OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty-Aware Global-View Reconstruction for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, multi-view multi-label learning (MVML) has gained popularity due to its close resemblance to real-world scenarios. However, the challenge of selecting informative features to ensure both performance and efficiency remains a significant question in MVML. Existing methods often extract information separately from the consistency part and the complementary part, which may result in noise due to unclear segmentation. In this paper, we propose a unified model constructed from the perspective of global-view reconstruction. Additionally, while feature selection methods can discern the importance of features, they typically overlook the uncertainty of samples, which is prevalent in realistic scenarios. To address this, we incorporate the perception of sample uncertainty during the reconstruction process to enhance trustworthiness. Thus, the global-view is reconstructed through the graph structure between samples, sample confidence, and the view relationship. The accurate mapping is established between the reconstructed view and the label matrix. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method on multi-view datasets.
UrbanVLP: Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pretraining for Urban Socioeconomic Indicator Prediction
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Urban socioeconomic indicator prediction aims to infer various metrics related to sustainable development in diverse urban landscapes using data-driven methods. However, prevalent pretrained models, particularly those reliant on satellite imagery, face dual challenges. Firstly, concentrating solely on macro-level patterns from satellite data may introduce bias, lacking nuanced details at micro levels, such as architectural details at a place. Secondly, the text generated by the precursor work UrbanCLIP, which fully utilizes the extensive knowledge of LLMs, frequently exhibits issues such as hallucination and homogenization, resulting in a lack of reliable quality. In response to these issues, we devise a novel framework entitled UrbanVLP based on Vision-Language Pretraining. Our UrbanVLP seamlessly integrates multi-granularity information from both macro (satellite) and micro (street-view) levels, overcoming the limitations of prior pretrained models. Moreover, it introduces automatic text generation and calibration, providing a robust guarantee for producing high-quality text descriptions of urban imagery. Rigorous experiments conducted across six socioeconomic indicator prediction tasks underscore its superior performance.
Reducing Leximin Fairness to Utilitarian Optimization
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to attain but is generally viewed as less fair. This paper presents a general reduction scheme that, given a utilitarian solver, produces a distribution over states (deterministic outcomes) that is leximin in expectation. Importantly, the scheme is robust in the sense that, given an approximate utilitarian solver, it produces a lottery that is approximately-leximin (in expectation) - with the same approximation factor. We apply our scheme to several social choice problems: stochastic allocations of indivisible goods, giveaway lotteries, and fair lotteries for participatory budgeting.
Chain-of-Instructions: Compositional Instruction Tuning on Large Language Models
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single instructions, and they struggle to follow complex instructions composed of multiple subtasks. In this work, we propose a novel concept of compositional instructions called chain-of-instructions (CoI), where the output of one instruction becomes an input for the next like a chain. Unlike the conventional practice of solving single instruction tasks, our proposed method encourages a model to solve each subtask step by step until the final answer is reached. CoI-tuning (i.e., fine-tuning with CoI instructions) improves the model's ability to handle instructions composed of multiple subtasks as well as unseen composite tasks such as multilingual summarization. Overall, our study find that simple CoI tuning of existing instruction data can provide consistent generalization to solve more complex, unseen, and longer chains of instructions.
Watch Out for Your Guidance on Generation! Exploring Conditional Backdoor Attacks against Large Language Models
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Mainstream backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of backdoor activation, we present a new poisoning paradigm against LLMs triggered by specifying generation conditions, which are commonly adopted strategies by users during model inference. The poisoned model performs normally for output under normal/other generation conditions, while becomes harmful for output under target generation conditions. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation conditions by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our attack can be generally divided into two types with different targets: Safety unalignment attack and Ability degradation attack. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and ability domains, achieving higher success rates than baseline methods, with 94.3 % on GPT-3.5-turbo
GLAM: Global-Local Variation Awareness in Mamba-based World Model
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Mimicking the real interaction trajectory in the inference of the world model has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms. Many methods directly use known state sequences for reasoning. However, this approach fails to enhance the quality of reasoning by capturing the subtle variation between states. Much like how humans infer trends in event development from this variation, in this work, we introduce Global-Local variation Awareness Mamba-based world model (GLAM) that improves reasoning quality by perceiving and predicting variation between states. GLAM comprises two Mambabased parallel reasoning modules, GMamba and LMamba, which focus on perceiving variation from global and local perspectives, respectively, during the reasoning process. GMamba focuses on identifying patterns of variation between states in the input sequence and leverages these patterns to enhance the prediction of future state variation. LMamba emphasizes reasoning about unknown information, such as rewards, termination signals, and visual representations, by perceiving variation in adjacent states. By integrating the strengths of the two modules, GLAM accounts for highervalue variation in environmental changes, providing the agent with more efficient imagination-based training. We demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in normalized human scores on the Atari 100k benchmark.
CriSPO: Multi-Aspect Critique-Suggestion-guided Automatic Prompt Optimization for Text Generation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Existing automatic prompt engineering methods are typically designed for discriminative tasks, where new task prompts are iteratively refined with limited feedback from a single metric reflecting a single aspect. However, these approaches are suboptimal for generative tasks, which require more nuanced guidance beyond a single numeric metric to improve the prompt and optimize multiple aspects of the generated text. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-aspect Critique-Suggestion-guided automatic Prompt Optimization (CriSPO) approach. CriSPO introduces a critique-suggestion module as its core component. This module spontaneously discovers aspects, and compares generated and reference texts across these aspects, providing specific suggestions for prompt modification. These clear critiques and actionable suggestions guide a receptive optimizer module to make more substantial changes, exploring a broader and more effective search space. To further improve CriSPO with multi-metric optimization, we introduce an Automatic Suffix Tuning (AST) extension to enhance the performance of task prompts across multiple metrics. We evaluate CriSPO on 4 state-of-the-art LLMs across 4 summarization and 5 QA datasets. Extensive experiments show 3-4% ROUGE score improvement on summarization and substantial improvement of various metrics on QA. Code available at https://github.com/amazon-science/crispo
Highly Parallelized Reinforcement Learning Training with Relaxed Assignment Dependencies
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

As the demands for superior agents grow, the training complexity of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) becomes higher. Thus, accelerating training of DRL has become a major research focus. Dividing the DRL training process into subtasks and using parallel computation can effectively reduce training costs. However, current DRL training systems lack sufficient parallelization due to data assignment between subtask components. This assignment issue has been ignored, but addressing it can further boost training efficiency. Therefore, we propose a high-throughput distributed RL training system called TianJi. It relaxes assignment dependencies between subtask components and enables event-driven asynchronous communication. Meanwhile, TianJi maintains clear boundaries between subtask components. To address convergence uncertainty from relaxed assignment dependencies, TianJi proposes a distributed strategy based on the balance of sample production and consumption. The strategy controls the staleness of samples to correct their quality, ensuring convergence. We conducted extensive experiments. TianJi achieves a convergence time acceleration ratio of up to 4.37 compared to related comparison systems. When scaled to eight computational nodes, TianJi shows a convergence time speedup of 1.6 and a throughput speedup of 7.13 relative to XingTian, demonstrating its capability to accelerate training and scalability. In data transmission efficiency experiments, TianJi significantly outperforms other systems, approaching hardware limits. TianJi also shows effectiveness in on-policy algorithms, achieving convergence time acceleration ratios of 4.36 and 2.95 compared to RLlib and XingTian. TianJi is accessible at https://github.com/HiPRL/TianJi.git.
Disentangle Nighttime Lens Flares: Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Lens flares arise from light reflection and refraction within sensor arrays, whose diverse types include glow, veiling glare, reflective flare and so on. Existing methods are specialized for one specific type only, and overlook the simultaneous occurrence of multiple typed lens flares, which is common in the real-world, e.g. coexistence of glow and displacement reflections from the same light source. These co-occurring lens flares cannot be effectively resolved by the simple combination of individual flare removal methods, since these coexisting flares originates from the same light source and are generated simultaneously within the same sensor array, exhibit a complex interdependence rather than simple additive relation. To model this interdependent flare relationship, our Nighttime Lens Flare Formation model is the first attempt to learn the intrinsic physical relationship between flares on the imaging plane. Building on this physical model, we introduce a solution to this joint flare removal task named Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal Network (SGLFR-Net), which is self-supervised without pre-training. Specifically, the nighttime glow is detangled in PSF Rendering Network(PSFR-Net) based on PSF Rendering Prior, while the reflective flare is modelled in Texture Prior Based Reflection Flare Removal Network (TPRR-Net). Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both joint and individual glare removal tasks.
AdaSkip: Adaptive Sublayer Skipping for Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Long-context large language models (LLMs) inference is increasingly critical, motivating a number of studies devoted to alleviating the substantial storage and computational costs in such scenarios. Layer-wise skipping methods are promising optimizations but rarely explored in long-context inference. We observe that existing layer-wise skipping strategies have several limitations when applied in long-context inference, including the inability to adapt to model and context variability, disregard for sublayer significance, and inapplicability for the prefilling phase. This paper proposes \sysname, an adaptive sublayer skipping method specifically designed for long-context inference. \sysname adaptively identifies less important layers by leveraging on-the-fly similarity information, enables sublayer-wise skipping, and accelerates both the prefilling and decoding phases. The effectiveness of \sysname is demonstrated through extensive experiments on various long-context benchmarks and models, showcasing its superior inference performance over existing baselines.
BUFF: Bayesian Uncertainty Guided Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Single Image Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Super-resolution (SR) techniques are critical for enhancing image quality, particularly in scenarios where high-resolution imagery is essential yet limited by hardware constraints. Existing diffusion models for SR have relied predominantly on Gaussian models for noise generation, which often fall short when dealing with the complex and variable texture inherent in natural scenes. To address these deficiencies, we introduce the Bayesian Uncertainty Guided Diffusion Probabilistic Model (BUFF). BUFF distinguishes itself by incorporating a Bayesian network to generate high-resolution uncertainty masks. These masks guide the diffusion process, allowing for the adjustment of noise intensity in a manner that is both context-aware and adaptive. This novel approach not only enhances the fidelity of super-resolved images to their original high-resolution counterparts but also significantly mitigates artifacts and blurring in areas characterized by complex textures and fine details. The model demonstrates exceptional robustness against complex noise patterns and showcases superior adaptability in handling textures and edges within images. Empirical evidence, supported by visual results, illustrates the model's robustness, especially in challenging scenarios, and its effectiveness in addressing common SR issues such as blurring. Experimental evaluations conducted on the DIV2K dataset reveal that BUFF achieves a notable improvement, with a +0.61 increase compared to baseline in SSIM on BSD100, surpassing traditional diffusion approaches by an average additional +0.20dB PSNR gain. These findings underscore the potential of Bayesian methods in enhancing diffusion processes for SR, paving the way for future advancements in the field.
V2C-CBM: Building Concept Bottlenecks with Vision-to-Concept Tokenizer
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer inherent interpretability by initially translating images into human-comprehensible concepts, followed by a linear combination of these concepts for classification. However, the annotation of concepts for visual recognition tasks requires extensive expert knowledge and labor, constraining the broad adoption of CBMs. Recent approaches have leveraged the knowledge of large language models to construct concept bottlenecks, with multimodal models like CLIP subsequently mapping image features into the concept feature space for classification. Despite this, the concepts produced by language models can be verbose and may introduce non-visual attributes, which hurts accuracy and interpretability. In this study, we investigate to avoid these issues by constructing CBMs directly from multimodal models. To this end, we adopt common words as base concept vocabulary and leverage auxiliary unlabeled images to construct a Vision-to-Concept (V2C) tokenizer that can explicitly quantize images into their most relevant visual concepts, thus creating a vision-oriented concept bottleneck tightly coupled with the multimodal model. This leads to our V2C-CBM which is training efficient and interpretable with high accuracy. Our V2C-CBM has matched or outperformed LLM-supervised CBMs on various visual classification benchmarks, validating the efficacy of our approach.
VerilogCoder: Autonomous Verilog Coding Agents with Graph-based Planning and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based Waveform Tracing Tool
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Due to the growing complexity of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs), automating hardware design can prevent a significant amount of human error from the engineering process and result in less errors. Verilog is a popular hardware description language for designing and modeling digital systems; thus, Verilog generation is one of the emerging areas of research to facilitate the design process. In this work, we propose VerilogCoder, a system of multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents for Verilog code generation, to autonomously write Verilog code and fix syntax and functional errors using collaborative Verilog tools (i.e., syntax checker, simulator, and waveform tracer). Firstly, we propose a task planner that utilizes a novel Task and Circuit Relation Graph retrieval method to construct a holistic plan based on module descriptions. To debug and fix functional errors, we develop a novel and efficient abstract syntax tree (AST)-based waveform tracing tool, which is integrated within the autonomous Verilog completion flow. The proposed methodology successfully generates 94.2% syntactically and functionally correct Verilog code, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods by 33.9% on the VerilogEval-Human v2 benchmark.
Generalized Class Discovery in Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

This work addresses the task of generalized class discovery (GCD) in instance segmentation. The goal is to discover novel classes and obtain a model capable of segmenting instances of both known and novel categories, given labeled and unlabeled data. Since the real world contains numerous objects with long-tailed distributions, the instance distribution for each class is inherently imbalanced. To address the imbalanced distributions, we propose an instance-wise temperature assignment (ITA) method for contrastive learning and class-wise reliability criteria for pseudo-labels. The ITA method relaxes instance discrimination for samples belonging to head classes to enhance GCD. The reliability criteria are to avoid excluding most pseudo-labels for tail classes when training an instance segmentation network using pseudo-labels from GCD. Additionally, we propose dynamically adjusting the criteria to leverage diverse samples in the early stages while relying only on reliable pseudo-labels in the later stages. We also introduce an efficient soft attention module to encode object-specific representations for GCD. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method by conducting experiments on two settings: COCO$_{half}$ + LVIS and LVIS + Visual Genome. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
LTLf Synthesis on First-Order Agent Programs in Nondeterministic Environments
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the synthesis of policies for high-level agent programs expressed in Golog, a language based on situation calculus that incorporates nondeterministic programming constructs. Unlike traditional approaches for program realization that assume full agent control or rely on incremental search, we address scenarios where environmental nondeterminism significantly influences program outcomes. Our synthesis problem involves deriving a policy that successfully realizes a given Golog program while ensuring the satisfaction of a temporal specification, expressed in Linear Temporal Logic on finite traces (LTLf), across all possible environmental behaviors. By leveraging an expressive class of first-order action theories, we construct a finite game arena that encapsulates program executions and tracks the satisfaction of the temporal goal. A game-theoretic approach is employed to derive such a policy. Experimental results demonstrate this approach's feasibility in domains with unbounded objects and non-local effects. This work bridges agent programming and temporal logic synthesis, providing a framework for robust agent behavior in nondeterministic environments.
Learning to Manipulate Under Limited Information
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to such strategic manipulation has become a key consideration for comparing voting methods. Here we measure resistance to manipulation by whether neural networks of various sizes can learn to profitably manipulate a given voting method in expectation, given different types of limited information about how other voters will vote. We trained over 100,000 neural networks of 26 sizes to manipulate against 8 different voting methods, under 6 types of limited information, in committee-sized elections with 5-21 voters and 3-6 candidates. We find that some voting methods, such as Borda, are highly manipulable by networks with limited information, while others, such as Instant Runoff, are not, despite being quite profitably manipulated by an ideal manipulator with full information. For the three probability models for elections that we use, the overall least manipulable of the 8 methods we study are Condorcet methods, namely Minimax and Split Cycle.
Self-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Calibration for Precise Intermediate Layer Matching in ANN-to-SNN Distillation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising for low-power computation due to their event-driven mechanism but often suffer from lower accuracy compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). ANN-to-SNN knowledge distillation can improve SNN performance, but previous methods either focus solely on label information, missing valuable intermediate layer features, or use a layer-wise approach that neglects spatial and temporal semantic inconsistencies, leading to performance degradation.To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called self-attentive spatio-temporal calibration (SASTC). SASTC uses self-attention to identify semantically aligned layer pairs between ANN and SNN, both spatially and temporally. This enables the autonomous transfer of relevant semantic information. Extensive experiments show that SASTC outperforms existing methods, effectively solving the mismatching problem. Superior accuracy results include 95.12% on CIFAR-10, 79.40% on CIFAR-100 with 2 time steps, and 68.69% on ImageNet with 4 time steps for static datasets, and 97.92% on DVS-Gesture and 83.60% on DVS-CIFAR10 for neuromorphic datasets. This marks the first time SNNs have outperformed ANNs on both CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, shedding the new light on the potential applications of SNNs.