GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation
Authors: Xinshu Li; Lina Yao
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Instrumental variables (IVs), widely applied in economics and healthcare, enable consistent counterfactual prediction in the presence of hidden confounding factors, effectively addressing endogeneity issues. The prevailing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods typically rely on the availability of valid IVs (satisfying Relevance, Exclusivity, and Exogeneity), a requirement which often proves elusive in real-world scenarios. Various data-driven techniques are being developed to create valid IVs (or representations of IVs) from a pool of IV candidates. However, most of these techniques still necessitate the inclusion of valid IVs within the set of candidates. This paper proposes a distribution-conditioned adversarial variational autoencoder to tackle this challenge. Specifically: 1) for Relevance and Exclusivity, we deduce the corresponding evidence lower bound following the Bayesian network structure and build the variational autoencoder; accordingly, 2) for Exogeneity , we design an adversarial game to encourage latent factors originating from the marginal distribution, compelling the independence between IVs and other outcome-related factors. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness, stability and generality of our proposed model in generating valid IV factors in the absence of valid IV candidates.
Agile Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Authors: Xinyao Li; Jingjing Li; Fengling Li; Lei Zhu; Ke Lu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Efficiently utilizing rich knowledge in pretrained models has become a critical topic in the era of large models. This work focuses on adaptively utilize knowledge from multiple source-pretrained models to an unlabeled target domain without accessing the source data. Despite being a practically useful setting, existing methods require extensive parameter tuning over each source model, which is computationally expensive when facing abundant source domains or larger source models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach which is free of the parameter tuning over source backbones. Our technical contribution lies in the Bi-level ATtention ENsemble (Bi-ATEN) module, which learns both intra-domain weights and inter-domain ensemble weights to achieve a fine balance between instance specificity and domain consistency. By slightly tuning source bottlenecks, we achieve comparable or even superior performance on a challenging benchmark DomainNet with less than 3% trained parameters and 8 times of throughput compared with SOTA method. Furthermore, with minor modifications, the proposed module can be easily equipped to existing methods and gain more than 4% performance boost. Code is available at https://github.com/TL-UESTC/Bi-ATEN.
Towards Effective and General Graph Unlearning via Mutual Evolution
Authors: Xunkai Li; Yulin Zhao; Zhengyu Wu; Wentao Zhang; Rong-Hua Li; Guoren Wang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of AI applications, the growing needs for data privacy and model robustness have highlighted the importance of machine unlearning, especially in thriving graph-based scenarios. However, most existing graph unlearning strategies primarily rely on well-designed architectures or manual process, rendering them less user-friendly and posing challenges in terms of deployment efficiency. Furthermore, striking a balance between unlearning performance and framework generalization is also a pivotal concern. To address the above issues, we propose Mutual Evolution Graph Unlearning (MEGU), a new mutual evolution paradigm that simultaneously evolves the predictive and unlearning capacities of graph unlearning. By incorporating aforementioned two components, MEGU ensures complementary optimization in a unified training framework that aligns with the prediction and unlearning requirements. Extensive experiments on 9 graph benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MEGU in addressing unlearning requirements at the feature, node, and edge levels. Specifically, MEGU achieves average performance improvements of 2.7%, 2.5%, and 3.2% across these three levels of unlearning tasks when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, MEGU exhibits satisfactory training efficiency, reducing time and space overhead by an average of 159.8x and 9.6x, respectively, in comparison to retraining GNN from scratch.
Component Fourier Neural Operator for Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations
Authors: Ye Li; Ting Du; Yiwen Pang; Zhongyi Huang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Solving Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations (SPDEs) poses computational challenges arising from the rapid transitions in their solutions within thin regions. The effectiveness of deep learning in addressing differential equations motivates us to employ these methods for solving SPDEs. In this paper, we introduce Component Fourier Neural Operator (ComFNO), an innovative operator learning method that builds upon Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), while simultaneously incorporating valuable prior knowledge obtained from asymptotic analysis. Our approach is not limited to FNO and can be applied to other neural network frameworks, such as Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), leading to potential similar SPDEs solvers. Experimental results across diverse classes of SPDEs demonstrate that ComFNO significantly improves accuracy compared to vanilla FNO. Furthermore, ComFNO exhibits natural adaptability to diverse data distributions and performs well in few-shot scenarios, showcasing its excellent generalization ability in practical situations.
Learning to Prompt Knowledge Transfer for Open-World Continual Learning
Authors: Yujie Li; Xin Yang; Hao Wang; Xiangkun Wang; Tianrui Li
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of continual learning in an open-world scenario, referred to as Open-world Continual Learning (OwCL). OwCL is increasingly rising while it is highly challenging in two-fold: i) learning a sequence of tasks without forgetting knowns in the past, and ii) identifying unknowns (novel objects/classes) in the future. Existing OwCL methods suffer from the adaptability of task-aware boundaries between knowns and unknowns, and do not consider the mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose Pro-KT, a novel prompt-enhanced knowledge transfer model for OwCL. Pro-KT includes two key components: (1) a prompt bank to encode and transfer both task-generic and task-specific knowledge, and (2) a task-aware open-set boundary to identify unknowns in the new tasks. Experimental results using two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed Pro-KT outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts in both the detection of unknowns and the classification of knowns markedly. Code released at https://github.com/YujieLi42/Pro-KT.
SPD-DDPM: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models in the Symmetric Positive Definite Space
Authors: Yunchen Li; Zhou Yu; Gaoqi He; Yunhang Shen; Ke Li; Xing Sun; Shaohui Lin
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Symmetric positive definite(SPD) matrices have shown important value and applications in statistics and machine learning, such as FMRI analysis and traffic prediction. Previous works on SPD matrices mostly focus on discriminative models, where predictions are made directly on E(X|y), where y is a vector and X is an SPD matrix. However, these methods are challenging to handle for large-scale data. In this paper, inspired by denoising diffusion probabilistic model(DDPM), we propose a novel generative model, termed SPD-DDPM, by introducing Gaussian distribution in the SPD space to estimate E(X|y). Moreover, our model can estimate p(X) unconditionally and flexibly without giving y. On the one hand, the model conditionally learns p(X|y) and utilizes the mean of samples to obtain E(X|y) as a prediction. On the other hand, the model unconditionally learns the probability distribution of the data p(X) and generates samples that conform to this distribution. Furthermore, we propose a new SPD net which is much deeper than the previous networks and allows for the inclusion of conditional factors. Experiment results on toy data and real taxi data demonstrate that our models effectively fit the data distribution both unconditionally and conditionally.
Backpropagation Through Agents
Authors: Zhiyuan Li; Wenshuai Zhao; Lijun Wu; Joni Pajarinen
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: A fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is to learn the joint policy in an extremely large search space, which grows exponentially with the number of agents. Moreover, fully decentralized policy factorization significantly restricts the search space, which may lead to sub-optimal policies. In contrast, the auto-regressive joint policy can represent a much richer class of joint policies by factorizing the joint policy into the product of a series of conditional individual policies. While such factorization introduces the action dependency among agents explicitly in sequential execution, it does not take full advantage of the dependency during learning. In particular, the subsequent agents do not give the preceding agents feedback about their decisions. In this paper, we propose a new framework Back-Propagation Through Agents (BPTA) that directly accounts for both agents' own policy updates and the learning of their dependent counterparts. This is achieved by propagating the feedback through action chains. With the proposed framework, our Bidirectional Proximal Policy Optimisation (BPPO) outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on matrix games, StarCraftII v2, Multi-agent MuJoCo, and Google Research Football demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Multi-Granularity Causal Structure Learning
Authors: Jiaxuan Liang; Jun Wang; Guoxian Yu; Shuyin Xia; Guoyin Wang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Unveiling, modeling, and comprehending the causal mechanisms underpinning natural phenomena stand as fundamental endeavors across myriad scientific disciplines. Meanwhile, new knowledge emerges when discovering causal relationships from data. Existing causal learning algorithms predominantly focus on the isolated effects of variables, overlook the intricate interplay of multiple variables and their collective behavioral patterns. Furthermore, the ubiquity of high-dimensional data exacts a substantial temporal cost for causal algorithms. In this paper, we develop a novel method called MgCSL (Multi-granularity Causal Structure Learning), which first leverages sparse auto-encoder to explore coarse-graining strategies and causal abstractions from micro-variables to macro-ones. MgCSL then takes multi-granularity variables as inputs to train multilayer perceptrons and to delve the causality between variables. To enhance the efficacy on high-dimensional data, MgCSL  introduces a simplified acyclicity constraint to adeptly search the directed acyclic graph among variables. Experimental results show that MgCSL outperforms competitive baselines, and finds out explainable causal connections on fMRI datasets.
Inducing Clusters Deep Kernel Gaussian Process for Longitudinal Data
Authors: Junjie Liang; Weijieying Ren; Hanifi Sahar; Vasant Honavar
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We consider the problem of predictive modeling from irregularly and sparsely sampled longitudinal data with unknown, complex correlation structures and abrupt discontinuities. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel inducing clusters longitudinal deep kernel Gaussian Process (ICDKGP). ICDKGP approximates the data generating process by a zero-mean GP with a longitudinal deep kernel that models the unknown complex correlation structure in the data and a deterministic non-zero mean function to model the abrupt discontinuities. To improve the scalability and interpretability of ICDKGP, we introduce inducing clusters corresponding to centers of clusters in the training data. We formulate the training of ICDKGP as a constrained optimization problem and derive its evidence lower bound. We introduce a novel relaxation of the resulting problem which under rather mild assumptions yields a solution with error bounded relative to the original problem. We describe the results of extensive experiments demonstrating that ICDKGP substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art longitudinal methods on data with both smoothly and non-smoothly varying outcomes.
Self-Supervised Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Contrastive Hashing for Cross-Modal Search
Authors: Meiyu Liang; Junping Du; Zhengyang Liang; Yongwang Xing; Wei Huang; Zhe Xue
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Deep cross-modal hashing technology provides an effective and efficient cross-modal unified representation learning solution for cross-modal search. However, the existing methods neglect the implicit fine-grained multimodal knowledge relations between these modalities such as when the image contains information that is not directly described in the text. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised multi-grained multi-modal knowledge graph contrastive hashing method for cross-modal search (CMGCH). Firstly, in order to capture implicit fine-grained cross-modal semantic associations, a multi-modal knowledge graph is constructed, which represents the implicit multimodal knowledge relations between the image and text as inter-modal and intra-modal semantic associations. Secondly, a cross-modal graph contrastive attention network is proposed to reason on the multi-modal knowledge graph to sufficiently learn the implicit fine-grained inter-modal and intra-modal knowledge relations. Thirdly, a cross-modal multi-granularity contrastive embedding learning mechanism is proposed, which fuses the global coarse-grained and local fine-grained embeddings by multihead attention mechanism for inter-modal and intra-modal contrastive learning, so as to enhance the cross-modal unified representations with stronger discriminativeness and semantic consistency preserving power. With the joint training of intra-modal and inter-modal contrast, the invariant and modal-specific information of different modalities can be maintained in the final unified cross-modal unified hash space. Extensive experiments on several cross-modal benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CMGCH outperforms the state-of the-art methods.
DC-NAS: Divide-and-Conquer Neural Architecture Search for Multi-Modal Classification
Authors: Xinyan Liang; Pinhan Fu; Qian Guo; Keyin Zheng; Yuhua Qian
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Neural architecture search-based multi-modal classification (NAS-MMC) methods can individually obtain the optimal classifier for different multi-modal data sets in an automatic manner. However, most existing NAS-MMC methods are dramatically time consuming due to the requirement for training and evaluating enormous models. In this paper, we propose an efficient evolutionary-based NAS-MMC method called divide-and-conquer neural architecture search (DC-NAS). Specifically, the evolved population is first divided into k+1 sub-populations, and then k sub-populations of them evolve on k small-scale data sets respectively that are obtained by splitting the entire data set using the k-fold stratified sampling technique; the remaining one evolves on the entire data set. To solve the sub-optimal fusion model problem caused by the training strategy of partial data, two kinds of sub-populations that are trained using partial data and entire data exchange the learned knowledge via two special knowledge bases. With the two techniques mentioned above, DC-NAS achieves the training time reduction and classification performance improvement. Experimental results show that DC-NAS achieves the state-of-the-art results in term of classification performance, training efficiency and the number of model parameters than the compared NAS-MMC methods on three popular multi-modal tasks including multi-label movie genre classification, action recognition with RGB and body joints and dynamic hand gesture recognition.
Value at Adversarial Risk: A Graph Defense Strategy against Cost-Aware Attacks
Authors: Junlong Liao; Wenda Fu; Cong Wang; Zhongyu Wei; Jiarong Xu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Deep learning methods on graph data have achieved remarkable efficacy across a variety of real-world applications, such as social network analysis and transaction risk detection. Nevertheless, recent studies have illuminated a concerning fact: even the most expressive Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to graph adversarial attacks. While several methods have been proposed to enhance the robustness of GNN models against adversarial attacks, few have focused on a simple yet realistic approach: valuing the adversarial risks and focused safeguards at the node level. This empowers defenders to allocate heightened security level to vulnerable nodes, while lower to robust nodes. With this new perspective, we propose a novel graph defense strategy RisKeeper, such that the adversarial risk can be directly kept in the input graph. We start at valuing the adversarial risk, by introducing a cost-aware projected gradient descent attack that takes into account both cost avoidance and compliance with costs budgets. Subsequently, we present a learnable approach to ascertain the ideal security level for each individual node by solving a bi-level optimization problem. Through extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Our in-depth case studies provide further insights into vulnerable and robust structural patterns, serving as inspiration for practitioners to exercise heightened vigilance.
Invariant Random Forest: Tree-Based Model Solution for OOD Generalization
Authors: Yufan Liao; Qi Wu; Xing Yan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization is an essential topic in machine learning. However, recent research is only focusing on the corresponding methods for neural networks. This paper introduces a novel and effective solution for OOD generalization of decision tree models, named Invariant Decision Tree (IDT). IDT enforces a penalty term with regard to the unstable/varying behavior of a split across different environments during the growth of the tree. Its ensemble version, the Invariant Random Forest (IRF), is constructed. Our proposed method is motivated by a theoretical result under mild conditions, and validated by numerical tests with both synthetic and real datasets. The superior performance compared to non-OOD tree models implies that considering OOD generalization for tree models is absolutely necessary and should be given more attention.
Ahpatron: A New Budgeted Online Kernel Learning Machine with Tighter Mistake Bound
Authors: Yun Liao; Junfan Li; Shizhong Liao; Qinghua Hu; Jianwu Dang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the mistake bound of online kernel learning on a budget. We propose a new budgeted online kernel learning model, called Ahpatron, which significantly improves the mistake bound of previous work and resolves an open problem related to upper bounds of hypothesis space constraints. We first present an aggressive variant of Perceptron, named AVP, a model without budget, which uses an active updating rule. Then we design a new budget maintenance mechanism, which removes a half of examples, and projects the removed examples onto a hypothesis space spanned by the remaining examples. Ahpatron adopts the above mechanism to approximate AVP. Theoretical analyses prove that Ahpatron has tighter mistake bounds, and experimental results show that Ahpatron outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on the same or a smaller budget.
Spiking NeRF: Representing the Real-World Geometry by a Discontinuous Representation
Authors: Zhanfeng Liao; Yan Liu; Qian Zheng; Gang Pan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: A crucial reason for the success of existing NeRF-based methods is to build a neural density field for the geometry representation via multiple perceptron layers (MLPs).
MLPs are continuous functions, however, real geometry or density field is frequently discontinuous at the interface between the air and the surface. Such a contrary brings the problem of unfaithful geometry representation. To this end, this paper proposes spiking NeRF, which leverages spiking neurons and a hybrid Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-Spiking Neural Network (SNN) framework to build a discontinuous density field for faithful geometry representation. Specifically, we first demonstrate the reason why continuous density fields will bring inaccuracy. Then, we propose to use the spiking neurons to build a discontinuous density field. We conduct a comprehensive analysis for the problem of existing spiking neuron models and then provide the numerical relationship between the parameter of the spiking neuron and the theoretical accuracy of geometry. Based on this, we propose a bounded spiking neuron to build the discontinuous density field. Our method achieves SOTA performance. The source code and the supplementary material are available at https://github.com/liaozhanfeng/Spiking-NeRF.
Mitigating Label Noise through Data Ambiguation
Authors: Julian Lienen; Eyke Hüllermeier
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Label noise poses an important challenge in machine learning, especially in deep learning, in which large models with high expressive power dominate the field. Models of that kind are prone to memorizing incorrect labels, thereby harming generalization performance. Many methods have been proposed to address this problem, including robust loss functions and more complex label correction approaches. Robust loss functions are appealing due to their simplicity, but typically lack flexibility, while label correction usually adds substantial complexity to the training setup. In this paper, we suggest to address the shortcomings of both methodologies by "ambiguating" the target information, adding additional, complementary candidate labels in case the learner is not sufficiently convinced of the observed training label. More precisely, we leverage the framework of so-called superset learning to construct set-valued targets based on a confidence threshold, which deliver imprecise yet more reliable beliefs about the ground-truth, effectively helping the learner to suppress the memorization effect. In an extensive empirical evaluation, our method demonstrates favorable learning behavior on synthetic and real-world noise, confirming the effectiveness in detecting and correcting erroneous training labels.
Episodic Return Decomposition by Difference of Implicitly Assigned Sub-trajectory Reward
Authors: Haoxin Lin; Hongqiu Wu; Jiaji Zhang; Yihao Sun; Junyin Ye; Yang Yu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Real-world decision-making problems are usually accompanied by delayed rewards, which affects the sample efficiency of Reinforcement Learning, especially in the extremely delayed case where the only feedback is the episodic reward obtained at the end of an episode. Episodic return decomposition is a promising way to deal with the episodic-reward setting. Several corresponding algorithms have shown remarkable effectiveness of the learned step-wise proxy rewards from return decomposition. However, these existing methods lack either attribution or representation capacity, leading to inefficient decomposition in the case of long-term episodes. In this paper, we propose a novel episodic return decomposition method called Diaster (Difference of implicitly assigned sub-trajectory reward). Diaster decomposes any episodic reward into credits of two divided sub-trajectories at any cut point, and the step-wise proxy rewards come from differences in expectation. We theoretically and empirically verify that the decomposed proxy reward function can guide the policy to be nearly optimal. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of both sample efficiency and performance. The code is available at https://github.com/HxLyn3/Diaster.