United States

Optimal control problems (OCPs) involve finding a control function for a dynamical system such that a cost functional is optimized. It is central to physical systems in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel instance-solution control operator perspective, which solves OCPs in a one-shot manner without direct dependence on the explicit expression of dynamics or iterative optimization processes. The control operator is implemented by a new neural operator architecture named Neural Adaptive Spectral Method (NASM), a generalization of classical spectral methods. We theoretically validate the perspective and architecture by presenting the approximation error bounds of NASM for the control operator.  Experiments on synthetic environments and a real-world dataset verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, including substantial speedup in running time, and high-quality in- and out-of-distribution generalization.

AAAI 2025

Optimal Control Operator Perspective and a Neural Adaptive Spectral Method

behavior learning control

[![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/f25361a85b7c83a7476c0b3c1c0bb1b2.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18jcAcciCBQHj6R07Dbpm2HCOBEIwAOCU/view?usp=sharing)


Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2024, was held at Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, USA.

The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was **“Embracing Human-Centered HRI”**.

With the continuous technological effort of understanding human needs, creating human-desired robotic systems, and developing real human user experiences, we are marching together towards building a promising and excellent human quality of life, all for our wellness and our next generation.

The conference provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss a variety of topics related to the broad theme of Robot and Human Interactive Communication involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies, and generated more insights for the future of Robot and Human Interactive Communication!

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IEEE RO-MAN 2024

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication was held in Pasadena, California, USA. The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was “Embracing Human-Centered HRI”.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Discrete latent representation techniques, such as Vector Quantization (VQ) and Sparse Coding (SC), have demonstrated superior image reconstruction and generation quality compared to continuous representation methods in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs).
However, existing approaches often treat the latent representations of an image independently in their discrete representation space, neglecting both the inherent structural information within each representation and the correlations among them. This oversight leads to coarse representations and suboptimal generated results.
In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing correlations among and within the latent representations of individual images in the latent discrete space of VAEs using sparse coding. We impose two-dimensional structural information through adaptive thresholding, enhancing local structure in image representations while suppressing noise via parsimonious representation with a learned dictionary. 
Empirical studies on three real benchmark datasets, including a clinical Ultrasound dataset, BSDS500, and mini-Imagenet, demonstrate that our proposed model preserves fine-grained details in image reconstruction and significantly outperforms baseline models of SC-VAE and VQ-VAE across objective and subjective image quality metrics. Particularly noteworthy are the substantial performance improvements observed on the ultrasound dataset, where structure information is crucial. Specifically, we observe significant performance improvements of 7.68 % and 17.03 % in SSIM,  3.25 dB and 6.58 dB in PSNR, 0.15 and 0.24 in LPIPS, 45.38 and 84.05 in FID over SC-VAE and VQ-VAE, respectively, indicating the superiority of our method in terms of image reconstruction quality and fidelity. 
Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSC-VAE-38E6/

SSC-VAE: Structured Sparse Coding Based Variational Autoencoder for Detail Preserved Image Reconstruction

Handling imbalance in class distribution when building a classifier over tabular data has been a problem of long-standing interest.  One popular approach is augmenting the training dataset with synthetically generated data.  While classical augmentation techniques were limited to linear interpolation of existing minority class examples, recently higher capacity deep generative models are providing greater promise. 

However, handling of imbalance in class distribution when building a deep generative model is also a challenging problem, that has not been studied as extensively as imbalanced classifier model training.  We show that state-of-the-art deep generative models yield significantly lower-quality minority examples than majority examples. We propose a novel technique of converting the binary class labels to ternary class labels by introducing a class for the region where minority and majority distributions overlap.  We show that just this pre-processing of the training set, significantly improves the quality of data generated spanning several state-of-the-art diffusion and GAN-based models. While training the classifier using synthetic data, we remove the overlap class from the training data and justify the reasons behind the enhanced accuracy. We perform extensive experiments on four real-life datasets, five different classifiers, and five generative models, demonstrating that our method enhances not only the synthesizer performance of state-of-the-art models but also the classifier performance

Synthetic Tabular Data Generation for Imbalanced Classification: The Surprising Effectiveness of an Overlap Class

We study the problem of determining an envy-free allocation of indivisible goods among multiple agents with additive valuations. EFX, which stands for envy-freeness up to any good, is a well-studied relaxation of the envy-free allocation problem and has been shown to exist for specific scenarios. EFX is known to exist when there are only three agents, and for any number of agents when there are only two types of valuations. EFX allocations are also known to exist for four agents with at most one good unallocated. 
    
    In this paper, we show that EFX exists with at most one good unallocated for any number of agents having three types of valuations. Additionally, we show that complete EFX allocations exist when all but two agents have identical valuations.

(Almost Full) EFX for Three (and More) Types of Agents

Given news articles about an entity, such as a public figure or organization, timeline summarization (TLS) involves generating a timeline that summarizes the key events about the entity. However, the TLS task is too under-specified, since what is of interest to each reader may vary, and hence there is not a single ideal or optimal timeline. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, called constrained timeline summarization (CTLS), where a timeline is generated in which all events in the timeline meet some constraint. An example of a constrained timeline concerns Tiger Woods’ legal battles, where only events related to his legal problems are selected to appear in the timeline. We collected a new human-verified dataset of constrained timelines involving 47 entities and 5 constraints per entity. We propose an approach that employs a large language model to summarize news articles according to a specified constraint and cluster them to identify key events to include in a constrained timeline. In addition, we propose a novel self-reflection method during summary generation, demonstrating that this approach successfully leads to improved performance.

Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance

In recent years, predicting Big Five personality traits from multimodal data has received significant attention in artificial intelligence (AI). However, existing computational models often fail to achieve satisfactory performance. Psychological research has shown a strong correlation between pose and personality traits, yet previous research has largely ignored pose data in computational models. To address this gap, we develop a novel multimodal dataset that incorporates full-body pose data. The dataset includes video recordings of 287 participants completing a virtual interview with 36 questions, along with self-assessed Big Five personality scores as labels. To effectively utilize this multimodal data, we introduce the Psychology-Inspired Network (PINet), which consists of three key modules: Multimodal Feature Awareness (MFA), Multimodal Feature Interaction (MFI), and Psychology-Informed Modality Correlation Loss (PIMC Loss). The MFA module leverages the Vision Mamba Block to capture comprehensive visual features related to personality, while the MFI module efficiently fuses the multimodal features. The PIMC Loss, grounded in psychological theory, guides the model to emphasize different modalities for different personality dimensions. Experimental results show that the PINet outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline models. Furthermore, the three modules of PINet contribute almost equally to the model’s overall performance. Incorporating pose data significantly enhances the model’s performance, with the pose modality ranking mid-level in importance among the five modalities. These findings address the existing gap in personality-related datasets that lack full-body pose data and provide a new approach for improving the accuracy of personality prediction models, highlighting the importance of integrating psychological insights into AI frameworks.

Pose as a Modality: A Psychology-Inspired Network for Personality Recognition with a New Multimodal Dataset

Dealing with distribution shift is a significant challenge when building offline reinforcement learning (RL) models that can generalize from a static dataset to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Previous approaches have employed pessimism or conservatism strategies. More recently, data-driven work has taken a distributional perspective, treating offline data as a domain adaptation problem. However, these methods use heuristic techniques to simulate distribution shifts, resulting in a limited diversity of artificially created distribution gaps. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective: offline datasets inherently contain multiple latent distributions, with behavior data from diverse policies potentially following different distributions and data from the same policy across various time phases also exhibiting distribution variance. We introduce the Latent Distribution Representation Learning (LAD) framework, which aims to characterize the multiple latent distributions within offline data by reducing the distribution gaps between any pair of them. LAD consists of a min-max adversarial process: it first identifies the "worst-case" distributions to enlarge the diversity of distribution gaps and then reduces these gaps to learn invariant representations for generalization. We derive a generalization error bound to support LAD theoretically and verify its effectiveness through extensive experiments.

Improving Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Latent Distribution Representation Learning

Human multimodal language understanding (MLU) is an indispensable component of expression analysis (e.g., sentiment or humor) from heterogeneous modalities, including visual postures, linguistic contents, and acoustic behaviours. Existing works invariably focus on designing sophisticated structures or fusion strategies to achieve impressive improvements. Unfortunately, they all suffer from the subject variation problem due to data distribution discrepancies among subjects. Concretely, MLU models are easily misled by distinct subjects with different expression customs and characteristics in the training data to learn subject-specific spurious correlations, limiting performance and generalizability across new subjects. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a recapitulative causal graph to formulate the MLU procedure and analyze the confounding effect of subjects. Then, we propose SuCI, a simple yet effective causal intervention module to disentangle the impact of subjects acting as unobserved confounders and achieve model training via true causal effects. As a plug-and-play component, SuCI can be widely applied to most methods that seek unbiased predictions. Comprehensive experiments on several MLU benchmarks clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed module.

Debiased Multimodal Understanding for Human Language Sequences

The early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is crucial for potential patients to receive timely treatment and prevent disease progression. Recent studies have shown that PD is closely linked to impairments in facial muscle control, resulting in characteristic “masked face” symptoms. This discovery offers a novel perspective for PD diagnosis by leveraging facial expression recognition and analysis techniques to capture and quantify these features, thereby distinguishing between PD patients and non-PD individuals based on their facial expressions. However, concerns about data privacy and legal restrictions have led to significant “data silos”, posing challenges to data sharing and limiting the accuracy and generalization of existing diagnostic models due to small, localized datasets. To address this issue, we propose an innovative adaptive federated learning approach that aims to jointly analyze facial expression data from multiple medical institutions while preserving data privacy. Our proposed approach comprehensively evaluates each client's contributions in terms of gradient, data, and learning efficiency, overcoming the non-IID issues caused by varying data sizes or heterogeneity across clients. To demonstrate the real-world impact of our approach, we collected a new facial expression dataset of PD patients in collaboration with a hospital. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method for PD diagnosis and facial expression recognition, offering a promising avenue for rapid, non-invasive initial screening and advancing healthcare intelligence.

Breaking Data Silos in Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis: An Adaptive Federated Learning Approach for Privacy-Preserving Facial Expression Analysis

Artificial intelligence has made significant strides in reasoning
over complex structured multimodal and multilingual
data, addressing critical challenges in domains such as finance
and healthcare. This abstract highlights key advancements
in tabular reasoning, temporal analysis, and structured
multimodal reasoning.
One major contributions include TempTabQA (Gupta
et al. 2023), a benchmark for temporal question answering;
novel methods to enhance temporal reasoning in large
language models (LLMs); and a framework for evaluating
mathematical reasoning in financial documents (Srivastava
et al. 2024). These works establish robust approaches for interpreting
time-sensitive and quantitative data. Building on
this foundation, we have developed hybrid SQL-text adaptive
reasoning models, H-STAR, and knowledge-aware reasoning
techniques for semi-structured tables (Mathur et al.
2024), enabling precise and efficient handling of complex
queries.
In the vision-language domain, our contributions include
advancements in spatial reasoning for geographic
data, MAPWise (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2024b), methods
to improve robustness in chart interpretation, FlowVQA
(Singh et al. 2024), and evaluations of LLMs’ ability
to understand visual data, such as charts, RobustCQA
(Mukhopadhyay et al. 2024a). Furthermore, we have addressed
challenges in multilingual and cross-modal robustness
through innovations in multilingual table synchronization,
InfoSync(Khincha et al. 2023), concurrent robustness
evaluation across languages and modalities (Gupta et al.
2024), and numerical reasoning in tabular data (Akhtar et al.
2023).
Our future work focuses on enhancing reasoning for dynamically
evolving data through hybrid LLM-SQL queries,
symbolic query generation, and multi-table retrieval. We
also aim to address challenges in interpreting hierarchical
structures, complex multiple charts, and diverse map types,
while advancing the analysis of real-world multimodal data.
Additionally, we seek to improve table generation for both
closed-book and open-book scenarios and refine evaluation
frameworks for structured data tasks.
These efforts highlight AI’s potential to tackle

Advancements in AI for Reasoning with Complex Data

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning hold immense potential to accelerate scientific discovery and engineering design. A fundamental challenge in these domains involves efficiently exploring a large space of hypotheses using expensive experiments in a resource-efficient manner. My research focuses on developing novel adaptive experimental design methods to address this broad challenge. Specifically, I develop new probabilistic modeling and decision making tools that operate in small data settings. These approaches have yielded substantial improvements in sample-efficiency, particularly for black-box optimization over high-dimensional combinatorial spaces (e.g., sequences and graphs). This cover letter outlines key methods I have developed and their real-world sustainability applications in areas such as nano-porous materials discovery, hardware design, and additive manufacturing. Additionally, I highlight my initiatives to foster collaboration between Science/Engineering and AI communities.

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SSC-VAE: Structured Sparse Coding Based Variational Autoencoder for Detail Preserved Image Reconstruction

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