AAAI 2025 论文列表

Recently, image inpainting has become a common tool for manipulating nature images in a malicious manner, which has led to the rapid advancement of inpainting forensics. Although current forensics methods have shown precise location of inpainting regions and reliable robustness against image post-processing operations, it remains unclear whether they can effectively resist the possible attacks in real-world scenarios. To identify potential flaws, we propose a novel black-box anti-forensics framework to attack inpainting forensics methods, which employs reinforcement learning to generate a query-efficient countermeasure, named RLGC. To this end, we define reinforcement learning paradigm to model the Markov Decision Process of query-based black-box anti-forensics scenario. Specifically, pixel-wise agents are used to modulate anti-forensics images based on action selection and query forensics methods to obtain corresponding outputs. Later, reward function evaluates attack effect and image distortion with these outputs. To maximize the cumulative reward, policy and value networks are integrated and trained by Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that, without visually detectable distortion on anti-forensics images, RLGC achieves remarkable attack effects in a highly query-effcient way against various black-box inpainting forensics methods, even outperforming the most representative white-box attack method.

Video has emerged as a favored multimedia format on the internet. To better gain video contents, a new topic HIREST is presented, including video retrieval, moment retrieval, moment segmentation, and step-captioning. The pioneering work chooses the pre-trained CLIP-based model for video retrieval, and leverages it as a feature extractor for other three challenging tasks solved in a multi-task learning paradigm. Nevertheless, this work struggles to learn the comprehensive cognition of user-preferred content, due to disregarding the hierarchies and association relations across modalities. In this paper, guided by the shallow-to-deep principle, we propose a query-centric audio-visual cognition (QUAG) network to construct a reliable multi-modal representation for moment retrieval, segmentation and step-captioning. Specifically, we first design the modality-synergistic perception to obtain rich audio-visual content, by modeling global contrastive alignment and local fine-grained interaction between visual and audio modalities. Then, we devise the query-centric cognition that uses the deep-level query to perform the temporal-channel filtration on the shallow-level audio-visual representation. This can cognize user-preferred content and thus attain a query-centric audio-visual representation for three tasks. Extensive experiments show QUAG achieves the SOTA results on HIREST. Further, we test QUAG on the query-based video summarization task and verify its good generalization.

Neural implicit representations have shown remarkable abilities in jointly modeling geometry, color, and camera poses in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Current methods use coordinates, positional encodings, or other geometry features as input to query neural implicit functions for signed distances and color which produce rendering errors to drive the optimization in overfitting image observations. However, due to the run time efficiency requirement in SLAM systems, we are merely allowed to conduct optimization on each frame in few iterations, which is far from enough for neural networks to overfit these queries. The underfitting usually results in severe drifts in camera tracking and artifacts in reconstruction. To resolve this issue, we propose query quantized neural SLAM which uses quantized queries to reduce variations of input for much easier and faster overfitting a frame. To this end, we quantize a query into a discrete representation with a set of codes, and only allow neural networks to observe a finite number of variations. This allows neural networks to become increasingly familiar with these codes after overfitting more and more previous frames. Moreover, we also introduce novel initialization, losses, and argumentation to stabilize the optimization with significant uncertainty in the early optimization stage, constrain the optimization space, and estimate camera poses more accurately. We justify the effectiveness of each design and report visual and numerical comparisons on widely used benchmarks to show our superiority over the latest methods in both reconstruction and camera tracking.

The deployment of machine learning models in operational contexts represents a significant investment for any organisation. Consequently, the risk of these models being misappropriated by competitors needs to be addressed. In recent years, numerous proposals have been put forth to detect instances of model stealing. However, these proposals operate under implicit and disparate data and model access assumptions; as a consequence, it remains unclear how they can be effectively compared to one another. Our evaluation shows that a simple baseline that we introduce performs on par with existing state-of-the-art fingerprints, which, on the other hand, are much more complex. To uncover the reasons behind this intriguing result, this paper introduces a systematic approach to both the creation of model fingerprinting schemes and their evaluation benchmarks. By dividing model fingerprinting into three core components – Query, Representation and Detection (QuRD) – we are able to identify ~100 previously unexplored QuRD combinations and gain insights into their performance. Finally, we introduce a set of metrics to compare and guide the creation of more representative model stealing detection benchmarks. Our approach reveals the need for more challenging benchmarks and a sound comparison with baselines. To foster the creation of new fingerprinting schemes and benchmarks, we open-source our fingerprinting toolbox.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to determine the meaning of target words according to the given context. The recognition of high-frequency senses has reached expectations, and the current research focus is mainly on low-frequency senses, namely Long-tail Senses (LTSs). One of the challenges in long-tail WSD is to obtain clear and distinguishable definition representations based on limited word sense definitions. Researchers try to mine word sense definition information from data from different sources to enhance the representations. Inspired by quantum theory, this paper provides a constraint mechanism for representations under non-homogeneous data to leverage the geometric relationship in its Hilbert space to constrain the value range of parameters, thereby alleviating the dependence on big data and improving the accuracy of representations. We theoretically analyze the feasibility of the constraint mechanism, and verify the WSD system based on this mechanism on the standard evaluation framework, constructed LTS datasets and cross-lingual datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme and achieve competitive performance.

Best arm identification (BAI) is a key problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, where K arms each has an associated reward distribution, and the objective is to minimize the number of queries needed to identify the best arm with high confidence. In this paper, we explore BAI using quantum oracles. For the case where each query probes only one arm (m=1), we devise a quantum algorithm with a query complexity upper bound of O((K/Delta)log(1/delta)), where delta is the confidence parameter and Delta is the reward gap between best and second best arms. This improves on the classical bound by a factor of 1/Delta. For the general case where a single query can probe m arms (1<= m<= K) simultaneously, we propose an algorithm with an upper bound of O((K/(Delta x sqrt(m))) log(1/delta)), improving by a factor of sqrt(m) compared to the m=1 case. We also provide query complexity lower bounds for both scenarios, which match the upper bounds up to logarithmic factors, and validate our theoretical results with Qiskit-based simulations.

There is a growing trend toward AI systems interacting with humans to revolutionize a range of application domains such as healthcare and transportation. However, unsafe human-machine interaction can lead to catastrophic failures. We propose a novel approach that predicts future states by accounting for the uncertainty of human interaction, monitors whether predictions satisfy or violate safety requirements, and adapts control actions based on the predictive monitoring results. Specifically, we develop a new quantitative predictive monitor based on Signal Temporal Logic with Uncertainty (STL-U) to compute a robustness degree interval, which indicates the extent to which a sequence of uncertain predictions satisfies or violates an STL-U requirement. We also develop a new loss function to guide the uncertainty calibration of Bayesian deep learning and a new adaptive control method, both of which leverage STL-U quantitative predictive monitoring results. We apply the proposed approach to two case studies: Type 1 Diabetes management and semi-autonomous driving. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves safety and effectiveness in both case studies.

Existing work on the alignment problem has focused mainly on (1) qualitative descriptions of the alignment problem; (2) attempting to align AI actions with human interests by focusing on value specification and learning; and/or (3) focusing on a single agent or on humanity as a monolith. Recent sociotechnical approaches highlight the need to understand complex misalignment among multiple human and AI agents. We address this gap by adapting a computational social science model of human contention to the alignment problem. Our model quantifies misalignment in large, diverse agent groups with potentially conflicting goals across various problem areas. Misalignment scores in our framework depend on the observed agent population, the domain in question, and conflict between agents' weighted preferences. Through simulations, we demonstrate how our model captures intuitive aspects of misalignment across different scenarios. We then apply our model to two case studies, including an autonomous vehicle setting, showcasing its practical utility. Our approach offers enhanced explanatory power for complex sociotechnical environments and could inform the design of more aligned AI systems in real-world applications.

The problem of checking satisfiability of linear real arithmetic (LRA) and non-linear real arithmetic (NRA) formulas has broad applications, in particular, they are at the heart of logic-related applications such as logic for artificial intelligence, program analysis, etc. While there has been much work on checking satisfiability of unquantified LRA and NRA formulas, the problem of checking satisfiability of quantified LRA and NRA formulas remains a significant challenge. The main bottleneck in the existing methods is a computationally expensive quantifier elimination step. In this work, we propose a novel method for efficient quantifier elimination in quantified LRA and NRA formulas. We propose a template-based Skolemization approach, where we automatically synthesize linear/polynomial Skolem functions in order to eliminate quantifiers in the formula. The key technical ingredient in our approach are Positivstellensätze theorems from algebraic geometry, which allow for an efficient manipulation of polynomial inequalities. Our method offers a range of appealing theoretical properties combined with a strong practical performance. On the theory side, our method is sound, semi-complete, and runs in subexponential time and polynomial space, as opposed to existing sound and complete quantifier elimination methods that run in doubly-exponential time and at least exponential space. On the practical side, our experiments show superior performance compared to state of the art SMT solvers in terms of the number of solved instances and runtime, both on LRA and on NRA benchmarks.

In an era overwhelmed by vast amounts of data, the effective curation of web-crawl datasets is essential for optimizing model performance. This paper tackles the challenges associated with the unstructured and heterogeneous nature of such datasets. Traditional heuristic curation methods often inadequately capture complex features, resulting in biases and the exclusion of relevant data. We introduce an advanced, learning-driven approach, Ensemble Curation Of DAta ThroUgh Multimodal Operators, called EcoDatum, which employs a novel quality-guided deduplication method to balance feature distribution. EcoDatum strategically integrates various unimodal and multimodal data curation operators within a weak supervision ensemble framework, utilizing automated optimization to effectively score each data point. EcoDatum, which significantly improves the data curation quality and efficiency, outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, ranking 1st on the DataComp leaderboard with an average performance score of 0.182 across 38 diverse evaluation datasets. This represents a 28% improvement over the DataComp baseline method, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving dataset curation and model training efficiency.

Diffusion Models (DM) have democratized AI image generation through an iterative denoising process. Quantization is a major technique to alleviate the inference cost and reduce the size of DM denoiser networks. However, as denoisers evolve from variants of convolutional U-Nets toward newer Transformer architectures, it is of growing importance to understand the quantization sensitivity of different weight layers, operations and architecture types to performance. In this work, we address this challenge with Qua2SeDiMo, a mixed-precision Post-Training Quantization framework that generates explainable insights on the cost-effectiveness of various model weight quantization methods for different denoiser operation types and block structures. We leverage these insights to make high-quality mixed-precision quantization decisions for a myriad of diffusion models ranging from foundational U-Nets to state-of-the-art Transformers. As a result, Qua2SeDiMo can construct 3.4-bit, 3.9-bit, 3.65-bit and 3.7-bit weight quantization on PixArt-α, PixArt-Σ, Hunyuan-DiT and SDXL, respectively. We further pair our weight-quantization configurations with 6-bit activation quantization and outperform existing approaches in terms of quantitative metrics and generative image quality.

Advanced Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) perform well for high-quality images, but their performance dramatically decreases for degraded images. Data augmentation is commonly used to alleviate this problem, but using too much perturbed data might seriously decrease the performance on pristine images. To tackle this challenge, we take our cue from the assumption of spatial coincidence in human visual perception, i.e. multiscale and varying receptive fields are required for understanding pristine and degraded images. Correspondingly, we propose a novel plug-and-play network architecture, dubbed Quality-Adaptive Receptive Fields (QuARF), to automatically select the optimal receptive fields based on the quality of the input image. To this end, we first design a multi-kernel convolutional block, which comprises multiscale continuous receptive fields. Afterward, we design a quality-adaptive routing network to predict the significance of each kernel, based on the quality features extracted from the input image. In this way, QuARF automatically selects the optimal inference route for each image. To further boost efficiency and effectiveness, the input feature map is split into multiple groups, with each group independently learning its quality-adaptive routing parameters. We apply QuARF to a variety of DNNs and conduct experiments in both discriminative and generation tasks, including semantic segmentation, image translation, and restoration. Thorough experimental results show that QuARF significantly and robustly improves the performance for degraded images, and outperforms data augmentation in most cases.

Open set anomaly detection (OSAD) is a crucial task that aims to identify abnormal patterns or behaviors in data sets, especially when the anomalies observed during training do not represent all possible classes of anomalies. The recent advances in quantum computing in handling complex data structures and improving machine learning models herald a paradigm shift in anomaly detection methodologies. This study proposes a Quantum Scoring Module (Qsco), embedding quantum variational circuits into neural networks to enhance the model's processing capabilities in handling uncertainty and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments conducted across eight real-world anomaly detection datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance in detecting anomalies across varied settings and reveal that integrating quantum simulators does not result in prohibitive time complexities. At the same time, the experimental results under different noise models also prove that Qsco is a noise-resilient algorithm. Our study validates the feasibility of quantum-enhanced anomaly detection methods in practical applications.

As a crucial operator in numerous scientific and engineering computing applications, the automatic optimization of General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) with full utilization of ever-evolving hardware architectures (e.g. GPUs and RISC-V) is of paramount importance. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate functionally correct code for simple tasks, they have yet to produce high-performance code. The key challenge resides in deeply understanding diverse hardware architectures and crafting prompts that effectively unleash the potential of LLMs to generate high-performance code. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt mechanism called QiMeng-GEMM which enables LLMs to comprehend the architectural characteristics of different hardware platforms and automatically search for the optimization combinations for GEMM. The key of QiMeng-GEMM is a set of informative, adaptive, and iterative meta-prompts. Based on this, a searching strategy for optimal combinations of meta-prompts is used to iteratively generate high-performance code. Extensive experiments conducted on 4 leading LLMs, various paradigmatic hardware platforms, and representative matrix dimensions unequivocally demonstrate QiMeng-GEMM’s superior performance in auto-generating optimized GEMM code. Compared to vanilla prompts, our method achieves a performance enhancement of up to 113×. Even when compared to human experts, our method can reach 115% of cuBLAS on NVIDIA GPUs and 211% of OpenBLAS on RISC-V CPUs. Notably, while human experts often take months to optimize GEMM, our approach reduces the development cost by over 240×.

Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is a simple practice of Neural Network (NN) and the cornerstone of research and development of deep learning. Each neuron is connected to all neurons in the previous layer and implements a non-linear mapping through activation functions. MLP can learn complex non-linear relationships among features through the superposition of multiple hidden layers, but it still cannot discover the inherent strong correlation among features. The reason is that each neuron uses a simple weighted summation method to organize all the neurons in the previous layer. Inspired by quantum theory, this paper builds a non-linear NN layer that can mine strong correlations among features based on multi-body quantum systems, and then constructs a multi-layer perceptron, called Quantum-inspired MLP (QiMLP). It is conceivable that QiMLP will have important inspirational significance in reshaping machine learning, deep learning and large language models. We theoretically analyzed the basis for QiMLP to mine strong correlations among features, and implemented experiments on multiple classic deep learning datasets. Experimental results verify that QiMLP not only learns strong correlations among features, but also significantly reduces the number of parameters with hundreds of times improvement.

Significant advancements have been achieved in the realm of understanding poses and interactions of two hands manipulating an object. The emergence of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies has heightened the demand for real-time performance in these applications. However, current state-of-the-art models often exhibit promising results at the expense of substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we present a query-optimized real-time Transformer (QORT-Former), the first Transformer-based real-time framework for 3D pose estimation of two hands and an object. We first limit the number of queries and decoders to meet the efficiency requirement. Given limited number of queries and decoders, we propose to optimize queries which are taken as input to the Transformer decoder, to secure better accuracy: (1) we propose to divide queries into three types (a left hand query, a right hand query and an object query) and enhance query features (2) by using the contact information between hands and an object and (3) by using three-step update of enhanced image and query features with respect to one another. With proposed methods, we achieved real-time pose estimation performance using just 108 queries and 1 decoder (53.5 FPS on an RTX 3090TI GPU). Surpassing state-of-the-art results on the H2O dataset by 17.6% (left hand), 22.8% (right hand), and 27.2% (object), as well as on the FPHA dataset by 5.3% (right hand) and 10.4% (object), our method excels in accuracy. Additionally, it sets the state-of-the-art in interaction recognition, maintaining real-time efficiency with an off-the-shelf action recognition module.

Serving LLMs requires substantial memory due to the storage requirements of Key-Value (KV) embeddings in the KV cache, which grows with sequence length. An effective approach to compress KV cache is quantization. However, traditional quantization methods face significant memory overhead due to the need to store quantization constants (at least a zero point and a scale) in full precision per data block. Depending on the block size, this overhead can add 1 or 2 bits per quantized number. We introduce QJL, a new quantization approach that consists of a Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) transform followed by sign-bit quantization. In contrast to existing methods, QJL eliminates memory overheads by removing the need for storing quantization constants. We propose an asymmetric estimator for the inner product of two vectors and demonstrate that applying QJL to one vector and a standard JL transform without quantization to the other provides an unbiased estimator with minimal distortion. We have developed an efficient implementation of the QJL sketch and its corresponding inner product estimator, incorporating a lightweight CUDA kernel for optimized computation. When applied across various LLMs and NLP tasks to quantize the KV cache to only 3 bits, QJL demonstrates a more than fivefold reduction in KV cache memory usage without compromising accuracy, all while achieving faster runtime.

We present QGen Studio: an adaptive question-answer generation, training, and evaluation platform. QGen Studio enables users to leverage large language models (LLMs) to create custom question-answer datasets and fine-tune models on this synthetic data. It features a dataset viewer and model explorer to streamline this process. The dataset viewer provides key metrics and visualizes the context from which the QA pairs are generated, offering insights into data quality. The model explorer supports model comparison, allowing users to contrast the performance of their trained LLMs against other models, supporting performance benchmarking and refinement. QGen Studio delivers an interactive, end-to-end solution for generating QA datasets and training scalable, domain-adaptable models. The studio will be open-sourced soon, allowing users to deploy it locally.

Facial expression recognition faces challenges where labeled significant features in datasets are mixed with unlabeled redundant ones. In this paper, we introduce Cross Similarity Attention (CSA) to mine richer intrinsic information from image pairs, overcoming a limitation when the Scaled Dot-Product Attention of ViT is directly applied to calculate the similarity between two different images. Based on CSA, we simultaneously minimize intra-class differences and maximize inter-class differences at the fine-grained feature level through interactions among multiple branches. Contrastive residual distillation is utilized to transfer the information learned in the cross module back to the base network. We ingeniously design a four-branch centrally symmetric network, named Quadruplet Cross Similarity (QCS), which alleviates gradient conflicts arising from the cross module and achieves balanced and stable training. It can adaptively extract discriminative features while isolating redundant ones. The cross-attention modules exist during training, and only one base branch is retained during inference, resulting in no increase in inference time. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several FER datasets.