GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Parameterized Approximation Algorithm for Doubly Constrained Fair Clustering
Authors: Xiaoliang Wu; Qilong Feng; Junyu Huang; Jianxin Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Fair clustering has recently received considerable attention where numerous distinct fairness notions are developed. Despite being well-justified, these fairness notions are frequently studied in isolation, leaving the need to explore how they can be combined. Building on prior work, we focus on the doubly constrained fair clustering that incorporates two widely adopted demographic representation fairness notions in clustering: group fairness and data summarization fairness. Both fairness notions extend classical clustering formulation by associating each data point with a demographic label, where group fairness requires each cluster to proportionally reflect the population-level distribution of demographic groups, and data summarization fairness ensures the chosen facilities maintaining the population-level demographic representation of each group. In this paper, we study the Fixed-Parameter Tractable (FPT) approximation algorithms for doubly constrained fair clustering under the k-median objective, referred to Df-k-Med. The previous algorithms typically enumerate different demographic groups or construct fairness coreset, parameterized by both the number of opened facilities and demographic labels. By further leveraging the local fairness information, we propose a color-agnostic structural method that obtains the parameterized result independent of the number of demographic labels while effectively handling the combination of both fairness constraints. Specifically, we design a constant factor approximation for the Df-k-Med problem with fairness violation by one, which runs in FPT(k)-time, where k is the number of opened facilities.
Fine-grained Prompt Screening: Defending Against Backdoor Attack on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Yiran Xu; Nan Zhong; Guobiao Li; Anda Cheng; Yinggui Wang; Zhenxing Qian; Xinpeng Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models exhibit impressive generation capabilities in recently studies. However, they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where model outputs are manipulated by malicious triggers. In this paper, we propose a novel input-level defense method, called Fine-grained Prompt Screening (GrainPS). Our method is motivated by the phenomenon, i.e., Semantics Misalignment, where the backdoor trigger causes the inconsistency between the cross-attention projections of object words (the key words to determine the main content of the generated image) and their true semantics. In particular, we divide each prompt into pieces and conduct fine-grained analysis by examining the impact of the trigger on object words in the cross-attention layers rather than their global influence on the entire generated image. To assess the impact of each word on object words, we formulate "semantics alignment score'' as the metric with a carefully crafted detection strategy to identify the trigger. Therefore, our implementation can detect backdoor input prompts and localize of triggers simultaneously. Evaluations across four advanced backdoor attack scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed defense method.
FairSMOE: Mitigating Multi-Attribute Fairness Problem with Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Changdi Yang; Zheng Zhan; Ci Zhang; Yifan Gong; Yize Li; Zichong Meng; Jun Liu; Xuan Shen; Hao Tang; Geng Yuan; Pu Zhao; Xue Lin; Yanzhi Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Real‐world datasets usually contain multiple attributes, making it essential to ensure fairness across all of them simultaneously. However, different attributes may vary in difficulty, and no existing approaches have effectively addressed this issue. Consequently, an attribute‐adaptive strategy is needed to achieve fairness for all attributes. Multi‐task Learning (MTL) leverages shared information to optimize multiple tasks concurrently, while Sparsely‐Gated Mixture‐of‐Experts (SMoE) can dynamically allocate computational resources to the most needed tasks. In this work, we formulate multi‐attribute fairness issue as an MTL problem and employ SMoE to achieve desirable performance across all attributes simultaneously. We first analyze the feasibility and find the potentiality by formalizing multi-attribute fairness problem into a MTL problem and mitigating it by using SMoE. However, vanilla SMoE could lead to over-utilization problem which causes sub-optimal performance. We then proposed an innovative SMoE framework for multi-attribute fair image classification, which further improves multi-attribute fairness by redesigning the MoE layer and routing policy with fairness consideration. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness. Taking a DeiT-Small as the backbone, we achieve 77.25% and 86.01% accuracy on the ISIC2019 and CelebA dataset respectively with Multi-attribute Predictive Quality Disparity (PQD) score of 0.801 and 0.787, beating current state-of-the-art methods Muffin, InfoFair and MultiFair.
GraphProt: Certified Black-Box Shielding Against Backdoored Graph Models
Authors: Xiao Yang; Yuni Lai; Kai Zhou; Gaolei Li; Jianhua Li; Hang Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Graph learning models have been empirically proven to be vulnerable to backdoor threats, wherein adversaries submit trigger-embedded inputs to manipulate the model predictions. Current graph backdoor defenses manifest several limitations: 1) dependence on model-related details, 2) necessitation of additional fine-tuning, and 3) reliance on extra explainability tools, all of which are infeasible under stringent privacy policies. To address those limitations, we propose GraphProt, a certified black-box defense method to suppress backdoor attacks on GNN-based graph classifiers. Our GraphProt operates in a model-agnostic manner and solely leverages graph input. Specifically, GraphProt first introduces designed topology-feature-filtration to mitigate graph anomalies. Subsequently, subgraphs are sampled via a formulated strategy integrating topology and features, followed by a robust model inference through a majority vote-based subgraph prediction ensemble. Our results across benchmark attacks and datasets show GraphProt effectively reduces attack success rates while preserving regular graph classification accuracy.
Rethinking Removal Attack and Fingerprinting Defense for Model Intellectual Property Protection: A Frequency Perspective
Authors: Cheng Zhang; Yang Xu; Tingqiao Huang; Zixing Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Training deep neural networks is resource-intensive, making it crucial to protect their intellectual property from infringement. However, current model ownership resolution (MOR) methods predominantly address general removal attacks that involve weight modifications, with limited research considering alternative attack perspectives. In this work, we propose a frequency-based model ownership removal attack, grounded in a key observation: modifying a model's high-frequency coefficients does not significantly impact its performance but does alter its weights and decision boundary. This change invalidates the existing MOR methods. We further propose a frequency-based fingerprinting technique as a defense mechanism. By extracting frequency-domain characteristics instead of decision boundary or model weights, our fingerprinting defense effectively against the proposed frequency-based removal attack and demonstrates robustness against existing general removal attacks. The experimental results show that the frequency-based removal attack can easily defeat state-of-the-art white-box watermarking and fingerprinting schemes while preserving model performance, and the proposed defense method is also effective. Our code is released at: https://github.com/huangtingqiao/RRA-IJCAI25.
Causality-Inspired Disentanglement for Fair Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Guixian Zhang; Debo Cheng; Guan Yuan; Shang Liu; Yanmei Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Fair graph neural networks aim to eliminate discriminatory biases in predictions. Existing approaches often rely on adversarial learning to mitigate dependencies between sensitive attributes and labels but face challenges due to optimisation difficulties. A key limitation lies in neglecting intrinsic causality, which may lead to the entanglement of sensitive and causal factors, discarding causal factors or retaining sensitive factors in the final prediction, especially on unbalanced datasets. To address this issue, we propose a Causality-inspired Disentangled framework for Fair Graph neural networks (CDFG). In CDFG, node representations are conceptualised as a combination of causal and sensitive factors, enabling fair representation learning by only utilising the causal factors. We first use a counterfactual data generation mechanism to generate counterfactual data with similar causal factors but completely different sensitive factors. Then, we input real-world data and counterfactual data into the factor disentanglement module to achieve independence and disentanglement between the causal factors and sensitive factors. Finally, an adaptive mask module extracts the causal representation for fair and accurate graph-based predictions. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that CDFG consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving competitive utility and significantly improved fairness.
DFCA: Disentangled Feature Contrastive Learning and Augmentation for Fairer Dermatological Diagnostics
Authors: Pengcheng Zhao; Xiaowei Ding
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: With the increasing integration of AI in medical research and applications, the issue of fairness has become as critical as diagnostic accuracy. In dermatology diagnosis, the challenge of class-imbalanced data, which is sometimes limited and contains demographic attributes, results in an imbalanced and insufficient representation within the feature space of deep learning models. Besides, feature entanglement within deep learning models confuses skin tone and disease condition information, impairing model performance among vulnerable groups. Moreover, feature entanglement often constrains the efforts to mitigate unfairness, entailing a trade-off between fairness and diagnostic accuracy. This paper introduces the Disentangled Feature Contrastive learning and Augmentation framework (DFCA), aiming to enhance fairness in dermatological diagnoses without compromising accuracy. Initially, DFCA disentangles skin images into disease related and skin-tone features. Subsequently, the two sets of features are projected into normalized spaces for contrastive learning, each modeled by a mixture of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions. DFCA then samples from these vMF distributions to inversely augment the feature space. To further evaluate the fairness-accuracy balance, we propose a new metric, the Accuracy-Fairness Balance Degree (AFBD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that DFCA significantly improves both fairness and accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Why the Agent Made that Decision: Contrastive Explanation Learning for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Rui Zuo; Simon Khan; Zifan Wang; Garrett Ethan Katz; Qinru Qiu
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in solving complex decision-making problems, yet its adoption in critical domains is hindered by the lack of interpretability in its decision-making processes. Existing explainable AI (xAI) approaches often fail to provide meaningful explanations for RL agents, particularly because they overlook the contrastive nature of human reasoning—answering "why this action instead of that one?" To address this gap, we propose a novel framework of contrastive learning to explain RL selected actions, named VisionMask. VisionMask is trained to generate explanations by explicitly contrasting the agent's chosen action with alternative actions in a given state using a self-supervised manner. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through experiments across diverse RL environments, evaluating it in terms of faithfulness, robustness and complexity. Our results show that VisionMask significantly improves human understanding of agent behavior while maintaining accuracy and fidelity. Furthermore, we present examples illustrating how VisionMask can be used for counterfactual analysis. This work bridges the gap between RL and xAI, paving the way for safer and more interpretable RL systems.
Keypoints as Dynamic Centroids for Unified Human Pose and Segmentation
Authors: Niaz Ahmad; Jawad Khan; Kang G. Shin; Youngmoon Lee; Guanghui Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The dynamic movement of the human body presents a fundamental challenge for human pose estimation and body segmentation. State-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on combining keypoint heatmaps with segmentation masks, but often struggle in scenarios involving overlapping joints during pose estimation or rapidly changing poses for instance-level segmentation. To address these limitations, we leverage Keypoints as Dynamic Centroid (KDC), a new centroid-based representation for unified human pose estimation and instance-level segmentation. KDC adopts a bottom-up paradigm to generate keypoint heatmaps for easily distinguishable and complex keypoints, and improves keypoint detection and confidence scores by introducing KeyCentroids using a keypoint disk. It leverages high-confidence keypoints as dynamic centroids in the embedding space to generate MaskCentroids, allowing for the swift clustering of pixels to specific human instances during rapid changes in human body movements in a live environment. Our experimental evaluations focus on crowded and occluded cases using the CrowdPose, OCHuman, and COCO benchmarks, demonstrating KDC’s effectiveness and generalizability in challenging scenarios in terms of both accuracy and runtime performance. Our implementation is available at https://sites.google.com/view/niazahmad/projects/kdc.
Top-I2P: Explore Open-Domain Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Using Topology Relationship
Authors: Pei An; Jiaqi Yang; Muyao Peng; You Yang; Qiong Liu; Jie Ma; Liangliang Nan
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Image-to-point cloud (I2P) registration is a fundamental task in computer vision, which aims to align pixels in 2D images with corresponding points in 3D point clouds. While deep learning based methods dominate this field, they often fail to generalize to the open domain. In this paper, we address open-domain I2P registration from the topology relationships perspective. Firstly, we find that topology relationships reflect sparse connections between pixels and points, which shows the significant potential in enhancing cross-modality feature interaction in the open domain. Building on this insight, we develop an I2P registration framework using topology relationships. After that, to construct and leverage the topology relationships between the heterogeneous 2D and 3D spaces, we design a registration network, Top-I2P, with correction-based topology reasoning and fast topology feature interaction modules. Extensive experiments on 7-Scenes, RGBD-V2, ScanNet, and self-collected I2P datasets demonstrate that Top-I2P achieves superior registration performance in open-domain scenarios.
LensNet: An End-to-End Learning Framework for Empirical Point Spread Function Modeling and Lensless Imaging Reconstruction
Authors: Jiesong Bai; Yuhao Yin; Yihang Dong; Xiaofeng Zhang; Chi-Man Pun; Xuhang Chen
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Lensless imaging stands out as a promising alternative to conventional lens-based systems, particularly in scenarios demanding ultracompact form factors and cost-effective architectures. However, such systems are fundamentally governed by the Point Spread Function (PSF), which dictates how a point source contributes to the final captured signal. Traditional lensless techniques often require explicit calibrations and extensive pre-processing, relying on static or approximate PSF models. These rigid strategies can result in limited adaptability to real-world challenges, including noise, system imperfections, and dynamic scene variations, thus impeding high-fidelity reconstruction. In this paper, we propose LensNet, an end-to-end deep learning framework that integrates spatial-domain and frequency-domain representations in a unified pipeline. Central to our approach is a learnable Coded Mask Simulator (CMS) that enables dynamic, data-driven estimation of the PSF during training, effectively mitigating the shortcomings of fixed or sparsely calibrated kernels. By embedding a Wiener filtering component, LensNet refines global structure and restores fine-scale details, thus alleviating the dependency on multiple handcrafted pre-processing steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate LensNet's robust performance and superior reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly in preserving high-frequency details and attenuating noise. The proposed framework establishes a novel convergence between physics-based modeling and data-driven learning, paving the way for more accurate, flexible, and practical lensless imaging solutions for applications ranging from miniature sensors to medical diagnostics. The link of code is https://github.com/baijiesong/Lensnet.
Towards Region-Adaptive Feature Disentanglement and Enhancement for Small Object Detection
Authors: Yanchao Bi; Yang Ning; Xiushan Nie; Xiankai Lu; Yongshun Gong; Leida Li
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Current feature fusion strategies often fail to adequately account for the influence of activation intensity across different scales on small object features, which impedes the effective detection of small objects. To address this limitation, we propose the Region-Adaptive Feature Disentanglement and Enhancement (RAFDE) strategy, which improves both downsampling and feature fusion by leveraging activation intensity variations at multiple scales. First, we introduce the Boundary Transitional Region-enhanced Downsampling (BTRD) module, which enhances boundary transitional regions containing both strongly and weakly activated features, thereby mitigating the loss of crucial boundary information for small objects. Second, we present the Regional-Adaptive Feature Fusion (RAFF) module, which adaptively disentangles and fuses co-activated and uni-activated regions from adjacent levels into the current level, effectively reducing the risk of small objects being overwhelmed. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that the RAFDE strategy is highly effective and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/b-yanchao/RAFDE.git.
MCD-CLIP: Multi-view Chest Disease Diagnosis with Disentangled CLIP
Authors: Songyue Cai; Yujie Mo; Liang Peng; Yucheng Xie; Tao Tong; Xiaofeng Zhu
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Pre-trained methods for multi-view chest X-ray images have demonstrated impressive performance in chest disease diagnosis, but there are still some limitations that need to be addressed. Firstly, many pre-trained methods require full fine-tuning pre-trained models to induce significant computational resource usage and the prior knowledge destruction. Secondly, many pre-trained methods cannot efficiently balance consistency and complementarity among views, leading to information loss and performance degradation. To tackle these issues, we propose MCD-CLIP, a CLIP-based multi-view chest disease diagnosis method. It uses visual prompts and a Prompt-Aligner to align prompts across views, along with the additional text representation for efficient transfer. Moreover, we employ Adapters to disentangle the image representation, maintaining consistency and complementarity from different views. Experimental results on the chest X-ray dataset demonstrate that MCD-CLIP achieves comparable or better performance on a variety of tasks with 94.31% fewer tunable parameters compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source codes are released at https://github.com/YuzunoKawori/MCD-CLIP.
Towards VLM-based Hybrid Explainable Prompt Enhancement for Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Detection
Authors: Weichao Cai; Weiliang Huang; Yunkang Cao; Chao Huang; Fei Yuan; Bob Zhang; Jie Wen
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Detection (ZSIAD) aims to identify and localize anomalies in industrial images from unseen categories. Owing to the powerful generalization capabilities, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved growing interest in ZSIAD. To guide the model toward understanding and localizing the semantically complex industrial anomalies, existing VLM-based methods have attempted to provide additional prompts to the model through learnable text prompt templates. However, these zero-shot methods lack detailed descriptions of specific anomalies, making it difficult to classify and segment the diverse range of industrial anomalies accurately. To address the aforementioned issue, we firstly propose the multi-stage prompt generation agent for ZSIAD. Specifically, we leverage the Multi-modal Language Large Model (MLLM) to articulate the detailed differential information between normal and test samples, which can provide detailed text prompts to the model through further refinement and anti-false alarm constraint. Moreover, we introduce the Visual Fundamental Model (VFM) to generate anomaly-related attention prompts for more accurate localization of anomalies with varying sizes and shapes. Extensive experiments on seven real-world industrial anomaly detection datasets have shown that the proposed method not only outperforms recent SOTA methods, but also its explainable prompts provide the model with a more intuitive basis for anomaly identification.
IterMeme: Expert-Guided Multimodal LLM for Interactive Meme Creation with Layout-Aware Generation
Authors: Yaqi Cai; Shancheng Fang; Yadong Qu; Xiaorui Wang; Meng Shao; Hongtao Xie
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Meme creation is a creative process that blends images and text. However, existing methods lack critical components, failing to support intent-driven caption-layout generation and personalized generation, making it difficult to generate high-quality memes. To address this limitation, we propose IterMeme, an end-to-end interactive meme creation framework that utilizes a unified Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to facilitate seamless collaboration among multiple components. To overcome the absence of a caption-layout generation component, we develop a robust layout representation method and construct a large-scale image-caption-layout dataset, MemeCap, which enhances the model’s ability to comprehend emotions and coordinate caption-layout generation effectively. To address the lack of a personalization component, we introduce a parameter-shared dual-LLM architecture that decouples the intricate representations of reference images and text. Furthermore, we incorporate the expert-guided M³OE for fine-grained identity properties (IP) feature extraction and cross-modal fusion. By dynamically injecting features into every layer of the model, we enable adaptive refinement of both visual and semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that IterMeme significantly advances the field of meme creation by delivering consistently high-quality outcomes. The code, model, and dataset will be open-sourced to the community.