OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Human Pose Estimation Through Focused Human and Joint Regions
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Human pose estimation has given rise to a broad spectrum of novel and compelling applications, including action recognition, sports analysis, as well as surveillance. However, accurate video pose estimation remains an open challenge. One aspect that has been overlooked so far is that existing methods learn motion clues from all pixels rather than focusing on the target human body, making them easily misled and disrupted by unimportant information such as background changes or movements of other people. Additionally, while the current Transformer-based pose estimation methods has demonstrated impressive performance with global modeling, they struggle with local context perception and precise positional identification. In this paper, we try to tackle these challenges from three aspects: (1) We propose a bilayer Human-Keypoint Mask module that performs coarse-to-fine visual token refinement, which gradually zooms in on the target human body and keypoints while masking out unimportant figure regions. (2) We further introduce a novel deformable cross attention mechanism and a bidirectional separation strategy to adaptively aggregate spatial and temporal motion clues from constrained surrounding contexts. (3) We mathematically formulate the deformable cross attention, constraining that the model focuses solely on the regions centered at the target person body. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. A remarkable highlight is that our method achieves an 84.8 mean Average Precision (mAP) on the challenging wrist joint, which significantly outperforms the 81.5 mAP achieved by the current state-of-the-art method on the PoseTrack2017 dataset.
SpatioTemporal Learning for Human Pose Estimation in Sparsely-Labeled Videos
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Human pose estimation in videos remains a challenge, largely due to the reliance on extensive manual annotation of large datasets, which is expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, existing approaches often struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies and overlook the complementary relationship between temporal pose heatmaps and visual features. To address these limitations, we introduce STDPose, a novel framework that enhances human pose estimation by learning spatiotemporal dynamics in sparsely-labeled videos. STDPose incorporates two key innovations: 1) A novel Dynamic-Aware Mask to capture long-range motion context, allowing for a nuanced understanding of pose changes. 2) A system for encoding and aggregating spatiotemporal representations and motion dynamics to effectively model spatiotemporal relationships, improving the accuracy and robustness of pose estimation. STDPose establishes a new performance benchmark for both video pose propagation (i.e., propagating pose annotations from labeled frames to unlabeled frames) and pose estimation tasks, across three large-scale evaluation datasets. Additionally, utilizing pseudo-labels generated by pose propagation, STDPose achieves competitive performance with only 26.7% labeled data.
LogicAD: Explainable Anomaly Detection via VLM-based Text Feature Extraction
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Logical image understanding involves interpreting and reasoning about the relationships and consistency within an image's visual content. This capability is essential in applications such as industrial inspection, where logical anomaly detection is critical for maintaining high-quality standards and minimizing costly recalls. Previous research in anomaly detection (AD) has relied on prior knowledge for designing algorithms, which often requires extensive manual annotations, significant computing power, and large amounts of data for training. Autoregressive, multimodal Vision Language Models (AVLMs) offer a promising alternative due to their exceptional performance in visual reasoning across various domains. Despite this, their application to logical AD remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate using AVLMs for logical AD and demonstrate that they are well-suited to the task. Combining AVLMs with format embedding and a logic reasoner, we achieve SOTA performance on public benchmarks, MVTec LOCO AD, with an AUROC of 86.0% and F1-max of 83.7%, along with explanations of anomalies. This significantly outperforms the existing SOTA method by a large margin.
BigMac: A Communication-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Model Structure for Fast Training and Inference
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure scales the Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) and improves their performance with only the sub-linear increase in computation resources. Recently, a fine-grained DeepSeekMoE structure is proposed, which can further improve the computing efficiency of MoE without performance degradation. However, the All-to-All communication introduced by MoE has become a bottleneck, especially for the fine-grained structure, which typically involves and activates more experts, hence contributing to heavier communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel MoE structure named BigMac, which is also fine-grained but with high communication efficiency. The innovation of BigMac is mainly due to that we abandon the \textbf{c}ommunicate-\textbf{d}escend-\textbf{a}scend-\textbf{c}ommunicate (CDAC) manner used by fine-grained MoE, which leads to the All-to-All communication always taking place at the highest dimension. Instead, BigMac designs an efficient \textbf{d}escend-\textbf{c}ommunicate-\textbf{c}ommunicate-\textbf{a}scend (DCCA) manner. Specifically, we add a descending and ascending projection at the entrance and exit of the expert, respectively, which enables the communication to perform at a very low dimension. Furthermore, to adapt to DCCA, we re-design the structure of small experts, ensuring that the expert in BigMac has enough complexity to address tokens. Experimental results show that BigMac achieves comparable or even better model quality than fine-grained MoEs with the same number of experts and a similar number of total parameters. Equally importantly, BigMac reduces the end-to-end latency by up to 3.09$\times$ for training and increases the throughput by up to 3.11$\times$ for inference on state-of-the-art AI computing frameworks including Megatron, Tutel, and DeepSpeed-Inference.
Bites of Tomorrow: Personalized Recommendations for a Healthier and Greener Plate
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The recent emergence of extreme climate events has significantly raised awareness about sustainable living. In addition to developing energy-saving materials and technologies, existing research mainly relies on traditional methods that encourage behavioral shifts towards sustainability, which can be overly demanding or only passively engaging. In this work, we propose to employ recommendation systems to actively nudge users toward more sustainable choices. We introduce Green Recommender Aligned with Personalized Eating (GRAPE), which is designed to prioritize and recommend sustainable food options that align with users' evolving preferences. We also design two innovative Green Loss functions that cater to green indicators with either uniform or differentiated priorities, thereby enhancing adaptability across a range of scenarios. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our GRAPE.
Constructing Fair Latent Space for Intersection of Fairness and Explainability
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

As the use of machine learning models has increased, numerous studies have aimed to enhance fairness. However, research on the intersection of fairness and explainability remains insufficient, leading to potential issues in gaining the trust of actual users. Here, we propose a novel module that constructs a fair latent space, enabling faithful explanation while ensuring fairness. The fair latent space is constructed by disentangling and redistributing labels and sensitive attributes, allowing the generation of counterfactual explanations for each type of information. Our module is attached to a pretrained generative model, transforming its biased latent space into a fair latent space. Additionally, since only the module needs to be trained, there are advantages in terms of time and cost savings, without the need to train the entire generative model. We validate the fair latent space with various fairness metrics and demonstrate that our approach can effectively provide explanations for biased decisions and assurances of fairness.
Dimension Reduction for Symbolic Regression
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Solutions of symbolic regression problems are expressions that are composed of input variables and operators from a finite set of function symbols. One measure for evaluating symbolic regression algorithms is their ability to recover formulae, up to symbolic equivalence, from finite samples. Not unexpectedly, the recovery problem becomes harder when the formula gets more complex, that is, when the number of variables and operators gets larger. Variables in naturally occurring symbolic formulas often appear only in fixed combinations. This can be exploited in symbolic regression by substituting one new variable for the combination, effectively reducing the number of variables. However, finding valid substitutions is challenging. Here, we address this challenge by searching over the expression space of small substitutions and testing for validity. The validity test is reduced to a test of functional dependence. The resulting iterative dimension reduction procedure can be used with any symbolic regression approach. We show that it reliably identifies valid substitutions and significantly boosts the performance of different types of state-of-the-art symbolic regression algorithms.
Discovering Symmetries of ODEs by Symbolic Regression
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Solving systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is essential when it comes to understanding the behavior of dynamical systems. Yet, automated solving remains challenging, in particular for nonlinear systems. Computer algebra systems (CASs) provide support for solving ODEs by first simplifying them, in particular through the use of Lie point symmetries. Finding these symmetries is, however, itself a difficult problem for CASs. Recent works in symbolic regression have shown promising results for recovering symbolic expressions from data. Here, we adapt search-based symbolic regression to the task of finding generators of Lie point symmetries. With this approach, we can find symmetries of ODEs that existing CASs cannot find.
Event-Enhanced Blurry Video Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we tackle the task of blurry video super-resolution (BVSR), aiming to generate high-resolution (HR) videos from low-resolution (LR) and blurry inputs. Current BVSR methods often fail to restore sharp details at high resolutions, resulting in noticeable artifacts and jitter due to insufficient motion information for deconvolution and the lack of high-frequency details in LR frames. To address these challenges, we introduce event signals into BVSR and propose a novel event-enhanced network, Ev-DeblurVSR. To effectively fuse information from frames and events for feature deblurring, we introduce a reciprocal feature deblurring module that leverages motion information from intra-frame events to deblur frame features while reciprocally using global scene context from the frames to enhance event features. Furthermore, to enhance temporal consistency, we propose a hybrid deformable alignment module that fully exploits the complementary motion information from inter-frame events and optical flow to improve motion estimation in the deformable alignment process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Ev-DeblurVSR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Notably, on real data, our method is +2.59 dB more accurate and 7.28$\times$ faster than the recent best BVSR baseline FMA-Net. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/Ev-DeblurVSR.
VidSole: A Multimodal Dataset for Joint Kinetics Quantification and Disease Detection with Deep Learning
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding internal joint loading is critical for diagnosing gait-related diseases such as knee osteoarthritis; however, current methods of measuring joint risk factors are time-consuming, expensive, and restricted to lab settings. In this paper, we enable the large-scale, cost-effective biomechanical analysis of joint loading via three key contributions: the development and deployment of novel instrumented insoles, the creation of a large multimodal biomechanics dataset (VidSole), and a baseline deep learning pipeline to predict internal joint loading factors. Our novel instrumented insole measures the tri-axial forces and moments across five high-pressure points under the foot. VidSole consists of the forces and moments measured by these insoles along with corresponding RGB video from two viewpoints, 3D body motion capture, and force plate data for over 2,600 trials of 52 diverse participants performing four fundamental activities of daily living (sit-to-stand, stand-to-sit, walking, and running). We feed the insole data and kinematic parameters extractable from video (i.e., pose, knee angle) into a deep learning pipeline consisting of an ensemble Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) activity classifier followed by activity-specific Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) regression networks to estimate knee adduction moment (KAM), a biomechanical risk factor for knee osteoarthritis. The successful classification of activities at an accuracy of 99.02 percent and KAM estimation with mean absolute error (MAE) less than 0.5 percent*body weight*height, the current threshold for accurately detecting knee osteoarthritis with KAM, illustrates the usefulness of our dataset for future research and clinical settings.
C2PD: Continuity-Constrained Pixelwise Deformation for Guided Depth Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Guided depth super-resolution (GDSR) has demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of domains, with numerous methods being proposed. However, existing methods often treat depth maps as images, where shading values are computed discretely, making them struggle to effectively restore the continuity inherent in the depth map. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that maximizes the utilization of spatial characteristics in depth, coupled with human abstract perception of real-world substance, by transforming the GDSR issue into deformation of a roughcast with ideal plasticity, which can be deformed by force like a continuous object. Specifically, we firstly designed a cross-modal operation, Continuity-constrained Asymmetrical Pixelwise Operation (CAPO), which can mimic the process of deforming an isovolumetrically flexible object through external forces. Utilizing CAPO as the fundamental component, we develop the Pixelwise Cross Gradient Deformation (PCGD), which is capable of emulating operations on ideal plastic objects (without volume constraint). Notably, our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across four widely adopted benchmarks for GDSR, with significant advantages in large-scale tasks and generalizability.
AudioGenX: Explainability on Text-to-Audio Generative Models
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Text-to-audio generation models (TAG) have achieved significant advances in generating audio conditioned on text descriptions. However, a critical challenge lies in the lack of transparency regarding how each textual input impacts the generated audio. To address this issue, we introduce AudioGenX, an Explainable AI (XAI) method that provides explanations for text-to-audio generation models by highlighting the importance of input tokens. AudioGenX optimizes an Explainer by leveraging factual and counterfactual objective functions to provide faithful explanations at the audio token level. This method offers a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between text inputs and audio outputs, enhancing both the explainability and trustworthiness of TAG models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AudioGenX in producing faithful explanations, benchmarked against existing methods using novel evaluation metrics specifically designed for audio generation tasks.
Efficient Training of Neural Fractional-Order Differential Equation via Adjoint Backpropagation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Fractional-order differential equations (FDEs) enhance traditional differential equations by extending the order of differential operators from integers to real numbers, offering greater flexibility in modeling complex dynamical systems with nonlocal characteristics. Recent progress at the intersection of FDEs and deep learning has catalyzed a new wave of innovative models, demonstrating the potential to address challenges such as graph representation learning. However, training neural FDEs has primarily relied on direct differentiation through forward-pass operations in FDE numerical solvers, leading to increased memory usage and computational complexity, particularly in large-scale applications. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable adjoint backpropagation method for training neural FDEs by solving an augmented FDE backward in time, which substantially reduces memory requirements. This approach provides a practical neural FDE toolbox and holds considerable promise for diverse applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in several tasks, achieving performance comparable to baseline models while significantly reducing computational overhead.
VarDrop: Enhancing Training Efficiency by Reducing Variate Redundancy in Periodic Time Series Forecasting
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Variate tokenization, which independently embeds each variate as separate tokens, has achieved remarkable improvements in multivariate time series forecasting. However, employing self-attention with variate tokens incurs a quadratic computational cost with respect to the number of variates, thus limiting its training efficiency for large-scale applications. To address this issue, we propose VarDrop, a simple yet efficient strategy that reduces the token usage by omitting redundant variate tokens during training. VarDrop adaptively excludes redundant tokens within a given batch, thereby reducing the number of tokens used for dot-product attention while preserving essential information. Specifically, we introduce k-dominant frequency hashing (k-DFH), which utilizes the ranked dominant frequencies in the frequency domain as a hash value to efficiently group variate tokens exhibiting similar periodic behaviors. Then, only representative tokens in each group are sampled through stratified sampling. By performing sparse attention with these selected tokens, the computational cost of scaled dot-product attention is significantly alleviated. Experiments conducted on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that VarDrop outperforms existing efficient baselines.
Using Explainable AI and Hierarchical Planning for Outreach with Robots
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding how robots plan and execute tasks is crucial in today's world, where they are becoming more prevalent in our daily lives. However, teaching non-experts, such as K-12 students, the complexities of robot planning can be challenging. This work presents an open-source platform, JEDAI.Ed, that simplifies the process using a visual interface that abstracts the details of various planning processes that robots use for performing complex mobile manipulation tasks. Using principles developed in the field of explainable AI, this intuitive platform enables students to use a high-level intuitive instruction set to perform complex tasks, visualize them on an in-built simulator, and to obtain helpful hints and natural language explanations for errors. Finally, JEDAI.Ed, includes an adaptive curriculum generation method that provides students with customized learning ramps. This platform's efficacy was tested through a user study with university students who had little to no computer science background. Our results show that JEDAI.Ed is highly effective in increasing student engagement, teaching robotics programming, and decreasing the time need to solve tasks as compared to baselines.
Nearly Tight Bounds for Exploration in Streaming Multi-Armed Bandits with Known Optimality Gap
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the sample-memory-pass trade-offs for pure exploration in multi-pass streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) with the *a priori* knowledge of the optimality gap $Δ_{[2]}$. Here, and throughout, the optimality gap $Δ_{[i]}$ is defined as the mean reward gap between the best and the $i$-th best arms. A recent line of results by Jin, Huang, Tang, and Xiao [ICML'21] and Assadi and Wang [COLT'24] have shown that if there is no known $Δ_{[2]}$, a pass complexity of $Θ(\log(1/Δ_{[2]}))$ (up to $\log\log(1/Δ_{[2]})$ terms) is necessary and sufficient to obtain the *worst-case optimal* sample complexity of $O(n/Δ^{2}_{[2]})$ with a single-arm memory. However, our understanding of multi-pass algorithms with known $Δ_{[2]}$ is still limited. Here, the key open problem is how many passes are required to achieve the complexity, i.e., $O( \sum_{i=2}^{n}1/Δ^2_{[i]})$ arm pulls, with a sublinear memory size. In this work, we show that the ``right answer'' for the question is $Θ(\log{n})$ passes (up to $\log\log{n}$ terms). We first present a lower bound, showing that any algorithm that finds the best arm with slightly sublinear memory -- a memory of $o({n}/{\text{polylog}({n})})$ arms -- and $O(\sum_{i=2}^{n}{1}/{Δ^{2}_{[i]}}\cdot \log{(n)})$ arm pulls has to make $Ω(\frac{\log{n}}{\log\log{n}})$ passes over the stream. We then show a nearly-matching algorithm that assuming the knowledge of $Δ_{[2]}$, finds the best arm with $O( \sum_{i=2}^{n}1/Δ^2_{[i]} \cdot \log{n})$ arm pulls and a *single arm* memory.
Quickest Detection of Adversarial Attacks Against Correlated Equilibria
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

We consider correlated equilibria in strategic games in an adversarial environment, where an adversary can compromise the public signal used by the players for choosing their strategies, while players aim at detecting a potential attack as soon as possible to avoid loss of utility. We model the interaction between the adversary and the players as a zero-sum game and we derive the maxmin strategies for both the defender and the attacker using the framework of quickest change detection. We define a class of adversarial strategies that achieve the optimal trade-off between attack impact and attack detectability and show that a generalized CUSUM scheme is asymptotically optimal for the detection of the attacks. Our numerical results on the Sioux-Falls benchmark traffic routing game show that the proposed detection scheme can effectively limit the utility loss by a potential adversary.