GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
FedCompetitors: Harmonious Collaboration in Federated Learning with Competing Participants
Authors: Shanli Tan; Hao Cheng; Xiaohu Wu; Han Yu; Tiantian He; Yew Soon Ong; Chongjun Wang; Xiaofeng Tao
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving approach for collaborative training of machine learning models. Given the potential data heterogeneity, it is crucial to select appropriate collaborators for each FL participant (FL-PT) based on data complementarity. Recent studies have addressed this challenge. Similarly, it is imperative to consider the inter-individual relationships among FL-PTs where some FL-PTs engage in competition. Although FL literature has acknowledged the significance of this scenario, practical methods for establishing FL ecosystems remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we extend a principle from the balance theory, namely “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”, to ensure the absence of conflicting interests within an FL ecosystem. The extended principle and the resulting problem are formulated via graph theory and integer linear programming. A polynomial-time algorithm is proposed to determine the collaborators of each FL-PT. The solution guarantees high scalability, allowing even competing FL-PTs to smoothly join the ecosystem without conflict of interest. The proposed framework jointly considers competition and data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data demonstrate its efficacy compared to five alternative approaches, and its ability to establish efficient collaboration networks among FL-PTs.
Harnessing the Power of Beta Scoring in Deep Active Learning for Multi-Label Text Classification
Authors: Wei Tan; Ngoc Dang Nguyen; Lan Du; Wray Buntine
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Within the scope of natural language processing, the domain of multi-label text classification is uniquely challenging due to its expansive and uneven label distribution. The complexity deepens due to the demand for an extensive set of annotated data for training an advanced deep learning model, especially in specialized fields where the labeling task can be labor-intensive and often requires domain-specific knowledge. Addressing these challenges, our study introduces a novel deep active learning strategy, capitalizing on the Beta family of proper scoring rules within the Expected Loss Reduction framework. It computes the expected increase in scores using the Beta Scoring Rules,  which are then transformed into sample vector representations. These vector representations guide the diverse selection of informative sample, directly linking this process to the model's expected proper score. Comprehensive evaluations across both synthetic and real datasets reveal our method's capability to often outperform established acquisition techniques in multi-label text classification, presenting encouraging outcomes across various architectural and dataset scenarios.
A Two-Stage Information Extraction Network for Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Xin Tan; Ce Zhao; Chengliang Liu; Jie Wen; Zhanyan Tang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Recently, multi-view multi-label classification (MvMLC) has received a significant amount of research interest and many methods have been proposed based on the assumptions of view completion and label completion. However, in real-world scenarios, multi-view multi-label data tends to be incomplete due to various uncertainties involved in data collection and manual annotation. As a result, the conventional MvMLC methods fail. In this paper, we propose a new two-stage MvMLC network to solve this incomplete MvMLC issue with partial missing views and missing labels. Different from the existing works, our method attempts to leverage the diverse information from the partially missing data based on the information theory. Specifically, our method aims to minimize task-irrelevant information while maximizing task-relevant information through the principles of information bottleneck theory and mutual information extraction. The first stage of our network involves training view-specific classifiers to concentrate the task-relevant information. Subsequently, in the second stage, the hidden states of these classifiers serve as input for an alignment model, an autoencoder-based mutual information extraction framework, and a weighted fusion classifier to make the final prediction. Extensive experiments performed on five datasets validate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinTan10/TSIEN.
An Effective Augmented Lagrangian Method for Fine-Grained Multi-View Optimization
Authors: Yuze Tan; Hecheng Cai; Shudong Huang; Shuping Wei; Fan Yang; Jiancheng Lv
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The significance of multi-view learning in effectively mitigating the intricate intricacies entrenched within heterogeneous data has garnered substantial attention in recent years. Notwithstanding the favorable achievements showcased by recent strides in this area, a confluence of noteworthy challenges endures. To be specific, a majority of extant methodologies unceremoniously assign weights to data points view-wisely. This ineluctably disregards the intrinsic reality that disparate views confer diverse contributions to each individual sample, consequently neglecting the rich wellspring of sample-level structural insights harbored within the dataset. In this paper, we proposed an effective Augmented Lagrangian MethOd for fiNe-graineD (ALMOND) multi-view optimization. 
This innovative approach scrutinizes the interplay among multiple views at the granularity of individual samples, thereby fostering the enhanced preservation of local structural coherence. The Augmented Lagrangian Method (ALM) is elaborately incorporated into our framework, which enables us to achieve an optimal solution without involving an inexplicable intermediate variable as previous methods do. Empirical experiments on multi-view clustering tasks across heterogeneous datasets serve to incontrovertibly showcase the effectiveness of our proposed methodology, corroborating its preeminence over incumbent state-of-the-art alternatives.
SimCalib: Graph Neural Network Calibration Based on Similarity between Nodes
Authors: Boshi Tang; Zhiyong Wu; Xixin Wu; Qiaochu Huang; Jun Chen; Shun Lei; Helen Meng
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in modeling graph data as exemplified in various applications. Recently, the GNN calibration problem has attracted increasing attention, especially in cost-sensitive scenarios. Previous work has gained empirical insights on the issue, and devised effective approaches for it, but theoretical supports still fall short. In this work, we shed light on the relationship between GNN calibration and nodewise similarity via theoretical analysis. A novel calibration framework, named SimCalib, is accordingly proposed to consider similarity between nodes at global and local levels. At the global level, the Mahalanobis distance between the current node and class prototypes is integrated to implicitly consider similarity between the current node and all nodes in the same class. At the local level, the similarity of node representation movement dynamics, quantified by nodewise homophily and relative degree, is considered. Informed about the application of nodewise movement patterns in analyzing nodewise behavior on the over-smoothing problem, we empirically present a possible relationship between over-smoothing and GNN calibration problem. Experimentally, we discover a correlation between nodewise similarity and model calibration improvement, in alignment with our theoretical results. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments investigating different design factors and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SimCalib framework for GNN calibration by achieving state-of-the-art performance on 14 out of 16 benchmarks.
DP-AdamBC: Your DP-Adam Is Actually DP-SGD (Unless You Apply Bias Correction)
Authors: Qiaoyue Tang; Frederick Shpilevskiy; Mathias Lécuyer
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The Adam optimizer is a popular choice in contemporary deep learning due to its strong empirical performance. However we observe that in privacy sensitive scenarios, the traditional use of Differential Privacy (DP) with the Adam optimizer leads to sub-optimal performance on several tasks. We find that this performance degradation is due to a DP bias in Adam's second moment estimator, introduced by the addition of independent noise in the gradient computation to enforce DP guarantees. This DP bias leads to a different scaling for low variance parameter updates, that is inconsistent with the behavior of non-private Adam, and Adam's sign descent interpretation. We propose the DP-AdamBC optimization algorithm, which corrects for the bias in the second moment estimation and retrieves the expected behaviour of Adam. Empirically, DP-AdamBC significantly improves the optimization performance of DP-Adam by up to 3.5% in final accuracy in image, text, and graph node classification tasks.
Non-monotone Sequential Submodular Maximization
Authors: Shaojie Tang; Jing Yuan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we study a fundamental problem in submodular optimization known as sequential submodular maximization. The primary objective of this problem is to select and rank a sequence of items to optimize a group of submodular functions.
The existing research on this problem has predominantly concentrated on the monotone setting, assuming that the submodular functions are non-decreasing. However, in various real-world scenarios, like diversity-aware recommendation systems, adding items to an existing set might negatively impact the overall utility. In response, we propose to study this problem with non-monotone submodular functions and develop approximation algorithms for both flexible and fixed length constraints, as well as a special case with identical utility functions. The empirical evaluations further validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms in the domain of video recommendations.
Comprehensive View Embedding Learning for Single-Cell Multimodal Integration
Authors: Zhenchao Tang; Jiehui Huang; Guanxing Chen; Calvin Yu-Chian Chen
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Motivation: Advances in single-cell measurement techniques provide rich multimodal data, which helps us to explore the life state of cells more deeply. However, multimodal integration, or, learning joint embeddings from multimodal data remains a current challenge. The difficulty in integrating unpaired single-cell multimodal data is that different modalities have different feature spaces, which easily leads to information loss in joint embedding. And few existing methods have fully exploited and fused the information in single-cell multimodal data. Result: In this study, we propose CoVEL, a deep learning method for unsupervised integration of single-cell multimodal data. CoVEL learns single-cell representations from a comprehensive view, including regulatory relationships between modalities, fine-grained representations of cells, and relationships between different cells. The comprehensive view embedding enables CoVEL to remove the gap between modalities while protecting biological heterogeneity. Experimental results on multiple public datasets show that CoVEL is accurate and robust to single-cell multimodal integration. Data availability: https://github.com/shapsider/scintegration.
z-SignFedAvg: A Unified Stochastic Sign-Based Compression for Federated Learning
Authors: Zhiwei Tang; Yanmeng Wang; Tsung-Hui Chang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising privacy-preserving
distributed learning paradigm but suffers from high communi-
cation cost when training large-scale machine learning models.
Sign-based methods, such as SignSGD, have been proposed
as a biased gradient compression technique for reducing the
communication cost. However, sign-based algorithms could
diverge under heterogeneous data, which thus motivated the de-
velopment of advanced techniques, such as the error-feedback
method and stochastic sign-based compression, to fix this
issue. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from slower
convergence rates, and none of them allows multiple local
SGD updates like FedAvg. In this paper, we propose a novel
noisy perturbation scheme with a general symmetric noise
distribution for sign-based compression, which not only al-
lows one to flexibly control the bias-variance tradeoff for the
compressed gradient, but also provides a unified viewpoint
to existing stochastic sign-based methods. More importantly,
the proposed scheme enables the development of the very first
sign-based FedAvg algorithm (z-SignFedAvg) to accelerate
the convergence. Theoretically, we show that z-SignFedAvg
achieves a faster convergence rate than existing sign-based
methods and, under the uniformly distributed noise, can enjoy
the same convergence rate as its uncompressed counterpart.
Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the
z-SignFedAvg can achieve competitive empirical performance
on real datasets and outperforms existing schemes.
Deciphering Raw Data in Neuro-Symbolic Learning with Provable Guarantees
Authors: Lue Tao; Yu-Xuan Huang; Wang-Zhou Dai; Yuan Jiang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Neuro-symbolic hybrid systems are promising for integrating machine learning and symbolic reasoning, where perception models are facilitated with information inferred from a symbolic knowledge base through logical reasoning. Despite empirical evidence showing the ability of hybrid systems to learn accurate perception models, the theoretical understanding of learnability is still lacking. Hence, it remains unclear why a hybrid system succeeds for a specific task and when it may fail given a different knowledge base. In this paper, we introduce a novel way of characterising supervision signals from a knowledge base, and establish a criterion for determining the knowledge’s efficacy in facilitating successful learning. This, for the first time, allows us to address the two questions above by inspecting the knowledge base under investigation. Our analysis suggests that many knowledge bases satisfy the criterion, thus enabling effective learning, while some fail to satisfy it, indicating potential failures. Comprehensive experiments confirm the utility of our criterion on benchmark tasks.
Efficient Nonparametric Tensor Decomposition for Binary and Count Data
Authors: Zerui Tao; Toshihisa Tanaka; Qibin Zhao
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In numerous applications, binary reactions or event counts are observed and stored within high-order tensors. Tensor decompositions (TDs) serve as a powerful tool to handle such high-dimensional and sparse data. However, many traditional TDs are explicitly or implicitly designed based on the Gaussian distribution, which is unsuitable for discrete data. Moreover, most TDs rely on predefined multi-linear structures, such as CP and Tucker formats. Therefore, they may not be effective enough to handle complex real-world datasets. To address these issues, we propose ENTED, an Efficient Nonparametric TEnsor Decomposition for binary and count tensors.  Specifically, we first employ a nonparametric Gaussian process (GP) to replace traditional multi-linear structures. Next, we utilize the Pólya-Gamma augmentation which provides a unified framework to establish conjugate models for binary and count distributions. Finally, to address the computational issue of GPs, we enhance the model by incorporating sparse orthogonal variational inference of inducing points, which offers a more effective covariance approximation within GPs and stochastic natural gradient updates for nonparametric models. We evaluate our model on several real-world tensor completion tasks, considering binary and count datasets. The results manifest both better performance and computational advantages of the proposed model.
FFT-Based Dynamic Token Mixer for Vision
Authors: Yuki Tatsunami; Masato Taki
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multi-head-self-attention (MHSA)-equipped models have achieved notable performance in computer vision. Their computational complexity is proportional to quadratic numbers of pixels in input feature maps, resulting in slow processing, especially when dealing with high-resolution images. New types of token-mixer are proposed as an alternative to MHSA to circumvent this problem: an FFT-based token-mixer involves global operations similar to MHSA but with lower computational complexity. However, despite its attractive properties, the FFT-based token-mixer has not been carefully examined in terms of its compatibility with the rapidly evolving MetaFormer architecture. Here, we propose a novel token-mixer called Dynamic Filter and novel image recognition models, DFFormer and CDFFormer, to close the gaps above. The results of image classification and downstream tasks, analysis, and visualization show that our models are helpful. Notably, their throughput and memory efficiency when dealing with high-resolution image recognition is remarkable. Our results indicate that Dynamic Filter is one of the token-mixer options that should be seriously considered. The code is available at https://github.com/okojoalg/dfformer
An Information-Flow Perspective on Algorithmic Fairness
Authors: Samuel Teuber; Bernhard Beckert
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: This work presents insights gained by investigating the relationship between algorithmic fairness and the concept of secure information flow. The problem of enforcing secure information flow is well-studied in the context of information security: If secret information may "flow" through an algorithm or program in such a way that it can influence the program’s output, then that is considered insecure information flow as attackers could potentially observe (parts of) the secret.

There is a strong correspondence between secure information flow and algorithmic fairness: if protected attributes such as race, gender, or age are treated as secret program inputs, then secure information flow means that these "secret" attributes cannot influence the result of a program. While most research in algorithmic fairness evaluation concentrates on studying the impact of algorithms (often treating the algorithm as a black-box), the concepts derived from information flow can be used both for the analysis of disparate treatment as well as disparate impact w.r.t. a structural causal model.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between quantitative as well as qualitative information-flow properties and fairness. Moreover, based on this duality, we derive a new quantitative notion of fairness called fairness spread, which can be easily analyzed using quantitative information flow and which strongly relates to counterfactual fairness. We demonstrate that off-the-shelf tools for information-flow properties can be used in order to formally analyze a program's algorithmic fairness properties, including the new notion of fairness spread as well as established notions such as demographic parity.
Amalgamating Multi-Task Models with Heterogeneous Architectures
Authors: Jidapa Thadajarassiri; Walter Gerych; Xiangnan Kong; Elke Rundensteiner
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL) is essential for real-world applications that handle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as selfdriving cars. MTL methods improve the performance of all tasks by utilizing information across tasks to learn a robust shared representation. However, acquiring sufficient labeled data tends to be extremely expensive, especially when having to support many tasks. Recently, Knowledge Amalgamation (KA) has emerged as an effective strategy for addressing the lack of labels by instead learning directly from pretrained models (teachers). KA learns one unified multi-task student that masters all tasks across all teachers. Existing KA for MTL works are limited to teachers with identical architectures, and thus propose layer-to-layer based approaches. Unfortunately, in practice, teachers may have heterogeneous architectures; their layers may not be aligned and their dimensionalities or scales may be incompatible. Amalgamating multi-task teachers with heterogeneous architectures remains an open problem. For this, we design Versatile Common Feature Consolidator (VENUS), the first solution to this problem. VENUS fuses knowledge from the shared representations of each teacher into one unified generalized representation for all tasks. Specifically, we design the Feature Consolidator network that leverages an array of teacher-specific trainable adaptors. These adaptors enable the student to learn from multiple teachers, even if they have incompatible learned representations. We demonstrate that VENUS outperforms five alternative methods on numerous benchmark datasets across a broad spectrum of experiments.
ConSequence: Synthesizing Logically Constrained Sequences for Electronic Health Record Generation
Authors: Brandon Theodorou; Shrusti Jain; Cao Xiao; Jimeng Sun
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Generative models can produce synthetic patient records for analytical tasks when real data is unavailable or limited. However, current methods struggle with adhering to domain-specific knowledge and removing invalid data. We present ConSequence, an effective approach to integrating domain knowledge into sequential generative neural network outputs. Our rule-based formulation includes temporal aggregation and antecedent evaluation modules, ensured by an efficient matrix multiplication formulation, to satisfy hard and soft logical constraints across time steps. Existing constraint methods often fail to guarantee constraint satisfaction, lack the ability to handle temporal constraints, and hinder the learning and computational efficiency of the model. In contrast, our approach efficiently handles all types of constraints with guaranteed logical coherence. We demonstrate ConSequence's effectiveness in generating electronic health records, outperforming competitors in achieving complete temporal and spatial constraint satisfaction without compromising runtime performance or generative quality. Specifically, ConSequence successfully prevents all rule violations while improving the model quality in reducing its test perplexity by 5% and incurring less than a 13% slowdown in generation speed compared to an unconstrained model.
N-gram Unsupervised Compoundation and Feature Injection for Better Symbolic Music Understanding
Authors: Jinhao Tian; Zuchao Li; Jiajia Li; Ping Wang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The first step to apply deep learning techniques for symbolic music understanding is to transform musical pieces (mainly in MIDI format) into sequences of predefined tokens like note pitch, note velocity, and chords. Subsequently, the sequences are fed into a neural sequence model to accomplish specific tasks.
Music sequences exhibit strong correlations between adjacent elements, making them prime candidates for N-gram techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP). Consider classical piano music: specific melodies might recur throughout a piece, with subtle variations each time.
In this paper, we propose a novel method, NG-Midiformer, for understanding symbolic music sequences that leverages the N-gram approach. Our method involves first processing music pieces into word-like sequences with our proposed unsupervised compoundation, followed by using our N-gram Transformer encoder, which can effectively incorporate N-gram information to enhance the primary encoder part for better understanding of music sequences.
The pre-training process on large-scale music datasets enables the model to thoroughly learn the N-gram information contained within music sequences, and subsequently apply this information for making inferences during the fine-tuning stage.
Experiment on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieved state-of-the-art performance on a series of music understanding downstream tasks. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/CinqueOrigin/NG-Midiformer.