AAAI 2025 论文列表

The paper targets the challenging task of Ship License Plate (SLP) recognition. Existing methods for SLP recognition are hampered by the scarcity of large and publicly available datasets, leading to evaluations on small and non-representative datasets. To alleviate it, we have built a large dataset, called SLP34K, which consists of 34,385 images collected by an intelligent traffic surveillance system. The dataset is carefully manually annotated with text labels and attributes, and presents high data diversity by multiple installation locations and long capturing period of the cameras. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective SLP recognition baseline method. The baseline is equipped with a strong visual encoder that benefits from initial pre-training via self-supervised learning, followed by further refinement through our devised semantic enhancement module. Extensive experiments on SLP34K verify the effectiveness of our proposed baseline. Moreover, while our baseline is designed for SLP recognition, it can also be used for common scene text recognition and achieve state-of-the-art performance on seven mainstream scene text recognition datasets.

Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning, simulation, and experimentation, we still lack integrated AI systems capable of performing autonomous long-term scientific research and discovery. This paper examines the current state of AI for scientific discovery, highlighting recent progress in large language models and other AI techniques applied to scientific tasks. We then outline key challenges and promising research directions toward developing more comprehensive AI systems for scientific discovery, including the need for science-focused AI agents, improved benchmarks and evaluation metrics, multimodal scientific representations, and unified frameworks combining reasoning, theorem proving, and data-driven modeling. Addressing these challenges could lead to transformative AI tools to accelerate progress across disciplines towards scientific discovery.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in many graph mining tasks. However, scaling them to large graphs is challenging due to the high computational and storage costs of repeated feature propagation and non-linear transformation during training. One commonly employed approach to address this challenge is model-simplification, which only executes the Propagation (P) once in the pre-processing, and Combine (C) these receptive fields in different ways and then feed them into a simple model for better performance. Despite their high predictive performance and scalability, these methods still face two limitations. First, existing approaches mainly focus on exploring different C methods from the model perspective, neglecting the crucial problem of performance degradation with increasing P depth from the data-centric perspective, known as the over-smoothing problem. Second, pre-processing overhead takes up most of the end-to-end processing time, especially for large-scale graphs. To address these limitations, we present random walk with noise masking (RMask), a plug-and-play module compatible with the existing model-simplification works. This module enables the exploration of deeper GNNs while preserving their scalability. Unlike the previous model-simplification works, we focus on continuous P and found that the noise existing inside each P is the cause of the over-smoothing issue, and use the efficient masking mechanism to eliminate them. Experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate that model-simplification works equipped with RMask yield superior performance compared to their original version and can make a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

The maximin optimisation problem, inspired by Von Neumann’s work (von Neumann 1928) and widely applied in adversarial optimisation, has become a key research area in machine learning. Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) is a common method for solving these problems but requires the pay-off function to be differentiable, making it unsuitable for discrete or binary functions that often occur in game-theoretical scenarios. Co-evolutionary algorithms (CoEAs), which are derivative-free, offer an alternative to these problems. However, the theoretical understanding of CoEAs is still limited. This paper provides the first rigorous runtime analysis of CoEAs with pairwise dominance on binary two-player zero-sum games (or maximin problems), specifically focusing on the DIAGONAL game. The mathematical analysis rigorously shows that the PDCoEA can efficiently find the optimum in polynomial runtime with high probability under low mutation rates and large population sizes. Empirical evidence also identifies an error threshold where higher mutation rates lead to inefficiency. In contrast, single-pair-individual algorithms, i.e., RLS-PD and (1+1)-CoEAs, fail to find the optimum in polynomial time. These findings highlight the usefulness of pairwise dominance, low mutation rates, and large populations in maintaining a “co-evolutionary arms race”.

In this talk, I will present our recent advances in sequential decision-making systems in reward-maximizing deep RL and the emerging reward-matching GFlowNets. The presentation will examine three fundamental challenges: efficiency, robustness, and practical applications.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has garnered significant attention as a crucial link between vision and language, aimed at generating accurate responses to visual queries. However, current VQA models still struggle with the challenges of minority class collapse and spurious semantic correlations posed by language bias and imbalanced distributions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Prompt-Driven Geometric Harmonization (PDGH) paradigm, which integrates both geometric structure and information entropy principles to enhance the ability of VQA models to generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. Specifically, our PDGH approach is meticulously designed to generate image-generated prompts that are guided by specific question cues, facilitating a more accurate and context-aware understanding of the visual content. Moreover, we project the prompt-visual-question and visual-question joint representations into a unified hypersphere space, applying feature weight self-orthogonality and prompt-information entropy correction constraints to optimize the margin, further alleviating minority class collapse and correcting language bias. To maintain the geometric integrity of the representation space, we introduce multi-space geometric contrast constraints to minimize the impact of spurious priors introduced during training. Finally, a semantic matrix is constructed for the coordinated joint representation to ensure that the learned instances are semantically consistent and improve reasoning ability. Extensive experiments on various general and medical VQA datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our PDGH approach over existing state-of-the-art baselines.

LLM have achieved success in many fields but still troubled by problematic content in the training corpora. LLM unlearning aims at reducing their influence and avoid undesirable behaviours. However, existing unlearning methods remain vulnerable to adversarial queries and the unlearned knowledge resurfaces after the manually designed attack queries. As part of a red-team effort to proactively assess the vulnerabilities of unlearned models, we design Dynamic Unlearning Attack (DUA), a dynamic and automated framework to attack these models and evaluate their robustness. It optimizes adversarial suffixes to reintroduce the unlearned knowledge in various scenarios. We find that unlearned knowledge can be recovered in 55.2% of the questions, even without revealing the unlearned model's parameters. In response to this vulnerability, we propose Latent Adversarial Unlearning (LAU), a universal framework that effectively enhances the robustness of the unlearned process. It formulates the unlearning process as a min-max optimization problem and resolves it through two stages: an attack stage, where perturbation vectors are trained and added to the latent space of LLMs to recover the unlearned knowledge, and a defense stage, where previously trained perturbation vectors are used to enhance unlearned model's robustness. With our LAU framework, we obtain two robust unlearning methods, AdvGA and AdvNPO. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple unlearning benchmarks and various models, and demonstrate that they improve the unlearning effectiveness by over 53.5%, cause only less than a 11.6% reduction in neighboring knowledge, and have almost no impact on the model's general capabilities.

Existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches follow the idealized closed-world assumption, neglecting the challenges present in realistic medical scenarios, such as open-set distribution and imbalanced class distribution. Although some methods in natural domains attempt to address the open-set problem, they are insufficient for medical domains, where intertwined challenges like class imbalance and small inter-class lesion discrepancies persist. Thus, this paper presents a novel self-recalibrated semantic training framework, which is tailored for SSL in medical imaging by ingeniously harvesting realistic unlabeled samples. Inspired by the observation that certain open-set samples share some similar disease-related representations with in-distribution samples, we first propose an informative sample selection strategy that identifies high-value samples to serve as augmentations, thereby effectively enriching the semantics of known categories. Furthermore, we adopt a compact semantic clustering strategy to address the semantic confusion raised by the above newly introduced open-set semantics. Moreover, to mitigate the interference of class imbalance in open-set SSL, we introduce a less biased dual-balanced classifier with similarity pseudo-label regularization and category-customized regularization. Extensive experiments on a variety of medical image datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method over state-of-the-art Closed-set and Open-set SSL methods.

Model counting is the task of counting the number of satisfying assignments of a Boolean formula. Since counting is intractable in general, most applications use (ε, δ)-approximations, where the output is within a (1+ε)-factor of the count with probability at least 1-δ. Many demanding applications make thousands of counting queries, and the state-of-the-art approximate counter, ApproxMC, makes hundreds of calls to SAT solvers to answer a single approximate counting query. The sheer number of SAT calls, poses a significant challenge to the existing approaches. In this work, we propose an approximation scheme, ApproxMC7, that is tailored to such demanding applications with low time limits. Compared to ApproxMC, ApproxMC7 makes 14× fewer SAT calls while providing the same guarantees as ApproxMC in the constant-factor regime. In an evaluation over 2,247 instances, ApproxMC7 solved 271 more and achieved a 2× speedup against ApproxMC.

Model counting is a fundamental task that involves determining the number of satisfying assignments to a logical formula, typically in conjunctive normal form (CNF). While CNF model counting has received extensive attention over recent decades, interest in Pseudo-Boolean (PB) model counting is just emerging partly due to the greater flexibility of PB formulas. As such, we observed feature gaps in existing PB counters such as a lack of support for projected and incremental settings, which could hinder adoption. In this work, our main contribution is the introduction of the PB model counter PBCount2, the first exact PB model counter with support for projected and incremental model counting. Our counter, PBCount2, uses our Least Occurrence Weighted Min Degree (LOW-MD) computation ordering heuristic to support projected model counting and a cache mechanism to enable incremental model counting. In our evaluations, PBCount2 completed at least 1.40x the number of benchmarks of competing methods for projected model counting and at least 1.18x of competing methods in incremental model counting.

Recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs) have highlighted the critical need of calibrating model predictions, with neighborhood prediction similarity recognized as a pivotal component. Existing studies suggest that nodes with analogous neighborhood prediction similarity often exhibit similar calibration characteristics. Building on this insight, recent approaches incorporate neighborhood similarity into node-wise temperature scaling techniques. However, our analysis reveals that this assumption does not hold universally. Calibration errors can differ significantly even among nodes with comparable neighborhood similarity, depending on their confidence levels. This necessitates a re-evaluation of existing GNN calibration methods, as a single, unified approach may lead to sub-optimal calibration. In response, we introduce Simi-Mailbox, a novel approach that categorizes nodes by both neighborhood similarity and their own confidence, irrespective of proximity or connectivity. Our method allows fine-grained calibration by employing group-specific temperature scaling, with each temperature tailored to address the specific miscalibration level of affiliated nodes, rather than adhering to a uniform trend based on neighborhood similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Simi-Mailbox across diverse datasets on different GNN architectures, achieving up to 13.79% error reduction compared to uncalibrated GNN predictions.

It is well known that numeric planning can be made decidable if the domain of all numeric state variables is finite. This bounded formulation can be polynomially compiled into classical planning with Boolean conditions and conditional effects preserving the plan size exactly. However, it remains unclear whether this compilation has any practical utility. To explore this aspect, this work revisits the theoretical compilation framework from a practical perspective, focusing on the fragment of simple numeric planning. Specifically, we introduce three different compilations. The first, called one-hot, aims to systematise the current practice among planning practitioners of modelling numeric planning through classical planning. The other two, termed binary compilations, extend and specialise the logarithmic encoding introduced in previous literature. Our experimental analysis reveals that the overly complex logarithmic encoding can, surprisingly, be made practical with some representational expedients. Among these, the use of axioms is particularly crucial. Furthermore, we identify a class of mildly numeric planning problems where a classical planner, i.e., LAMA, when run on the compiled problem, is highly competitive with state-of-the-art numeric planners.

Recently, deep learning based methods have revolutionized remote sensing image segmentation. However, these methods usually rely on a predefined semantic class set, thus needing additional image annotation and model training when adapting to new classes. More importantly, they are unable to segment arbitrary semantic classes. In this work, we introduce Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation (OVRSISS), which aims to segment arbitrary semantic classes in remote sensing images. To address the lack of OVRSISS datasets, we develop LandDiscover50K, a comprehensive dataset of 51,846 images covering 40 diverse semantic classes. In addition, we propose a novel framework named GSNet that integrates domain priors from special remote sensing models and versatile capabilities of general vision-language models. Technically, GSNet consists of a Dual-Stream Image Encoder (DSIE), a Query-Guided Feature Fusion (QGFF), and a Residual Information Preservation Decoder (RIPD). DSIE first captures comprehensive features from both special models and general models in dual streams. Then, with the guidance of variable vocabularies, QGFF integrates specialist and generalist features, enabling them to complement each other. Finally, RIPD is proposed to aggregate multi-source features for more accurate mask predictions. Experiments show that our method outperforms other methods by a large margin, and our proposed LandDiscover50K improves the performance of OVRSISS methods. The dataset and method will be publicly available.

Sentiment analysis is rapidly advancing by utilizing various data modalities (e.g., text, video, and audio). However, most existing techniques only learn the atomic-level features that reflect strong correlations, while ignoring more complex compositions in multimodal data. Moreover, they also neglected the incongruity in semantic distribution among modalities. In light of this, we introduce a novel Hierarchical Correlation Modeling Network (HCMNet), which enhances the multimodal sentiment analysis by exploring both the atomic-level correlations based on dynamic attention reasoning and the composition-level correlations through topological graph reasoning. In addition, we also alleviate the impact of distributional inconsistencies between modalities from both atomic-level and composition-level perspectives. Specifically, we first design an atomic-level contrastive loss that constrains the semantic distribution across modalities to mitigate the atomic-level inconsistency. Then, we design a graph optimal transport module that integrates transport flows with different graphs to constrain the composition-level semantic distribution, thus reducing the inconsistency of compositional nodes. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically inspired models that process visual inputs over multiple time steps. However, they often struggle with limited feature discrimination along the temporal dimension due to inherent spatiotemporal invariance. This limitation arises from the redundant activation of certain regions and shared supervision for multiple time steps, constraining the network’s ability to adapt and learn diverse features. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Temporal-Self-Erasing (TSE) supervision method that dynamically adapts the learning regions of interest for different time steps. The TSE method operates by identifying highly activated regions from predictions across multiple time steps and adaptively suppressing them during model training, thereby encouraging the network to focus on less activated yet potentially informative regions. This approach not only enhances the feature discrimination capability of SNNs but also facilitates more effective multi-time-step inference by exploiting more semantic information. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our TSE method significantly improves the classification accuracy and robustness of SNNs.

In Continual Learning (CL), while existing work primarily focuses on the multi-class classification task, there has been limited research on Multi-Label Learning (MLL). In practice, MLL datasets are often class-imbalanced, making it inherently challenging, a problem that is even more acute in CL. Due to its sensitivity to imbalance, Macro-AUC is an appropriate and widely used measure in MLL. However, there is no research to optimize Macro-AUC in MLCL specifically. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a new memory replay-based method to tackle the imbalance issue for Macro-AUC-oriented MLCL. Specifically, inspired by recent theory work, we propose a new Reweighted Label-Distribution-Aware Margin (RLDAM) loss. Furthermore, to be compatible with the RLDAM loss, a new memory-updating strategy named Weight Retain Updating (WRU) is proposed to maintain the numbers of positive and negative instances of the original dataset in memory. Theoretically, we provide superior generalization analyses of the RLDAM-based algorithm in terms of Macro-AUC, separately in batch MLL and MLCL settings. This is the first work to offer theoretical generalization analyses in MLCL to our knowledge. Finally, a series of experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our method over several baselines.

Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite communication demonstrates significant advantages in emergency short burst data services. However, unstable satellite networks, particularly those with frequent packet loss, present a severe challenge to accurate image transmission. To address it, we propose a loss-resilient image coding approach that leverages end-to-end optimization in learned image compression (LIC). Our method builds on the channel-wise progressive coding framework, incorporating Spatial-Channel Rearrangement (SCR) on the encoder side and Mask Conditional Aggregation (MCA) on the decoder side to improve reconstruction quality with unpredictable errors. By integrating the Gilbert-Elliot model into the training process, we enhance the model's ability to generalize in real-world network conditions. Extensive evaluations show that our approach outperforms traditional and deep learning-based methods in terms of compression performance and stability under diverse packet loss, offering robust and efficient progressive transmission even in challenging environments.

Deep multi-view clustering incorporating graph learning has presented tremendous potential. Most methods encounter costly square time consumption w.r.t. data size. Theoretically, anchor-based graph learning can alleviate this limitation, but related deep models mainly rely on manual discretization approaches to select anchors, which indicates that 1) the anchors are fixed during model training and 2) they may deviate from the true cluster distribution. Consequently, the unreliable anchors may corrupt clustering results. In this paper, we propose the Deep Multi-view Anchor Clustering (DMAC) model that performs clustering in linear time. Concretely, the initial anchors are intervened by the positive-incentive noise sampled from Gaussian distribution, such that they can be optimized with a newly designed anchor learning loss, which promotes a clear relationship between samples and anchors. Afterwards, anchor graph convolution is devised to model the cluster structure formed by the anchors, and the mutual information maximization loss is built to provide cross-view clustering guidance. In this way, the learned anchors can better represent clusters. With the optimal anchors, the full sample graph is calculated to derive a discriminative embedding for clustering. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of DMAC compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are structured data presented as directed graphs. Due to the common issues of incompleteness and inaccuracy encountered during construction and maintenance, completing KGs becomes a critical task. Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) excels at inferring patterns or models from seen data to be applied to unseen data. However, existing methods mainly focus on new entities, while relations are usually randomly initialized. To this end, we propose TARGI, a simple yet effective inductive method for KGC. Specifically, we first construct a global relation graph for each topology from a global graph perspective, thus leveraging the in-variance of relation structures. We then utilize this graph to aggregate the rich embeddings of new relations and new entities, thereby performing KGC robustly in inductive scenarios. This successfully addresses the excessive reliance on the degree of relations and resolves the high complexity and limited scope of enclosing subgraph sampling in existing fully inductive algorithms. We conduct KGC experiments on six inductive datasets using inference data where entities are entirely new and new relations at 100 percent, 50 percent, and 0 percent radios. Extensive results demonstrate that our model accurately learns the topological structures and embeddings of new relations, and guides the embedding learning of new entities. Notably, our model outperforms 15 SOTA methods, especially in two fully inductive datasets.