United States

The rapid advancement in self-supervised representation learning has highlighted its potential to leverage unlabeled data for learning rich visual representations. However, the existing techniques, particularly those employing different augmentations of the same image, often rely on a limited set of simple transformations that cannot fully capture variations in the real world. This constrains the diversity and quality of samples, which leads to sub-optimal representations. In this paper, we introduce a framework that enriches the self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm by utilizing generative models to produce semantically consistent image augmentations. By directly conditioning generative models on a source image, our method enables the generation of diverse augmentations while maintaining the semantics of the source image, thus offering a richer set of data for SSL. Our extensive experimental results on various joint-embedding SSL techniques demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the quality of learned visual representations by up to 10% Top-1 accuracy in downstream tasks. This research demonstrates that incorporating generative models into the joint-embedding SSL workflow opens new avenues for exploring the potential of synthetic data. This development paves the way for more robust and versatile representation learning techniques.

AAAI 2025

Can Generative Models Improve Self-Supervised Representation Learning?

unsupervised and self-supervised learning

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.



In today’s information-rich era, users rely heavily on recommender systems to identify relevant content. Graph structures, renowned for their ability to model intricate user-content relationships, have become essential to these systems. However, the accuracy of recommendations hinges critically on the quality of node representations within these graphs. Personalized recommendations strive to enhance uniqueness by maximizing the dissimilarity between representations (known as uniformity) while simultaneously ensuring that the representations align closely with the content users engage with (dubbed as alignment). Nevertheless, balancing these conflicting objectives remains a challenge for optimal recommendation performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose an innovative approach called SIURec, which differs significantly from previous studies. Rather than relying on manual weight selection between uniformity and alignment and optimizing uniformity solely on the final representation, SIURec adopts an adaptive adjustment method that learns the optimal weight between uniformity and alignment automatically. By optimizing uniformity at every convolutional layer, SIURec captures users’ sub-interests more effectively, ultimately leading to improved recommendation accuracy. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that SIURec achieves superior learning of uniformity (with an average improvement of 4.26% in accuracy compared to eleven SOTA methods) and exhibits robustness across different hyperparameter settings. Our implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SIURec-5A0D.

Sub-Interest-Aware Representation Uniformity for Recommender System

Conditioning image generation facilitates seamless editing and the creation of photorealistic images. However, conditioning on noisy or Out-of-Distribution (OoD) images poses significant challenges, particularly in balancing fidelity to the input and realism of the output. We introduce Confident Ordinary Differential Editing (CODE), a novel approach for image synthesis that effectively handles OoD guidance images. Utilizing a diffusion model as a generative prior, CODE enhances images through score-based updates along the probability-flow Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory. This method requires no task-specific training, handcrafted modules, or assumptions, and is compatible with any diffusion model. Positioned at the intersection of conditional image generation and blind image restoration, CODE operates in a fully blind manner, relying solely on a pre-trained generative model. Our method introduces an alternative approach to blind restoration: instead of targeting a specific ground truth image based on assumptions about the underlying corruption, CODE aims to increase the likelihood of the input image while maintaining fidelity. This results in the most probable in-distribution image around the input. Our contributions are twofold. First, CODE introduces a novel editing method based on ODE providing enhanced control, realism, and fidelity compared to SDE-based counterpart. Second, we introduce a confidence interval-based clipping method, which improves CODE’s effectiveness by allowing it to disregard certain pixels or information, thus enhancing the restoration process in a blind manner. Experimental results demonstrate CODE’s effectiveness over existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving severe degradation or OoD inputs.

CODE: Confident Ordinary Differential Editing

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the medical field, the need for its explainability has grown. In medical image analysis, a high degree of transparency and model interpretability can help clinicians better understand and trust the decision-making process of AI models. In this study, we propose a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based approach that aims to enhance the transparency of the AI model in medical image analysis. The initial step is to use traditional CNN to obtain a teacher model and then use KD to simplify the CNN architecture, retain most of the features of the data set, and reduce the number of network layers. It also uses the feature map of the student model to perform hierarchical analysis to identify key features and decision-making processes. This leads to intuitive visual explanations. We selected three public medical data sets (brain tumor, eye disease, and Alzheimer's) to test our method. It shows that even when the number of layers is reduced, our model provides a remarkable result in the test set and reduces the time required for the interpretability analysis.

A Knowledge Distillation-Based Approach to Enhance Transparency of Classifier Models

In this paper, we introduce ProtoOcc, a novel 3D occupancy prediction model designed to predict the occupancy states and semantic classes of 3D voxels through a deep semantic understanding of scenes. ProtoOcc consists of two main components: the Dual Branch Encoder (DBE) and the Prototype Query Decoder (PQD). The DBE produces a new 3D voxel representation by combining 3D voxel and BEV representations across multiple scales through a dual branch structure. This design enhances both performance and computational efficiency by providing a large receptive field for the BEV representation while maintaining a smaller receptive field for the voxel representation. The PQD introduces Prototype Queries to accelerate the decoding process. Scene-Adaptive Prototypes are derived from the 3D voxel features of input sample, while Scene-Agnostic Prototypes are computed by applying Scene-Adaptive Prototypes to an Exponential Moving Average during the training phase. By using these prototype-based queries for decoding, we can directly predict 3D occupancy in a single step, eliminating the need for iterative Transformer decoding. Additionally, we propose the Robust Prototype Learning, which injects noise into prototype generation process and trains the model to denoise during the training phase. ProtoOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance with 45.02% mIoU on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark. For single-frame method, it reaches 39.52% mIoU with an inference speed of 12.83 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 3090.

ProtoOcc: Accurate, Efficient 3D Occupancy Prediction Using Dual Branch Encoder-Prototype Query Decoder

Evaluations of large-scale recognition methods typically focus on overall performance. While this approach is common, it often fails to provide insights into performance across individual classes, which can lead to fairness issues and misrepresentation. Addressing these gaps is crucial for accurately assessing how well methods handle novel or unseen classes and ensuring a fair evaluation. To address fairness in open-set recognition (OSR), we demonstrate that per-class performance can vary dramatically. We introduce Gaussian Hypothesis Open Set Technique (GHOST), a novel algorithm that models deep features using class-wise multivariate Gaussian distributions with diagonal covariance matrices. We apply Z-score normalization to logits to mitigate the impact of feature magnitudes that deviate from the model’s expectations, thereby reducing the likelihood of the network assigning a high score to an unknown sample. We evaluate GHOST across multiple ImageNet-1K pre-trained deep networks and test it with four different unknown datasets. Using standard metrics such as AUOSCR, AUROC and FPR95, we achieve statistically significant improvements, advancing the state-of-the-art in large-scale OSR. Source code will be published upon acceptance.

GHOST: Gaussian Hypothesis Open-Set Technique

Controllable image semantic understanding tasks, such as captioning or segmentation, necessitate users to input a prompt (e.g., text or bounding boxes) to predict a unique outcome, presenting challenges such as high-cost prompt input or limited information output. This paper introduces a new task ``Image Collaborative Segmentation and Captioning'' (SegCaptioning), which aims to translate a straightforward prompt, like a bounding box around an object, into diverse semantic interpretations represented by (caption, masks) pairs, allowing flexible result selection by users. This task poses significant challenges, including accurately capturing a user's intention from a minimal prompt while simultaneously predicting multiple semantically aligned caption words and masks. Technically, we propose a novel Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model that leverages structured scene graph features for correlated mask-caption prediction. Initially, we introduce a Prompt-Centric Scene Graph Adaptor to map a user's prompt to a scene graph, effectively capturing his intention. Subsequently, we employ a diffusion process incorporating a Scene Graph Guided Bimodal Transformer to predict correlated caption-mask pairs by uncovering intricate correlations between them. To ensure accurate alignment, we design a Multi-Entities Contrastive Learning loss to explicitly align visual and textual entities by considering inter-modal similarity, resulting in well-aligned caption-mask pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate that SGDiff achieves superior performance in SegCaptioning, yielding promising results for both captioning and segmentation tasks with minimal prompt input.

SGDiff: Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model for Image Collaborative SegCaptioning

The end-to-end automated design of machine learning (ML) pipelines significantly reduces the workload for data scientists and democratizes ML for non-experts. Evolutionary algorithm (EA)-based automated ML (AutoML) systems, a prominent category of AutoML, often face inefficiencies due to the costly fitness evaluation of candidate ML pipelines. Although surrogate models have been employed to approximate the true performance of pipelines more quickly, a key challenge remains in effectively bridging the semantic gap between the heterogeneous features of datasets and pipelines. To address this issue, we propose ADELA, a novel accompanying surrogate-based optimization strategy that accelerates EA-based AutoML while retaining the performance of the resulting pipelines. ADELA operates in two phases: Offline, leveraging a high-quality curated pipeline corpus to meta-learn an accompanying surrogate model; and Online, selecting the accompanying pipeline and using the learned model to predict the performance of evaluation pipelines instead of executing them. The accompanying mechanism effectively mitigates the semantic gap between datasets and pipelines, enabling ADELA to reduce computation times by an average of 73.66\% while retaining 98.78\% of the final pipeline performance, as demonstrated in extensive experimental evaluations. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ADELA-0534.

ADELA: Accelerating Evolutionary Design of Machine Learning Pipelines with the Accompanying Surrogate Model

Heterogeneous graphs, which are common in real-world downstream tasks, have recently sparked a wave of research interest. The performance of end-to-end heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) greatly relies on supervised training for specific tasks. To reduce the labeling cost, the "pretrain-finetune" paradigm has been widely adopted, but it leads to a knowledge gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks. In an effort to address this gap, the "pretrain-prompt" paradigm has emerged as a promising approach. This involves fine-tuning randomly initialized learnable vectors in downstream tasks. However, this approach may result in an insufficient representation of downstream task features. Existing techniques for heterogeneous graph prompting restructure the heterogeneous graph to align with the homogeneous graph prompting scheme. This can potentially introduce the same limitations as homogeneous graph prompt learning. In this paper, we propose HePa, short for Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for all-level classification tasks. It not only includes a unified prompt template-graph adapted for heterogeneous graphs but also introduces a novel pre-prompt token optimized during the pre-training phase to convey task information downstream. With these designs, HePa can complete all levels of classification tasks toward few-shot scenarios while activating in-context learning. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis of HePa on three benchmark datasets.

HePa: Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for All-Level Classification Tasks

Social Intelligence Queries (Social-IQ) serve as the primary multimodal benchmark for evaluating a model's social intelligence level. While impressive multiple-choice question (MCQ) accuracy is achieved by current solutions, increasing evidence shows that they are largely, and in some cases entirely, dependent on language modality, overlooking visual context. Additionally, the closed-set nature further prevents the exploration of whether and to what extent the reasoning path behind selection is correct. To address these limitations, we propose the Visually Explainable and Grounded Artificial Social Intelligence (VEGAS) model.  As a generative multimodal model, VEGAS leverages open-ended answering to provide explainable responses, which enhances the clarity and evaluation of reasoning paths. To enable visually grounded answering, we propose a novel sampling strategy to provide the model with more relevant visual frames. We then enhance the model's interpretation of these frames through Generalist Instruction Fine-Tuning (GIFT), which aims to: i) learn multimodal-language transformations for fundamental emotional social traits, and ii) establish multimodal joint reasoning capabilities.  Extensive experiments, comprising modality ablation, open-ended assessments, and supervised MCQ evaluations, consistently show that VEGAS effectively utilizes visual information in reasoning to produce correct and also credible answers. We expect this work to offer a new perspective on Social-IQ and advance the development of human-like Social-AI. Code will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VEGAS-3D3D/.

VEGAS: Towards Visually Explainable and Grounded Artificial Social Intelligence

While recent works have achieved great success on one-shot 3D common object generation, high quality and fidelity 3D head generation from a single image remains a great challenge. Previous text-based methods for generating 3D heads were limited by text descriptions and image-based methods struggled to produce high-quality head geometry. To handle this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework, ID-Sculpt, to generate high-quality 3D heads while preserving their identities. Our work incorporates the identity information of the portrait image into three parts: 1) geometry initialization, 2) geometry sculpting, and 3) texture generation stages. Given a reference portrait image, we first align the identity features with text features to realize ID-aware guidance enhancement, which contains the control signals representing the face information. We then use the canny map, ID features of the portrait image, and a pre-trained text-to-normal/depth diffusion model to generate ID-aware geometry supervision and 3D-GAN inversion is employed to generate ID-aware geometry initialization. 
Furthermore, with the ability to inject identity information into 3D head generation, we use ID-aware guidance to calculate ID-aware Score Distillation (ISD) for geometry sculpting. For texture generation, we adopt the ID Consistent Texture Inpainting and Refinement which progressively expands the view for texture inpainting to obtain an initialization UV texture map. We then use the id-aware guidance to provide image-level supervision for noisy multi-view images to obtain a refined texture map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can generate high-quality 3D heads with accurate geometry and texture from a single in-the-wild portrait image.

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