GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Interpretable DNFs
Authors: Martin C. Cooper; Imane Bousdira; Clément Carbonnel
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: A classifier is considered interpretable if each of its decisions has an explanation which is small enough to be easily understood by a human user. A DNF can be seen as a binary classifier kappa over boolean domains. The size of an explanation of a positive decision taken by a DNF kappa is bounded by the size of the terms in kappa, since we can explain a positive decision by giving a term of kappa that evaluates to true. Since both positive and negative decisions must be explained, we consider that interpretable DNFs are those kappa for which both kappa and its complement can be expressed as DNFs composed of terms of bounded size. In this paper, we investigate the family of k-DNFs whose complements can also be expressed as k-DNFs. We compare two such families, namely depth-k decision trees and nested k-DNFs, a novel family of models. Experimental evidence indicates that nested k-DNFs are an interesting alternative to decision trees in terms of interpretability and accuracy.
KIPPO: Koopman-Inspired Proximal Policy Optimization
Authors: Andrei Cozma; Landon Harris; Hairong Qi
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in various domains, and policy gradient methods like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) have gained popularity due to their balance in performance, training stability, and computational efficiency. These methods directly optimize policies through gradient-based updates. However, developing effective control policies for environments with complex and non-linear dynamics remains a challenge. High variance in gradient estimates and non-convex optimization landscapes often lead to unstable learning trajectories. Koopman Operator Theory has emerged as a powerful framework for studying non-linear systems through an infinite-dimensional linear operator that acts on a higher-dimensional space of measurement functions. In contrast with their non-linear counterparts, linear systems are simpler, more predictable, and easier to analyze. In this paper, we present Koopman-Inspired Proximal Policy Optimization (KIPPO), which learns an approximately linear latent-space representation of the underlying system’s dynamics while retaining essential features for effective policy learning. This is achieved through a Koopman-approximation auxiliary network that can be added to the baseline policy optimization algorithms without altering the architecture of the core policy or value function. Extensive experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over the PPO baseline with 6–60% increased performance while reducing variability by up to 91% when evaluated on various continuous control tasks.
A Fast Neural Architecture Search Method for Multi-Modal Classification via Knowledge Sharing
Authors: Zhihua Cui; Shiwu Sun; Qian Guo; Xinyan Liang; Yuhua Qian; Zhixia Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Neural architecture search-based multi-modal classification (NAS-MMC) aims to automatically find optimal network structures for improving the multi-modal classification performance. However, most current NAS-MMC methods are quite time-consuming during the training process. In this paper, we propose a knowledge sharing-based neural architecture search (KS-NAS) method for multi-modal classification. The KS-NAS optimizes the search process by introducing a dynamically updated knowledge base to reduce the consumption of computational resource. Specifically, during the deep evolutionary search, individuals in the initial population acquire initial parameters from a knowledge base, and then undergo training and optimization until convergence is reached, avoiding the need for training from scratch. The knowledge base is dynamically updated by aggregating the parameters of high-quality individuals trained within the population, thus progressively improving the quality of the knowledge base. As the population evolves, the knowledge base continues to optimize, ensuring that subsequent individuals can obtain higher-quality initialization parameters, which significantly accelerates the training speed of the population. Experimental results show that the KS-NAS method achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of classification performance and training efficiency across multiple popular multi-modal tasks.
Learning from Logical Constraints with Lower- and Upper-Bound Arithmetic Circuits
Authors: Lucile Dierckx; Alexandre Dubray; Siegfried Nijssen
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: An important class of neuro-symbolic (NeSy) methods relies on knowledge compilation (KC) techniques to transform logical constraints into a differentiable exact arithmetic circuit (AC) that represents all models of a logical formula. However, given the complexity of KC, compiling such exact circuits can be infeasible. Previous works in such cases proposed to compile a circuit for a subset of models. In this work, we will show that gradients calculated on a subset of models can be very far from true gradients. We propose a new framework that calculates gradients based on compiling logical constraints partially in not only a lower-bound circuit but also an upper-bound circuit. We prove that from this pair of ACs, gradients that are within a bounded distance from true gradients can be calculated. Our experiments show that adding the upper-bound AC also helps the learning process in practice, allowing for similar or better generalisation than working solely with fully compiled ACs, even with less than 150 seconds of partial compilation.
FedDLAD: A Federated Learning Dual-Layer Anomaly Detection Framework for Enhancing Resilience Against Backdoor Attacks
Authors: Binbin Ding; Penghui Yang; Sheng-Jun Huang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In Federated Learning (FL), the decentralized nature of client training introduces vulnerabilities, notably backdoor attacks. Prevailing anomaly detection approaches typically perform binary classification, dividing clients into trusted and untrusted groups. However, these methods face two critical challenges: the insider threat, where malicious clients concealed within the trusted group compromise the global model, and the benign exclusion, where legitimate contributions from benign clients are mistakenly classified as untrusted and disregarded. These issues weaken both the robustness and fairness of FL systems, exposing inherent defense vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose FedDLAD, a Federated Learning Dual-Layer Anomaly Detection framework designed to enhance resilience against backdoor attacks. The framework leverages the Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor (COF) module to perform a robust initial classification of clients by analyzing structural data connectivity. The Interquartile Range (IQR) module further reinforces this by mitigating the insider threat through the removal of residual malicious influences within the trusted group. Furthermore, the Pardon module dynamically reintegrates misclassified benign clients from the untrusted group, thereby preserving their valuable contributions and addressing the benign exclusion. We conduct extensive evaluations of FedDLAD against state-of-the-art defenses on real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce backdoor attack success rates while maintaining robust model performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/dingbinb/FedDLAD.
Block Circulant Adapter for Large Language Models
Authors: Xinyu Ding; Meiqi Wang; Siyu Liao; Zhongfeng Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is difficult due to their huge model size. Recent Fourier domain-based methods show potential for reducing fine-tuning costs. We propose a block circulant matrix-based fine-tuning method with a stable training heuristic to leverage the properties of circulant matrices and one-dimensional Fourier transforms to reduce storage and computation costs. Experiments show that our method uses 14× less number of parameters than VeRA, 16× smaller than LoRA and 32× less FLOPs than FourierFT, while maintaining close or better task performance. Our approach presents a promising way in frequency domain to fine-tune large models on downstream tasks.
Counterfactual Explanations for Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Shuyang Dong; Shangtong Zhang; Lu Feng
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address ``what if” scenarios, provide a promising avenue for understanding RL decisions but remain underexplored for continuous action spaces. We propose a novel approach for generating counterfactual explanations in continuous action RL by computing alternative action sequences that improve outcomes while minimizing deviations from the original sequence. Our approach leverages a distance metric for continuous actions and accounts for constraints such as adhering to predefined policies in specific states. Evaluations in two RL domains, Diabetes Control and Lunar Lander, demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our approach, enabling more interpretable and trustworthy RL applications.
A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity
Authors: Yihang Du; Jiaying Hu; Suyang Hou; Yueyang Ding; Xiaobo Sun
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Spatial labeling assigns labels to specific spatial locations to characterize their spatial properties and relationships, with broad applications in scientific research and practice. Measuring the similarity between two spatial labelings is essential for understanding their differences and the contributing factors, such as changes in location properties or labeling methods. An adequate and unbiased measurement of spatial labeling similarity should consider the number of matched labels (label agreement), the topology of spatial label distribution, and the heterogeneous impacts of mismatched labels. However, existing methods often fail to account for all these aspects. To address this gap, we propose a methodological framework to guide the development of methods that meet these requirements. Given two spatial labelings, the framework transforms them into graphs based on location organization, labels, and attributes (e.g., location significance). The distributions of their graph attributes are then extracted, enabling an efficient computation of distributional discrepancy to reflect the dissimilarity level between the two labelings. We further provide a concrete implementation of this framework, termed Spatial Labeling Analogy Metric (SLAM), along with an analysis of its theoretical foundation, for evaluating spatial labeling results in spatial transcriptomics (ST) as per their similarity with ground truth labeling. Through a series of carefully designed experimental cases involving both simulated and real ST data, we demonstrate that SLAM provides a comprehensive and accurate reflection of labeling quality compared to other well-established evaluation metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/YihDu/ SLAM.
Continuous-Time Reward Machines
Authors: Amin Falah; Shibashis Guha; Ashutosh  Trivedi
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a sampling-based method for sequential decision-making, in which a learning agent iteratively converges toward an optimal policy by leveraging feedback from the environment in the form of scalar reward signals. While timing information is often abstracted in discrete-time domains, time-critical learning applications—such as queuing systems, population processes, and manufacturing systems—are naturally modeled as Continuous-Time Markov Decision Processes (CTMDPs). Since the seminal work of Bradtke and Duff, model-free RL for CTMDPs has become well-understood. However, in many practical applications, practitioners possess high-quality information about system rates derived from traditional queuing theory, which learning agents could potentially exploit to accelerate convergence. Despite this, classical RL algorithms for CTMDPs typically re-learn these parameters through sampling. In this work, we propose continuous-time reward machines (CTRMs), a novel framework that embeds reward functions and real-time state-action dynamics into a unified structure. CTRMs enable RL agents to effectively navigate dense-time environments while leveraging reward shaping and counterfactual experiences for accelerated learning. Our empirical results demonstrate CTRMs' ability to improve learning efficiency in time-critical environments.
Multi-player Multi-armed Bandits with Delayed Feedback
Authors: Jingqi Fan; Zilong Wang; Shuai Li; Linghe Kong
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Multi-player multi-armed bandits (MP-MAB) have been extensively studied due to their application in cognitive radio networks. In this setting, multiple players simultaneously select arms and instantly receive feedback. However, in realistic decentralized networks, feedback is often delayed due to sensing latency and signal processing. Without a central coordinator, explicit communication is impossible, and delayed feedback disrupts implicit coordination, since it depends on synchronous observations. As a result, collisions are frequent and system performance degrades significantly. In this paper, we propose an algorithm in MP-MAB with stochastic delay feedback. Each player in the algorithm independently maintains an estimate of the optimal arm set based on their own delayed rewards but only pulls arms from the set, which is, with high probability, identical to those of other players, thus avoiding collisions. The identical arm set also enables implicit communication, allowing players to utilize the exploration results of others. We establish a regret upper bound and derive a lower bound to prove the algorithm is near-optimal. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our algorithm.
One-step Label Shift Adaptation via Robust Weight Estimation
Authors: Ruidong Fan; Xiao Ouyang; Tingjin Luo; Lijun Zhang; Chenping Hou
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Label shift is a prevalent phenomenon encountered in open environments, characterized by a notable discrepancy in the label distributions between the source (training) and target (test) domains, whereas the conditional distributions given the labels remain invariant. Existing label shift methods adopt a two-step strategy: initially computing the importance weight and subsequently utilizing it to calibrate the target outputs. However, this conventional strategy overlooks the intricate interplay between output adjustment and weight estimation. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach termed as One-step Label Shift Adaptation (OLSA). Our methodology jointly learns the predictive model and the corresponding weights through a bi-level optimization framework, with the objective of minimizing an upper bound on the target risk. To enhance the robustness of our proposed model, we incorporate a debiasing term into the upper-level classifier training and devise a regularization term for the lower-level weight estimation. Furthermore, we present theoretical analyses about the generalization bounds, offering guarantees for the model's performance. Extensive experimental results substantiate the efficacy of our proposal.
Not All Layers of LLMs Are Necessary During Inference
Authors: Siqi Fan; Xin Jiang; Xiang Li; Xuying Meng; Peng Han; Shuo Shang; Aixin Sun; Yequan Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Due to the large number of parameters, the inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) is resource-intensive. However, not all requests posed to LLMs are equally difficult to handle. Through analysis, we show that for some tasks, LLMs can achieve results comparable to the final output at some intermediate layers. That is, not all layers of LLMs are necessary during inference. If we can predict at which layer the inferred results match the final results (produced by evaluating all layers), we could significantly reduce the inference cost. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm named AdaInfer to adaptively terminate the inference process for an input instance. AdaInfer relies on easily obtainable statistical features and classic classifiers like SVM. Experiments on well-known LLMs like the Llama2 series and OPT, show that AdaInfer can achieve an average of 17.8% pruning ratio, and up to 43% on sentiment tasks, with nearly no performance drop (<1%). Because AdaInfer does not alter LLM parameters, the LLMs incorporated with AdaInfer maintain generalizability across tasks.
Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning with Class Semantic Correlations
Authors: Yuxin Fan; Junbiao Cui; Jiye Liang; Jianqing Liang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Open-world semi-supervised learning (OWSSL) aims to recognize both known and unknown classes, but the labeled samples only cover the known classes. Existing OWSSL methods primarily represent classes as symbolic variables, which ignore the rich internal semantic information associated with the classes and thus hampers their ability to recognize unknown classes. Recent studies incorporate textual descriptions of classes to facilitate training, but these methods overlook the class semantic correlations, which constrains their effectiveness in recognizing unknown classes. To address these issues, we propose a novel OWSSL method. Our method fine-tunes only the image encoder during training while keeping the text encoder frozen, thereby preserving the rich semantic correlations learned during the pre-training phase. Furthermore, we employ a semantic margin to extract class semantic correlations from textual descriptions, which are then utilized in enhancing image representation discriminability. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms representative OWSSL methods in the recognition of both known and unknown classes.
Screening, Rectifying, and Re-Screening: A Unified Framework for Tuning Vision-Language Models with Noisy Labels
Authors: Chaowei Fang; Hangfei Ma; Zhihao  Li; De  Cheng; Yue Zhang; Guanbin Li
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models have shown remarkable potential for downstream tasks. However, their fine-tuning under noisy labels remains an open problem due to challenges like self-confirmation bias and the limitations of conventional small-loss criteria. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to address these issues, consisting of three key steps: Screening, Rectifying, and Re-Screening. First, a dual-level semantic matching mechanism is introduced to categorize samples into clean, ambiguous, and noisy samples by leveraging both macro-level and micro-level textual prompts. Second, we design tailored pseudo-labeling strategies to rectify noisy and ambiguous labels, enabling their effective incorporation into the training process. Finally, a re-screening step, utilizing cross-validation with an auxiliary vision-language model, mitigates self-confirmation bias and enhances the robustness of the framework. Extensive experiments across ten datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches for tuning vision-language pre-trained models with noisy labels.
HiTuner: Hierarchical Semantic Fusion Model Fine-Tuning on Text-Attributed Graphs
Authors: Zihan Fang; Zhiling Cai; Yuxuan Zheng; Shide Du; Yanchao Tan; Shiping Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are vital for modeling entity relationships across various domains. Graph Neural Networks have become cornerstone for processing graph structures, while the integration of text attributes remains a prominent research. The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides new opportunities for advancing textual encoding in TAGs. However, LLMs face challenges in specialized domains due to their limited task-specific knowledge, and fine-tuning them for specific tasks demands significant resources. To cope with the above challenges, we propose HiTuner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) with domain expertise as tuner to enhance the hierarchical LLM contextualized representations for modeling TAGs. Specifically, we first strategically select hierarchical hidden states of LLM to form a set of diverse and complementary descriptions as input for the sparse projection operator. Concurrently, a hybrid representation learning is developed to amalgamate the broad linguistic comprehension of LLMs with task-specific insights of the fine-tuned PLMs. Finally, HiTuner employs a confidence network to adaptively fuse the semantically-augmented representations. Empirical results across benchmark datasets spanning various domains validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/ZihanFang11/HiTuner
Federated Multi-view Graph Clustering with Incomplete Attribute Imputation
Authors: Wei Feng; Zeyu Bi; Qianqian Wang; Bo Dong
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Federated Multi-View Clustering (FedMVC) aims to uncover consistent clustering structures from distributed multi-view data for clustering while preserving data privacy. However, existing FedMVC methods under vertical settings either ignore the ubiquitous incomplete view issue or require uploading data features, which may lead to privacy leakage or induce high communication costs. To mitigate the view incompleteness issue and simultaneously maintain privacy and efffciency, we propose a novel Federated Multiview Graph Clustering with Incomplete Attribute Imputation (FMVC-IAI). This method constructs a consensus graph structure through complementary multi-view data and then utilizes a non-parametric graph neural network (GNN) to impute missing features. Additionally, it utilizes the adjacency graph as the knowledge carrier to share and fuse the multi-view information. To alleviate the high communication cost due to graph sharing, we proposed to share the anchor graph for global adjacency graph construction, which reduces communication cost and also helps to reduce privacy leakage risk. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in FedMVC tasks with incomplete views.
Tensorial Multi-view Clustering with Deep Anchor Graph Projection
Authors: Wei Feng; Dongyuvan Wei; Qianqian Wang; Bo Dong
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Multi-view clustering (MVC) has emerged as an important unsupervised multi-view learning method that leverages consistent and complementary information to enhance clustering performance. Recently, tensorized MVC, which processes multi-view data as a tensor to capture their cross-view information, has received considerable attention. However, existing tensorized MVC methods generally overlook deep structures within each view and rely on post-processing to derive clustering results, leading to potential information loss and degraded performance. To address these issues, we develop Tensorial Multi-view Clustering with Deep Anchor Graph Projection (TMVC-DAGP), which performs deep projection on the anchor graph, thus improving model scalability. Besides, we utilize a sparsity regularization to eliminate the redundancy and enforce the projected anchor graph to retain a clear clustering structure. Furthermore, TMVC-DAGP leverages weighted Tensor Schatten $p$-norm to exploit the consistent and complementary information. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate TMVC-DAGP's effectiveness and superiority.