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Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, e.g., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs&#39; powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages.

AAAI 2024

Simple Image-Level Classification Improves Open-Vocabulary Object Detection | VIDEO

multi-label recognition

multi-modal learning

object detection

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, e.g., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages.

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. 

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to segment unseen objects in a query image using a few pixel-wise annotated support images, thus expanding the capabilities of semantic segmentation. The main challenge lies in extracting sufficient information from the limited support images to guide the segmentation process. Conventional methods typically address this problem by generating single or multiple prototypes from the support images and calculating their cosine similarity to the query image. However, these methods often fail to capture meaningful information for modeling the de facto joint distribution of pixel and category. Consequently, they result in incomplete segmentation of foreground objects and mis-segmentation of the complex background. To overcome this issue, we propose the Cross Gaussian Mixture Generative Model (CGMGM), a novel Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs)-based FSS method, which establishes the joint distribution of pixel and category in both the support and query images. Specifically, our method initially matches the feature representations of the query image with those of the support images to generate and refine an initial segmentation mask. It then employs GMMs to accurately model the joint distribution of foreground and background using the support masks and the initial segmentation mask. Subsequently, a parametric decoder utilizes the posterior probability of pixels in the query image, by applying the Bayesian theorem, to the joint distribution, to generate the final segmentation mask. Experimental results on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate our CGMGM's effectiveness and superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

CGMGM: A Cross-Gaussian Mixture Generative Model for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation | VIDEO

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN), as one of the biologically inspired neural network infrastructures, has drawn increasing attention recently. It adopts binary spike activations to transmit information, thus the multiplications of activations and weights can be substituted by additions, which brings high energy efficiency. 
    However, in the paper, we theoretically and experimentally prove that the binary spike activation map cannot carry enough information, thus causing information loss and resulting in accuracy decreasing.
    To handle the problem, we propose a ternary spike neuron to transmit information. The ternary spike neuron can also enjoy the event-driven and multiplication-free operation advantages of the binary spike neuron but will boost the information capacity. 
    Furthermore, we also embed a trainable factor in the ternary spike neuron to learn the suitable spike amplitude, thus our SNN will adopt different spike amplitudes along layers, which can better suit the phenomenon that the membrane potential distributions are different along layers.
    To retain the efficiency of the vanilla ternary spike, the trainable ternary spike SNN will be converted to a standard one again via a re-parameterization technique in the inference. 
    Extensive experiments with several popular network structures over static and dynamic datasets show that the ternary spike can consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods.

Ternary Spike: Learning Ternary Spikes for Spiking Neural Networks

Privacy preserving has become increasingly critical with the emergence of social media. Unlearnable examples have been proposed to avoid leaking personal information on the Internet by degrading the generalization abilities of deep learning models. However, our study reveals that unlearnable examples are easily detectable. We provide theoretical results on linear separability of certain unlearnable poisoned dataset and simple network-based detection methods that can identify all existing unlearnable examples, as demonstrated by extensive experiments. Detectability of unlearnable examples with simple networks motivates us to design a novel defense method. We propose using stronger data augmentations coupled with adversarial noises generated by simple networks, to degrade the detectability and thus provide effective defense against unlearnable examples with a lower cost. Adversarial training with large budgets is a widely used defense method on unlearnable examples. We establish quantitative criteria between the poison and adversarial budgets, which determine the existence of robust unlearnable examples or the failure of the adversarial defense.

Detection and Defense of Unlearnable Examples

We consider a decentralized multi-player multi-armed bandit (MP-MAB) problem where  players cannot observe the actions and rewards of other players and no explicit communication or coordination between players is possible.  Prior studies mostly focus on maximizing the sum of rewards of the players over time. However, the total reward maximization learning may lead to imbalanced reward among players, leading to poor Quality of Service (QoS) for some players. In contrast, our objective is to let each player $n$ achieve an expected average reward of at least $\gamma_n$ over time, i.e., achieving a $\gamma_n$ level of QoS. We develop a novel decentralized MP-MAB algorithm to accomplish this objective by leveraging the methodology of randomized matching.  We prove that our decentralized algorithm can ensure that all players have an $O(1)$ QoS regret. We also reveal an analog between our MP-MAB model and the online wireless queuing systems, which builds a connection between QoS in MP-MAB learning and stability in queuing theory.

Decentralized Scheduling with QoS Constraints: Achieving O(1) QoS Regret of Multi-Player Bandits

Engineering design methods aim to generate new designs that meet desired performance requirements. Past work has directly introduced conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) into this field and achieved promising results in single-point design problems(one performance requirement under one working condition). However, these methods assume that the performance requirements are distributed in categorical space, which is not reasonable in these scenarios. Although Continuous conditional GANs (CcGANs) introduce Vicinal Risk Minimization (VRM) to reduce the performance loss caused by this assumption, they still face the following challenges: 1) CcGANs can not handle multi-point design problems (multiple performance requirements under multiple working conditions). 2) Their training process is time-consuming due to the high computational complexity of the vicinal loss. To address these issues, A Continuous conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model (CcDPM) is proposed, which the first time introduces the diffusion model into the engineering design area and VRM into the diffusion model. CcDPM adopts a novel sampling method called multi-point design sampling to deal with multi-point design problems. Moreover, the k-d tree is used in the training process of CcDPM to shorten the calculation time of vicinal loss and speed up the training process by 2-300 times in our experiments. Experiments on a synthetic problem and three real-world design problems demonstrate that CcDPM outperforms the state-of-the-art GAN models.

CcDPM: A Continuous Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Inverse Design | VIDEO

Estimating the individuals' potential response to varying treatment doses is crucial for decision-making in areas such as precision medicine and management science. Most recent studies predict counterfactual outcomes by learning a covariate representation that is independent of the treatment variable. However, such independence constraints neglect much of the covariate information that is useful for counterfactual prediction, especially when the treatment variables are continuous. To tackle the above issue, in this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate the importance of the balancing and prognostic representations for unbiased estimation of the heterogeneous dose-response curves, that is, the learned representations are constrained to satisfy the conditional independence between the covariates and both of the treatment variables and the potential responses. Based on this, we propose a novel Contrastive balancing Representation learning Network using a partial distance measure, called CRNet, for estimating the heterogeneous dose-response curves without losing the continuity of treatments. Extensive experiments are conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrating that our proposal significantly outperforms previous methods.

Contrastive Balancing Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Dose-Response Curves Estimation

Distributed sparse Gaussian process (dGP) models provide an ability to achieve accurate predictive performance using data from multiple devices in a time efficient and scalable manner. The distributed computation of model, however, risks exposure of privately owned data to public manipulation. In this paper we propose a secure solution for dGP regression models using multi-key homomorphic encryption. Experimental results show that with a little sacrifice in terms of time complexity, we achieve a secure dGP model without deteriorating the predictive performance compared to traditional non-secure dGP models. We also present a practical implementation of the proposed model using several Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit modules to simulate a real-world scenario. Thus, secure dGP model plugs the data security issues of dGP and provide a secure and trustworthy solution for multiple devices to use privately owned data for model computation in a distributed environment availing speed, scalability and robustness of dGP.

Secure Distributed Sparse Gaussian Process Models Using Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption

Whole slide image (WSI) classification is a crucial component in automated pathology analysis. Due to the inherent challenges of high-resolution WSIs and the absence of patch-level labels, most of the proposed methods follow the multiple instance learning (MIL) formulation. While MIL has been equipped with excellent instance feature extractors and aggregators, it is prone to learn spurious associations that undermine the performance of the model. For example, relying solely on color features may lead to erroneous diagnoses due to spurious associations between the disease and the color of patches. To address this issue, we develop a causal MIL framework for WSI classification, effectively distinguishing between causal and spurious associations. Specifically, we use the expectation of the intervention P(Y | do(X)) for bag prediction rather than the traditional likelihood P(Y | X). By applying the front-door adjustment, the spurious association is effectively blocked, where the intervened mediator is aggregated from patch-level features. We evaluate our proposed method on two publicly available WSI datasets, Camelyon16 and TCGA-NSCLC. Our causal MIL framework shows outstanding performance and is plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating with various feature extractors and aggregators.

CaMIL: Causal Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

It has become a popular paradigm to transfer the knowledge of large-scale pre-trained models to various downstream tasks via fine-tuning the entire model parameters. However, with the growth of model scale and the rising number of downstream tasks, this paradigm inevitably meets the challenges in terms of computation consumption and memory footprint issues. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) (e.g., Adapter, LoRA, BitFit) shows a promising paradigm to alleviate these concerns by updating only a portion of parameters. Despite these PEFTs having demonstrated satisfactory performance in natural language processing, it remains under-explored for the question: whether these techniques could be transferred to graph-based tasks with Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs)? Therefore, in this paper, we fill this gap by providing extensive benchmarks with traditional PEFTs on a range of graph-based downstream tasks. Our empirical study shows that it is sub-optimal to directly transfer existing PEFTs to graph-based tasks due to the issue of feature distribution shift. To address this issue, we propose a novel structure-aware PEFT approach, named G-Adapter, which leverages graph convolution operation to introduce graph structure information (e.g., graph adjacency matrix) as an inductive bias to guide the updating process. Further, we propose Bregman proximal point optimization to alleviate feature distribution shift by preventing the model from aggressive update. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G-Adapter obtains state-of-the-art performance compared to counterparts on nine graph benchmark datasets based on diverse pre-trained GTNs, and delivers tremendous memory footprint efficiency compared to the conventional paradigm.

G-Adapter: Towards Structure-Aware Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Graph Transformer Networks

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical framework that efficiently scales toward large-scale routing problems. GLOP hierarchically partitions large routing problems into Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and TSPs into Shortest Hamiltonian Path Problems. For the first time, we hybridize non-autoregressive neural heuristics for coarse-grained problem partitions and autoregressive neural heuristics for fine-grained route constructions, leveraging the scalability of the former and the meticulousness of the latter. Experimental results show that GLOP achieves competitive and state-of-the-art real-time performance on large-scale routing problems, including TSP, ATSP, CVRP, and PCTSP. Our code is available at: https://github.com/henry-yeh/GLOP.

Simple Image-Level Classification Improves Open-Vocabulary Object Detection | VIDEO

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CGMGM: A Cross-Gaussian Mixture Generative Model for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation | VIDEO

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CGMGM: A Cross-Gaussian Mixture Generative Model for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation | VIDEO

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