Canada

Split Federated Learning (SFL) is an emerging edge-friendly version of Federated Learning (FL), where clients process a small portion of the entire model. While SFL was considered to be resistant to Model Extraction Attack (MEA) by design, a recent work shows it is not necessarily the case. Still, gradient-based MEAs are not effective against a target model that is changing, as is the case in training-from-scratch applications. In this work, we propose a strong MEA during the SFL training phase. The proposed Early-Mix-GAN (EMGAN) attack effectively exploits gradient queries regardless of data assumptions. EMGAN adopts three key components to address the problem of inconsistent gradients. Specifically, it employs (i) Early-learner approach for better adaptability, (ii) Multi-GAN approach to introduce randomness in generator training to mitigate mode collapse, and (iii) ProperMix to effectively augment the limited amount of synthetic data for a better approximation of the target domain data distribution. EMGAN achieves excellent results in extracting server-side models. With only 50 training samples, EMGAN successfully extracts a 5-layer server-side model of VGG-11 on CIFAR-10, with 7% less accuracy than the target model. With zero training data, the extracted model achieves 81.3% accuracy, which is significantly better than the 45.5% accuracy of the model extracted by the SoTA method.

AAAI 2024

EMGAN: Early-Mix-GAN on Extracting Server-Side Model in Split Federated Learning

model ip protection

model extraction attack

federated learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

The substantial success of Vision Transformer (ViT) in computer vision tasks is largely attributed to the architecture design. This underscores the necessity of efficient architecture search for designing better ViTs automatically. As training-based architecture search methods are computationally intensive, there’s a growing interest in training-free methods that use zero-cost proxies to score ViTs. However, existing training-free approaches require expert knowledge to manually design specific zero-cost proxies. Moreover, these zero-cost proxies exhibit limitations to generalize across diverse domains. In this paper, we introduce Auto-Prox, an automatic proxy discovery framework, to address the problem. First, we build the ViT-Bench-101, which involves different ViT candidates and their actual performance on multiple datasets. Utilizing ViT-Bench-101, we can evaluate zero-cost proxies based on their score-accuracy correlation. Then, we represent zero-cost proxies with computation graphs and organize the zero-cost proxy search space with ViT statistics and primitive operations. To discover generic zero-cost proxies, we propose a joint correlation metric to evolve and mutate different zero-cost proxy candidates. We introduce an elitism-preserve strategy for search efficiency to achieve a better trade-off between exploitation and exploration. Based on the discovered zero-cost proxy, we conduct a ViT architecture search in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generalizes well to different datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results both in ranking correlation and final accuracy. Codes can be found at https://github.com/lilujunai/Auto-Prox-AAAI24.

Auto-Prox: Training-Free Vision Transformer Architecture Search via Automatic Proxy Discovery

Although automatically animating audio-driven talking heads has recently received growing interest, previous efforts have mainly concentrated on achieving lip synchronization with the audio, neglecting two crucial elements for generating expressive videos: emotion style and art style. In this paper, we present an innovative audio-driven talking face generation method called Style2Talker. It involves two stylized stages, namely Style-E and Style-A, which integrate text-controlled emotion style and picture-controlled art style into the final output. In order to prepare the scarce emotional text descriptions corresponding to the videos, we propose a labor-free paradigm that employs large-scale pretrained models to automatically annotate emotional text labels for existing audio-visual datasets. Incorporating the synthetic emotion texts, the Style-E stage utilizes a large-scale CLIP model to extract emotion representations, which are combined with the audio, serving as the condition for an efficient latent diffusion model designed to produce emotional motion coefficients of a 3DMM model. Moving on to the Style-A stage, we develop a coefficient-driven motion generator and an art-specific style path embedded in the well-known StyleGAN. This allows us to synthesize high-resolution artistically stylized talking head videos using the generated emotional motion coefficients and an art style source picture. Moreover, to better preserve image details and avoid artifacts, we provide StyleGAN with the multi-scale content features extracted from the identity image and refine its intermediate feature maps by the designed content encoder and refinement network, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of audio-lip synchronization and performance of both emotion style and art style.

Style2Talker: High-Resolution Talking Head Generation with Emotion Style and Art Style

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to synthesize vivid facial animations that accurately synchronize with speech and match the unique speaking style. However, existing works primarily focus on achieving precise lip synchronization while neglecting to model the subject-specific speaking style, often resulting in unrealistic facial animations. To the best of our knowledge, this work makes the first attempt to explore the coupled information between the speaking style and the semantic content in facial motions. Specifically, we introduce an innovative speaking style disentanglement method, which enables arbitrary-subject speaking style encoding and leads to a more realistic synthesis of speech-driven facial animations. Subsequently, we propose a novel framework called Mimic to learn disentangled representations of the speaking style and content from facial motions by building two latent spaces for style and content, respectively. Moreover, to facilitate disentangled representation learning, we introduce four well-designed constraints: an auxiliary style classifier, an auxiliary inverse classifier, a content contrastive loss, and a pair of latent cycle losses, which can effectively contribute to the construction of the identity-related style space and semantic-related content space. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is capable of capturing diverse speaking styles for speech-driven 3D facial animation. The source code and supplementary video are publicly available at: https://zeqing-wang.github.io/Mimic/

Mimic: Speaking Style Disentanglement for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation

Consistent editing of real images is a challenging task, as it requires performing non-rigid edits (e.g., changing postures) to the main objects in the input image without changing their identity or attributes. To guarantee consistent attributes, some existing methods fine-tune the entire model or the textual embedding for structural consistency, but they are time-consuming and fail to perform non-rigid edits. Other works are tuning-free, but their performances are weakened by the quality of Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) reconstruction, which often fails in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach called Tuning-free Inversion-enhanced Control (TIC), which directly correlates features from the inversion process with those from the sampling process to mitigate the inconsistency in DDIM reconstruction. Specifically, our method effectively obtains inversion features from the key and value features in the self-attention layers, and enhances the sampling process by these inversion features, thus achieving accurate reconstruction and content-consistent editing. To extend the applicability of our method to general editing scenarios, we also propose a mask-guided attention concatenation strategy that combines contents from both the inversion and the naive DDIM editing processes. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms previous works in reconstruction and consistent editing, and produces impressive results in various settings.

Tuning-Free Inversion-Enhanced Control for Consistent Image Editing

Pan-sharpening involves reconstructing missing high-frequency information in multi-spectral images with low spatial resolution, using a higher-resolution panchromatic image as guidance. Although the inborn connection with frequency domain, existing pan-sharpening research has not almost investigated the potential solution upon frequency domain. To this end, we propose a novel Frequency Adaptive Mixture of Experts (FAME) learning framework for pan-sharpening, which consists of three key components: the Adaptive Frequency Separation Prediction Module, the Sub-Frequency Learning Expert Module, and the Expert Mixture Module. In detail, the first leverages the discrete cosine transform to perform frequency separation by predicting the frequency mask. On the basis of generated mask, the second with low-frequency MOE and high-frequency MOE takes account for enabling the effective low-frequency and high-frequency information reconstruction. Followed by, the final fusion module dynamically weights high frequency and low-frequency MOE knowledge to adapt to remote sensing images with significant content variations. Quantitative and qualitative experiments over multiple datasets demonstrate that our method performs the best against other state-of-the-art ones and comprises a strong generalization ability for real-world scenes. Code will be made publicly at https://github.com/alexhe101/FAME-Net.

Frequency-Adaptive Pan-Sharpening with Mixture of Experts

How to effectively exploit spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture target appearance changes in visual tracking. However, most deep learning-based trackers mainly focus on designing a complicated appearance model or template updating strategy, while lacking the exploitation of context between consecutive frames and thus entailing the \textit{when-and-how-to-update} dilemma. To address these issues, we propose a novel explicit visual prompts framework for visual tracking, dubbed EVPTrack. Specifically, we utilize spatio-temporal tokens to propagate information between consecutive frames without focusing on updating templates. As a result, we cannot only alleviate the challenge of \textit{when-to-update}, but also avoid the hyper-parameters associated with updating strategies. Then, we utilize the spatio-temporal tokens to generate explicit visual prompts that facilitate inference in the current frame. The prompts are fed into a transformer encoder together with the image tokens without additional processing.
Consequently, the efficiency of our model is improved by avoiding how-to-update. In addition, we consider multi-scale information as explicit visual prompts, providing multiscale template features to enhance the EVPTrack's ability to handle target scale changes. Extensive experimental results on six benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT, LaSOText, GOT-10k, UAV123, TrackingNet, and TNL2K.) validate that our EVPTrack can achieve competitive performance at a real-time speed by effectively exploiting both spatio-temporal and multi-scale information. Code and models are available at
https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EVPTrack.

Explicit Visual Prompts for Visual Object Tracking

Adversarial attacks involve adding perturbations to the source image to cause misclassification by the target model, which demonstrates the potential of attacking face recognition models. Existing adversarial face image generation methods still can’t achieve satisfactory performance because of low transferability and high detectability. In this paper, we propose a unified framework Adv-Diffusion that can generate imperceptible adversarial identity perturbations in the latent space but not the raw pixel space, which utilizes strong inpainting capabilities of the latent diffusion model to generate realistic adversarial images. Specifically, we propose the identity-sensitive conditioned diffusion generative model to generate semantic perturbations in the surroundings. The designed adaptive strength-based adversarial perturbation algorithm can ensure both attack transferability and stealthiness. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the public FFHQ and CelebA-HQ datasets prove the proposed method achieves superior performance compared
with the state-of-the-art methods without an extra generative model training process. The source code is available at https://github.com/kopper-xdu/Adv-Diffusion.

Adv-Diffusion: Imperceptible Adversarial Face Identity Attack via Latent Diffusion Model

Our work aims to reconstruct a 3D object that is held and rotated by a hand in front of a static RGB camera. Previous methods that use implicit neural representations to recover the geometry of a generic hand-held object from multi-view images achieved compelling results in the visible part of the object. However, these methods falter in accurately capturing the shape within the hand-object contact region due to occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel method that deals with surface reconstruction under occlusion by incorporating priors of 2D occlusion elucidation and physical contact constraints. For the former, we introduce an object amodal completion network to infer the 2D complete mask of objects under occlusion. To ensure the accuracy and view consistency of the predicted 2D amodal masks, we devise a joint optimization method for both amodal mask refinement and 3D reconstruction. For the latter, we impose penetration and attraction constraints on the local geometry in contact regions. We evaluate our approach on HO3D and HOD datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction surface quality, with an improvement of 52% on HO3D and 20% on HOD. Project webpage: https://east-j.github.io/ihor.

In-Hand 3D Object Reconstruction from a Monocular RGB Video

Large language models (LLMs) often contain misleading content, emphasizing the need to align them with human values to ensure secure AI systems. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been employed to achieve this alignment. However, it encompasses two main drawbacks: (1) RLHF exhibits complexity, instability, and sensitivity to hyperparameters in contrast to SFT. (2) Despite massive trial-and-error, multiple sampling is reduced to pair-wise contrast, thus lacking contrasts from a macro perspective. In this paper, we propose Preference Ranking Optimization (PRO) as an efficient SFT algorithm to directly fine-tune LLMs for human alignment. PRO extends the pair-wise contrast to accommodate preference rankings of any length. By iteratively contrasting candidates, PRO instructs the LLM to prioritize the best response while progressively ranking the rest responses. In this manner, PRO effectively transforms human alignment into aligning the probability ranking of n responses generated by LLM with the preference ranking of humans towards these responses. Experiments have shown that PRO outperforms baseline algorithms, achieving comparable results to ChatGPT and human responses through automatic-based, reward-based, GPT-4, and human evaluations.

Preference Ranking Optimization for Human Alignment

Sketch re-identification (Re-ID) seeks to match pedestrians' photos from surveillance videos with corresponding sketches. However, we observe that existing works still have two critical limitations: (i) cross- and intra-modality discrepancies hinder the extraction of modality-shared features, (ii) standard triplet loss fails to constrain latent feature distribution in each modality with inadequate samples. To overcome the above issues, we propose a differentiable auxiliary learning network (DALNet) to explore a robust auxiliary modality for Sketch Re-ID. Specifically, for (i) we construct an auxiliary modality by using a dynamic auxiliary generator (DAG) to bridge the gap between sketch and photo modalities. The auxiliary modality highlights the described person in photos to mitigate background clutter and learns sketch style through style refinement. Moreover, a modality interactive attention module (MIA) is presented to align the features and learn the invariant patterns of two modalities by auxiliary modality. To address (ii), we propose a multi-modality collaborative learning scheme (MMCL) to align the latent distribution of three modalities. An intra-modality circle loss in MMCL brings learned global and modality-shared features of the same identity closer in the case of insufficient samples within each modality. Extensive experiments verify the superior performance of our DALNet over the state-of-the-art methods for Sketch Re-ID, and the generalization in sketch-based image retrieval and sketch-photo face recognition tasks.

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Auto-Prox: Training-Free Vision Transformer Architecture Search via Automatic Proxy Discovery

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