GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Contrastive Learning Inspired by the Philosophy of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”
Authors: Yudong Zhang; Ruobing Xie; Jiansheng Chen; Xingwu Sun; Zhanhui Kang; Yu Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Contrastive learning is a prevalent technique in self-supervised vision representation learning, typically generating positive pairs by applying two data augmentations to the same image. Designing effective data augmentation strategies is crucial for the success of contrastive learning. Inspired by the story of the blind men and the elephant, we introduce JointCrop and JointBlur. These methods generate more challenging positive pairs by leveraging the joint distribution of the two augmentation parameters, thereby enabling contrastive learning to acquire more effective feature representations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to explicitly incorporate the joint distribution of two data augmentation parameters into contrastive learning. As a plug-and-play framework without additional computational overhead, JointCrop and JointBlur enhance the performance of SimCLR, BYOL, MoCo v1, MoCo v2, MoCo v3, SimSiam, and Dino baselines with notable improvements.
Efficient Reinforcement Learning Through Adaptively Pretrained Visual Encoder
Authors: Yuhan Zhang; Guoqing Ma; Guangfu Hao; Liangxuan Guo; Yang Chen; Shan Yu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: While Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can successfully learn to handle complex tasks, effectively generalizing acquired skills to unfamiliar settings remains a challenge. One of the reasons behind this is the visual encoder used are task-dependent, preventing effective feature extraction in different settings. To address this issue, recent studies have tried to pretrain encoders with diverse visual inputs in order to improve their performance. However, they rely on existing pretrained encoders without further exploring the impact of pretraining period. In this work, we propose APE: efficient reinforcement learning through Adaptively Pretrained visual Encoder—a framework that utilizes adaptive augmentation strategy during the pretraining phase and extracts useful features with only a few interactions within the task environments in the policy learning period. Experiments are conducted across various domains, including DeepMind Control Suite, Atari Games and Memory Maze benchmarks, to verify the effectiveness of our method. Results show that mainstream RL methods, such as DreamerV3 and DrQ-v2, achieve state-of-the-art performance when equipped with APE. In addition, APE significantly improves the sampling efficiency during learning, approaching the efficiency of state-based method using only visual inputs in several control tasks. These findings demonstrate the potential of adaptive pretraining of encoder in enhancing the generalization ability and efficiency of visual RL algorithms.
LAGD: Local Topological-Alignment and Global Semantic-Deconstruction for Incremental 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yumin Zhang; Haoran Duan; Rui Sun; Yue Cheng; Tejal Shah; Rajiv Ranjan; Bo Wei
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Numerous deep learning-based works focusing on 3D semantic segmentation have been proposed and have achieved impressive performance. However, due to the catastrophic forgetting, existing methods will degrade dramatically in a real-world scenario where new 3D semantic categories are arriving continually. Straightforwardly applying typical class-incremental learning methods on 3D data even aggravates forgetting due to the irregular and noisy geometric structure. Aiming to address this realistic challenge, from the perspective of capturing local topological characteristics and mitigating global semantic shift, we propose a unified framework named Local topological Alignment and Global semantic Deconstruction (LAGD) to incrementally learn semantic knowledge of novel 3D categories while maintaining performance on previously learned knowledge. Specifically, we develop a novel Interaction Topological-aware Alignment (ITA) to maintain the learned knowledge efficiently by capturing the local geometric characteristics with interacted adjacent state-specific knowledge. Besides, to mitigate the forgetting caused by the global semantic shift, we deconstruct the logits into positive and negative parts which are distilled separately, achieving an elaborate distillation process in terms of Semantic-knowledge Deconstruction Distillation (SDD). With the cooperation of ITA and SDD, LAGD achieves a sota performance, especially in the long-term incremental learning scenario. Extensive experimental results illustrate the superiority of our proposed LAGD.
MLAAN: Scaling Supervised Local Learning with Multilaminar Leap Augmented Auxiliary Network
Authors: Yuming Zhang; Shouxin Zhang; Peizhe Wang; Feiyu Zhu; Dongzhi Guan; Junhao Su; Jiabin Liu; Changpeng Cai
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) typically employ an end-to-end (E2E) training paradigm which presents several challenges, including high GPU memory consumption, inefficiency, and difficulties in model parallelization during training. Recent research has sought to address these issues, with one promising approach being local learning. This method involves partitioning the backbone network into gradient-isolated modules and manually designing auxiliary networks to train these local modules. Existing methods often neglect the interaction of information between local modules, leading to myopic issues and a performance gap compared to E2E training. To address these limitations, we propose the Multilaminar Leap Augmented Auxiliary Network (MLAAN). Specifically, MLAAN comprises Multilaminar Local Modules (MLM) and Leap Augmented Modules (LAM). MLM captures both local and global features through independent and cascaded auxiliary networks, alleviating performance issues caused by insufficient global features. However, overly simplistic auxiliary networks can impede MLM's ability to capture global information. To address this, we further design LAM, an enhanced auxiliary network that uses the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) method to facilitate information exchange between local modules, thereby mitigating the shortsightedness resulting from inadequate interaction. The synergy between MLM and LAM has demonstrated excellent performance. Our experiments on the CIFAR-10, STL-10, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets show that MLAAN can be seamlessly integrated into existing local learning frameworks, significantly enhancing their performance and even surpassing end-to-end (E2E) training methods, while also reducing GPU memory consumption.
Asynchronous Federated Clustering with Unknown Number of Clusters
Authors: Yunfan Zhang; Yiqun Zhang; Yang Lu; Mengke Li; Xi Chen; Yiu-ming Cheung
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Federated Clustering (FC) is crucial to mining knowledge from unlabeled non-Independent Identically Distributed (non-IID) data provided by multiple clients while preserving their privacy. Most existing attempts learn cluster distributions at local clients, then securely pass the desensitized information to the server for aggregation. However, some tricky but common FC problems are still relatively unexplored, including the heterogeneity in terms of clients' communication capacity and the unknown number of proper clusters. To further bridge the gap between FC and real application scenarios, this paper first shows that the clients' communication asynchrony and unknown proper cluster numbers are complex coupling problems, and then proposes an Asynchronous Federated Cluster Learning (AFCL) method accordingly. It spreads the excessive number of seed points to clients as a learning medium and coordinates them across clients to form a consensus. To alleviate the distribution imbalance cumulated due to the unforeseen asynchronous uploading from the heterogeneous clients, we also design a balancing mechanism for seeds updating. As a result, the seeds gradually adapt to each other to reveal a proper number of clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of AFCL.
Mixture of Experts as Representation Learner for Deep Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Yunhe Zhang; Jinyu Cai; Zhihao Wu; Pengyang Wang; See-Kiong Ng
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to integrate information from diverse data sources to facilitate the clustering process, which has achieved considerable success in various real-world applications. However, previous MVC methods typically employ one of two strategies: (1) designing separate feature extraction pipelines for each view, which restricts their ability to fully exploit collaborative potential; or (2) employing a single shared representation module, which hinders the capture of diverse, view-specific representations. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Deep Multi-View Clustering via Collaborative Experts (DMVC-CE), a novel MVC approach that employs the Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework. DMVC-CE incorporates a gating network that dynamically selects multiple experts for handling each data sample, capturing diverse and complementary information from different views. Additionally, to ensure balanced expert utilization and maintain their diversity, we introduce an equilibrium loss and a multi-expert distinctiveness enhancer. The equilibrium loss prevents excessive reliance on specific experts, while the distinctiveness enhancer encourages each expert to specialize in different aspects of the data, thereby promoting diversity in learned representations. Comprehensive experiments on various multi-view benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of DMVC-CE compared to state-of-the-art MVC baselines.
Domain Adaptive Unfolded Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zepeng Zhang; Olga Fink
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Over the last decade, graph neural networks (GNNs) have made significant progress in numerous graph machine learning tasks.
In real-world applications, where domain shifts occur and labels are often unavailable for a new target domain, graph domain adaptation (GDA) approaches have been proposed to facilitate knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain.
Previous efforts in tackling distribution shifts across domains have mainly focused on aligning the node embedding distributions generated by the GNNs in the source and target domains.
However, as the core part of GDA approaches, the impact of the underlying GNN architecture has received limited attention.
In this work, we explore this orthogonal direction, i.e., how to facilitate GDA with architectural enhancement.
In particular, we consider a class of GNNs that are designed explicitly based on optimization problems, namely unfolded GNNs (UGNNs), whose training process can be represented as bi-level optimization.
Empirical and theoretical analyses demonstrate that when transferring from the source domain to the target domain, the lower-level objective value generated by the UGNNs significantly increases, resulting in an increase in the upper-level objective as well.
Motivated by this observation, we propose a simple yet effective strategy called cascaded propagation (CP), which is guaranteed to decrease the lower-level objective value.
The CP strategy is widely applicable to general UGNNs, and we evaluate its efficacy with three representative UGNN architectures.
Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that the UGNNs integrated with CP outperform state-of-the-art GDA baselines.
STraj: Self-training for Bridging the Cross-Geography Gap in Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Zhanwei Zhang; Minghao Chen; Zhihong Gu; Xinkui Zhao; Zheng Yang; Binbin Lin; Deng Cai; Wenxiao Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Accurate trajectory prediction has prominent significance in autonomous driving scenarios.
Most existing methods predict the trajectory of an agent by learning its interaction with 
other agents and the map within the scenario.
However, the heterogeneous distribution of these elements across different geographical scenarios is always ignored.
Thus, trajectory predictors might struggle to generalize well when deployed in different geographical scenarios.
To bridge the cross-geography gap, in this paper, 
we propose a plug-and-play self-training pipeline, termed STraj, for cross-geography trajectory prediction. STraj comprises three progressive steps: pseudo label (i.e., time-series trajectory) generation, update, and utilization.
First, to generate pseudo labels that generalize to the cross-geography scenarios,
STraj pre-trains the predictor through the complementary agent and map augmentations. 
Second, to facilitate the stable training of the predictor, 
we design a specific pseudo label update strategy. 
This strategy selects high-consistency pseudo trajectories from the current and historical epochs to supervise the target domain samples. 
Third, with generated pseudo trajectories, we introduce trajectory-induced contrastive learning to mitigate the representation bias of cross-geography agents.
Extensive experiment results on various cross-geography trajectory prediction benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STraj.
TCAM-Diff: Triplane-Aware Cross-Attention Medical Diffusion Model
Authors: Zhenkai Zhang; Krista A. Ehinger; Tom Drummond
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: We introduce TCAM-Diff, a novel 3D medical image generation model that reduces the memory requirements to encode and generate high-resolution 3D data. This model utilizes a decoder-only autoencoder method to learn triplane representation from dense volume and leverages generalization operations to prevent overfitting. Subsequently, it uses a triplane-aware cross-attention diffusion model to learn and integrate these features effectively. Furthermore, the features generated by the diffusion model can be rapidly transformed into 3D volumes using a pre-trained decoder module. Our experiments on three different scales of medical datasets, BrainTumour 128x128x128, Pancreas 256x256x256, and Colon 512x512x512, demonstrated outstanding results. We utilized MSE and SSIM to evaluate reconstruction quality and leveraged the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (W-GAN) critic to assess generative quality. Comparisons to existing approaches show that our method gives better reconstruction and generation results than other encoder-decoder methods with similar-sized latent spaces.
WaveletMixer: A Multi-Resolution Wavelets Based MLP-Mixer for Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Zichi Zhang; Tuan Dung Pham; Yimeng An; Ngoc Phu Doan; Majed Alsharari; Viet-Hung Tran; Anh-Tuan Hoang; Hans Vandierendonck; Son T. Mai
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Time Series Forecasting (TSF) aims at predicting future values for a time series data and plays a crucial role in many real-world applications, e.g., finance, disease spread, or weather predictions. However, it is also a very challenging task due to complex temporal dependencies in the data, especially for long-term forecasting. In this paper, we introduce WaveletMixer, an iterative multi-levels, multi-resolutions and multi-phases approach to effectively capture long-term dependencies of multivariate time series in both global and local perspectives for improving forecasting performance. WaveletMixer fundamentally differs from existing works in the following key aspects. First, it exploits multi-levels properties of Wavelet transformation to create multiple forecasting models for different frequency domains at various levels of resolutions. Second, the relationships among different frequency domains are exploited to iteratively adjust all prediction models at all levels simultaneously in both local and global perspectives to reduce prediction errors and biases, thus significantly improving the final accuracy. Third, while WaveletMixer is a general framework that can be used to boost the performance of any deep-learning architecture (e.g., MLP, LSTM or Transformer), we additionally introduce TS-Learner, an MLP-based model to further enhance the performance in long-term forecasting. Extensive experiments have been conducted on nine real-world datasets to demonstrate the outstanding performance of WaveletMixer compared to SOTA methods and to reveal its important characteristics.
ACCon: Angle-Compensated Contrastive Regularizer for Deep Regression
Authors: Botao Zhao; Xiaoyang Qu; Zuheng Kang; Junqing Peng; Jing Xiao; Jianzong Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In deep regression, capturing the relationship among continuous labels in feature space is a fundamental challenge that has attracted increasing interest. Addressing this issue can prevent models from converging to suboptimal solutions across various regression tasks, leading to improved performance, especially for imbalanced regression and under limited sample sizes. However, existing approaches often rely on order-aware representation learning or distance-based weighting. In this paper, we hypothesize a linear negative correlation between label distances and representation similarities in regression tasks. To implement this, we propose an angle-compensated contrastive regularizer for deep regression, which adjusts the cosine distance between anchor and negative samples within the contrastive learning framework. Our method offers a plug-and-play compatible solution that extends most existing contrastive learning methods for regression tasks. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that our proposed angle-compensated contrastive regularizer not only achieves competitive regression performance but also excels in data efficiency and effectiveness on imbalanced datasets.
Logarithmic Regret for Linear Markov Decision Processes with Adversarial Corruptions
Authors: Canzhe Zhao; Xiangcheng Zhang; Baoxiang Wang; Shuai Li
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In this work, we study the logarithmic regret for reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation and adversarial corruptions, in the formulation of linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we consider the case where there exist adversarial corruptions over the reward functions, and the total amount of the corruptions of each step h across all episodes K is bounded by a corruption level C ≥ 0. We propose an algorithm, double-weighted least-squares value iteration with UCB (DW-LSVI-UCB), which leverages weighted linear regressions to learn the (corrupted) unknown reward parameters and unknown transition parameters simultaneously. We prove that DW-LSVI-UCB attains an O( d2H4 log2(1+K/δ) gapmin + CdH2) regret (omitting the dependence on lower order terms), where d is the ambient dimension of the feature mapping, H is the horizon length, gapmin is the minimal sub-optimality gap, and K is the number of episodes. Additionally, when there are no adversarial corruptions over reward functions, the regret of our algorithm improves the previous best result by an O(dH/ log K) factor.
Supervised Score-Based Modeling by Gradient Boosting
Authors: Changyuan Zhao; Hongyang Du; Guangyuan Liu; Dusit Niyato
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Score-based generative models can effectively learn the distribution of data by estimating the gradient of the distribution. Due to the multi-step denoising characteristic, researchers have recently considered combining score-based generative models with the gradient boosting algorithm, a multi-step supervised learning algorithm, to solve supervised learning tasks. However, existing generative model algorithms are often limited by the stochastic nature of the models and the long inference time, impacting prediction performances. Therefore, we propose a Supervised Score-based Model (SSM), which can be viewed as a gradient boosting algorithm combining score matching. We provide a theoretical analysis of learning and sampling for SSM to balance inference time and prediction accuracy. Via the ablation experiment in selected examples, we demonstrate the outstanding performances of the proposed techniques. Additionally, we compare our model with other probabilistic models, including Natural Gradient Boosting (NGboost), Classification and Regression Diffusion Models (CARD), Diffusion Boosted Trees (DBT), and non-probabilistic gradient boosting models. The experimental results show that our model outperforms existing models in both accuracy and inference time.
Personalized Label Inference Attack in Federated Transfer Learning via Contrastive Meta Learning
Authors: Hanyu Zhao; Zijie Pan; Yajie Wang; Zuobin Ying; Lei Xu; Yu-an Tan
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) is a popular approach to solve the problem of heterogeneous feature space and label distribution. Among the mainstream strategies for FTL, parameter decoupling, which balance the impact of a single global model and multiple personalized models under data heterogeneity, has attracted the attention of many researchers. However, few attacks have been proposed to evaluate the privacy risk of FTL. We find that the fine-tuned structures and the gradient update mechanisms of parameter decoupling would be more likely to leak personalized information for the server to infer private labels. Based on our findings, we propose the label inference attack that combines meta classifier with contrastive learning in FTL. Our experiments show that the proposed attack has ability to extract local personalized information from the differences before and after fine-tuning to improve the accuracy of the attack in the absence of a downstream model. Our research can reveal potential privacy risks in FTL and motivate more research on private and secure FTL.
Incomplete and Unpaired Multi-View Graph Clustering with Cross-View Feature Fusion
Authors: Liang Zhao; Ziyue Wang; Xiao Wang; Zhikui Chen; Bo Xu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Due to its effectiveness and efficiency, graph-based multi-view clustering has recently attracted much attention. However, the multi-view data are often incomplete and unpaired in real-world applications as a consequence of data loss or corruption. Although efforts have been made through a series of methods to address the problems of incomplete or unpaired multi-view data, the following issues still persist: 1) Most existing methods only focus on the incomplete multi-view data or unpaired multi-view data, and exhibit weaknesses when addressing both incomplete and unpaired multi-view data simultaneously. 2) Some methods neglect the graph information of the data from different views during the learning process. To tackle these issues, we propose the Multi-view Graph Clustering framework with Cross-view Feature Fusion (MGCCFF), a novel approach for clustering incomplete and unpaired multi-view data. Specifically, MGCCFF learns soft clustering label information from complete data and utilizes this to capture category-level cross-view correspondences. It then learns latent representation enriched with cross-view information based on the established mappings. To obtain a multi-view graph structure under conditions of incomplete and unpaired data, MGCCFF innovatively integrates the concept of self-expression with the autoencoder architecture and exploits the latent relationships between labels and the graph structure, thereby enabling the generation of sparse and accurate graphical structure under multi-view conditions for the final clustering task. The experiments on incomplete and unpaired multi-view datasets demonstrate that MGCCFF outperforms state-of-the-art methods.