AAAI 2025 Papers

Controllable image semantic understanding tasks, such as captioning or segmentation, necessitate users to input a prompt (e.g., text or bounding boxes) to predict a unique outcome, presenting challenges such as high-cost prompt input or limited information output. This paper introduces a new task ``Image Collaborative Segmentation and Captioning'' (SegCaptioning), which aims to translate a straightforward prompt, like a bounding box around an object, into diverse semantic interpretations represented by (caption, masks) pairs, allowing flexible result selection by users. This task poses significant challenges, including accurately capturing a user's intention from a minimal prompt while simultaneously predicting multiple semantically aligned caption words and masks. Technically, we propose a novel Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model that leverages structured scene graph features for correlated mask-caption prediction. Initially, we introduce a Prompt-Centric Scene Graph Adaptor to map a user's prompt to a scene graph, effectively capturing his intention. Subsequently, we employ a diffusion process incorporating a Scene Graph Guided Bimodal Transformer to predict correlated caption-mask pairs by uncovering intricate correlations between them. To ensure accurate alignment, we design a Multi-Entities Contrastive Learning loss to explicitly align visual and textual entities by considering inter-modal similarity, resulting in well-aligned caption-mask pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate that SGDiff achieves superior performance in SegCaptioning, yielding promising results for both captioning and segmentation tasks with minimal prompt input.

Can LLMs consistently improve their previous outputs for better results? For this to be true, LLMs would need to be better at discriminating among previously-generated alternatives, than generating initial responses. We explore the validity of this hypothesis in practice. We first formulate a unified framework that allows us to compare the generative and discriminative capability of any model on any task. In our resulting experimental analysis of several open-source and industrial LLMs, we observe that model’s are not reliably better at discriminating among previously-generated alternatives than generating initial responses. This finding challenges the notion that LLMs may be able to enhance their performance only through their own judgment.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), discrete speech representations have become crucial for integrating speech into LLMs. Existing methods for speech representation discretization rely on a predefined codebook size and Euclidean distance-based quantization. However, 1) the size of codebook is a critical parameter that affects both codec performance and downstream task training efficiency. 2) The Euclidean distance-based quantization may lead to audio distortion when the size of the codebook is controlled within a reasonable range. In fact, in the field of information compression, structural information and entropy guidance are crucial, but previous methods have largely overlooked these factors. Therefore, we address the above issues from an information-theoretic perspective, we present SECodec, a novel speech representation codec based on structural entropy (SE) for building speech language models. Specifically, we first model speech as a graph, clustering the speech features nodes within the graph and extracting the corresponding codebook by hierarchically and disentangledly minimizing 2D SE. Then, to address the issue of audio distortion, we propose a new quantization method. This method still adheres to the 2D SE minimization principle, adaptively selecting the most suitable token corresponding to the cluster for each incoming original speech node. Furthermore, we develop a Structural Entropy-based Speech Language Model (SESLM) that leverages SECodec. Experimental results demonstrate that SECodec performs comparably to EnCodec in speech reconstruction, and SESLM surpasses VALL-E in zero-shot text-to-speech tasks.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in capability and influence, ensuring their security and preventing harmful outputs has become crucial. A promising approach to address these concerns involves training models to automatically generate adversarial prompts for red teaming. However, the evolving subtlety of vulnerabilities in LLMs challenges the effectiveness of current adversarial methods, which struggle to generate diverse, complex prompts and dynamically explore the weaknesses of these models. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Self-Evolving Adversarial Safety (SEAS) optimization framework, which includes both a SEAS dataset and a SEAS pipeline. The SEAS dataset comprises complex adversarial prompts, while the SEAS pipeline operates through three stages: Initialization, Attack, and Adversarial Optimization. This framework generates a diverse range of adversarial prompts and dynamically explores the model's vulnerabilities to enhance its security. Our contributions include a novel adversarial framework, a comprehensive safety dataset, and empirical evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of SEAS.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models (LMs) with human values by training reward models (RMs) on binary preferences and using these RMs to fine-tune the base models. Despite its importance, the internal mechanisms of RLHF remain poorly understood. This paper introduces new metrics to evaluate RM effectiveness, focusing on feature imprint, feature resistance, and feature robustness. We categorize alignment datasets into target features (desired values) and spoiler features (undesired concepts). By regressing RM scores against these features, we quantify the extent to which RMs reward them -- feature imprint. We define alignment resistance as the proportion of the preference dataset where RMs fail to match human preferences, and we assess alignment robustness by analyzing RM responses to slightly perturbed texts. Our experiments, utilizing open-source components like the Anthropic/hh-rlhf preference dataset and OpenAssistant RMs, reveal significant imprints of target features and a notable sensitivity to spoiler features. We observed a 26% resistance incidence in portions of the dataset where LM labelers disagreed with human preferences. We also find that misalignment stems from confusing entries in the alignment dataset. These findings underscore the importance of scrutinizing both RMs and alignment datasets for a deeper understanding of value alignment.

In this paper, we propose SDAS, a new motion data assessment and storage system designed to acquire new motion data with reduced redundancy and maximizing diversity. SDAS collects data in the field, retrieves the most similar data from the database in real-time, and provides visualization tools that allow for the comparison of differences between the capture data and the stored data. Through this system, researchers can efficiently build and manage a database. The demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/vqW0uMDnZTw.

The iterative sampling procedure employed by diffusion models (DMs) often leads to significant latency. To address this, we propose Stochastic Consistency Distillation (SCott) to enable accelerated text-to-image generation, where high-quality generations can be achieved with just 2-4 sampling steps or even1 step, and further improvements can be obtained by additional cost, e.g., 4 steps. In contrast to vanilla consistency distillation (CD) which distills the ordinary differential equation solvers-based sampling process of a pre-trained teacher model into a student, SCott explores the possibility and validates the efficacy of integrating stochastic differential equation (SDE) solvers into CD to fully unleash the potential of the teacher. SCott is augmented with elaborate strategies to control the noise strength and sampling process of the SDE solver. An adversarial loss is further incorporated to strengthen the sample quality with rare sampling steps. Empirically, on the MSCOCO-2017 5K dataset with a Stable Diffusion-V1.5 teacher, SCott achieves an FID of 21.9, surpassing that of the 1-step InstaFlow (23.4) and the 4-step UFOGen (22.1). Moreover, SCott can yield more diverse samples than other consistency models for high-resolution image generation, with up to 16% improvement in a qualified metric.

Sign languages, used by around 70 million Deaf individuals globally, are visual languages that convey visual and contextual information. Current methods in vision-based sign language recognition (SLR) and translation (SLT) struggle with dialogue scenes due to limited dataset diversity and the neglect of contextually relevant information. To address these challenges, we introduce SCOPE (Sign language COntextual Processing with Embedding from LLMs), a novel context-aware vision-based SLR and SLT framework. For SLR, we utilize dialogue contexts through a multi-modal encoder to enhance gloss-level recognition. For subsequent SLT, we further fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) by incorporating prior conversational context. We also contribute a new sign language dataset that contains 72 hours of Chinese sign language videos in contextual dialogues across various scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our SCOPE framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, including Phoenix-2014T, CSL-Daily, and our SCOPE dataset. Moreover, surveys conducted with participants from the Deaf community further validate the robustness and effectiveness of our approach in real-world applications. Both our dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research.

3D object detection is one of the fundamental perception tasks for autonomous vehicles. Fulfilling such a task with a 4D millimeter-wave radar is very attractive since the sensor is able to acquire 3D point clouds similar to Lidar while maintaining robust measurements under adverse weather. However, due to the high sparsity and noise associated with the radar point clouds, the performance of the existing methods is still much lower than expected. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) method for 4D radar-based 3D object detection. It characterizes the capability of learning the feature from a Lidar-radar-fused teacher network with semi-supervised distillation. We first propose an adaptive fusion module in the teacher network to boost its performance. Then, two feature distillation modules are designed to facilitate the cross-modality knowledge transfer. Finally, a semi-supervised output distillation is proposed to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the distillation framework. With the same network structure, our radar-only student trained by SCKD boosts the mAP by 10.38% over the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art works on the VoD dataset. The experiment on ZJUODset also shows 5.12% mAP improvements on the moderate difficulty level over the baseline when extra unlabeled data are available.

Subcellular structure segmentation is a fundamental task in biological imaging. Existing self-supervised representation learning combined with classical k-means clustering achieved unsupervised image segmentation, but it was constrained by time-consuming test-time pixel-wise feature extraction and clustering synchronization. This study introduces SCCS, a lightweight graph neural network-based spectral clustering framework for end-to-end subcellular structure segmentation upon superpixel graphs, greatly relieving the computational complexity in test-time numerical spectral clustering and inter-graph label inconsistency. Specifically, SCCS exploits the self-supervised masked autoencoder for representation learning and the construction of superpixel graphs (spG). Unlike per-graph scalar affinity-based spectral clustering, the proposed SCCS parameterizes the mapping from learned deep spG representations to coordinates in the spectral embedding space and the clustering assignments. The SCCS is optimized under unsupervised eigendecomposition and incremental clustering criteria, which synchronize the intra- and inter-graph spectral clustering. The proposed approach is evaluated on a publicly available volumetric electron microscopy dataset. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and performance gains of the proposed SCCS over the state-of-the-art in discovering a variety of subcellular structures.

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large language models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs tend to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue, limiting their helpfulness. In this paper, we propose a Safety-Conscious Activation Steering (SCANS) method to mitigate the exaggerated safety concerns in aligned LLMs. First, SCANS extracts the refusal steering vectors within the activation space and utilizes vocabulary projection to anchor some specific safety-critical layers which influence model refusal behavior. Second, by tracking the hidden state transition, SCANS identifies the steering direction and steers the model behavior accordingly, achieving a balance between exaggerated safety and adequate safety. Experiments show that SCANS achieves new state-of-the-art performance on XSTest and OKTest benchmarks, without impairing their defense capability against harmful queries and maintaining almost unchanged model capability.

As the Ethereum platform continues to mature and gain widespread usage, it is crucial to maintain high standards of smart contract writing practices. While bad practices in smart contracts may not directly lead to security issues, they do elevate the risk of encountering problems. Therefore, to understand and avoid these bad practices, this paper introduces the first systematic study of bad practices in smart contracts, delving into over 35 specific issues. Specifically, we propose a large language models (LLMs)-based framework, SCALM. It combines Step-Back Prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to effectively identify and address various bad practices. Our extensive experiments using multiple LLMs and datasets have shown that SCALM outperforms existing tools in detecting bad practices in smart contracts.

Edge labels are typically at various granularity levels owing to the varying preferences of annotators, thus handling the subjectivity of per-pixel labels has been a focal point for edge detection. Previous methods often employ a simple voting strategy to diminish such label uncertainty or impose a strong assumption of labels with a pre-defined distribution, e.g., Gaussian. In this work, we unveil that the segment anything model (SAM) provides strong prior knowledge to model the uncertainty in edge labels. Our key insight is that the intermediate SAM features inherently correspond to object edges at various granularities, which reflects different edge options due to uncertainty. Therefore, we attempt to align uncertainty with granularity by regressing intermediate SAM features from different layers to object edges at multi-granularity levels. In doing so, the model can fully and explicitly explore diverse ``uncertainties'' in a data-driven fashion. Specifically, we inject a lightweight module (~ 1.5% additional parameters) into the frozen SAM to progressively fuse and adapt its intermediate features to estimate edges from coarse to fine. It is crucial to normalize the granularity level of human edge labels to match their innate uncertainty. For this, we simply perform linear blending to the real edge labels at hand to create pseudo labels with varying granularities. Consequently, our uncertainty-aligned edge detector can flexibly produce edges at any desired granularity (including an optimal one). Thanks to SAM, our model uniquely demonstrates strong generalizability for cross-dataset edge detection. Extensive experimental results on BSDS500, Muticue and NYUDv2 validate our model's superiority.

Label corruption, where training samples are mislabeled due to non-expert annotation or adversarial attacks, significantly degrades model performance. Acquiring large, perfectly labeled datasets is costly, and retraining models from scratch is computationally expensive. To address this, we introduce Scaled Activation Projection (SAP), a novel SVD (Singular Value Decomposition)-based corrective machine unlearning algorithm. SAP mitigates label noise by identifying a small subset of trusted samples using cross-entropy loss and projecting model weights onto a clean activation space estimated using SVD on these trusted samples. This process suppresses the noise introduced in activations due to the mislabeled samples. In our experiments, we demonstrate SAP’s effectiveness on synthetic noise with different settings and real-world label noise. SAP applied to the CIFAR dataset with 25% synthetic corruption show upto 6% generalization improvements. Additionally, SAP can improve the generalization over noise robust training approaches on CIFAR dataset by ∼ 3.2% on average. Further, we observe generalization improvements of 2.31% for a Vision Transformer model trained on naturally corrupted Clothing1M.

The primary challenge of cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) is the domain disparity between the training and inference phases, which can exist in either the input data or the target classes. Previous models struggle to learn feature representations that generalize to various unknown domains from limited training domain samples. In contrast, the large-scale visual model SAM, pre-trained on tens of millions of images from various domains and classes, possesses excellent generalizability. In this work, we propose a SAM-aware graph prompt reasoning network (GPRN) that fully leverages SAM to guide CD-FSS feature representation learning and improve prediction accuracy. Specifically, we propose a SAM-aware prompt initialization module (SPI) to transform the masks generated by SAM into visual prompts enriched with high-level semantic information. Since SAM tends to divide an object into many sub-regions, this may lead to visual prompts representing the same semantic object having inconsistent or fragmented features. We further propose a graph prompt reasoning (GPR) module that constructs a graph among visual prompts to reason about their interrelationships and enable each visual prompt to aggregate information from similar prompts, thus achieving global semantic consistency. Subsequently, each visual prompt embeds its semantic information into the corresponding mask region to assist in feature representation learning. To refine the segmentation mask during testing, we also design a non-parameter adaptive point selection module (APS) to select representative point prompts from query predictions and feed them back to SAM to refine inaccurate segmentation results. Experiments on four standard CD-FSS datasets demonstrate that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results.

Document Information Extraction (DIE) aims to extract structured information from Visually Rich Documents (VRDs). Previous full-training approaches have demonstrated strong performance but may struggle with generalization to unseen data. In contrast, training-free methods leverage powerful pre-trained models like Large Language Models (LLMs) to address various downstream tasks with only a few examples. Nonetheless, training-free methods for DIE encounter two primary challenges: (1) understanding the complex relationship between layout and textual elements in VRDs, and (2) providing accurate guidance to pre-trained models. To address these challenges, we propose SAmple-centric In-context Learning (SAIL). SAIL introduces a fine-grained entity-level textual similarity to facilitate in-depth text analysis by LLMs and incorporates layout similarity to enhance the analysis of layouts in VRDs. Moreover, SAIL formulates a unified In-Context Learning (ICL) prompt template for various sample-centric examples, enabling tailored prompts that deliver precise guidance to pre-trained models for each sample. Extensive experiments on FUNSD, CORD, and SROIE benchmarks with various base models (e.g., LLMs) indicate that our SAIL outperforms training-free baselines, even closer to the full-training methods, showing the superiority and generalization of our method.

Most techniques approach the problem of image forgery localization as a binary segmentation task, training neural networks to label original areas as 0 and forged areas as 1. In contrast, we tackle this issue from a more fundamental perspective by partitioning images according to their originating sources. To this end, we propose Segment Any Forged Image Region (SAFIRE), which solves forgery localization using point prompting. Each point on an image is used to segment the source region containing itself. This allows us to partition images into multiple source regions, a capability achieved for the first time. Additionally, rather than memorizing certain forgery traces, SAFIRE naturally focuses on uniform characteristics within each source region. This approach leads to more stable and effective learning, achieving superior performance in both the new task and the traditional binary forgery localization.

Backdoor attacks in federated learning (FL) face challenges such as lower attack success rates and compromised main task accuracy (MA) compared to local training. Existing methods like distributed backdoor attack (DBA) mitigate these issues by modifying malicious clients’ updates and partitioning global triggers to enhance backdoor persistence and stealth. The recent full combination backdoor attack (FCBA) further improves backdoor efficiency with a full combination strategy. However, these methods are mainly applicable in small-scale FL. In large-scale FL, small trigger patterns weaken impact, and scaling them requires controlling exponentially more clients, which poses significant challenges, while simply reverting to DBA may decrease backdoor performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose the self-adaptive distributed backdoor attack (SADBA), which achieves similar performance to FCBA with a lower percentage of malicious clients (PMC). It also adapts more flexibly through an optimized model poisoning strategy and a self-adaptive data poisoning strategy. Experiments demonstrate SADBA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher or comparable backdoor performance and MA across various datasets with limited PMC.

Robustness and generalizability in medical image segmentation are often hindered by scarcity and limited diversity of training data, which stands in contrast to the variability encountered during inference. While conventional strategies---such as domain-specific augmentation, specialized architectures, and tailored training procedures---can alleviate these issues, they depend on the availability and reliability of domain knowledge. When such knowledge is unavailable, misleading, or improperly applied, performance may deteriorate. In response, we introduce a novel, domain-agnostic, add-on, and data-driven strategy inspired by image stacking in image denoising. Termed ``semantic stacking,'' our method estimates a denoised semantic representation that complements the conventional segmentation loss during training. This method does not depend on domain-specific assumptions, making it broadly applicable across diverse image modalities, model architectures, and augmentation techniques. Through extensive experiments, we validate the superiority of our approach in improving segmentation performance under diverse conditions.