transformation Learning for Progressive Correspondence Pruning

Referring 3D instance segmentation is a challenging task aimed at accurately segmenting a target instance within a 3D scene based on a given referring expression. However, previous methods have overlooked the distinct roles played by different words in referring expressions. Additionally, they have failed to incorporate the positional relationship within referring expressions with the spatial correlations in 3D scenes. To alleviate these issues, we present a novel model called X-RefSeg3D, which constructs a cross-modal graph for the input 3D scene and unites textual and spatial relationships for reasoning via graph neural networks. Our approach begins by capturing object-specific text features, which are then fused with the instance features to construct a comprehensive cross-modal scene graph. Subsequently, we integrate the obtained cross-modal features into graph neural networks, leveraging the K-nearest algorithm to derive explicit instructions from expressions and factual relationships in scenes. This enables the effective capture of higher-order relationships among instances, thereby enhancing feature fusion and facilitating reasoning. Finally, the refined feature undergoes a matching module to compute the ultimate matching score. Experimental results on ScanRefer demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing previous approaches by a substantial margin of +3.67% in terms of mIOU.

X-RefSeg3D: Enhancing Referring 3D Instance Segmentation via Structured Cross-Modal Graph Neural Networks

Text-guided image manipulation has attracted significant attention recently. Prevailing techniques concentrate on image attribute editing for individual objects, however, encountering challenges when it comes to multi-object editing. The main reason is the lack of consistency constraints on the spatial layout. This work presents a multi-region guided image manipulation framework, enabling manipulation through region-level textual prompts. With MultiDiffusion as a baseline, we are dedicated to the automatic generation of a rational multi-object spatial distribution, where disparate regions are fused as a unified entity. To mitigate interference from regional fusion, we employ an off-the-shelf model (CLIP) to impose region-aware spatial guidance on multi-object manipulation. Moreover, when applied to the StableDiffusion, the presence of quality-related yet object-agnostic lengthy words hampers the manipulation. To ensure focus on meaningful object-specific words for efficient guidance and generation, we introduce a keyword selection method. Furthermore, we demonstrate a downstream application of our method for multi-region inversion, which is tailored for manipulating multiple objects in real images. Our approach, compatible with variants of Stable Diffusion models, is readily applicable for manipulating diverse objects in extensive images with high-quality generation, showing superb image control capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/liyiming09/multi-region-guided-diffusion.

Multi-Region Text-Driven Manipulation of Diffusion Imagery

Human body orientation estimation (HBOE) aims to estimate the orientation of a human body relative to the camera’s frontal view. Despite recent advancements in this field, there still exist limitations in achieving fine-grained results. We identify certain defects and propose corresponding approaches as follows: 1). Existing datasets suffer from non-uniform angle distributions, resulting in sparse image data for certain angles. To provide comprehensive and high-quality data, we introduce RMOS (Rendered Model Orientation Set), a rendered dataset comprising 150K accurately labeled human instances with a wide range of orientations. 2). Directly using one-hot vector as labels may overlook the similarity between angle labels, leading to poor supervision.  And converting the predictions from radians to degrees enlarges the regression error. To enhance supervision, we employ Laplace smoothing to vectorize the label, which contains more information. For fine-grained predictions, we adopt weighted Smooth-L1-loss to align predictions with the smoothed-label, thus providing robust supervision. 3). Previous works ignore body-part-specific information, resulting in coarse predictions. By employing local-window self-attention, our model could utilize different body part information for more precise orientation estimations. We validate the effectiveness of our method in the benchmarks with extensive experiments and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art. Project is available at: https://github.com/Whalesong-zrs/Towards-Fine-grained-HBOE.

Towards Fine-Grained HBOE with Rendered Orientation Set and Laplace Smoothing

Deep neural networks face limitations in the area of visual abstract reasoning. In this work, we present a neural network model that addresses the challenges posed by Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Inspired by the two-stream hypothesis, we introduce the Dual-stream Reasoning Network (DRNet), which utilizes two parallel branches to capture image features. The reasoning module first learns to merge the high-level features of the same image. Then, it employs a rule extractor to handle combinations involving the 8 context images and each candidate image, extracting discrete abstract rules and utilizing an MLP to make predictions. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed DRNet achieves state-of-the-art average performance on several RPM benchmarks. Additionally, DRNet exhibits strong generalization capabilities, even extending to different out-of-distribution scenarios. The dual streams within DRNet fulfill distinct roles, addressing local and spatial information, and are subsequently integrated into the reasoning module, leveraging the abstract rules to facilitate the execution of visual reasoning tasks. These findings suggest that the dual-stream architecture could serve as a crucial component of visual abstract reasoning.

Learning Visual Abstract Reasoning through Dual-Stream Networks | VIDEO

Chinese idioms pose a significant challenge for machine reading comprehension due to their metaphorical meanings often diverging from their literal counterparts, leading to metaphorical inconsistency. Furthermore, the same idiom can have different meanings in different contexts, resulting in contextual inconsistency. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved some success in idioms reading comprehension, existing approaches still struggle to accurately capture idiom representations due to metaphorical inconsistency and contextual inconsistency of idioms. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model, Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning Method (MSCLM), which simultaneously addresses metaphorical inconsistency and contextual inconsistency of idioms. To mitigate metaphorical inconsistency, we propose a metaphor contrastive learning module based on the prompt method, bridging the semantic gap between literal and metaphorical meanings of idioms. To mitigate contextual inconsistency, we propose a multi-semantic cross-attention module to explore semantic features between different metaphors of the same idiom in various contexts. Our model has been compared with multiple current latest models (including GPT-3.5) on multiple Chinese idiom reading comprehension datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that MSCLM outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Mitigating Idiom Inconsistency: A Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning Method for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proven to effectively alleviate the data sparsity problem in Recommender System (RS). Recent CDR methods often disentangle user features into domain-invariant and domain-specific features for efficient cross-domain knowledge transfer. Despite showcasing robust performance, three crucial aspects remain unexplored for existing disentangled CDR approaches: i) The significance nuances of the interaction behaviors are ignored in generating disentangled features; ii) 
The user features are disentangled irrelevant to the individual items to be recommended; iii) The general knowledge transfer overlooks the user's personality when interacting with diverse items. To this end, we propose a Graph Disentangled Contrastive framework for CDR (GDCCDR) with personalized transfer by meta-networks. An adaptive parameter-free filter is proposed to gauge the significance of diverse interactions, thereby facilitating more refined disentangled representations. In sight of the success of Contrastive Learning (CL) in RS, we propose two CL-based constraints for item-aware disentanglement. Proximate CL ensures the coherence of domain-invariant features between domains, while eliminatory CL strives to disentangle features within each domains using mutual information between users and items. Finally, for domain-invariant features, we adopt meta-networks to achieve personalized transfer. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GDCCDR over state-of-the-art methods.

Graph Disentangled Contrastive Learning with Personalized Transfer for Cross-Domain Recommendation

The integration of Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for tackling some challenges in RL, such as sparse rewards, lack of exploration, and brittle convergence properties. However, existing methods often employ actor networks as individuals of EA, which may constrain their exploratory capabilities, as the entire actor population will stop evolution when the critic network in RL falls into local optimal. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces a Two-stage Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (TERL) framework that maintains a population containing both actor and critic networks. TERL divides the learning process into two stages. In the initial stage, individuals independently learn actor-critic networks, which are optimized alternatively by RL and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). This dual optimization fosters greater exploration, curbing susceptibility to local optima. Shared information from a common replay buffer and PSO algorithm substantially mitigates the computational load of training multiple agents. In the subsequent stage, TERL shifts to a refined exploitation phase. Here, only the best individual undergoes further refinement, while the rest individuals continue PSO-based optimization. This allocates more computational resources to the best individual for yielding superior performance. Empirical assessments, conducted across a range of continuous control problems, validate the efficacy of the proposed TERL paradigm.

Two-Stage Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Enhancing Exploration and Exploitation

Adversarial attacks on 3D point clouds often exhibit unsatisfactory imperceptibility, which primarily stems from the disregard for manifold-aware distortion, i.e., distortion of the underlying 2-manifold surfaces. In this paper, we develop novel manifold constraints to reduce such distortion, aiming to enhance the imperceptibility of adversarial attacks on 3D point clouds. Specifically, we construct a bijective manifold mapping between point clouds and a simple parameter shape using an invertible auto-encoder. Consequently, manifold-aware distortion during attacks can be captured within the parameter space. By enforcing manifold constraints that preserve local properties of the parameter shape, manifold-aware distortion is effectively mitigated, ultimately leading to enhanced imperceptibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating manifold constraints into conventional adversarial attack solutions yields superior imperceptibility, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.

Manifold Constraints for Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks on Point Clouds

This paper focuses on the Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task that aims to answer questions derived from untrimmed audible videos. To generate accurate answers, an AVQA model is expected to find the most informative audio-visual clues relevant to the given questions. In this paper, we propose to explicitly consider fine-grained visual objects in video frames (object-level clues) and explore the multi-modal relations (i.e., the object, audio, and question) in terms of feature interaction and model optimization. For the former, we present an end-to-end object-oriented network that adopts a question-conditioned clue discovery module to concentrate audio/visual modalities on respective keywords of the question and designs a modality-conditioned clue collection module to highlight closely associated audio segments or visual objects. For model optimization, we propose an object-aware adaptive-positivity learning strategy that selects the highly semantic-matched multi-modal pair as positivity. Specifically, we design two object-aware contrastive loss functions to identify the highly relevant question-object pairs and audio-object pairs, respectively. These selected pairs are constrained to have larger similarity values than the mismatched pairs. The positivity-selecting process is adaptive as the positivity pairs selected in each video frame may be different. These two object-aware objectives help the model understand which objects are exactly relevant to the question and which are making sounds. Extensive experiments on the MUSIC-AVQA dataset demonstrate the proposed method is effective in finding favorable audio-visual clues and also achieves new state-of-the-art question-answering performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangbin-ai/APL.

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Exploiting the Social-Like Prior in Transformer for Visual Reasoning

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Exploiting the Social-Like Prior in Transformer for Visual Reasoning

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Graph Context Transformation Learning for Progressive Correspondence Pruning

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