OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SKI Models: Skeleton Induced Vision-Language Embeddings for Understanding Activities of Daily Living
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The introduction of vision-language models like CLIP has enabled the development of foundational video models capable of generalizing to unseen videos and human actions. However, these models are typically trained on web videos, which often fail to capture the challenges present in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) videos. Existing works address ADL-specific challenges, such as similar appearances, subtle motion patterns, and multiple viewpoints, by combining 3D skeletons and RGB videos. However, these approaches are not integrated with language, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen action classes. In this paper, we introduce SKI models, which integrate 3D skeletons into the vision-language embedding space. SKI models leverage a skeleton-language model, SkeletonCLIP, to infuse skeleton information into Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) through collaborative training. Notably, SKI models do not require skeleton data during inference, enhancing their robustness for real-world applications. The effectiveness of SKI models is validated on three popular ADL datasets for zero-shot action recognition and video caption generation tasks.
Higher Order Structures for Graph Explanations
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning representations of graph-structured data, demonstrating remarkable performance across various tasks. Recognising their importance, there has been extensive research focused on explaining GNN predictions, aiming to enhance their interpretability and trustworthiness. However, GNNs and their explainers face a notable challenge: graphs are primarily designed to model pair-wise relationships between nodes, which can make it tough to capture higher-order, multi-node interactions. This characteristic can pose difficulties for existing explainers in fully representing multi-node relationships. To address this gap, we present Framework For Higher-Order Representations In Graph Explanations (FORGE), a framework that enables graph explainers to capture such interactions by incorporating higher-order structures, resulting in more accurate and faithful explanations. Extensive evaluation shows that on average real-world datasets from the GraphXAI benchmark and synthetic datasets across various graph explainers, FORGE improves average explanation accuracy by 1.9x and 2.25x, respectively. We perform ablation studies to confirm the importance of higher-order relations in improving explanations, while our scalability analysis demonstrates FORGE's efficacy on large graphs.
Confidence Estimation for Error Detection in Text-to-SQL Systems
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Text-to-SQL enables users to interact with databases through natural language, simplifying the retrieval and synthesis of information. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in converting natural language questions into SQL queries, their broader adoption is limited by two main challenges: achieving robust generalization across diverse queries and ensuring interpretative confidence in their predictions. To tackle these issues, our research investigates the integration of selective classifiers into Text-to-SQL systems. We analyse the trade-off between coverage and risk using entropy based confidence estimation with selective classifiers and assess its impact on the overall performance of Text-to-SQL models. Additionally, we explore the models' initial calibration and improve it with calibration techniques for better model alignment between confidence and accuracy. Our experimental results show that encoder-decoder T5 is better calibrated than in-context-learning GPT 4 and decoder-only Llama 3, thus the designated external entropy-based selective classifier has better performance. The study also reveal that, in terms of error detection, selective classifier with a higher probability detects errors associated with irrelevant questions rather than incorrect query generations.
JoVALE: Detecting Human Actions in Video Using Audiovisual and Language Contexts
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Video Action Detection (VAD) entails localizing and categorizing action instances within videos, which inherently consist of diverse information sources such as audio, visual cues, and surrounding scene contexts. Leveraging this multi-modal information effectively for VAD poses a significant challenge, as the model must identify action-relevant cues with precision. In this study, we introduce a novel multi-modal VAD architecture, referred to as the Joint Actor-centric Visual, Audio, Language Encoder (JoVALE). JoVALE is the first VAD method to integrate audio and visual features with scene descriptive context sourced from large-capacity image captioning models. At the heart of JoVALE is the actor-centric aggregation of audio, visual, and scene descriptive information, enabling adaptive integration of crucial features for recognizing each actor's actions. We have developed a Transformer-based architecture, the Actor-centric Multi-modal Fusion Network, specifically designed to capture the dynamic interactions among actors and their multi-modal contexts. Our evaluation on three prominent VAD benchmarks, including AVA, UCF101-24, and JHMDB51-21, demonstrates that incorporating multi-modal information significantly enhances performance, setting new state-of-the-art performances in the field.
CoDe: Communication Delay-Tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration via Dual Alignment of Intent and Timeliness
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Communication has been widely employed to enhance multi-agent collaboration. Previous research has typically assumed delay-free communication, a strong assumption that is challenging to meet in practice. However, real-world agents suffer from channel delays, receiving messages sent at different time points, termed {\it{Asynchronous Communication}}, leading to cognitive biases and breakdowns in collaboration. This paper first defines two communication delay settings in MARL and emphasizes their harm to collaboration. To handle the above delays, this paper proposes a novel framework, Communication Delay-tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration (CoDe). At first, CoDe learns an intent representation as messages through future action inference, reflecting the stable future behavioral trends of the agents. Then, CoDe devises a dual alignment mechanism of intent and timeliness to strengthen the fusion process of asynchronous messages. In this way, agents can extract the long-term intent of others, even from delayed messages, and selectively utilize the most recent messages that are relevant to their intent. Experimental results demonstrate that CoDe outperforms baseline algorithms in three MARL benchmarks without delay and exhibits robustness under fixed and time-varying delays.
Predicting User Behavior in Smart Spaces with LLM-Enhanced Logs and Personalized Prompts
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Enhancing the intelligence of smart systems, such as smart home, and smart vehicle, and smart grids, critically depends on developing sophisticated planning capabilities that can anticipate the next desired function based on historical interactions. While existing methods view user behaviors as sequential data and apply models like RNNs and Transformers to predict future actions, they often fail to incorporate domain knowledge and capture personalized user preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that incorporates LLM-enhanced logs and personalized prompts. Our approach first constructs a graph that captures individual behavior preferences derived from their interaction histories. This graph effectively transforms into a soft continuous prompt that precedes the sequence of user behaviors. Then our approach leverages the vast general knowledge and robust reasoning capabilities of a pretrained LLM to enrich the oversimplified and incomplete log records. By enhancing these logs semantically, our approach better understands the user's actions and intentions, especially for those rare events in the dataset. We evaluate the method across four real-world datasets from both smart vehicle and smart home settings. The findings validate the effectiveness of our LLM-enhanced description and personalized prompt, shedding light on potential ways to advance the intelligence of smart space.
Is Your Image a Good Storyteller?
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
ERL-MPP: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning with Multi-head Puzzle Perception for Solving Large-scale Jigsaw Puzzles of Eroded Gaps
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Solving jigsaw puzzles has been extensively studied. While most existing models focus on solving either small-scale puzzles or puzzles with no gap between fragments, solving large-scale puzzles with gaps presents distinctive challenges in both image understanding and combinatorial optimization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework of Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning with Multi-head Puzzle Perception (ERL-MPP) to derive a better set of swapping actions for solving the puzzles. Specifically, to tackle the challenges of perceiving the puzzle with gaps, a Multi-head Puzzle Perception Network (MPPN) with a shared encoder is designed, where multiple puzzlet heads comprehensively perceive the local assembly status, and a discriminator head provides a global assessment of the puzzle. To explore the large swapping action space efficiently, an Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (EvoRL) agent is designed, where an actor recommends a set of suitable swapping actions from a large action space based on the perceived puzzle status, a critic updates the actor using the estimated rewards and the puzzle status, and an evaluator coupled with evolutionary strategies evolves the actions aligning with the historical assembly experience. The proposed ERL-MPP is comprehensively evaluated on the JPLEG-5 dataset with large gaps and the MIT dataset with large-scale puzzles. It significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models on both datasets.
Functional Connectomes of Neural Networks
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The human brain is a complex system, and understanding its mechanisms has been a long-standing challenge in neuroscience. The study of the functional connectome, which maps the functional connections between different brain regions, has provided valuable insights through various advanced analysis techniques developed over the years. Similarly, neural networks, inspired by the brain's architecture, have achieved notable success in diverse applications but are often noted for their lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that bridges neural networks and human brain functions by leveraging brain-inspired techniques. Our approach, grounded in the insights from the functional connectome, offers scalable ways to characterize topology of large neural networks using stable statistical and machine learning techniques. Our empirical analysis demonstrates its capability to enhance the interpretability of neural networks, providing a deeper understanding of their underlying mechanisms.
Tradutor: Building a Variety Specific Translation Model
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Language models have become foundational to many widely used systems. However, these seemingly advantageous models are double-edged swords. While they excel in tasks related to resource-rich languages like English, they often lose the fine nuances of language forms, dialects, and varieties that are inherent to languages spoken in multiple regions of the world. Languages like European Portuguese are neglected in favor of their more popular counterpart, Brazilian Portuguese, leading to suboptimal performance in various linguistic tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the first open-source translation model specifically tailored for European Portuguese, along with a novel dataset specifically designed for this task. Results from automatic evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our best model surpasses existing open-source translation systems for Portuguese and approaches the performance of industry-leading closed-source systems for European Portuguese. By making our dataset, models, and code publicly available, we aim to support and encourage further research, fostering advancements in the representation of underrepresented language varieties.
Enhancing Portuguese Variety Identification with Cross-Domain Approaches
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in natural language processing have raised expectations for generative models to produce coherent text across diverse language varieties. In the particular case of the Portuguese language, the predominance of Brazilian Portuguese corpora online introduces linguistic biases in these models, limiting their applicability outside of Brazil. To address this gap and promote the creation of European Portuguese resources, we developed a cross-domain language variety identifier (LVI) to discriminate between European and Brazilian Portuguese. Motivated by the findings of our literature review, we compiled the PtBrVarId corpus, a cross-domain LVI dataset, and study the effectiveness of transformer-based LVI classifiers for cross-domain scenarios. Although this research focuses on two Portuguese varieties, our contribution can be extended to other varieties and languages. We open source the code, corpus, and models to foster further research in this task.
Hierarchical Vector Quantization for Unsupervised Action Segmentation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we address unsupervised temporal action segmentation, which segments a set of long, untrimmed videos into semantically meaningful segments that are consistent across videos. While recent approaches combine representation learning and clustering in a single step for this task, they do not cope with large variations within temporal segments of the same class. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method, termed Hierarchical Vector Quantization (HVQ), that consists of two subsequent vector quantization modules. This results in a hierarchical clustering where the additional subclusters cover the variations within a cluster. We demonstrate that our approach captures the distribution of segment lengths much better than the state of the art. To this end, we introduce a new metric based on the Jensen-Shannon Distance (JSD) for unsupervised temporal action segmentation. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, namely Breakfast, YouTube Instructional and IKEA ASM. Our approach outperforms the state of the art in terms of F1 score, recall and JSD.
Enhancing Noise-Robust Losses for Large-Scale Noisy Data Learning
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Large annotated datasets inevitably contain noisy labels, which poses a major challenge for training deep neural networks as they easily memorize the labels. Noise-robust loss functions have emerged as a notable strategy to counteract this issue, but it remains challenging to create a robust loss function which is not susceptible to underfitting. Through a quantitative approach, this paper explores the limited overlap between the network output at initialization and regions of non-vanishing gradients of bounded loss functions in the initial learning phase. Using these insights, we address underfitting of several noise robust losses with a novel method denoted as logit bias, which adds a real number $ε$ to the logit at the position of the correct class. The logit bias enables these losses to achieve state-of-the-art results, even on datasets like WebVision, consisting of over a million images from 1000 classes. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be used to determine optimal parameters for several loss functions -- without having to train networks. Remarkably, our method determines the hyperparameters based on the number of classes, resulting in loss functions which require zero dataset or noise-dependent parameters.
Learning More Expressive General Policies for Classical Planning Domains
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

GNN-based approaches for learning general policies across planning domains are limited by the expressive power of $C_2$, namely; first-order logic with two variables and counting. This limitation can be overcame by transitioning to $k$-GNNs, for $k=3$, wherein object embeddings are substituted with triplet embeddings. Yet, while $3$-GNNs have the expressive power of $C_3$, unlike $1$- and $2$-GNNs that are confined to $C_2$, they require quartic time for message exchange and cubic space to store embeddings, rendering them infeasible in practice. In this work, we introduce a parameterized version R-GNN[$t$] (with parameter $t$) of Relational GNNs. Unlike GNNs, that are designed to perform computation on graphs, Relational GNNs are designed to do computation on relational structures. When $t=\infty$, R-GNN[$t$] approximates $3$-GNNs over graphs, but using only quadratic space for embeddings. For lower values of $t$, such as $t=1$ and $t=2$, R-GNN[$t$] achieves a weaker approximation by exchanging fewer messages, yet interestingly, often yield the expressivity required in several planning domains. Furthermore, the new R-GNN[$t$] architecture is the original R-GNN architecture with a suitable transformation applied to the inputs only. Experimental results illustrate the clear performance gains of R-GNN[$1$] over the plain R-GNNs, and also over Edge Transformers that also approximate $3$-GNNs.
Structured Packing in LLM Training Improves Long Context Utilization
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advancements in long-context large language models have attracted significant attention, yet their practical applications often suffer from suboptimal context utilization. This study investigates structuring training data to enhance semantic interdependence, demonstrating that this approach effectively improves context utilization. To this end, we introduce the Structured Packing for Long Context (SPLiCe) method, which utilizes retrieval to collate mutually relevant documents into long and coherent training examples. We validate SPLiCe empirically across models of varying sizes -- 3B, 7B, and 13B -- achieving improved performance in long-context tasks, such as Qasper and HotpotQA. Remarkably, even brief fine-tuning with SPLiCe is sufficient to realize these benefits. Additionally, SPLiCe effectively mitigates the lost-in-middle phenomenon often observed in large models. Our comprehensive analysis of SPLiCe explores its design choices and reveals intriguing transfer effects; for instance, training on programming code enhances performance on natural language tasks.
On Local Overfitting and Forgetting in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The infrequent occurrence of overfitting in deep neural networks is perplexing: contrary to theoretical expectations, increasing model size often enhances performance in practice. But what if overfitting does occur, though restricted to specific sub-regions of the data space? In this work, we propose a novel score that captures the forgetting rate of deep models on validation data. We posit that this score quantifies local overfitting: a decline in performance confined to certain regions of the data space. We then show empirically that local overfitting occurs regardless of the presence of traditional overfitting. Using the framework of deep over-parametrized linear models, we offer a certain theoretical characterization of forgotten knowledge, and show that it correlates with knowledge forgotten by real deep models. Finally, we devise a new ensemble method that aims to recover forgotten knowledge, relying solely on the training history of a single network. When combined with self-distillation, this method enhances the performance of any trained model without adding inference costs. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method across multiple datasets, contemporary neural network architectures, and training protocols.
xPatch: Dual-Stream Time Series Forecasting with Exponential Seasonal-Trend Decomposition
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, the application of transformer-based models in time-series forecasting has received significant attention. While often demonstrating promising results, the transformer architecture encounters challenges in fully exploiting the temporal relations within time series data due to its attention mechanism. In this work, we design eXponential Patch (xPatch for short), a novel dual-stream architecture that utilizes exponential decomposition. Inspired by the classical exponential smoothing approaches, xPatch introduces the innovative seasonal-trend exponential decomposition module. Additionally, we propose a dual-flow architecture that consists of an MLP-based linear stream and a CNN-based non-linear stream. This model investigates the benefits of employing patching and channel-independence techniques within a non-transformer model. Finally, we develop a robust arctangent loss function and a sigmoid learning rate adjustment scheme, which prevent overfitting and boost forecasting performance. The code is available at the following repository: https://github.com/stitsyuk/xPatch.
We Are AI: Taking Control of Technology
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Responsible AI (RAI) is the science and practice of ensuring the design, development, use, and oversight of AI are socially sustainable--benefiting diverse stakeholders while controlling the risks. Achieving this goal requires active engagement and participation from the broader public. This paper introduces "We are AI: Taking Control of Technology," a public education course that brings the topics of AI and RAI to the general audience in a peer-learning setting. We outline the goals behind the course's development, discuss the multi-year iterative process that shaped its creation, and summarize its content. We also discuss two offerings of We are AI to an active and engaged group of librarians and professional staff at New York University, highlighting successes and areas for improvement. The course materials, including a multilingual comic book series by the same name, are publicly available and can be used independently. By sharing our experience in creating and teaching We are AI, we aim to introduce these resources to the community of AI educators, researchers, and practitioners, supporting their public education efforts.