GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms That Play a Game, Not Toss a Coin
Authors: Toby Walsh
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Randomized mechanisms can have good normative properties compared to their deterministic counter-parts. However, randomized mechanisms are problematic in several ways such as in their verifiability. We propose here to de-randomize such mechanisms by having agents play a game instead of tossing a coin. The game is designed so agents play randomly, and this play injects “randomness” into the mechanism. Surprisingly this de-randomization retains many of the good normative properties of the original randomized mechanism but gives a mechanism that is deterministic and easy, for instance, to audit. We consider three general purpose methods to de-randomize mechanisms, and apply these to six different domains: voting, facility location, task allocation, school choice, peer selection, and resource allocation. We propose a number of novel de-randomized mechanisms for these six domains with good normative properties (such as equilibria in which agents sincerely report preferences over the original problem). In one domain, we additionally show that a new and desirable normative property emerges as a result of de-randomization.property emerges as a result of de-randomization.
Improved Approximation of Weighted MMS Fairness for Indivisible Chores
Authors: Fangxiao Wang; Bo Li; Pinyan Lu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We study how to fairly allocate a set of indivisible chores among n agents who may have different weights corresponding to their involvement in completing these chores. We found that some of the existing fairness notions may place agents with lower weights at a disadvantage, which motivates us to explore weighted maximin share fairness (WMMS). While it is known that a WMMS allocation may not exist, no non-trivial approximation has been discovered thus far. In this paper, we first design a simple sequential picking algorithm that solely relies on the agents’ ordinal rankings of the items, which achieves an approximation ratio of O(log n). Then, for the case involving two agents, we improve the approximation ratio to (√3+1)/2 ≈1.366, and prove that it is optimal. We also consider an online setting when the items arrive one after another and design an O(√n)-competitive online algorithm given the valuations are normalized
How Hard Is It to Impact the Impact of Your Paper?
Authors: Yongjie Yang
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Consolidation-disruption index (CD index) is a new metric for qualitatively measuring the contribution of a patent or a research paper. We embark on the study of the complexity of the CD index manipulation problems, which model scenarios where scholars seek to enhance the CD indices of their papers through the merging, addition, or deletion of papers. We show that these problems are generally computationally hard, even when restricted to very realistic special cases. Specifically, we analyze how various parameters influence the parameterized complexity of these problems.
Exponential Lower Bounds on the Double Oracle Algorithm in Zero-Sum Games
Authors: Brian Hu Zhang; Tuomas Sandholm
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The double oracle algorithm is a popular method of solving games, because it is able to reduce computing equilibria to computing a series of best responses. However, its theoretical properties are not well understood. In this paper, we provide exponential lower bounds on the performance of the double oracle algorithm in both partially-observable stochastic games (POSGs) and extensive-form games (EFGs). Our results depend on what is assumed about the tiebreaking scheme---that is, which meta-Nash equilibrium or best response is chosen, in the event that there are multiple to pick from. In particular, for EFGs, our lower bounds require adversarial tiebreaking, whereas for POSGs, our lower bounds apply regardless of how ties are broken.
A Strategic Analysis of Prepayments in Financial Credit Networks
Authors: Hao Zhou; Yongzhao Wang; Konstantinos Varsos; Nicholas Bishop; Rahul Savani; Anisoara Calinescu; Michael Wooldridge
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In financial credit networks, prepayments enable a firm to settle its debt obligations ahead of an agreed-upon due date. Prepayments have a transformative impact on the structure of networks, influencing the financial well-being (utility) of individual firms. This study investigates prepayments from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We first establish the computational complexity of finding prepayments that maximize welfare, assuming global coordination among firms in the financial network. Subsequently, our focus shifts to understanding the strategic behavior of individual firms in the presence of prepayments. We introduce a prepayment game where firms strategically make prepayments, delineating the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria and analyzing the price of anarchy (stability) within this game. Recognizing the computational challenges associated with determining Nash equilibria in prepayment games, we use a simulation-based approach, known as empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA). Through EGTA, we are able to find Nash equilibria among a carefully-chosen set of heuristic strategies. By scrutinizing the equilibrium behavior of firms, we outline the characteristics of high-performing strategies for strategic prepayments and establish connections between our empirical and theoretical findings.
A Complete Landscape of EFX Allocations on Graphs: Goods, Chores and Mixed Manna
Authors: Yu Zhou; Tianze Wei; Minming Li; Bo Li
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We study envy-free up to any item (EFX) allocations on graphs where vertices and edges represent agents and items respectively. An agent is only interested in items that are incident to her and all other items have zero marginal values to her. Christodoulou et al. first proposed this setting and studied the case of goods. We extend this setting to the case of mixed manna where an item may be liked or disliked by its endpoint agents. In our problem, an agent has an arbitrary valuation over her incident items such that the items she likes have non-negative marginal values to her and those she dislikes have non-positive marginal values. We provide a complete study of the four notions of EFX for mixed manna in the literature, which differ by whether the removed item can have zero marginal value. We prove that an allocation that satisfies the notion of EFX where the virtually-removed item could always have zero marginal value may not exist and determining its existence is NP-complete, while one that satisfies any of the other three notions always exists and can be computed in polynomial time. We also prove that an orientation (i.e., a special allocation where each edge must be allocated to one of its endpoint agents) that satisfies any of the four notions may not exist, and determining its existence is NP-complete.
ScreenAI: A Vision-Language Model for UI and Infographics Understanding
Authors: Gilles Baechler; Srinivas Sunkara; Maria Wang; Fedir Zubach; Hassan Mansoor; Vincent Etter; Victor Carbune; Jason Lin; Jindong Chen; Abhanshu Sharma
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Screen user interfaces (UIs) and infographics, sharing similar visual language and design principles, play important roles in human communication and human-machine interaction. We introduce ScreenAI, a vision-language model that specializes in UI and infographics understanding. Our model improves upon the PaLI architecture with the flexible patching strategy of pix2struct and is trained on a unique mixture of datasets. At the heart of this mixture is a novel screen annotation task in which the model has to identify the type and location of UI elements. We use these text annotations to describe screens to Large Language Models and automatically generate question-answering (QA), UI navigation, and summarization training datasets at scale. We run ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of these design choices. At only 5B parameters, ScreenAI achieves new state-of-the-art results on UI- and infographics-based tasks (Multipage DocVQA, WebSRC, and MoTIF), and new best-in-class performance on others (ChartQA, DocVQA, and InfographicVQA) compared to models of similar size. Finally, we release three new datasets: one focused on the screen annotation task and two others focused on question answering.
Multi-level Disentangling Network for Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition Based on Multimodal Physiological Signals
Authors: Ziyu Jia; Fengming Zhao; Yuzhe Guo; Hairong Chen; Tianzi Jiang
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Emotion recognition based on multimodal physiological signals is attracting more and more attention. However, how to deal with the consistency and heterogeneity of multimodal physiological signals, as well as individual differences across subjects, pose two significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a Multi-level Disentangling Network named MDNet for cross-subject emotion recognition based on multimodal physiological signals. Specifically, MDNet consists of a modality-level disentangling module and a subject-level disentangling module. The modality-level disentangling module projects multimodal physiological signals into modality-invariant subspace and modality-specific subspace, capturing modality-invariant features and modality-specific features. The subject-level disentangling module separates subject-shared features and subject-private features among different subjects from multimodal data, which facilitates cross-subject emotion recognition. Experiments on two multimodal emotion datasets demonstrate that MDNet outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.
VSGT: Variational Spatial and Gaussian Temporal Graph Models for EEG-based Emotion Recognition
Authors: Chenyu Liu; Xinliang Zhou; Jiaping Xiao; Zhengri Zhu; Liming Zhai; Ziyu Jia; Yang Liu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Electroencephalogram (EEG), which directly reflects the emotional activity of the brain, has been increasingly utilized for emotion recognition. Most works exploit the spatial and temporal dependencies in EEG to learn emotional feature representations, but they still have two limitations to reach their full potential. First, prior knowledge is rarely used to capture the spatial dependency of brain regions. Second, the cross temporal dependency between consecutive time slices for different brain regions is ignored. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Variational Spatial and Gaussian Temporal (VSGT) graph models to investigate the spatial and temporal dependencies for EEG-based emotion recognition. The VSGT has two key components: Variational Spatial Encoder (VSE) and Gaussian Temporal Encoder (GTE). The VSE leverages the upper bound theorem to identify the dynamic spatial dependency based on prior knowledge by the variational Bayesian method. Besides, the GTE exploits the conditional Gaussian graph transform that computes comprehensive temporal dependency between consecutive time slices. Finally, the VSGT utilizes a recurrent structure to calculate the spatial and temporal dependencies for all time slices. Extensive experiments show the superiority of VSGT over state-of-the-art methods on multiple EEG datasets.
Concept-Level Causal Explanation Method for Brain Function Network Classification
Authors: Jinduo Liu; Feipeng Wang; Junzhong Ji
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Using deep models to classify brain functional networks (BFNs) for the auxiliary diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases has become increasingly popular. However, the unexplainability of deep models has seriously hindered their applications in computer-aided diagnosis. In addition, current explanation methods mostly focus on natural images, which cannot be directly used to explain the deep model for BFN classification. In this paper, we propose a concept-level causal explanation method for BFN classification called CLCEM. First, CLCEM employs the causal learning method to extract concepts that are meaningful to humans from BFNs. Second, it aggregates the same concepts to obtain the contribution of each concept to the model output. Finally, CLCEM adds the contribution of each concept to make a diagnosis. The experimental results show that our CLCEM can not only accurately identify brain regions related to specific brain diseases but also make decisions based on the concepts of these brain regions, which enables humans to understand the decision-making process without performance degradation.
LitE-SNN: Designing Lightweight and Efficient Spiking Neural Network through Spatial-Temporal Compressive Network Search and Joint Optimization
Authors: Qianhui Liu; Jiaqi Yan; Malu Zhang; Gang Pan; Haizhou Li
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) mimic the information-processing mechanisms of the human brain and are highly energy-efficient, making them well-suited for low-power edge devices. However, the pursuit of accuracy in current studies leads to large, long-timestep SNNs, conflicting with the resource constraints of these devices. In order to design lightweight and efficient SNNs, we propose a new approach named LitE-SNN that incorporates both spatial and temporal compression into the automated network design process. Spatially, we present a novel Compressive Convolution block (CompConv) to expand the search space to support pruning and mixed-precision quantization. Temporally, we are the first to propose a compressive timestep search to identify the optimal number of timesteps under specific computation cost constraints. Finally, we formulate a joint optimization to simultaneously learn the architecture parameters and spatial-temporal compression strategies to achieve high performance while minimizing memory and computation costs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Google Speech Command datasets demonstrate our proposed LitE-SNNs can achieve competitive or even higher accuracy with remarkably smaller model sizes and fewer computation costs.
Designing Behavior-Aware AI to Improve the Human-AI Team Performance in AI-Assisted Decision Making
Authors: Syed Hasan Amin Mahmood; Zhuoran Lu; Ming Yin
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: With the rapid development of decision aids that are driven by AI models, the practice of AI-assisted decision making has become increasingly prevalent. To improve the human-AI team performance in decision making, earlier studies mostly focus on enhancing humans' capability in better utilizing a given AI-driven decision aid. In this paper, we tackle this challenge through a complementary approach—we aim to train "behavior-aware AI" by adjusting the AI model underlying the decision aid to account for humans' behavior in adopting AI advice. In particular, as humans are observed to accept AI advice more when their confidence in their own judgement is low, we propose to train AI models with a human-confidence-based instance weighting strategy, instead of solving the standard empirical risk minimization problem. Under an assumed, threshold-based model characterizing when humans will adopt the AI advice, we first derive the optimal instance weighting strategy for training AI models. We then validate the efficacy and robustness of our proposed method in improving the human-AI joint decision making performance through systematic experimentation on synthetic datasets. Finally, via randomized experiments with real human subjects along with their actual behavior in adopting the AI advice, we demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the decision making performance of the human-AI team in practice.
DBPNet: Dual-Branch Parallel Network with Temporal-Frequency Fusion for Auditory Attention Detection
Authors: Qinke Ni; Hongyu Zhang; Cunhang Fan; Shengbing Pei; Chang Zhou; Zhao Lv
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to recognize the attended speaker based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals in multi-talker environments. Most AAD methods only focus on the temporal or frequency domain, but neglect the relationships between these two domains, which results in the inability to simultaneously consider both time-varying and spectral-spatial information. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dual-branch parallel network with temporal-frequency fusion for AAD, named DBPNet, which consists of the temporal attentive branch and the frequency residual branch. Specifically, the temporal attentive branch aims to capture the time-varying features in the EEG time-series signal. The frequency residual branch aims to extract spectral-spatial features of multi-band EEG signals by the residual convolution. Finally, these dual branches are fused to consider both EEG signals time-varying and spectral-spatial features and get classification results. Experimental results show that compared with the best baseline, DBPNet achieves a relative improvement of 20.4% with a 0.1-second decision window for the MM-AAD dataset, but the number of trainable parameters is reduced by about 91 times.
ReliaAvatar: A Robust Real-Time Avatar Animator with Integrated Motion Prediction
Authors: Bo Qian; Zhenhuan Wei; Jiashuo Li; Xing Wei
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Efficiently estimating the full-body pose with minimal wearable devices presents a worthwhile research direction. Despite significant advancements in this field, most current research neglects to explore full-body avatar estimation under low-quality signal conditions, which is prevalent in practical usage. To bridge this gap, we summarize three scenarios that may be encountered in real-world applications: standard scenario, instantaneous data-loss scenario, and prolonged data-loss scenario, and propose a new evaluation benchmark. The solution we propose to address data-loss scenarios is integrating the full-body avatar pose estimation problem with motion prediction. Specifically, we present ReliaAvatar, a real-time, reliable avatar animator equipped with predictive modeling capabilities employing a dual-path architecture. ReliaAvatar operates effectively, with an impressive performance rate of 109 frames per second (fps). Extensive comparative evaluations on widely recognized benchmark datasets demonstrate ReliaAvatar's superior performance in both standard and low data-quality conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/MIV-XJTU/ReliaAvatar.
TIM: An Efficient Temporal Interaction Module for Spiking Transformer
Authors: Sicheng Shen; Dongcheng Zhao; Guobin Shen; Yi Zeng
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as the third generation of neural networks, have gained prominence for their biological plausibility and computational efficiency, especially in processing diverse datasets. The integration of attention mechanisms, inspired by advancements in neural network architectures, has led to the development of Spiking Transformers. These have shown promise in enhancing SNNs' capabilities, particularly in the realms of both static and neuromorphic datasets. Despite their progress, a discernible gap exists in these systems, specifically in the Spiking Self Attention (SSA) mechanism's effectiveness in leveraging the temporal processing potential of SNNs. To address this, we introduce the Temporal Interaction Module (TIM), a novel, convolution-based enhancement designed to augment the temporal data processing abilities within SNN architectures. TIM's integration into existing SNN frameworks is seamless and efficient, requiring minimal additional parameters while significantly boosting their temporal information handling capabilities. Through rigorous experimentation, TIM has demonstrated its effectiveness in exploiting temporal information, leading to state-of-the-art performance across various neuromorphic datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/BrainCog-X/Brain-Cog/tree/main/examples/TIM.
One-step Spiking Transformer with a Linear Complexity
Authors: Xiaotian Song; Andy Song; Rong Xiao; Yanan Sun
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Spiking transformers have recently emerged as a robust alternative in deep learning. One focus of this field is the reduction of energy consumption, given that spiking transformers require lengthy simulation timesteps and complex floating-point attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a one-step approach that requires only one timestep and is of linear complexity. The proposed One-step Spiking Transformer (OST) incorporates a Time Domain Compression and Compensation (TDCC) component, which can significantly mitigate the spatio-temporal overhead of spiking transformers. Another novel component in OST is the Spiking Linear Transformation (SLT), designed to greatly reduce the number of floating-point multiply-and-accumulate operations. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic images show that OST can perform as well as or better than SOTA methods with just one timestep, even for more difficult tasks. For instance, comparing with Spikeformer, OST gains 1.59% in accuracy on ImageNet, yet 40.27% more efficient, and gains 0.7% on DVS128 Gesture. The supplementary materials and source code are available at https://github.com/songxt3/OST.
MetaJND: A Meta-Learning Approach for Just Noticeable Difference Estimation
Authors: Miaohui Wang; Yukuan Zhu; Rong Zhang; Wuyuan Xie
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The modeling of just noticeable difference (JND) in supervised learning for visual signals has made significant progress. However, existing JND models often suffer from limited generalization due to the need for large-scale training data and their constraints to certain image types. Moreover, these models primarily focus on a single RGB modality, ignoring the potential complementary impacts of multiple modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a new meta-learning approach for the JND modeling, called MetaJND. We introduce two key visual-sensitive modalities like saliency and depth, and leverage a self-attention mechanism for effective interdependence of multi-modal features. Additionally, we incorporate meta-learning for the modality alignment, facilitating dynamic weight generation. Furthermore, we perform hierarchical fusion through multi-layer channel and spatial feature rectification. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our MetaJND. Moreover, we have also evaluated its performance in compression and watermarking applications, observing higher bit-rate savings and better watermark hiding capabilities.
Apprenticeship-Inspired Elegance: Synergistic Knowledge Distillation Empowers Spiking Neural Networks for Efficient Single-Eye Emotion Recognition
Authors: Yang Wang; Haiyang Mei; Qirui Bao; Ziqi Wei; Mike Zheng Shou; Haizhou Li; Bo Dong; Xin Yang
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We introduce a novel multimodality synergistic knowledge distillation scheme tailored for efficient single-eye motion recognition tasks. This method allows a lightweight, unimodal student spiking neural network (SNN) to extract rich knowledge from an event-frame multimodal teacher network. The core strength of this approach is its ability to utilize the ample, coarser temporal cues found in conventional frames for effective emotion recognition. Consequently, our method adeptly interprets both temporal and spatial information from the conventional frame domain, eliminating the need for specialized sensing devices, e.g., event-based camera. The effectiveness of our approach is thoroughly demonstrated using both existing and our compiled single-eye emotion recognition datasets, achieving unparalleled performance in accuracy and efficiency over existing state-of-the-art methods.