GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AAKR: Adversarial Attack-based Knowledge Retention for Continual Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Zhidong Yu; Xiaoman Liu; Jiajun Hu; Zhenbo Shi; Wei Yang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In the context of  Continual Semantic Segmentation (CSS), replay-based methods tend to achieve better performance than knowledge distillation-based ones, as the former utilizes additional data to transfer old knowledge. However, this advantage is at the cost of necessitating additional space for storing the generative model and extra time for continual training. To address this predicament, we propose a novel CSS framework, namely Adversarial Attack-based Knowledge Retention (AAKR). The AKKR framework generates specific adversarial samples by adding images, and uses them to retain old knowledge. Specifically, we leverage adversarial attacks to generate adversarial images for incremental samples. By imposing additional constraints within these attacks, we enhance the transfer of old knowledge, thereby reinforcing the understanding of previously learned information. Furthermore, we design an attack probability module that adjusts adversarial attack directions based on training feedback. This module effectively encourages the new model to learn old knowledge from poorly protected classes, significantly improving knowledge transfer effectiveness. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of AAKR, and showcase that AAKR surpasses state-of-the-art competitors on benchmark datasets.
Dynamic Target Distribution Estimation for Source-Free Open-Set Domain Adaptation
Authors: Zhiqi Yu; Zhichao Liao; Jingjing Li; Zhi Chen; Lei Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has emerged as a promising technique for transferring knowledge from a labeled domain to an unlabeled domain. However, existing UDA methods are severely constrained by data privacy and semantic inconsistencies. To alleviate these limitations, this work challenges the Source-Free Open-Set Domain Adaptation (SF-OSDA), where the pre-trained source model is directly leveraged on the open target domain for adaptation. For this purpose, we introduce the novel Dynamic Target Distribution Estimation (DTDE) method, which effectively performs known classification and unknown separation through self-supervised learning with prototypes. To construct known prototypes, a self-adaptive sampling strategy is employed to consider the category disparity. For unknown prototypes, we utilize a self-splitting and excluding principle to bypass the unknown semantics problem. Specifically, self-splitting is to evaluate the overall clustering distribution of the target domain. By excluding clusters resembling known prototypes, the remaining cluster centroids can serve as unknown prototypes. The superiority of our approach is validated across multiple benchmarks. Remarkably, DTDE outperforms the best competitor by 7.6% on the VisDA dataset.
Contextual Structure Knowledge Transfer for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zhiyuan Yu; Wenzhong Li; Zhangyue Yin; Xiaobin Hong; Shijian Xiao; Sanglu Lu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Graph transfer learning endeavors to develop a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model in a fully-labeled source domain, with the intention of deploying it on a target domain that has limited labeled data for inference. We reveal that prevalent graph transfer learning methods are susceptible to the homophily shift problem. This issue arises from the divergence in homophily structures between the source and target graphs, leading to a notable deterioration in the performance of GNN models. In this paper, we introduce a novel Contextual Structural Graph Neural Network (CS-GNN) method, leveraging a tailored attention mechanism to apprehend a variety of local structural cues, facilitating structural knowledge transfer across domains. It features an ego-network module to distill local structural diversity and a moment-based approach to gauge structural patterns without needing ground-truth labels. CS-GNN crafts a feature smoothness matrix from node attributes, guiding a customized attention mechanism for feature aggregation. A group-wise fairness loss is employed to balance learning across various structural patterns, enhancing the model's ability to transfer knowledge across domains.  Comprehensive experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets substantiate the superiority of CS-GNN over the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant improvements in accuracy and robustness against homophily shifts.
DG-Mamba: Robust and Efficient Dynamic Graph Structure Learning with Selective State Space Models
Authors: Haonan Yuan; Qingyun Sun; Zhaonan Wang; Xingcheng Fu; Cheng Ji; Yongjian Wang; Bo Jin; Jianxin Li
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Dynamic graphs exhibit intertwined spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns, widely existing in the real world. Nevertheless, the structure incompleteness, noise, and redundancy result in poor robustness for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs). Dynamic Graph Structure Learning (DGSL) offers a promising way to optimize graph structures. However, aside from encountering unacceptable quadratic complexity, it overly relies on heuristic priors, making it hard to discover underlying predictive patterns. How to efficiently refine the dynamic structures, capture intrinsic dependencies, and learn robust representations, remains under-explored. In this work, we propose the novel DG-Mamba, a robust and efficient Dynamic Graph structure learning framework with the Selective State Space Models (Mamba). To accelerate the spatio-temporal structure learning, we propose a kernelized dynamic message-passing operator that reduces the quadratic time complexity to linear. To capture global intrinsic dynamics, we establish the dynamic graph as a self-contained system with State Space Model. By discretizing the system states with the cross-snapshot graph adjacency, we enable the long-distance dependencies capturing with the selective snapshot scan. To endow learned dynamic structures more expressive with informativeness, we propose the self-supervised Principle of Relevant Information for DGSL to regularize the most relevant yet least redundant information, enhancing global robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the robustness and efficiency of our DG-Mamba compared with the state-of-the-art baselines against adversarial attacks.
Class Semantic Attribute Perception Guided Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Qin Yue; Junbiao Cui; Jianqing Liang; Liang Bai
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in supervised image classification tasks, which relies on a large number of labeled samples for each class. Recently, zero-shot learning has garnered significant attention, which aims to recognize unseen classes using only training samples from seen classes. To bridge the gap between images and classes, class semantic attributes are introduced, making the alignment between image and class semantic attributes critical to zero-shot learning. However, existing methods often struggle to accurately focus on the image regions corresponding to individual class semantic attributes and tend to overlook the relations between different regions of an image, leading to poor alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a class semantic attribute perception guided zero-shot learning method. Specifically, we achieve coarse-grained perception of class semantic attributes across the entire image through contrastive semantic learning. Additionally, we attain fine-grained perception of individual class semantic attributes within image regions via region partitioning-based attribute alignment, which fully considers the relations between different regions of an image. By integrating these two processes into a unified network, we achieve multi-grained class semantic attribute perception, thereby enhancing the alignment between images and class semantic attributes. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on zero-shot learning benchmark data sets.
BiMAC: Bidirectional Multimodal Alignment in Contrastive Learning
Authors: Masoumeh Zareapoor; Pourya Shamsolmoali; Yue Lu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Achieving robust performance in vision-language tasks requires strong multimodal alignment, where textual and visual data interact seamlessly. Existing frameworks often combine contrastive learning with image captioning to unify visual and textual representations. However, reliance on global representations and unidirectional information flow from images to text limits their ability to reconstruct visual content accurately from textual descriptions. To address this limitation, we propose BiMAC, a novel framework that enables bidirectional interactions between images and text at both global and local levels. BiMAC employs advanced components to simultaneously reconstruct visual content from textual cues and generate textual descriptions guided by visual features. By integrating a text-region alignment mechanism, BiMAC identifies and selects relevant image patches for precise cross-modal interaction, reducing information noise and enhancing mapping accuracy. BiMAC achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, captioning, and classification.
ABQ-LLM: Arbitrary-Bit Quantized Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models
Authors: Chao Zeng; Songwei Liu; Yusheng Xie; Hong Liu; Xiaojian Wang; Miao Wei; Shu Yang; Fangmin Chen; Xing Mei
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, their practical application is constrained by substantial memory and computational demands. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is considered an effective method to accelerate LLM inference. Despite its growing popularity in LLM model compression, PTQ deployment faces two major challenges. First, low-bit quantization leads to performance degradation. Second, restricted by the limited integer computing unit type on GPUs, quantized matrix operations with different precisions cannot be effectively accelerated. To address these issues, we introduce a novel arbitrary-bit quantization algorithm and inference framework, ABQ-LLM. It achieves superior performance across various quantization settings and enables efficient arbitrary-precision quantized inference on the GPU. ABQ-LLM introduces several key innovations: (1) a distribution correction method for transformer blocks to mitigate distribution differences caused by full quantization of weights and activations, improving performance at low bit-widths. (2) the bit balance strategy to counteract performance degradation from asymmetric distribution issues at very low bit-widths (e.g., 2-bit). (3) an innovative quantization acceleration framework that reconstructs the quantization matrix multiplication of arbitrary precision combinations based on BTC (Binary TensorCore) equivalents, gets rid of the limitations of INT4/INT8 computing units. ABQ-LLM can convert each component bit width gain into actual acceleration gain, maximizing performance under mixed precision(e.g., W6A6, W2A8). Based on W2*A8 quantization configuration on LLaMA-7B model, it achieved a WikiText2 perplexity of 7.59  (2.17⬇ vs 9.76 in AffineQuant). Compared to SmoothQuant, we realized 1.6x acceleration improvement and 2.7x memory compression gain.
Zero-Shot Image Captioning with Multi-type Entity Representations
Authors: Delong Zeng; Ying Shen; Man Lin; Zihao Yi; Jiarui Ouyang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: As data and computational resources continue to expand, incorporating a variety of knowledge during the pre-training phase enhances large models, providing them with strong zero-shot capabilities. Due to the alignment of modal features by visual language models, zero-shot image captioning no longer necessitates pre-training on paired image-text labeled data, enabling accurate text description generation for images not encountered before. While recent research focuses on methods utilizing entity retrieval as anchors to bridge the gap between different modalities, these approaches often fall short of thoroughly analyzing the impact of entity retrieval recall on the zero-shot generation capabilities. To address this issue, we propose MERCap, a zero-shot image captioning method employing Multi-type Entity representation Retrieval.  More specifically, we first approximate image representation using the CLIP representation of text and Gaussian noise to address the modality gap. Then, we train a GPT-2 decoder to reconstruct text using entities as hard prompts and CLIP representations as soft prompts. Additionally, we construct a domain-specific entity set, assigning multiple representations to each entity and refining their representation vectors through contrastive learning. During inference, we retrieve entities and input them into the decoder to generate corresponding captions. Extensive experiments validate that our approach is efficient, achieving a new state-of-the-art level in cross-domain captioning and demonstrating strong competitiveness in in-domain captioning compared to existing methods.
WST: Wavelet-Based Multi-scale Tuning for Visual Transfer Learning
Authors: Jia Zeng; Lan Huang; Kangping Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Large-scale pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on visual tasks but are computationally expensive to transfer to downstream tasks. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers a promising transferring approach by updating only a subset of parameters. However, PEFT's effectiveness is hindered by discrepancies between pre-training and downstream tasks in terms of object scale and granularity. Downstream tasks often focus on finer-grained and more specialized recognition, requiring more detailed features. The diversity of feature scales of existing PEFT methods for ViT is limited. To address this, we propose a novel PEFT method named Wavelet-based multi-Scale Tuning (WST), which learns multi-scale features in a simple and efficient way. WST introduces a parallel fine-tuning patch embedding branch with a smaller patch size than the pre-trained model to capture finer-grained features. Furthermore, to handle the computational challenge from the resulting longer token sequence, WST designs wavelet fine-tuning blocks that balance both efficiency and performance. In the block, wavelet transform enables invertible and lossless down-sampling of the longer token sequence, aligning it with that of the backbone, and two lightweight linear mappings are employed to learn task-specific features. This design facilitates efficient multi-scale information exchange between the pre-trained backbone and fine-tuning branch. Extensive experiments on transfer learning demonstrate the promising performance and efficiency of our WST.
Graph Structure Refinement with Energy-based Contrastive Learning
Authors: Xianlin Zeng; Yufeng Wang; Yuqi Sun; Guodong Guo; Wenrui Ding; Baochang Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently gained widespread attention as a successful tool for analyzing graph-structured data. However, imperfect graph structure with noisy links lacks enough robustness and may damage graph representations, therefore limiting the GNNs' performance in practical tasks. Moreover, existing generative architectures fail to fit discriminative graph-related tasks. To tackle these issues, we introduce an unsupervised method based on a joint of generative training and discriminative training to learn graph structure and representation, aiming to improve the discriminative performance of generative models. We propose an Energy-based Contrastive Learning (ECL) guided Graph Structure Refinement (GSR) framework, denoted as ECL-GSR. To our knowledge, this is the first work to combine energy-based models with contrastive learning for GSR. Specifically, we leverage ECL to approximate the joint distribution of sample pairs, which increases the similarity between representations of positive pairs while reducing the similarity between negative ones. Refined structure is produced by augmenting and removing edges according to the similarity metrics among node representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ECL-GSR outperforms the state-of-the-art on eight benchmark datasets in node classification. ECL-GSR achieves faster training with fewer samples and memories against the leading baseline, highlighting its simplicity and efficiency in downstream tasks.
Blend the Separated: Mixture of Synergistic Experts for Data-Scarcity Drug-Target Interaction Prediction
Authors: Xinlong Zhai; Chunchen Wang; Ruijia Wang; Jiazheng Kang; Shujie Li; Boyu Chen; Tengfei Ma; Zikai Zhou; Cheng Yang; Chuan Shi
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Drug-target interaction prediction (DTI) is essential in various applications including drug discovery and clinical application. There are two perspectives of input data widely used in DTI prediction: Intrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are constructed, and extrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are related to other biological entities. However, any of the two perspectives of input data can be scarce for some drugs or targets, especially for those unpopular or newly discovered. Furthermore, ground-truth labels for specific interaction types can also be scarce. Therefore, we propose the first method to tackle DTI prediction under input data and/or label scarcity. To make our model functional when only one perspective of input data is available, we design two separate experts to process intrinsic and extrinsic data respectively and fuse them adaptively according to different samples. Furthermore, to make the two perspectives complement each other and remedy label scarcity, two experts synergize with each other in a mutually supervised way to exploit the enormous unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets under different extents of input data scarcity and/or label scarcity demonstrate our model outperforms states of the art significantly and steadily, with a maximum improvement of 53.53%. We also test our model without any data scarcity and it still outperforms current methods.
Specifying What You Know or Not for Multi-Label Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Aoting Zhang; Dongbao Yang; Chang Liu; Xiaopeng Hong; Yu Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Existing class incremental learning is mainly designed for single-label classification task, which is ill-equipped for multi-label scenarios due to the inherent contradiction of learning objectives for samples with incomplete labels. We argue that the main challenge to overcome this contradiction in multi-label class-incremental learning (MLCIL) lies in the model's inability to clearly distinguish between known and unknown knowledge. This ambiguity hinders the model's ability to retain historical knowledge, master current classes, and prepare for future learning simultaneously. In this paper, we target at specifying what is known or not to accommodate Historical, Current, and Prospective knowledge for MLCIL and propose a novel framework termed as HCP. Specifically, (i) we clarify the known classes by dynamic feature purification and recall enhancement with distribution prior, enhancing the precision and retention of known information. (ii) We design prospective knowledge mining to probe the unknown, preparing the model for future learning. Extensive experiments validate that our method effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting in MLCIL, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 3.3% on average accuracy for MS-COCO B0-C10 setting without replay buffers.
Text-Guided Nonverbal Enhancement Based on Modality-Invariant and -Specific Representations for Video Speaking Style Recognition
Authors: Beibei Zhang; Tongwei Ren; Gangshan Wu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Video speaking style recognition (VSSR) aims to classify different types of conversations in videos, contributing significantly to understanding human interactions. A significant challenge in VSSR is the inherent similarity among conversation videos, which makes it difficult to distinguish between different speaking styles.  Existing VSSR methods commit to providing available multimodal information to enhance the differentiation of conversation videos. Nevertheless, treating each modality equally leads to a suboptimal result for these methods due to text is inherently more aligned with conversation understanding compared to nonverbal modalities. To address this issue, we propose a text-guided nonverbal enhancement method, TNvE, which is composed of two core modules: 1) a text-guided nonverbal representation selection module employs cross-modal attention based on modality-invariant representations, picking out critical nonverbal information via textual guide; and 2) a modality-invariant and -specific representation decoupling module incorporates modality-specific representations and decouples them from modality-invariant representations, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of multimodal data. The former module encourages multimodal representations close to each other, while the latter module provides unique characteristics of each modality as a supplement. Extensive experiments are conducted on long-form video understanding datasets to demonstrate that TNvE is highly effective for VSSR, achieving a new state-of-the-art.
Learning Robust and Privacy-Preserving Representations via Information Theory
Authors: Binghui Zhang; Sayedeh Leila Noorbakhsh; Yun Dong; Yuan Hong; Binghui Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Machine learning models are vulnerable to both security attacks (e.g., adversarial examples) and privacy attacks (e.g., private attribute inference). We take the first step to mitigate both the security and privacy attacks, and maintain task utility as well. Particularly, we propose an information-theoretic framework to achieve the goals through the lens of representation learning, i.e., learning representations that are robust to both adversarial examples and attribute inference adversaries. We also derive novel theoretical results under our framework, e.g., the inherent trade-off between adversarial robustness/utility and attribute privacy, and guaranteed attribute privacy leakage against attribute inference adversaries.
Toward Efficient Data-Free Unlearning
Authors: Chenhao Zhang; Shaofei Shen; Weitong Chen; Miao Xu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Machine unlearning without access to real data distribution is challenging. The existing method based on data-free distillation achieved unlearning by filtering out synthetic samples containing forgetting information but struggled to distill the retaining-related knowledge efficiently. In this work, we analyze that such a problem is due to over-filtering, which reduces the synthesized retaining-related information. We propose a novel method, Inhibited Synthetic PostFilter (ISPF), to tackle this challenge from two perspectives: First, the Inhibited Synthetic, by reducing the synthesized forgetting information; Second, the PostFilter, by fully utilizing the retaining-related information in synthesized samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ISPF effectively tackles the challenge and outperforms existing methods.