United States

Conditional independence (CI) testing is a fundamental task in modern statistics and machine learning. The conditional randomization test (CRT) was recently introduced to test whether two random variables, $X$ and $Y$, are conditionally independent given a potentially high-dimensional set of random variables, $Z$. The CRT operates exceptionally well under the assumption that the conditional distribution $X|Z$ is known. However, since this distribution is typically unknown in practice, accurately approximating it becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose using  conditional diffusion models (CDMs) to learn the distribution of $X|Z$. Theoretically and empirically, it is shown that CDMs  closely approximate the true conditional distribution. Furthermore, CDMs offer a more accurate approximation of  $X|Z$ compared to GANs, potentially leading to a CRT that performs better than those based on GANs. To accommodate complex dependency structures, we utilize a computationally efficient classifier-based conditional mutual information (CMI) estimator as our test statistic. The proposed testing procedure performs effectively without requiring assumptions about specific distribution forms or feature dependencies, 
and is capable of handling mixed-type conditioning sets that include both continuous and discrete variables. Theoretical analysis  shows that our proposed test achieves a valid control of the type I error. A series of experiments on synthetic data  demonstrates that our new test 
effectively controls both type-I and type-II errors,  even in  high dimensional scenarios.

AAAI 2025

Conditional Diffusion Models Based Conditional Independence Testing

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


AAAI 2023

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.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/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. AAAI-25 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.



Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in the image and video generation tasks. Nevertheless, they often require a large amount of memory and time overhead during inference, due to the complex network architecture and considerable number of timesteps for iterative diffusion. Recently, the post-training quantization (PTQ) technique has proved a promising way to reduce the inference cost by quantizing the float-point operations to low-bit ones. However, most of them fail to tackle with the large variations in the distribution of activations across distinct channels and timesteps, as well as 
the inconsistent of input between quantization and inference on diffusion models, thus leaving much room for improvement. To address the above issues, we propose a novel method dubbed Timestep-Channel Adaptive Quantization for Diffusion Models (TCAQ-DM). Specifically, we develop a timestep-channel joint reparameterization (TCR) module to balance the activation range along both the timesteps and channels, facilitating the successive reconstruction procedure. Subsequently, we employ a dynamically adaptive quantization (DAQ) module that mitigate the quantization error by selecting an optimal quantizer for each post-Softmax layers according to their specific types of distributions. Moreover, we present a progressively aligned reconstruction (PAR) strategy to mitigate the bias caused by the input mismatch. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and distinct diffusion models demonstrate that the proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in most cases, especially yielding comparable FID metrics to the full precision model  on CIFAR-10 in the W6A6 setting, while enabling generating available images in the W4A4 settings. We will release the source code upon acceptance.

TCAQ-DM: Timestep-Channel Adaptive Quantization for Diffusion Models

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly and revolutionized natural language processing. However, high storage overhead and computing costs limit LLM deployment in resource-constrained environments. Quantization algorithms can effectively compress LLMs and accelerate inference, but they lead to loss in precision, especially in low-bit scenarios. In this paper, we find that the discarded weight values caused by quantization in fact contain treasures to improve LLMs' accuracy. To excavate those hidden treasures, we construct search spaces around these discarded weights and those weights within the search space can seamlessly be incorporated into the original quantization weight. To determine which weights should be merged, we design a plug-and-play weight compensation framework to capture global information and keep the weights with the highest potential benefits. Our framework can be combined with various LLM quantization algorithms to achieve higher precision without additional inference overhead. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on widely used benchmark datasets for LLMs. The code will be open-sourced after paper acceptance.

Treasures in Discarded Weights for LLM Quantization

Recent years have seen substantial progress in diffusion-based controllable video generation. 
However, achieving precise control in complex scenarios, including fine-grained object parts, sophisticated motion trajectories, and coherent background movement, remains a challenge. 
In this paper, we introduce *TrackGo*, a novel approach that leverages free-form masks and arrows for conditional video generation. 
This method offers users with a flexible and precise mechanism for manipulating video content.
We also propose the *TrackAdapter* for control implementation, an efficient and lightweight adapter designed to be seamlessly integrated into the temporal self-attention layers of a pretrained video generation model. This design leverages our observation that the attention map of these layers can accurately activate regions corresponding to motion in videos.
Our experimental results demonstrate that our new approach, enhanced by the TrackAdapter, achieves state-of-the-art performance on key metrics such as FVD, FID, and ObjMC scores.

TrackGo: A Flexible and Efficient Method for Controllable Video Generation

Talking head video generation involves animating a still face image using facial motion cues derived from a driving video to replicate target poses and expressions. Traditional methods often rely on the assumption that the relative positions of facial keypoints remain unchanged. However, this assumption fails when keypoints are occluded or when the head is in a profile pose, leading to inconsistencies in identity and blurring in certain facial regions.
In this paper, we introduce Occlusion-Insensitive Talking Head Video Generation, a novel approach that eliminates the reliance on spatial correlation of keypoints and instead leverages semantic correlation. Our method transforms facial features into a facelet semantic bank, where each facelet token represents a specific facial semantic. This bank is devoid of spatial information, allowing it to compensate for any invisible or occluded face regions during motion warping.
The facelet compensation module then populates the facelet tokens within the initially warped features by learning a correlation matrix between facial semantics and the facelet bank. This approach enables precise compensation for occlusions and pose changes, enhancing the fidelity of the generated videos.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, preserving source identity, maintaining fine-grained facial details, and capturing nuanced facial expressions with remarkable accuracy. Video demonstrations can be found in our supplementary materials.

Occlusion-Insensitive Talking Head Video Generation via Facelet Compensation

Many studies have concentrated on constructing supervised models utilizing paired datasets for image denoising, which proves to be expensive and time-consuming. Current self-supervised and unsupervised approaches typically rely on blind-spot networks or sub-image pairs sampling, resulting in pixel information loss and destruction of detailed structural information, thereby significantly constraining the efficacy of such methods. In this paper, we introduce Prompt-SID, a prompt-learning-based single image denoising framework that emphasizes the preservation of structural details. This approach is trained in a self-supervised manner using downsampled image pairs. It captures original-scale image information through structural encoding and integrates this prompt into the denoiser. To achieve this, we propose a structural representation generation model based on the latent diffusion process and design a structural attention module within the transformer-based denoiser architecture to decode the prompt. Additionally, we introduce a scale replay training mechanism, which effectively mitigates the scale gap from images of different resolutions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on synthetic, real-world, and fluorescence imaging datasets, showcasing the remarkable effectiveness of Prompt-SID. Our code will release soon.

Prompt-SID: Learning Structural Representation Prompt via Latent Diffusion for Single Image Denoising

Achieving a balance between accuracy and efficiency is a critical challenge in facial landmark detection (FLD). This paper introduces the Parallel Optimal Position Search (POPoS), a high-precision encoding-decoding framework designed to address the fundamental limitations of traditional FLD methods. POPoS employs three key innovations: (1) Pseudo-range multilateration is utilized to correct heatmap errors, enhancing the precision of landmark localization. By integrating multiple anchor points, this approach minimizes the impact of individual heatmap inaccuracies, leading to robust overall positioning. (2) To improve the pseudo-range accuracy of selected anchor points, the multilateration anchor loss function is proposed. This loss function effectively enhances the accuracy of distance map, mitigates the risk of local optima, and ensures optimal solutions. (3) A single-step parallel computation algorithm is introduced, significantly enhancing computational efficiency and reducing processing time. Comprehensive evaluations across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that POPoS consistently outperforms existing methods, particularly excelling in low-resolution scenarios with minimal computational overhead. These features establish POPoS as a highly efficient and accurate tool for FLD, with broad applicability in real-world scenarios.

POPoS: Improving Efficient and Robust Facial Landmark Detection with Parallel Optimal Position Search

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) recommendation provides online courses tailored to learners' individual preferences. Existing literature is limited by: 1) Ignoring the interrelations among courses, knowledge concepts, and videos, which leads to suboptimal recommendation performance; 2) Neglecting the hierarchical interactions between learners and components like courses, knowledge concepts, and videos, which makes it difficult to capture learners' intentions accurately. To address them, we propose a novel multi-type MOOCs recommendation framework, which enables multi-type educational content recommendations. This framework includes two important components: multi-relational representation and hierarchical reasoning. Regarding multi-relational representation, we first create two static course-relational and knowledge concept-relational graphs based on domain knowledge and construct a dynamic video-relational graph using learners' browsing historical sequences. Then, we capture the interactions among different components by learning the corresponding embeddings via graph neural networks. Regarding hierarchical reasoning, we implement a hierarchical beam search strategy to narrow down the candidate courses, knowledge concepts, and videos by calculating joint probability. Finally, we introduce an optional layer to increase the diversity and reasonableness of video recommendations by estimating learners' intentions. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of our method.

Multi-type MOOCs Recommendation: Leveraging Deep Multi-Relational Representation and Hierarchical Reasoning

Class incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) aims to segment new classes during continual steps while preventing the forgetting of old knowledge. Existing methods alleviate catastrophic forgetting by replaying distributions of previously learned classes using stored prototypes or features. However, they overlook a critical issue: in CISS, the representation of class knowledge is updated continuously through incremental learning, whereas prototype replay methods maintain fixed prototypes. This mismatch between updated representation and fixed prototypes limits the effectiveness of the prototype replay strategy. To address this issue, we propose the Adaptive prototype replay (Adapter) for CISS in this paper. Adapter comprises an adaptive deviation compensation (ADC) strategy and an uncertainty-aware constraint (UAC) loss. Specifically, the ADC strategy dynamically updates the stored prototypes based on the estimated representation shift distance to match the updated representation of old class. The UAC loss reduces prediction uncertainty, aggregating discriminative features to aid in generating compact prototypes. Additionally, we introduce a compensation-based prototype similarity discriminative (CPD) loss to ensure adequate differentiation between similar prototypes, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the adaptive prototype replay strategy. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and ADE20K datasets demonstrate that Adapter achieves state-of-the-art results and proves effective across various CISS tasks, particularly in challenging multi-step scenarios. The source code will be made available online.

Adaptive Prototype Replay for Class Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have spurred significant interest in continuous story image generation. In this paper, we introduce Storynizor, a model capable of generating coherent stories with strong inter-frame character
consistency, effective foreground-background separation, and diverse pose variation. The core innovation of Storynizor lies
in its key modules: ID-Synchronizer and ID-Injector. The ID-Synchronizer employs an auto-mask self-attention module and a mask perceptual loss across inter-frame images to improve the consistency of character generation, vividly representing their postures and backgrounds. The ID-Injector utilize a Shuffling Reference Strategy (SRS) to integrate ID features into specific locations, enhancing ID-based consistent character generation. Additionally, to facilitate the training of Storynizor, we have curated a novel dataset called StoryDB comprising 100,000 images. This dataset contains single and multiple-character sets in diverse environments, layouts, and gestures with detailed descriptions. Experimental results indicate that Storynizor demonstrates superior coherent story generation with high-fidelity character consistency, flexible postures, and vivid backgrounds compared to other character-specific methods.

Storynizor: Consistent Story Generation via Inter-Frame Synchronized and Shuffled ID Injection

Video moment retrieval (VMR) aims to locate the most likely video moment(s) corresponding to a text query in untrimmed videos. Training of existing methods is limited by the lack of diverse and generalisable VMR datasets, hindering their ability to generalise moment-text associations to queries containing novel semantic concepts (unseen both visually and textually in a training source domain). For model generalisation to novel semantics, existing methods rely heavily on assuming to have access to both video and text sentence pairs from a   target domain in addition to the source domain pair-wise training data. This is neither practical nor scalable. In this work, we introduce a more generalisable approach by assuming only text sentences describing new semantics are available in model training without having seen any videos from a target domain. To that end, we propose a Fine-grained Video Editing framework, termed FVE, that explores generative video diffusion to facilitate fine-grained video editing from the seen  source concepts to the unseen target sentences consisting of new concepts. This enables generative hypotheses of unseen video moments corresponding to the novel concepts in the target domain. This fine-grained generative video diffusion retains the original video structure and subject specifics from the source domain while introducing semantic distinctions of unseen novel vocabularies in the target domain. A critical challenge is how to enable this generative fine-grained diffusion process to be meaningful in optimising VMR, more than just synthesising visually pleasing videos. We solve this problem by introducing a hybrid selection mechanism that integrates three quantitative metrics to selectively incorporate synthetic video 
 moments (novel video hypotheses) as enlarged additions to the original source training data, whilst minimising potential detrimental noise or unnecessary repetitions in the novel synthetic videos harmful to VMR learning. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate
the effectiveness of FVE to unseen novel semantic video moment retrieval tasks

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TCAQ-DM: Timestep-Channel Adaptive Quantization for Diffusion Models

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