OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Certified Causal Defense with Generalizable Robustness
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

While machine learning models have proven effective across various scenarios, it is widely acknowledged that many models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recently, there have emerged numerous efforts in adversarial defense. Among them, certified defense is well known for its theoretical guarantees against arbitrary adversarial perturbations on input within a certain range (e.g., $l_2$ ball). However, most existing works in this line struggle to generalize their certified robustness in other data domains with distribution shifts. This issue is rooted in the difficulty of eliminating the negative impact of spurious correlations on robustness in different domains. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel certified defense framework GLEAN, which incorporates a causal perspective into the generalization problem in certified defense. More specifically, our framework integrates a certifiable causal factor learning component to disentangle the causal relations and spurious correlations between input and label, and thereby exclude the negative effect of spurious correlations on defense. On top of that, we design a causally certified defense strategy to handle adversarial attacks on latent causal factors. In this way, our framework is not only robust against malicious noises on data in the training distribution but also can generalize its robustness across domains with distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of our framework in certified robustness generalization in different data domains. Code is available in the supplementary materials.
Detail Matters: Mamba-Inspired Joint Unfolding Network for Snapshot Spectral Compressive Imaging
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In the coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging system, Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) have made impressive progress in recovering 3D hyperspectral images (HSIs) from a single 2D measurement. However, the inherent nonlinear and ill-posed characteristics of HSI reconstruction still pose challenges to existing methods in terms of accuracy and stability. To address this issue, we propose a Mamba-inspired Joint Unfolding Network (MiJUN), which integrates physics-embedded DUNs with learning-based HSI imaging. Firstly, leveraging the concept of trapezoid discretization to expand the representation space of unfolding networks, we introduce an accelerated unfolding network scheme. This approach can be interpreted as a generalized accelerated half-quadratic splitting with a second-order differential equation, which reduces the reliance on initial optimization stages and addresses challenges related to long-range interactions. Crucially, within the Mamba framework, we restructure the Mamba-inspired global-to-local attention mechanism by incorporating a selective state space model and an attention mechanism. This effectively reinterprets Mamba as a variant of the Transformer} architecture, improving its adaptability and efficiency. Furthermore, we refine the scanning strategy with Mamba by integrating the tensor mode-$k$ unfolding into the Mamba network. This approach emphasizes the low-rank properties of tensors along various modes, while conveniently facilitating 12 scanning directions. Numerical and visual comparisons on both simulation and real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MiJUN, and achieving overwhelming detail representation.
Mental-Perceiver: Audio-Textual Multi-Modal Learning for Estimating Mental Disorders
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, have become a global concern that affects people of all ages. Early detection and treatment are crucial to mitigate the negative effects these disorders can have on daily life. Although AI-based detection methods show promise, progress is hindered by the lack of publicly available large-scale datasets. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Modal Psychological assessment corpus (MMPsy), a large-scale dataset containing audio recordings and transcripts from Mandarin-speaking adolescents undergoing automated anxiety/depression assessment interviews. MMPsy also includes self-reported anxiety/depression evaluations using standardized psychological questionnaires. Leveraging this dataset, we propose Mental-Perceiver, a deep learning model for estimating mental disorders from audio and textual data. Extensive experiments on MMPsy and the DAIC-WOZ dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of Mental-Perceiver in anxiety and depression detection.
Efficient 3D Recognition with Event-driven Spike Sparse Convolution
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. Point clouds are sparse 3D spatial data, which suggests that SNNs should be well-suited for processing them. However, when applying SNNs to point clouds, they often exhibit limited performance and fewer application scenarios. We attribute this to inappropriate preprocessing and feature extraction methods. To address this issue, we first introduce the Spike Voxel Coding (SVC) scheme, which encodes the 3D point clouds into a sparse spike train space, reducing the storage requirements and saving time on point cloud preprocessing. Then, we propose a Spike Sparse Convolution (SSC) model for efficiently extracting 3D sparse point cloud features. Combining SVC and SSC, we design an efficient 3D SNN backbone (E-3DSNN), which is friendly with neuromorphic hardware. For instance, SSC can be implemented on neuromorphic chips with only minor modifications to the addressing function of vanilla spike convolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, KITTI, and Semantic KITTI datasets demonstrate that E-3DSNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with remarkable efficiency. Notably, our E-3DSNN (1.87M) obtained 91.7\% top-1 accuracy on ModelNet40, surpassing the current best SNN baselines (14.3M) by 3.0\%. To our best knowledge, it is the first direct training 3D SNN backbone that can simultaneously handle various 3D computer vision tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation) with an event-driven nature. Code is available: https://github.com/bollossom/E-3DSNN/.
HOGSA: Bimanual Hand-Object Interaction Understanding with 3D Gaussian Splatting Based Data Augmentation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding of bimanual hand-object interaction plays an important role in robotics and virtual reality. However, due to significant occlusions between hands and object as well as the high degree-of-freedom motions, it is challenging to collect and annotate a high-quality, large-scale dataset, which prevents further improvement of bimanual hand-object interaction-related baselines. In this work, we propose a new 3D Gaussian Splatting based data augmentation framework for bimanual hand-object interaction, which is capable of augmenting existing dataset to large-scale photorealistic data with various hand-object pose and viewpoints. First, we use mesh-based 3DGS to model objects and hands, and to deal with the rendering blur problem due to multi-resolution input images used, we design a super-resolution module. Second, we extend the single hand grasping pose optimization module for the bimanual hand object to generate various poses of bimanual hand-object interaction, which can significantly expand the pose distribution of the dataset. Third, we conduct an analysis for the impact of different aspects of the proposed data augmentation on the understanding of the bimanual hand-object interaction. We perform our data augmentation on two benchmarks, H2O and Arctic, and verify that our method can improve the performance of the baselines.
Universal Features Guided Zero-Shot Category-Level Object Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Object pose estimation, crucial in computer vision and robotics applications, faces challenges with the diversity of unseen categories. We propose a zero-shot method to achieve category-level 6-DOF object pose estimation, which exploits both 2D and 3D universal features of input RGB-D image to establish semantic similarity-based correspondences and can be extended to unseen categories without additional model fine-tuning. Our method begins with combining efficient 2D universal features to find sparse correspondences between intra-category objects and gets initial coarse pose. To handle the correspondence degradation of 2D universal features if the pose deviates much from the target pose, we use an iterative strategy to optimize the pose. Subsequently, to resolve pose ambiguities due to shape differences between intra-category objects, the coarse pose is refined by optimizing with dense alignment constraint of 3D universal features. Our method outperforms previous methods on the REAL275 and Wild6D benchmarks for unseen categories.
Revisiting Tampered Scene Text Detection in the Era of Generative AI
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid advancements of generative AI have fueled the potential of generative text image editing, meanwhile escalating the threat of misinformation spreading. However, existing forensics methods struggle to detect unseen forgery types that they have not been trained on, underscoring the need for a model capable of generalized detection of tampered scene text. To tackle this, we propose a novel task: open-set tampered scene text detection, which evaluates forensics models on their ability to identify both seen and previously unseen forgery types. We have curated a comprehensive, high-quality dataset, featuring the texts tampered by eight text editing models, to thoroughly assess the open-set generalization capabilities. Further, we introduce a novel and effective training paradigm that subtly alters the texture of selected texts within an image and trains the model to identify these regions. This approach not only mitigates the scarcity of high-quality training data but also enhances models' fine-grained perception and open-set generalization abilities. Additionally, we present DAF, a novel framework that improves open-set generalization by distinguishing between the features of authentic and tampered text, rather than focusing solely on the tampered text's features. Our extensive experiments validate the remarkable efficacy of our methods. For example, our zero-shot performance can even beat the previous state-of-the-art full-shot model by a large margin. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/qcf-568/OSTF.
GHOST: Gaussian Hypothesis Open-Set Technique
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Evaluations of large-scale recognition methods typically focus on overall performance. While this approach is common, it often fails to provide insights into performance across individual classes, which can lead to fairness issues and misrepresentation. Addressing these gaps is crucial for accurately assessing how well methods handle novel or unseen classes and ensuring a fair evaluation. To address fairness in Open-Set Recognition (OSR), we demonstrate that per-class performance can vary dramatically. We introduce Gaussian Hypothesis Open Set Technique (GHOST), a novel hyperparameter-free algorithm that models deep features using class-wise multivariate Gaussian distributions with diagonal covariance matrices. We apply Z-score normalization to logits to mitigate the impact of feature magnitudes that deviate from the model's expectations, thereby reducing the likelihood of the network assigning a high score to an unknown sample. We evaluate GHOST across multiple ImageNet-1K pre-trained deep networks and test it with four different unknown datasets. Using standard metrics such as AUOSCR, AUROC and FPR95, we achieve statistically significant improvements, advancing the state-of-the-art in large-scale OSR. Source code is provided online.
Kernel Learning for Sample Constrained Black-Box Optimization
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Black box optimization (BBO) focuses on optimizing unknown functions in high-dimensional spaces. In many applications, sampling the unknown function is expensive, imposing a tight sample budget. Ongoing work is making progress on reducing the sample budget by learning the shape/structure of the function, known as kernel learning. We propose a new method to learn the kernel of a Gaussian Process. Our idea is to create a continuous kernel space in the latent space of a variational autoencoder, and run an auxiliary optimization to identify the best kernel. Results show that the proposed method, Kernel Optimized Blackbox Optimization (KOBO), outperforms state of the art by estimating the optimal at considerably lower sample budgets. Results hold not only across synthetic benchmark functions but also in real applications. We show that a hearing aid may be personalized with fewer audio queries to the user, or a generative model could converge to desirable images from limited user ratings.
Eve: Efficient Multimodal Vision Language Models with Elastic Visual Experts
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal vision language models (VLMs) have made significant progress with the support of continuously increasing model sizes and data volumes. Running VLMs on edge devices has become a challenge for their widespread application. There are several efficient VLM efforts, but they often sacrifice linguistic capabilities to enhance multimodal abilities, or require extensive training. To address this quandary,we introduce the innovative framework of Efficient Vision Language Models with Elastic Visual Experts (Eve). By strategically incorporating adaptable visual expertise at multiple stages of training, Eve strikes a balance between preserving linguistic abilities and augmenting multimodal capabilities. This balanced approach results in a versatile model with only 1.8B parameters that delivers significant improvements in both multimodal and linguistic tasks. Notably, in configurations below 3B parameters, Eve distinctly outperforms in language benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art results 68.87% in VLM Benchmarks. Additionally, its multimodal accuracy outstrips that of the larger 7B LLaVA-1.5 model. Our code is available at https://github.com/rangmiao/Eve.
Click2Mask: Local Editing with Dynamic Mask Generation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advancements in generative models have revolutionized image generation and editing, making these tasks accessible to non-experts. This paper focuses on local image editing, particularly the task of adding new content to a loosely specified area. Existing methods often require a precise mask or a detailed description of the location, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors. We propose Click2Mask, a novel approach that simplifies the local editing process by requiring only a single point of reference (in addition to the content description). A mask is dynamically grown around this point during a Blended Latent Diffusion (BLD) process, guided by a masked CLIP-based semantic loss. Click2Mask surpasses the limitations of segmentation-based and fine-tuning dependent methods, offering a more user-friendly and contextually accurate solution. Our experiments demonstrate that Click2Mask not only minimizes user effort but also enables competitive or superior local image manipulations compared to SoTA methods, according to both human judgement and automatic metrics. Key contributions include the simplification of user input, the ability to freely add objects unconstrained by existing segments, and the integration potential of our dynamic mask approach within other editing methods.
ISPDiffuser: Learning RAW-to-sRGB Mappings with Texture-Aware Diffusion Models and Histogram-Guided Color Consistency
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

RAW-to-sRGB mapping, or the simulation of the traditional camera image signal processor (ISP), aims to generate DSLR-quality sRGB images from raw data captured by smartphone sensors. Despite achieving comparable results to sophisticated handcrafted camera ISP solutions, existing learning-based methods still struggle with detail disparity and color distortion. In this paper, we present ISPDiffuser, a diffusion-based decoupled framework that separates the RAW-to-sRGB mapping into detail reconstruction in grayscale space and color consistency mapping from grayscale to sRGB. Specifically, we propose a texture-aware diffusion model that leverages the generative ability of diffusion models to focus on local detail recovery, in which a texture enrichment loss is further proposed to prompt the diffusion model to generate more intricate texture details. Subsequently, we introduce a histogram-guided color consistency module that utilizes color histogram as guidance to learn precise color information for grayscale to sRGB color consistency mapping, with a color consistency loss designed to constrain the learned color information. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed ISPDiffuser outperforms state-of-the-art competitors both quantitatively and visually. The code is available at https://github.com/RenYangSCU/ISPDiffuser.
Shield Synthesis for LTL Modulo Theories
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) models have achieved remarkable success in various domains. However, these models also tend to demonstrate unsafe behaviors, precluding their deployment in safety-critical systems. To cope with this issue, ample research focuses on developing methods that guarantee the safe behaviour of a given ML model. A prominent example is shielding which incorporates an external component (a ``shield'') that blocks unwanted behavior. Despite significant progress, shielding suffers from a main setback: it is currently geared towards properties encoded solely in propositional logics (e.g., LTL) and is unsuitable for richer logics. This, in turn, limits the widespread applicability of shielding in many real-world systems. In this work, we address this gap, and extend shielding to LTL modulo theories, by building upon recent advances in reactive synthesis modulo theories. This allowed us to develop a novel approach for generating shields conforming to complex safety specifications in these more expressive, logics. We evaluated our shields and demonstrate their ability to handle rich data with temporal dynamics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach for synthesizing shields for such expressivity.
On the Power of Randomization for Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the problem of designing randomized obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms in several canonical auction settings. Obvious strategy-proofness, introduced by Li [American Economic Review, 2017], strengthens the well-known concept of dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC). Loosely speaking, it ensures that even agents who struggle with contingent reasoning can identify that their dominant strategy is optimal. Thus, one would hope to design OSP mechanisms with good approximation guarantees. Unfortunately, Ron [SODA,2024] has shown that deterministic OSP mechanisms fail to achieve an approximation better than $\min\{m,n\}$ where $m$ is the number of items and $n$ is the number of bidders, even for the simple settings of additive and unit-demand bidders. We circumvent these impossibilities by showing that randomized mechanisms that are obviously strategy-proof in the universal sense obtain a constant factor approximation for these classes. We show that this phenomenon occurs also for the setting of a multi-unit auction with single-minded bidders. Thus, our results provide a more positive outlook on the design of OSP mechanisms and exhibit a stark separation between the power of randomized and deterministic OSP mechanisms. To complement the picture, we provide impossibilities for randomized OSP mechanisms in each setting. While the deterministic VCG mechanism is well known to output an optimal allocation in dominant strategies, we show that even randomized OSP mechanisms cannot obtain more than $87.5\%$ of the optimal welfare. This further demonstrates that OSP mechanisms are significantly weaker than dominant-strategy mechanisms.
SafetyPrompts: A Systematic Review of Open Datasets for Evaluating and Improving Large Language Model Safety
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

The last two years have seen a rapid growth in concerns around the safety of large language models (LLMs). Researchers and practitioners have met these concerns by creating an abundance of datasets for evaluating and improving LLM safety. However, much of this work has happened in parallel, and with very different goals in mind, ranging from the mitigation of near-term risks around bias and toxic content generation to the assessment of longer-term catastrophic risk potential. This makes it difficult for researchers and practitioners to find the most relevant datasets for their use case, and to identify gaps in dataset coverage that future work may fill. To remedy these issues, we conduct a first systematic review of open datasets for evaluating and improving LLM safety. We review 144 datasets, which we identified through an iterative and community-driven process over the course of several months. We highlight patterns and trends, such as a trend towards fully synthetic datasets, as well as gaps in dataset coverage, such as a clear lack of non-English and naturalistic datasets. We also examine how LLM safety datasets are used in practice -- in LLM release publications and popular LLM benchmarks -- finding that current evaluation practices are highly idiosyncratic and make use of only a small fraction of available datasets. Our contributions are based on SafetyPrompts.com, a living catalogue of open datasets for LLM safety, which we plan to update continuously as the field of LLM safety develops.
Deterministic Policy Gradient Primal-Dual Methods for Continuous-Space Constrained MDPs
Venue: Conference AAAI 2025
Year: 2025

We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing deterministic policy gradient methods in continuous state and action spaces is particularly challenging due to the lack of enumerable state-action pairs and the adoption of deterministic policies, hindering the application of existing policy gradient methods. To this end, we develop a deterministic policy gradient primal-dual method to find an optimal deterministic policy with non-asymptotic convergence. Specifically, we leverage regularization of the Lagrangian of the constrained MDP to propose a deterministic policy gradient primal-dual (D-PGPD) algorithm that updates the deterministic policy via a quadratic-regularized gradient ascent step and the dual variable via a quadratic-regularized gradient descent step. We prove that the primal-dual iterates of D-PGPD converge at a sub-linear rate to an optimal regularized primal-dual pair. We instantiate D-PGPD with function approximation and prove that the primal-dual iterates of D-PGPD converge at a sub-linear rate to an optimal regularized primal-dual pair, up to a function approximation error. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in two continuous control problems: robot navigation and fluid control. This appears to be the first work that proposes a deterministic policy search method for continuous-space constrained MDPs.