OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modeling Precomputation In Games Played Under Computational Constraints
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Understanding the properties of games played under computational constraints remains challenging. For example, how do we expect rational (but computationally bounded) players to play games with a prohibitively large number of states, such as chess? This paper presents a novel model for the precomputation (preparing moves in advance) aspect of computationally constrained games. A fundamental trade-off is shown between randomness of play, and susceptibility to precomputation, suggesting that randomization is necessary in games with computational constraints. We present efficient algorithms for computing how susceptible a strategy is to precomputation, and computing an $ε$-Nash equilibrium of our model. Numerical experiments measuring the trade-off between randomness and precomputation are provided for Stockfish (a well-known chess playing algorithm).
A Ladder of Causal Distances
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Causal discovery, the task of automatically constructing a causal model from data, is of major significance across the sciences. Evaluating the performance of causal discovery algorithms should ideally involve comparing the inferred models to ground-truth models available for benchmark datasets, which in turn requires a notion of distance between causal models. While such distances have been proposed previously, they are limited by focusing on graphical properties of the causal models being compared. Here, we overcome this limitation by defining distances derived from the causal distributions induced by the models, rather than exclusively from their graphical structure. Pearl and Mackenzie (2018) have arranged the properties of causal models in a hierarchy called the "ladder of causation" spanning three rungs: observational, interventional, and counterfactual. Following this organization, we introduce a hierarchy of three distances, one for each rung of the ladder. Our definitions are intuitively appealing as well as efficient to compute approximately. We put our causal distances to use by benchmarking standard causal discovery systems on both synthetic and real-world datasets for which ground-truth causal models are available. Finally, we highlight the usefulness of our causal distances by briefly discussing further applications beyond the evaluation of causal discovery techniques.
Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Alignment by Probabilistic Reasoning and Semantic Embedding
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge Graph (KG) alignment is to discover the mappings (i.e., equivalent entities, relations, and others) between two KGs. The existing methods can be divided into the embedding-based models, and the conventional reasoning and lexical matching based systems. The former compute the similarity of entities via their cross-KG embeddings, but they usually rely on an ideal supervised learning setting for good performance and lack appropriate reasoning to avoid logically wrong mappings; while the latter address the reasoning issue but are poor at utilizing the KG graph structures and the entity contexts. In this study, we aim at combining the above two solutions and thus propose an iterative framework named PRASE which is based on probabilistic reasoning and semantic embedding. It learns the KG embeddings via entity mappings from a probabilistic reasoning system named PARIS, and feeds the resultant entity mappings and embeddings back into PARIS for augmentation. The PRASE framework is compatible with different embedding-based models, and our experiments on multiple datasets have demonstrated its state-of-the-art performance.
A Description Logic for Analogical Reasoning
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Ontologies formalise how the concepts from a given domain are interrelated. Despite their clear potential as a backbone for explainable AI, existing ontologies tend to be highly incomplete, which acts as a significant barrier to their more widespread adoption. To mitigate this issue, we present a mechanism to infer plausible missing knowledge, which relies on reasoning by analogy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies analogical reasoning within the setting of description logic ontologies. After showing that the standard formalisation of analogical proportion has important limitations in this setting, we introduce an alternative semantics based on bijective mappings between sets of features. We then analyse the properties of analogies under the proposed semantics, and show among others how it enables two plausible inference patterns: rule translation and rule extrapolation.
Physics-informed Spline Learning for Nonlinear Dynamics Discovery
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Dynamical systems are typically governed by a set of linear/nonlinear differential equations. Distilling the analytical form of these equations from very limited data remains intractable in many disciplines such as physics, biology, climate science, engineering and social science. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel Physics-informed Spline Learning (PiSL) framework to discover parsimonious governing equations for nonlinear dynamics, based on sparsely sampled noisy data. The key concept is to (1) leverage splines to interpolate locally the dynamics, perform analytical differentiation and build the library of candidate terms, (2) employ sparse representation of the governing equations, and (3) use the physics residual in turn to inform the spline learning. The synergy between splines and discovered underlying physics leads to the robust capacity of dealing with high-level data scarcity and noise. A hybrid sparsity-promoting alternating direction optimization strategy is developed for systematically pruning the sparse coefficients that form the structure and explicit expression of the governing equations. The efficacy and superiority of the proposed method have been demonstrated by multiple well-known nonlinear dynamical systems, in comparison with two state-of-the-art methods.
Lifting Symmetry Breaking Constraints with Inductive Logic Programming
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Efficient omission of symmetric solution candidates is essential for combinatorial problem-solving. Most of the existing approaches are instance-specific and focus on the automatic computation of Symmetry Breaking Constraints (SBCs) for each given problem instance. However, the application of such approaches to large-scale instances or advanced problem encodings might be problematic since the computed SBCs are propositional and, therefore, can neither be meaningfully interpreted nor transferred to other instances. As a result, a time-consuming recomputation of SBCs must be done before every invocation of a solver. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new model-oriented approach for Answer Set Programming that lifts the SBCs of small problem instances into a set of interpretable first-order constraints using the Inductive Logic Programming paradigm. Experiments demonstrate the ability of our framework to learn general constraints from instance-specific SBCs for a collection of combinatorial problems. The obtained results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art instance-specific method as well as the direct application of a solver.
The Surprising Power of Graph Neural Networks with Random Node Initialization
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective models for representation learning on relational data. However, standard GNNs are limited in their expressive power, as they cannot distinguish graphs beyond the capability of the Weisfeiler-Leman graph isomorphism heuristic. In order to break this expressiveness barrier, GNNs have been enhanced with random node initialization (RNI), where the idea is to train and run the models with randomized initial node features. In this work, we analyze the expressive power of GNNs with RNI, and prove that these models are universal, a first such result for GNNs not relying on computationally demanding higher-order properties. This universality result holds even with partially randomized initial node features, and preserves the invariance properties of GNNs in expectation. We then empirically analyze the effect of RNI on GNNs, based on carefully constructed datasets. Our empirical findings support the superior performance of GNNs with RNI over standard GNNs.
Reconciling Rewards with Predictive State Representations
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Predictive state representations (PSRs) are models of controlled non-Markov observation sequences which exhibit the same generative process governing POMDP observations without relying on an underlying latent state. In that respect, a PSR is indistinguishable from the corresponding POMDP. However, PSRs notoriously ignore the notion of rewards, which undermines the general utility of PSR models for control, planning, or reinforcement learning. Therefore, we describe a sufficient and necessary accuracy condition which determines whether a PSR is able to accurately model POMDP rewards, we show that rewards can be approximated even when the accuracy condition is not satisfied, and we find that a non-trivial number of POMDPs taken from a well-known third-party repository do not satisfy the accuracy condition. We propose reward-predictive state representations (R-PSRs), a generalization of PSRs which accurately models both observations and rewards, and develop value iteration for R-PSRs. We show that there is a mismatch between optimal POMDP policies and the optimal PSR policies derived from approximate rewards. On the other hand, optimal R-PSR policies perfectly match optimal POMDP policies, reconfirming R-PSRs as accurate state-less generative models of observations and rewards.
Optimal Algorithms for Range Searching over Multi-Armed Bandits
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified point, we have an associated weight, and the problem objective is to find a maximum-weight point within every given interval. The current work addresses range searching with stochastic weights: each point corresponds to an arm (that admits sample access) and the point's weight is the (unknown) mean of the underlying distribution. In this MAB setup, we develop sample-efficient algorithms that find, with high probability, near-optimal arms within the given intervals, i.e., we obtain PAC (probably approximately correct) guarantees. We also provide an algorithm for a generalization wherein the weight of each point is a multi-dimensional vector. The sample complexities of our algorithms depend, in particular, on the size of the optimal hitting set of the given intervals. Finally, we establish lower bounds proving that the obtained sample complexities are essentially tight. Our results highlight the significance of geometric constructs -- specifically, hitting sets -- in our MAB setting.
Reinforcement Learning for Sparse-Reward Object-Interaction Tasks in a First-person Simulated 3D Environment
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

First-person object-interaction tasks in high-fidelity, 3D, simulated environments such as the AI2Thor virtual home-environment pose significant sample-efficiency challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) agents learning from sparse task rewards. To alleviate these challenges, prior work has provided extensive supervision via a combination of reward-shaping, ground-truth object-information, and expert demonstrations. In this work, we show that one can learn object-interaction tasks from scratch without supervision by learning an attentive object-model as an auxiliary task during task learning with an object-centric relational RL agent. Our key insight is that learning an object-model that incorporates object-attention into forward prediction provides a dense learning signal for unsupervised representation learning of both objects and their relationships. This, in turn, enables faster policy learning for an object-centric relational RL agent. We demonstrate our agent by introducing a set of challenging object-interaction tasks in the AI2Thor environment where learning with our attentive object-model is key to strong performance. Specifically, we compare our agent and relational RL agents with alternative auxiliary tasks to a relational RL agent equipped with ground-truth object-information, and show that learning with our object-model best closes the performance gap in terms of both learning speed and maximum success rate. Additionally, we find that incorporating object-attention into an object-model's forward predictions is key to learning representations which capture object-category and object-state.
Generative Adversarial Neural Architecture Search
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the empirical success of neural architecture search (NAS) in deep learning applications, the optimality, reproducibility and cost of NAS schemes remain hard to assess. In this paper, we propose Generative Adversarial NAS (GA-NAS) with theoretically provable convergence guarantees, promoting stability and reproducibility in neural architecture search. Inspired by importance sampling, GA-NAS iteratively fits a generator to previously discovered top architectures, thus increasingly focusing on important parts of a large search space. Furthermore, we propose an efficient adversarial learning approach, where the generator is trained by reinforcement learning based on rewards provided by a discriminator, thus being able to explore the search space without evaluating a large number of architectures. Extensive experiments show that GA-NAS beats the best published results under several cases on three public NAS benchmarks. In the meantime, GA-NAS can handle ad-hoc search constraints and search spaces. We show that GA-NAS can be used to improve already optimized baselines found by other NAS methods, including EfficientNet and ProxylessNAS, in terms of ImageNet accuracy or the number of parameters, in their original search space.
AMA-GCN: Adaptive Multi-layer Aggregation Graph Convolutional Network for Disease Prediction
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have proven to be a powerful mean for Computer Aided Diagnosis (CADx). This approach requires building a population graph to aggregate structural information, where the graph adjacency matrix represents the relationship between nodes. Until now, this adjacency matrix is usually defined manually based on phenotypic information. In this paper, we propose an encoder that automatically selects the appropriate phenotypic measures according to their spatial distribution, and uses the text similarity awareness mechanism to calculate the edge weights between nodes. The encoder can automatically construct the population graph using phenotypic measures which have a positive impact on the final results, and further realizes the fusion of multimodal information. In addition, a novel graph convolution network architecture using multi-layer aggregation mechanism is proposed. The structure can obtain deep structure information while suppressing over-smooth, and increase the similarity between the same type of nodes. Experimental results on two databases show that our method can significantly improve the diagnostic accuracy for Autism spectrum disorder and breast cancer, indicating its universality in leveraging multimodal data for disease prediction.
Understanding Structural Vulnerability in Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Recent studies have shown that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the graph structure. Although multiple works have been proposed to improve their robustness against such structural adversarial attacks, the reasons for the success of the attacks remain unclear. In this work, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that structural adversarial examples can be attributed to the non-robust aggregation scheme (i.e., the weighted mean) of GCNs. Specifically, our analysis takes advantage of the breakdown point which can quantitatively measure the robustness of aggregation schemes. The key insight is that weighted mean, as the basic design of GCNs, has a low breakdown point and its output can be dramatically changed by injecting a single edge. We show that adopting the aggregation scheme with a high breakdown point (e.g., median or trimmed mean) could significantly enhance the robustness of GCNs against structural attacks. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that such a simple but effective method achieves the best robustness performance compared to state-of-the-art models.
Dependent Multi-Task Learning with Causal Intervention for Image Captioning
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work for image captioning mainly followed an extract-then-generate paradigm, pre-extracting a sequence of object-based features and then formulating image captioning as a single sequence-to-sequence task. Although promising, we observed two problems in generated captions: 1) content inconsistency where models would generate contradicting facts; 2) not informative enough where models would miss parts of important information. From a causal perspective, the reason is that models have captured spurious statistical correlations between visual features and certain expressions (e.g., visual features of "long hair" and "woman"). In this paper, we propose a dependent multi-task learning framework with the causal intervention (DMTCI). Firstly, we involve an intermediate task, bag-of-categories generation, before the final task, image captioning. The intermediate task would help the model better understand the visual features and thus alleviate the content inconsistency problem. Secondly, we apply Pearl's do-calculus on the model, cutting off the link between the visual features and possible confounders and thus letting models focus on the causal visual features. Specifically, the high-frequency concept set is considered as the proxy confounders where the real confounders are inferred in the continuous space. Finally, we use a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) strategy to enable end-to-end training and reduce the inter-task error accumulations. The extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the baseline models and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models.
Few-Shot Learning with Part Discovery and Augmentation from Unlabeled Images
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot learning is a challenging task since only few instances are given for recognizing an unseen class. One way to alleviate this problem is to acquire a strong inductive bias via meta-learning on similar tasks. In this paper, we show that such inductive bias can be learned from a flat collection of unlabeled images, and instantiated as transferable representations among seen and unseen classes. Specifically, we propose a novel part-based self-supervised representation learning scheme to learn transferable representations by maximizing the similarity of an image to its discriminative part. To mitigate the overfitting in few-shot classification caused by data scarcity, we further propose a part augmentation strategy by retrieving extra images from a base dataset. We conduct systematic studies on miniImageNet and tieredImageNet benchmarks. Remarkably, our method yields impressive results, outperforming the previous best unsupervised methods by 7.74% and 9.24% under 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot settings, which are comparable with state-of-the-art supervised methods.
On Self-Distilling Graph Neural Network
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, the teacher-student knowledge distillation framework has demonstrated its potential in training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, due to the difficulty of training over-parameterized GNN models, one may not easily obtain a satisfactory teacher model for distillation. Furthermore, the inefficient training process of teacher-student knowledge distillation also impedes its applications in GNN models. In this paper, we propose the first teacher-free knowledge distillation method for GNNs, termed GNN Self-Distillation (GNN-SD), that serves as a drop-in replacement of the standard training process. The method is built upon the proposed neighborhood discrepancy rate (NDR), which quantifies the non-smoothness of the embedded graph in an efficient way. Based on this metric, we propose the adaptive discrepancy retaining (ADR) regularizer to empower the transferability of knowledge that maintains high neighborhood discrepancy across GNN layers. We also summarize a generic GNN-SD framework that could be exploited to induce other distillation strategies. Experiments further prove the effectiveness and generalization of our approach, as it brings: 1) state-of-the-art GNN distillation performance with less training cost, 2) consistent and considerable performance enhancement for various popular backbones.
Isotonic Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge distillation uses both real hard labels and soft labels predicted by teacher models as supervision. Intuitively, we expect the soft labels and hard labels to be concordant w.r.t. their orders of probabilities. However, we found critical order violations between hard labels and soft labels in augmented samples. For example, for an augmented sample $x=0.7*panda+0.3*cat$, we expect the order of meaningful soft labels to be $P_\text{soft}(panda|x)>P_\text{soft}(cat|x)>P_\text{soft}(other|x)$. But real soft labels usually violate the order, e.g. $P_\text{soft}(tiger|x)>P_\text{soft}(panda|x)>P_\text{soft}(cat|x)$. We attribute this to the unsatisfactory generalization ability of the teacher, which leads to the prediction error of augmented samples. Empirically, we found the violations are common and injure the knowledge transfer. In this paper, we introduce order restrictions to data augmentation for knowledge distillation, which is denoted as isotonic data augmentation (IDA). We use isotonic regression (IR) -- a classic technique from statistics -- to eliminate the order violations. We show that IDA can be modeled as a tree-structured IR problem. We thereby adapt the classical IRT-BIN algorithm for optimal solutions with $O(c \log c)$ time complexity, where $c$ is the number of labels. In order to further reduce the time complexity, we also propose a GPU-friendly approximation with linear time complexity. We have verified on variant datasets and data augmentation techniques that our proposed IDA algorithms effectively increases the accuracy of knowledge distillation by eliminating the rank violations.