Canada

Uncertainty quantification is critical for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) in real-world applications. An Auxiliary Uncertainty Estimator (AuxUE) is one of the most effective means to estimate the uncertainty of the main task prediction without modifying the main task model. To be considered robust, an AuxUE must be capable of maintaining its performance and triggering higher uncertainties while encountering Out-of-Distribution (OOD) inputs, i.e., to provide robust aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. However, for vision regression tasks, current AuxUE designs are mainly adopted for aleatoric uncertainty estimates, and AuxUE robustness has not been explored. In this work, we propose a generalized AuxUE scheme for more robust uncertainty quantification on regression tasks. Concretely, to achieve a more robust aleatoric uncertainty estimation, different distribution assumptions are considered for heteroscedastic noise, and Laplace distribution is finally chosen to approximate the prediction error. For epistemic uncertainty, we propose a novel solution named Discretization-Induced Dirichlet pOsterior (DIDO), which models the Dirichlet posterior on the discretized prediction error. Extensive experiments on age estimation, monocular depth estimation, and super-resolution tasks show that our proposed method can provide robust uncertainty estimates in the face of noisy inputs and that it can be scalable to both image-level and pixel-wise tasks.

AAAI 2024

Discretization-Induced Dirichlet Posterior for Robust Uncertainty Quantification on Regression

ml: calibration & uncertainty quantification

cv: vision for robotics & autonomous driving

robustness & trustworthiness

peai: safety

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

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. 

Usually, to apply game-theoretic methods, we must specify utilities
precisely, and we run the risk that the solutions we compute are not
robust to errors in this specification.  Ordinal games provide an
attractive alternative: they require specifying only which outcomes
are preferred to which other ones.  Unfortunately, they provide little
guidance for how to play unless there are pure Nash equilibria;
evaluating mixed strategies appears to fundamentally require cardinal
utilities.

In this paper, we observe that we can in fact make good use of mixed
strategies in ordinal games if we consider settings that allow for
folk theorems.  These allow us to find equilibria that are robust, in
the sense that they remain equilibria no matter which cardinal
utilities are the correct ones -- as long as they are consistent with
the specified ordinal preferences.  We analyze this concept and study
the computational complexity of finding such equilibria in a range of
settings.

The Complexity of Computing Robust Mediated Equilibria in Ordinal Games | VIDEO

Deep Multi-view Graph Clustering (DMGC) aims to partition instances into different groups using the graph information extracted from multi-view data. The mainstream framework of DMGC methods applies graph neural networks to embed structure information into the view-specific representations and fuse them for the consensus representation. However, on one hand, we find that the graph learned in advance is not ideal for clustering as it is constructed by original multi-view data and localized connecting. On the other hand, most existing methods learn the consensus representation in a late fusion manner, which fails to propagate the structure relations across multiple views. Inspired by the observations, we propose a Structure-adaptive Unified gRaph nEural network for multi-view clusteRing (SURER), which can jointly learn a heterogeneous multi-view unified graph and robust graph neural networks for multi-view clustering. Specifically, we first design a graph structure learning module to refine the original view-specific attribute graphs, which removes false edges and discovers the potential connection. According to the view-specific refined attribute graphs, we integrate them into a unified heterogeneous graph by linking the representations of the same sample from different views. Furthermore, we use the unified heterogeneous graph as the input of the graph neural network to learn the consensus representation for each instance, effectively integrating complementary information from various views. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.

SURER: Structure-Adaptive Unified Graph Neural Network for Multi-View Clustering

The popularity of pre-trained large models has revolutionized downstream tasks across diverse fields, such as language, vision, and multi-modality. To minimize the adaption cost for downstream tasks, many Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques are proposed for language and 2D image pre-trained models. However, the specialized PEFT method for 3D pre-trained models is still under-explored. To this end, we introduce Point-PEFT, a novel framework for adapting point cloud pre-trained models with minimal learnable parameters. Specifically, for a pre-trained 3D model, we freeze most of its parameters, and only tune the newly added PEFT modules on downstream tasks, which consist of a Point-prior Prompt and a Geometry-aware Adapter. The Point-prior Prompt adopts a set of learnable prompt tokens, for which we propose to construct a memory bank with domain-specific knowledge, and utilize a parameter-free attention to enhance the prompt tokens. The Geometry-aware Adapter aims to aggregate point cloud features within spatial neighborhoods to capture fine-grained geometric information through local interactions. Extensive experiments indicate that our Point-PEFT can achieve better performance than the full fine-tuning on various downstream tasks, while using only 5% of the trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/PEFT-3D.

Point-PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for 3D Pre-trained Models | VIDEO

Data augmentation is an effective regularization strategy for mitigating overfitting in deep neural networks, and it plays a crucial role in 3D vision tasks, where the point cloud data is relatively limited. While mixing-based augmentation has shown promise for point clouds, previous methods mix point clouds either on block level or point level, which has constrained their ability to strike a balance between generating diverse training samples and preserving the local characteristics of point clouds. The significance of each part component of the point clouds has not been fully considered, as not all parts contribute equally to the classification task, and some parts may contain unimportant or redundant information. To overcome these challenges, we propose PointPatchMix, a novel approach that mixes point clouds at the patch level and integrates a patch scoring module to generate content-based targets for mixed point clouds. Our approach preserves local features at the patch level, while the patch scoring module assigns targets based on the content-based significance score from a pre-trained teacher model. We evaluate PointPatchMix on two benchmark datasets including ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, and demonstrate significant improvements over various baselines in both synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as few-shot settings. With Point-MAE as our baseline, our model surpasses previous methods by a significant margin. Furthermore, our approach shows strong generalization across various point cloud methods and enhances the robustness of the baseline model. Code is available at \url{https://jiazewang.com/projects/pointpatchmix.html}.

PointPatchMix: Point Cloud Mixing with Patch Scoring

Enhancing low-light videos in a supervised style presents a set of challenges, including limited data diversity, misalignment, and the domain gap introduced through the dataset construction pipeline. Our paper tackles these challenges by constructing a self-learned enhancement approach that gets rid of the reliance on any external training data. The challenge of self-supervised learning lies in fitting high-quality signal representations solely from input signals. Our work designs a bottleneck neural representation mechanism that extracts those signal. More in detail, we encode the frame-wise representation with a compact deep embedding and utilize a neural network to parameterize the video-level manifold consistently. Then, an entropy constraint is applied to the enhanced results based on the adjacent spatial-temporal context to filter out the degraded visual signals, e.g. noise and frame inconsistency. Last, a novel Chromatic Retinex decomposition is proposed to effectively align the reflectance distribution temporally. It benefits the entropy control on different components of each frame and facilitates noise-to-noise training, successfully suppressing the temporal flicker. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and superior effectiveness of our proposed method.

Seeing Dark Videos via Self-Learned Bottleneck Neural Representation

We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB) problem. In R-CPE-MAB, a player is given $d$ stochastic arms, and the reward of each arm $s\in\{1, \ldots, d\}$ follows an unknown distribution with mean $\mu_s$. In each time step, a player pulls a single arm and observes its reward. The player's goal is to identify the optimal \emph{action} $\boldsymbol{\pi}^{*} = \argmax_{\boldsymbol{\pi} \in \mathcal{A}} \boldsymbol{\mu}^{\top}\boldsymbol{\pi}$ from a finite-sized real-valued \emph{action set} $\mathcal{A}\subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$ with as few arm pulls as possible. Previous methods in the R-CPE-MAB assume that the size of the action set $\mathcal{A}$ is polynomial in $d$. We introduce an algorithm named the Generalized Thompson Sampling-based Explore (GenTS-Explore) algorithm, which is the first algorithm that can work even when the size of the action set is exponentially large in $d$. We also introduce a novel problem-dependent sample complexity lower bound of the R-CPE-MAB problem, and show that the GenTS-Explore algorithm achieves the optimal sample complexity up to a problem-dependent constant factor.

Thompson Sampling for Real-Valued Combinatorial Pure Exploration of Multi-Armed Bandit

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a powerful framework for training robust models against data distribution shifts. This paper focuses on constrained DRO, which has an explicit characterization of the robustness level.  Existing studies on constrained DRO mostly focus on convex loss function, and exclude the practical and challenging case with non-convex loss function, e.g., neural network. This paper develops a  stochastic algorithm and its performance analysis for non-convex constrained DRO. The computational complexity of our stochastic algorithm at each iteration is independent of the overall dataset size, and thus is suitable for large-scale applications. We focus on the general Cressie-Read family divergence defined uncertainty set which includes $\chi^2$-divergences as a special case. We prove that our algorithm finds an $\epsilon$-stationary point with an improved computational complexity than existing methods. Our method also applies to the smoothed conditional value at risk (CVaR) DRO.

Large-Scale Non-convex Stochastic Constrained Distributionally Robust Optimization | VIDEO

Panoramic imaging research on geometry recovery and High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction becomes a trend with the development of Extended Reality (XR). Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) provide a promising scene representation for both tasks without requiring extensive prior data. How- ever, in the case of inputting sparse Low Dynamic Range (LDR) panoramic images, NeRF often degrades with under-constrained geometry and is unable to reconstruct HDR radiance from LDR inputs. We observe that the radiance from each pixel in panoramic images can be modeled as both a signal to convey scene lighting information and a light source to illuminate other pixels. Hence, we propose the irradiance fields from sparse LDR panoramic images, which increases the observation counts for faithful geometry recovery and leverages the irradiance-radiance attenuation for HDR reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the irradiance fields outperform state-of-the-art methods on both geometry recovery and HDR reconstruction and validate their effectiveness. Furthermore, we show a promising byproduct of spatially-varying lighting estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Zhan/Pano-NeRF.

Pano-NeRF: Synthesizing High Dynamic Range Novel Views with Geometry from Sparse Low Dynamic Range Panoramic Images

We study an online allocation problem with sequentially arriving items and adversarially chosen agent values, with the goal of balancing fairness and efficiency. Our goal is to study the performance of algorithms that achieve strong guarantees under other input models such as stochastic inputs, in order to achieve robust guarantees against a variety of inputs. To that end, we study the PACE (Pacing According to Current Estimated utility) algorithm, an existing algorithm designed for stochastic input. We show that in the equal-budgets case, PACE is equivalent to an integral greedy algorithm. We go on to show that with natural restrictions on the adversarial input model, both the greedy allocation and PACE have asymptotically bounded multiplicative envy as well as competitive ratio for Nash welfare, with the multiplicative factors either constant or with optimal order dependence on the number of agents. This completes a "best-of-many-worlds" guarantee for PACE, since past work showed that PACE achieves guarantees for stationary and stochastic-but-non-stationary input models.

Greedy-Based Online Fair Allocation with Adversarial Input: Enabling Best-of-Many-Worlds Guarantees

Recently, despite the unprecedented success of large pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) on a wide range of downstream tasks, the real-world unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem is still not well explored. Therefore, in this paper, we first experimentally demonstrate that the unsupervised-trained VLMs can significantly reduce the distribution discrepancy between source and target domains, thereby improving the performance of UDA. However, a major challenge for directly deploying such models on downstream UDA tasks is prompt engineering, which requires aligning the domain knowledge of source and target domains, since the performance of UDA is severely influenced by a good domain-invariant representation. We further propose a Prompt-based Distribution Alignment (PDA) method to incorporate the domain knowledge into prompt learning. Specifically, PDA employs a two-branch prompt-tuning paradigm, namely base branch and alignment branch. The base branch focuses on integrating class-related representation into prompts, ensuring discrimination among different classes.  To further minimize domain discrepancy, for the alignment branch, we construct feature banks for both the source and target domains and propose image-guided feature tuning (IFT) to make the input attend to feature banks, which effectively integrates self-enhanced and cross-domain features into the model.  In this way, these two branches can be mutually promoted to enhance the adaptation of VLMs for UDA. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmarks to demonstrate that our proposed PDA achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/BaiShuanghao/Prompt-based-Distribution-Alignment.

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The Complexity of Computing Robust Mediated Equilibria in Ordinal Games | VIDEO

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