GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
COMMIT: Certifying Robustness of Multi-Sensor Fusion Systems Against Semantic Attacks
Authors: Zijian Huang; Wenda Chu; Linyi Li; Chejian Xu; Bo Li
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Multi-sensor fusion systems (MSFs) play a vital role as the perception module in modern autonomous vehicles (AVs). Therefore, ensuring their robustness against common and realistic adversarial semantic transformations, such as rotation and shifting in the physical world, is crucial for the safety of AVs. While empirical evidence suggests that MSFs exhibit improved robustness compared to single-modal models, they are still vulnerable to adversarial semantic transformations. In addition, although many empirical defenses have been proposed, several works show that these defenses can be further attacked by new adaptive attacks. So far, there is no certified defense proposed for MSFs. In this work, we propose the first robustness certification framework COMMIT to certify the robustness of multi-sensor fusion systems against semantic attacks. In particular, we propose a practical anisotropic noise mechanism that leverages randomized smoothing on multi-modal data and performs a grid-based splitting method to characterize complex semantic transformations. We also propose efficient algorithms to compute the certification in terms of object detection accuracy and IoU for large-scale MSF models. Empirically, we evaluate the efficacy of COMMIT in different settings and provide a comprehensive benchmark of certified robustness for different MSF models using the CARLA simulation platform. We show that the certification for MSF models is at most 48.39% higher than that of single-modal models, which validates the advantages of MSF models. We believe our certification framework and benchmark will contribute an important step towards certifiably robust AVs in practice.
Geodesic Flow Kernels for Semi-Supervised Learning on Mixed-Variable Tabular Dataset
Authors: Yoontae Hwang; Yongjae Lee
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Tabular data poses unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature, combining both continuous and categorical variables. Existing approaches often struggle to effectively capture the underlying structure and relationships within such data. We propose GFTab (Geodesic Flow Kernels for Semi-Supervised Learning on Mixed-Variable Tabular Dataset), a semi-supervised framework specifically designed for tabular datasets. GFTab incorporates three key innovations: 1) Variable-specific corruption methods tailored to the distinct properties of continuous and categorical variables, 2) A Geodesic flow kernel based similarity measure to capture geometric changes between corrupted inputs, and 3) Tree-based embedding to leverage hierarchical relationships from available labeled data. To rigorously evaluate GFTab, we curate a comprehensive set of 21 tabular datasets spanning various domains, sizes, and variable compositions. Our experimental results show that GFTab outperforms existing ML/DL models across many of these datasets, particularly in settings with limited labeled data.
SkipPool: Improved Sparse Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Differentiable Exploration
Authors: Sarith Imaduwage
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Hierarchical pooling in conjunction with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) improves performance in graph classification tasks.
Hierarchical pooling has to produce Multi-resolution representations while preserving graph-level information.
One such hierarchical pooling is Standard-Sparse-Pooling (SSP).
SSP assigns an importance score to each node, selects the Top-K nodes, and scales their attributes by their scores to produce the output.
We reveal SSPs’ tendency to pool Over Representative Regions (ORR) on the graph’s signal space leaving some regions unpooled thus proving that SSP is incapable of preserving graph-level information robustly.
We propose to overcome this by an improved differentiable exploration over the graph’s signal space dubbed as skipping hence the name SkipPool. 
We tested SkipPool & its variant SkipPool-Full each against matching pooling methods.
Proposed methods achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the majority of benchmark datasets. 
Moreover, we show that skipping is more robust at capturing the graph signal space consequently preserving more graph-level information than its counterparts. 
Proposed methods require a reasonably few parameters and their execution time can be kept low with parallelization.
Approximate State Abstraction for Markov Games
Authors: Hiroki Ishibashi; Kenshi Abe; Atsushi Iwasaki
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: This paper introduces state abstraction for two-player zero-sum Markov games (TZMGs) where the payoffs for the two players are determined by the state representing the environment and their respective actions, with state transitions following a Markov decision processes. For example, in games like soccer, the value of actions changes according to the state of play, we should describe them as Markov games. In TZMGs, the more the number of states becomes, the more difficult computing the equilibrium becomes. Therefore, we abstract the states of TZMGs and examine the performance. State abstraction reduces the number of states by treating multiple different states as a single state, and there is a substantial body of research on finding optimal policies for Markov decision processes using state abstraction. This study extends the state abstraction for MDPs to Markov games. In this case, the game with state abstraction may yield different equilibrium solutions from those of the ground game. To evaluate the equilibrium solutions of the game with state abstraction, we derived bounds on duality gap, which represents the distance from the equilibrium solutions of the ground game. Finally, we demonstrate our state abstraction with Markov Soccer, compute equilibrium policies, and examine the results.
Self-attention-based Diffusion Model for Time-series Imputation in Partial Blackout Scenarios
Authors: Mohammad Rafid Ul Islam; Prasad Tadepalli; Alan Fern
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Missing values in multivariate time series data can harm machine learning performance and introduce bias. These gaps arise from sensor malfunctions, blackouts, and human error and are typically addressed by data imputation. Previous work has tackled the imputation of missing data in random, complete blackouts and forecasting scenarios. The current paper addresses a more general missing pattern, which we call "partial blackout," where a subset of features is missing for consecutive time steps. We introduce a two-stage imputation process using self-attention and diffusion processes to model feature and temporal correlations. Notably, our model effectively handles missing data during training, enhancing adaptability and ensuring reliable imputation and performance, even with incomplete datasets. Our experiments on benchmark and two real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art in partial blackout scenarios and shows better scalability.
Discovering Options That Minimize Average Planning Time
Authors: Alexander Ivanov; Akhil Bagaria; George Konidaris
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: We present an option discovery algorithm that accelerates planning by minimizing the shortest distance between any two states in the MDP. The proposed algorithm produces options that approximately minimize planning time in the multi-goal setting: it is shown to be a worst case (4-alpha, 2)-approximation of the optimal option set, where alpha is the approximation ratio of the k-medians with penalties subroutine. We then present a variation, "Fast Average Options", with improved run-time and describe a general means of producing similar algorithms based on selection of a k-medians subroutine. We empirically evaluate our method on four discrete and two continuous control planning domains and show that it outperforms other leading option discovery algorithms.
TAIL-MIL: Time-Aware and Instance-Learnable Multiple Instance Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jaeseok Jang; Hyuk-Yoon Kwon
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of detecting anomalies in multivariate time series data. Considering a bag (e.g., multi-sensor data) consisting of two-dimensional spaces of time points and multivariate instances (e.g., individual sensors), we aim to detect anomalies at both the bag and instance level with a unified model. To circumvent the practical difficulties of labeling at the instance level in such spaces, we adopt a multiple instance learning (MIL)-based approach, which enables learning at both the bag- and instance- levels using only the bag-level labels. In this study, we introduce time-aware and instance-learnable MIL (simply, TAIL-MIL). We propose two specialized attention mechanisms designed to effectively capture the relationships between different types of instances. We innovatively integrate these attention mechanisms with conjunctive pooling applied to the two-dimensional structure at different levels (i.e., bag- and instance-level), enabling TAIL-MIL to effectively pinpoint both the timing and causative multivariate factors of anomalies. We provide theoretical evidence demonstrating TAIL-MIL's efficacy in detecting instances with two-dimensional structures. Furthermore, we empirically validate the superior performance of TAIL-MIL over the state-of-the-art MIL methods and multivariate time-series anomaly detection methods.
Read, Watch and Scream! Sound Generation from Text and Video
Authors: Yujin Jeong; Yunji Kim; Sanghyuk Chun; Jiyoung Lee
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Despite the impressive progress of multimodal generative models, video-to-audio generation still suffers from limited performance and limits the flexibility to prioritize sound synthesis for specific objects within the scene. Conversely, text-to-audio generation methods generate high-quality audio but pose challenges in ensuring comprehensive scene depiction and time-varying control.
To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel video-and-text-to-audio generation method, called ReWaS, where video serves as a conditional control for a text-to-audio generation model.
Especially, our method estimates the structural information of sound (namely, energy) from the video while receiving key content cues from a user prompt.
We employ a well-performing text-to-audio model to consolidate the video control, which is much more efficient for training multimodal diffusion models with massive triplet-paired (audio-video-text) data. In addition, by separating the generative components of audio, it becomes a more flexible system that allows users to freely adjust the energy, surrounding environment, and primary sound source according to their preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows superiority in terms of quality, controllability, and training efficiency.
Association Pattern-enhanced Molecular Representation Learning
Authors: Lingxiang Jia; Yuchen Ying; Tian Qiu; Shaolun Yao; Liang Xue; Jie Lei; Jie Song; Mingli Song; Zunlei Feng
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The applicability of drug molecules in various clinical scenarios is significantly influenced by a diverse range of molecular properties. By leveraging self-supervised conditions such as atom attributes and interatomic bonds, existing advanced molecular foundation models can generate expressive representations of these molecules. However, such models often overlook the fixed association patterns within molecules that influence physiological or chemical properties. In this paper, we introduce a novel association pattern-aware message passing method, which can serve as an effective yet general plug-and-play plugin, thereby enhancing the atom representations generated by molecular foundation models without requiring additional pretraining. Additionally, molecular property-specific pattern libraries are constructed to collect the generated interpretable common patterns that bind to these properties. Extensive experiments conducted on 11 benchmark molecular property prediction tasks across 8 advanced molecular foundation models demonstrate significant superiority of the proposed method, with performance improvements of up to approximately 20%. Furthermore, a property-specific pattern library is tailored for blood-brain barrier penetration, which has undergone corresponding mechanistic validation.
Balancing Privacy and Performance: A Many-in-One Approach for Image Anonymization
Authors: Xuemei Jia; Jiawei Du; Hui Wei; Ruinian Xue; Zheng Wang; Hongyuan Zhu; Jun Chen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The effective utilization of data through Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has profoundly influenced various aspects of society. The growing demand for high-quality, particularly personalized, data has spurred research efforts to prevent data leakage and protect privacy in recent years. Early privacy-preserving methods primarily relied on instance-wise modifications, such as erasing or obfuscating essential features for de-identification. However, this approach highlights an inherent trade-off: minimal modification offers insufficient privacy protection, while excessive modification significantly degrades task performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Recombining for Obfuscation (FRO) approach to address this trade-off. Unlike existing methods that generate one anonymized instance by perturbing the original data on a one-to-one basis, our FRO approach generates an anonymized instance by reassembling mixed ID-related features from multiple original data sources on a many-in-one basis. Instead of introducing additional noise for de-identification, our approach leverages the existing non-polluted features from other instances to anonymize data. Extensive experiments on identity identification tasks demonstrate that FRO outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, not only in utility performance but also in visual anonymization.
Collaborative Similarity Fusion and Consistency Recovery for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering
Authors: Bingbing Jiang; Chenglong Zhang; Xinyan Liang; Peng Zhou; Jie Yang; Xingyu Wu; Junyi Guan; Weiping Ding; Weiguo Sheng
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: As partial samples are often absent in certain views, incomplete multi-view clustering has become a challenging task. To tackle data with missing views, current methods either utilize the data similarity relations to recover missing samples or primarily consider the available information of existing samples, typically facing some inherent limitations. Firstly, traditional solutions cannot fully explore the potential information contained in missing samples due to their omission strategy, leading to sub-optimal graphs. Moreover, most methods mainly focus on data recovery from the view level, ignoring the differences among available/missing samples in various views. To this end, we propose a collaborative Similarity Fusion and Consistency Recovery (SFCR) method, which resolves the incomplete multi-view clustering problem by learning a unified similarity graph and recovering missing samples with consistent structures.
Specifically, to learn a reliable graph compatible across views, a novel view-to-sample fusion model is designed to adaptively coalesce the view-wise similarities among available samples, not only preserving the complementarity and consistency among views but also properly balancing different samples.
Furthermore, the missing samples are effectively recovered under the guidance of the fused similarity graph, so as to maintain the consistent structure of recovered data across views. In this way, the similarity learning and the missing data recovery benefit from each other in a collaborative reinforcement manner. Meanwhile, SFCR can directly obtain the final clustering labels without additional post-processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of SFCR.
Active Symbolic Discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations via Phase Portrait Sketching
Authors: Nan Jiang; Md Nasim; Yexiang Xue
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The symbolic discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) from trajectory data plays a pivotal role in AI-driven scientific discovery. Existing symbolic methods predominantly rely on fixed, pre-collected training datasets, which often result in suboptimal performance, as demonstrated in our case study in Figure 1. Drawing inspiration from active learning, we investigate strategies to query informative trajectory data that can enhance the evaluation of predicted ODEs. However, the butterfly effect in dynamical systems reveals that small variations in initial conditions can lead to drastically different trajectories, necessitating the storage of vast quantities of trajectory data using conventional active learning. To address this, we introduce Active Symbolic Discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations via Phase Portrait Sketching (APPS). Instead of directly selecting individual initial conditions, our APPS first identifies an informative region within the phase space and then samples a batch of initial conditions from this region. Compared to traditional active learning methods, APPS mitigates the gap of maintaining a large amount of data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APPS consistently discovers more accurate ODE expressions than baseline methods using passively collected datasets.
AIQViT: Architecture-Informed Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers
Authors: Runqing Jiang; Ye Zhang; Longguang Wang; Pengpeng Yu; Yulan Guo
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising solution for reducing the storage and computational cost of vision transformers (ViTs). Recent advances primarily target at crafting quantizers to deal with peculiar activations characterized by ViTs. However, most existing methods underestimate the information loss incurred by weight quantization, resulting in significant performance deterioration, particularly in low-bit cases. Furthermore, a common practice in quantizing post-Softmax activations of ViTs is to employ logarithmic transformations, which unfortunately prioritize less informative values around zero. This approach introduces additional redundancies, ultimately leading to suboptimal quantization efficacy. To handle these, this paper proposes an innovative PTQ method tailored for ViTs, termed AIQViT (Architecture-Informed Post-training Quantization for ViTs). First, we design an architecture-informed low-rank compensation mechanism, wherein learnable low-rank weights are introduced to compensate for the degradation caused by weight quantization. Second, we design a dynamic focusing quantizer to accommodate the unbalanced distribution of post-Softmax activations, which dynamically selects the most valuable interval for higher quantization resolution. Extensive experiments on five vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, point cloud classification, and point cloud part segmentation, demonstrate the superiority of AIQViT over state-of-the-art PTQ methods.
M3Net: Efficient Time-Frequency Integration Network with Mirror Attention for Audio Classification on Edge
Authors: Xuanming Jiang; Baoyi An; Guoshuai Zhao; Xueming Qian
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Audio classification plays a crucial role within fields such as human-machine interaction and intelligent robotics. However, high-performance audio classification systems typically demand significant computational and storage resources, posing substantial challenges when deploying to the resource-constrained edge devices with an urgent need for such capabilities. To achieve a new level of balance between model complexity and performance, we introduce a novel multi-view method for the separated time-frequency features extraction and utilization, which exists within the proposed Mini Mirror Multi-View Network (M3Net) in the form of the Mirror Attention mechanism. M3Net enables reversible spatial transformation of spectral features is capable of efficiently leverages robust local and global features in the time and frequency domains with low requirements for parameters. Experiments based on Mel-Spectrogram without data augmentation and pre-training indicate that M3Net can achieve classification accuracy over 97% on the UrbanSound8K and SpeechCommandsV2 datasets with only 0.03 million parameters. The contribution of each functional segment in M3Net is fully verified and explained in the ablation experiments.
A Knowledge Distillation-Based Approach to Enhance Transparency of Classifier Models
Authors: Yuchen Jiang; Xinyuan Zhao; Yihang Wu; Ahmad Chaddad
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: 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 disease) 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.
FedCFA: Alleviating Simpson’s Paradox in Model Aggregation with Counterfactual Federated Learning
Authors: Zhonghua Jiang; Jimin Xu; Shengyu Zhang; Tao Shen; Jiwei Li; Kun Kuang; Haibin Cai; Fei Wu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for data privacy and distributed optimization, but it suffers from data imbalance and heterogeneity among clients. Existing FL methods try to solve the problems by aligning client with server model or by correcting client model with control variables. These methods excel on IID and general Non-IID data but perform mediocrely in Simpson's Paradox scenarios. Simpson's Paradox refers to the phenomenon that the trend observed on the global dataset disappears or reverses on a subset, which may lead to the fact that global model obtained through aggregation in FL does not accurately reflect the distribution of global data. Thus, we propose FedCFA, an novel FL framework employing counterfactual learning to generate counterfactual samples by replacing local data critical factors with global average data, aligning local data distributions with the global and mitigating Simpson's Paradox effects. In addition, to improve the counterfactual samples quality, we introduce factor decorrelation (FDC) loss to reduce the correlation among features and thus improve the independence of extracted factors. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets and verify that our method outperforms other FL methods in terms of efficiency and global model accuracy under limited communication rounds.