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Generative models for learning combinatorial structures have transformative impacts in many applications. However, existing approaches fail to offer efficient and accurate learning results. Because the learning objective is subject to combinatorial constraints, the gradient estimation of the objective is highly intractable. Existing gradient estimation methods would easily run into exponential time/memory space, or incur huge estimation errors due to improper approximation. For this, we develop NEural Lovasz Sampler (NELSON), a neural network based on Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL). We show it guarantees to generate samples satisfying combinatorial constraints from the distribution of the constrained Markov Random Fields model (MRF) under certain conditions. We further present a fully differentiable contrastive divergence-based learning framework on constrained MRF (NELSON-CD). Meanwhile, NELSON-CD being fully differentiable allows us to take advantage of the parallel computing power of GPUs, resulting in great efficiency. Experimental results on three real-world combinatorial problems reveal that NELSON learns to generate 100% valid structures. In comparison, baselines either time out on large-size data sets or fail to generate valid structures, whereas NELSON scales much better with problem size. In addition, NELSON outperforms baselines in various learning metrics, such as log-likelihood and MAP scores.

AAAI 2023

Learning Combinatorial Structures via Markov Random Fields with Sampling through Lovasz Local Lemma

constrained markov random field

lovasz local lemma

constraint satisfaction

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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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. 
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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.

Pretrained vision models for object recognition often suffer a dramatic performance drop with degradations unseen during training. In this work, we propose a RObust FEature Rectification module (ROFER) to improve the performance of pretrained models against degradations. Specifically, ROFER first estimates the type and intensity of the degradation that corrupts the image features. Then, it leverages a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to rectify the features from the degradation by pulling them back to clear features. ROFER is a general-purpose module that can address various degradations simultaneously, including blur, noise, and low contrast. Besides, it can be plugged into pretrained models seamlessly to rectify the degraded features without retraining the whole model. Furthermore, ROFER can be easily extended to address composite degradations by adopting a beam search algorithm to find the composition order. Evaluations on CIFAR-10 and Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate that the accuracy of ROFER is 5% higher than that of SOTA methods on different degradations. With respect to composite degradations, ROFER improves the accuracy of a pretrained CNN by 10% and 6% on CIFAR-10 and Tiny-ImageNet respectively.

Robust Feature Rectification of Pretrained Vision Models for Object Recognition

Stochastic human motion prediction aims to forecast multiple plausible future motions given a single pose sequence from the past. Most previous works focus on designing elaborate losses to improve the accuracy, while the diversity is typically characterized by randomly sampling a set of latent variables from the latent prior, which is then decoded into possible motions. This joint training of sampling and decoding, however, suffers from posterior collapse as the learned latent variables tend to be ignored by a strong decoder, leading to limited diversity. Alternatively, inspired by the diffusion process in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, we propose MotionDiff, a diffusion probabilistic model to treat the kinematics of human joints as heated particles, which will diffuse from original states to a noise distribution. This process not only offers a natural way to obtain the "whitened'' latents without any trainable parameters, but also introduces a new noise in each diffusion step, both of which facilitate more diverse motions. Human motion prediction is then regarded as the reverse diffusion process that converts the noise distribution into realistic future motions conditioned on the observed sequence. Specifically, MotionDiff consists of two parts: a spatial-temporal transformer-based diffusion network to generate diverse yet plausible motions, and a flexible refinement network to further enable geometric losses and align with the ground truth. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our model yields the competitive performance in terms of both diversity and accuracy. 

Human Joint Kinematics Diffusion-Refinement for Stochastic Motion Prediction

Network binarization (i.e., binary neural networks, BNNs) can efficiently compress deep neural networks and accelerate model inference but cause severe accuracy degradation. Existing BNNs are mainly implemented based on the commonly used full-precision network backbones, and then the accuracy is improved with various techniques. However, there is a question of whether the full-precision network backbone is well adapted to BNNs. We start from the factors of the performance degradation of BNNs and analyze the problems of directly using full-precision network backbones for BNNs: for a given computational budget, the backbone of a BNN may need to be shallower and wider compared to the backbone of a full-precision network. With this in mind, Depth-Width Reshaping (DWR) is proposed to reshape the depth and width of existing full-precision network backbones and further optimize them by incorporating pruning techniques to better fit the BNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the analytical result and the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the original backbones, the DWR backbones constructed by the proposed method result in close to $O(\sqrt s )$ decrease in activations, while achieving an absolute accuracy increase by up to 1.7\% with comparable computational cost. Besides, by using the DWR backbones, existing methods can achieve new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy (e.g., 67.2\% on ImageNet with ResNet-18 as the original backbone). We hope this work provides a novel insight into the backbone design of BNNs. The code is available at https://github.com/pingxue-hfut/DWR.

Fast and Accurate Binary Neural Networks based on Depth-Width Reshaping

Depth map super-resolution (DSR) has been a fundamental task for 3D computer vision. While arbitrary scale DSR is a more realistic setting in this scenario, previous approaches predominantly suffer from the issue of inefficient real-numbered scale upsampling. To explicitly address this issue, we propose a novel continuous depth representation for DSR. The heart of this representation is our proposed Geometric Spatial Aggregator (GSA), which exploits a distance field modulated by arbitrarily upsampled target gridding, through which the geometric information is explicitly introduced into feature aggregation and target generation. Furthermore, bricking with GSA, we present a transformer-style backbone named GeoDSR, which possesses a principled way to construct the functional mapping between local coordinates and the high-resolution output results, empowering our model with the advantage of arbitrary shape transformation ready to help diverse zooming demand. Extensive experimental results on standard depth map benchmarks, e.g., NYU v2, have demonstrated that the proposed framework achieves significant restoration gain in arbitrary scale depth map super-resolution compared with the prior art. Our codes are available at https://github.com/nana01219/GeoDSR.

Learning Continuous Depth Representation via Geometric Spatial Aggregator

Crowdedness caused by overlapping among similar objects is a ubiquitous challenge in the field of 2D visual object detection. In this paper, we first underline two main effects of the crowdedness issue: 1) IoU-confidence correlation disturbances (ICD) and 2) confused de-duplication (CDD). Then we explore a pathway of cracking these nuts from the perspective of data augmentation. Primarily, a particular copy- paste scheme is proposed towards making crowded scenes. Based on this operation, we first design a "consensus learning" method to further resist the ICD problem and then find out the pasting process naturally reveals a pseudo "depth" of object in the scene, which can be potentially used for alleviating CDD dilemma. Both methods are derived from magical using of the copy-pasting without extra cost for hand-labeling. Experiments show that our approach can easily improve the state-of-the-art detector in typical crowded detection task by more than 2% without any bells and whistles. Moreover, this work can outperform existing data augmentation strategies in crowded scenario. 

Improving Crowded Object Detection via Copy-Paste

As a core technology of Intelligent Transportation System, traffic flow prediction has a wide range of applications. The fundamental challenge in traffic flow prediction is to effectively model the complex spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data. Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network (GNN) models have emerged as one of the most promising methods to solve this problem. However, GNN-based models have three major limitations for traffic prediction: i) Most methods model spatial dependencies in a static manner, which limits the ability to learn dynamic urban traffic patterns; ii) Most methods only consider short-range spatial information and are unable to capture long-range spatial dependencies; iii) These methods ignore the fact that the propagation of traffic conditions between locations has a time delay in traffic systems. To this end, we propose a novel Propagation Delay-aware dynamic long-range transFormer, namely PDFormer, for accurate traffic flow prediction. Specifically, we design a spatial self-attention module to capture the dynamic spatial dependencies. Then, two graph masking matrices are introduced to highlight spatial dependencies from short- and long-range views. Moreover, a traffic delay-aware feature transformation module is proposed to empower PDFormer with the capability of explicitly modeling the time delay of spatial information propagation. Extensive experimental results on six real-world public traffic datasets show that our method can not only achieve state-of-the-art performance but also exhibit competitive computational efficiency. Moreover, we visualize the learned spatial-temporal attention map to make our model highly interpretable. All datasets and codes are available.

PDFormer: Propagation Delay-aware Dynamic Long-range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction

We introduce AVCAffe, the first Audio-Visual dataset consisting of Cognitive load and Affect attributes. We record AVCAffe by simulating remote work scenarios over a video-conferencing platform, where subjects collaborate to complete a number of cognitively engaging tasks. AVCAffe is the largest originally collected (not collected from the Internet) affective dataset in English language. We recruit 106 participants from 18 different countries of origin, spanning an age range of 18 to 57 years old, with a balanced male-female ratio. AVCAffe comprises a total of 108 hours of video, equivalent to more than 58,000 clips along with task-based self-reported ground truth labels for arousal, valence, and cognitive load attributes such as mental demand, temporal demand, effort, and a few others. We believe AVCAffe would be a challenging benchmark for the deep learning research community given the inherent difficulty of classifying affect and cognitive load in particular. Moreover, our dataset fills an existing timely gap by facilitating the creation of learning systems for better self-management of remote work meetings, and further study of hypotheses regarding the impact of remote work on cognitive load and affective states. The dataset and the supplementary material are available on the website: https://pritamqu.github.io/AVCAffe.

AVCAffe: A Large Scale Audio-Visual Dataset of Cognitive Load and Affect for Remote Work

The popular Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm approximates the solution in a clipped policy space. Does there exist better policies outside of this space? By using a novel surrogate objective that employs the sigmoid function (which provides an interesting way of exploration), we found that the answer is ``YES'', and the better policies are in fact located very far from the clipped space. We show that PPO is insufficient in ``off-policyness'',  Our algorithm explores in a much larger policy space than PPO, and it maximizes the Conservative Policy Iteration (CPI) objective better than PPO during training. To the best of our knowledge, all current PPO methods have the clipping operation and optimize in the clipped policy space. Our method is the first of this kind, which advances the understanding of CPI optimization and policy gradient methods.

The Sufficiency of Off-Policyness and Soft Clipping: PPO is still Insufficient according to an Off-Policy Measure

Point annotations are considerably more time-efficient than bounding box annotations. However, how to use cheap point annotations to boost the performance of semi-supervised object detection is still an open question. In this work, we present Point-Teaching, a weakly- and semi-supervised object detection framework to fully utilize the point annotations. Specifically, we propose a Hungarian-based point matching method to generate pseudo labels for point annotated images. We further propose multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches at the level of images and points to supervise the object detector with point annotations. Finally, we propose a simple data augmentation, named Point-Guided Copy-Paste, to reduce the impact of those unmatched points. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a few datasets and various data regimes. In particular, Point-Teaching outperforms the previous best
method Group R-CNN by 3.1 AP with 5% fully label and 2.3 AP with 30% fully label on MS COCO dataset. We believe that our proposed framework can largely lower the bar of learning accurate object detectors and pave the way for its
broader applications.



Point-Teaching: Weakly Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Point Annotations

Recent work has demonstrated that pretrained transformers are overconfident in text classification tasks, which can be calibrated by the famous post-hoc calibration method temperature scaling (TS). Character or word spelling mistakes are frequently encountered in real applications and greatly threaten transformer model safety. Research on calibration under noisy settings is rare, and we focus on this direction. Based on a toy experiment, we discover that TS performs poorly when the datasets are perturbed by slight noise, such as swapping the characters, which results in distribution shift. We further utilize two metrics, predictive uncertainty and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), to measure the distribution shift between clean and noisy datasets, based on which we propose a simple yet effective transferable TS method for calibrating models dynamically. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods under noisy settings, we construct a benchmark consisting of four noise types and five shift intensities based on the QNLI, AG-News, and Emotion tasks. Experimental results on the noisy benchmark show that (1) the metrics are effective in measuring distribution shift and (2) transferable TS can significantly decrease the expected calibration error (ECE) compared with the competitive baseline ensemble TS by approximately 46.09\%.

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