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Present bias, the tendency to overvalue immediate rewards while undervaluing future ones, is a well-known barrier to achieving long-term goals. As artificial intelligence and behavioral economics increasingly focus on this phenomenon, the need for robust mathematical models to predict behavior and guide effective interventions has become crucial. However, existing models are constrained by their reliance on the discreteness of time and limited discount functions. This study introduces a novel continuous-time mathematical model for agents influenced by present bias.
Using the variational principle, we model human behavior, where individuals repeatedly act according to a sequence of states that minimize their perceived cost.
Our model not only retains analytical tractability but also accommodates various discount functions. Using this model, we consider intervention optimization problems under exponential and hyperbolic discounting and theoretically derive optimal intervention strategies, offering new insights into managing present-biased behavior.

AAAI 2025

A Continuous-time Tractable Model for Present-biased Agents

other foundations of game theory economic parad

gtep

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

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.



We present a new formal framework for generalized planning (GP) based on the situation calculus extended with LTL constraints. The GP problem is specified by a first-order basic action theory whose models are the problem instances. This low-level theory is then abstracted into a high-level propositional nondeterministic basic action theory with a single model. A refinement mapping relates the two theories. LTL formulas are used to specify the temporally extended goals as well as assumed trace constraints. If all LTL trace constraints hold at the low level and the high-level model can simulate all the low-level models with respect to the mapping, we say that we have a temporally lifted abstraction. We prove that if we have such an abstraction and the agent has a strategy to achieve a LTL goal under some trace constraints at the abstract level, then there exists a refinement of the strategy to achieve the refinement of the goal at the concrete level. We use LTL synthesis to generate the strategy at the abstract level. We illustrate our approach by synthesizing a program that solves a data structure manipulation problem.

Situation Calculus Temporally Lifted Abstractions for Generalized Planning

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in classifying molecular graphs, capitalizing on their ability to capture rich semantics. However, HGNNs for molecule property prediction exhibit significant susceptibility to adversarial attacks—a challenge that prior research has entirely overlooked. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the first study focused on robust graph-level representation learning tailored for heterogeneous molecular graphs. To achieve this goal, we propose a comprehensive $\textbf{R}$obust $\textbf{H}$eterogeneous $\textbf{G}$raph $\textbf{C}$lassification ($\textbf{RHGC}$) framework grounded in the Information Bottleneck principle, which aims to identify the most informative and least noisy heterogeneous subgraphs to derive robust, holistic representations.  This is specifically accomplished through a dedicated Node Semantic Purifier, which enhances node-level and semantic-level robustness by eliminating label-irrelevant interference using graph stochastic attention and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, along with a Global Graph Disentanglement method, which improves graph-level robustness by addressing information leak. Experiments on three molecular benchmarks demonstrate that RHGC enhances accuracy by an average of 5.06% under all three attack settings and meanwhile by 4.33% on clean data. Our code and model will be made publicly available, which can be found in the supplementary material.

Robust Heterogeneous Graph Classification for Molecular Property Prediction with Information Bottleneck

We study the problem of designing replication-proof bandit mechanisms when agents strategically register or replicate their own arms to maximize their payoff.
Specifically, we consider Bayesian agents who only know the distribution from which their own arms' mean rewards are sampled, which is the first to study Bayesian extension of Shin et al. 2022.
With Bayesian agents, in stark contrast to the previous work, analyzing the replication-proofness of an algorithm becomes significantly complicated even in a single-agent setting.
We provide sufficient and necessary conditions for an algorithm to be replication-proof in the single-agent setting, and prove that exploration-then-commit algorithm satisfies these properties.
These results centers around several analytical theorems in comparing the expected regret of multiple bandit instances, which might be of independent interest and never have been studied to the best of our knowledge. 
We expand this result to the multi-agent setting, and provide a replication-proof algorithm for any problem instance.
We finalize our result by proving its sublinear regret upper bound that matches H-UCB.

Replication-proof Bandit Mechanism Design with Bayesian Agents

The advancement in multimodal research has increased focus on Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC), targeting accurately identifying emotional changes. Methods based on graph convolution can better capture the dynamic changes of emotions and improve the accuracy and robustness of emotion recognition. However, existing methods do not distinguish the interaction patterns of a conversation, which results in limiting their ability to model contextual emotional relationships. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Interactive Bimodal HyperGraph Convolutional Networks (DIB-HGCN), which creatively constructs two types of sub-hypergraphs, i.e., the monologic sub-hypergraph and the dialogic sub-hypergraph, for modeling emotion relationships of different interaction patterns. The monologic sub-hypergraph is used to explore the contextual consistent emotions during the speaker's monologue interactions, while the dialogic sub-hypergraph focuses on capturing the emotional transfers in the dialogic interactions. Meanwhile, the single window partitioning mechanism fails to accommodate the distinct emotional velocity variations across the two interaction patterns. Therefore, we set up dynamic windows in the monologic interactions to fully utilize the information of sentence nodes with consistent emotions, and we add fragment windows to the dialogic interactions to prevent information interference caused by frequent emotional transfers. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods on two benchmark multimodal ERC datasets.

Dynamic Interactive Bimodal Hypergraph Networks for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with tools significantly enhances their problem-solving potential across multifaceted tasks.
However, current tools automatically created by LLMs often serve as a mere summary of specific problems or solutions, which face two main issues: 
1) Low reusability: The tools are overly problem-specific and struggle to handle new problems.
2) Limited diversity: The toolsets are too narrow, limiting their application to address a broader range of different problems.
In this paper, we propose the Knowledge-grounded Tool Creation with Evolution (KTCE) framework, which aims to craft reusable and comprehensive toolsets for LLMs in a two-stage process.
In the first stage (Knowledge-based Tool Creation), we conceptualize tools as a form of executable domain knowledge and propose a problem-knowledge-tool paradigm. 
Specifically, we leverage LLMs to abstract "knowledge" from "problems" and create a three-layer knowledge tree of topics, concepts, and key points. This hierarchical structure serves as a foundation for inducing atomic "tools" from "knowledge", grounding them in fundamental concepts and enhancing their usability.
In the second stage (Tool Evolutionary Search), we evolve the toolsets through several actions including tool selection, mutation, and crossover. This stage mimics the biological evolution process, aiding toolsets in discovering new tools or updating existing ones, thereby increasing the diversity of the toolset.
Experiments on challenging mathematical/tabular/scientific reasoning tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial accuracy improvements ranging from 5.02% to 17.62% on average. Moreover, in-depth analyses reveal the superior characteristics of our toolkit, including high reusability, high diversity, and high generalizability on cross-data/LLM performance with low complexity.

Automated Creation of Reusable and Diverse Toolsets for Enhancing LLM Reasoning

This paper introduces a SAT-based technique that calculates a compact and complete symmetry-break for finite model finding. Classes of algebraic structures are typically described as first order logic formulas and the concrete algebras are models of these formulas. These models include an enormous number of isomorphic, i.e. symmetric, algebras.

Calculating a complete symmetry-break gives us a formula that has as models, exactly one canonical representative from each equivalence class of algebras. Thus, we enable answering questions about properties of the models so that computation and search are restricted to the set of canonical representations.

For instance, we can answer the question: How many non-isomorphic semigroups are there of size n? Questions of this type can be answered by counting the satisfying assignments of a SAT formula, which already filters out non-isomorphic models. Applying the introduced approach enables us to calculate numbers of algebraic structures not present in the literature and that go beyond the possibilities of pure enumeration approaches.

Complete Symmetry Breaking for Finite Models

This paper proposes a method for measuring conditional feature importance via generative modeling. In explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), conditional feature importance assesses the impact of a feature on a prediction model's performance given the information of other features. Model-agnostic post hoc methods to do so typically evaluate changes in the predictive performance under on-manifold feature value manipulations. Such procedures require creating feature values that respect conditional feature distributions, which can be challenging in practice. Recent advancements in generative modeling can facilitate this. For tabular data, which may consist of both categorical and continuous features, the adversarial random forest (ARF) stands out as a generative model that can generate on-manifold data points without requiring intensive tuning efforts or computational resources, making it a promising candidate model for subroutines in XAI methods. This paper proposes cARFi (conditional ARF feature importance), a method for measuring conditional feature importance through feature values sampled from ARF-estimated conditional distributions. cARFi requires only little tuning to yield robust importance scores that can flexibly adapt for conditional or marginal notions of feature importance, including straightforward extensions to condition on feature subsets and allows for inferring the significance of feature importances through statistical tests.

Conditional Feature Importance with Generative Modeling Using Adversarial Random Forests

Reasoning about the causes behind observations is crucial to the formalization of rationality. While extensive research has been conducted on root cause analysis, most studies have predominantly focused on deterministic settings. In this paper, we investigate causation in more realistic nondeterministic domains, where the agent does not have any control on and may not know the choices that are made by the environment. We build on recent preliminary work on actual causation in the nondeterministic situation calculus to formalize more sophisticated forms of reasoning about actual causes in such domains. We investigate the notions of “Certainly Causes” and “Possibly Causes” that enable the representation of actual cause for agent actions in these domains. We then show how regression in the situation calculus can be extended to reason about various notions of actual causes.

Reasoning About Actual Causes in Nondeterministic Dynamic Domains

The development of therapeutic antibodies heavily relies on accurate predictions of how antigens will interact with antibodies. Existing computational methods in antibody design often overlook crucial conformational changes that antigens undergo during the binding process, significantly impacting the reliability of the resulting antibodies. To bridge this gap, we introduce dyAb, a flexible framework that incorporates AlphaFold2-driven predictions to model pre-binding antigen structures and specifically addresses the dynamic nature of antigen conformation changes. Our dyAb model leverages a unique combination of coarse-grained interface alignment and fine-grained flow matching techniques to simulate the interaction dynamics and structural evolution of the antigen-antibody complex, providing a realistic representation of the binding process. Extensive experiments show that dyAb significantly outperforms existing models in antibody design involving changing antigen conformations. These results highlight dyAb's potential to streamline the design process for therapeutic antibodies, promising more efficient development cycles and improved outcomes in clinical applications.

dyAb: Flow Matching for Flexible Antibody Design with AlphaFold-driven Pre-binding Antigen

Recently, a state-of-the-art series of algorithms—Goal-Conditioned Weighted Supervised Learning (GCWSL) methods—has been introduced to address the challenges inherent in offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). GCWSL optimizes a lower bound on the goal-conditioned RL objective and has demonstrated exceptional performance across a range of goal-reaching tasks, offering a simple, effective, and stable solution. Nonetheless, researches has revealed a critical limitation in GCWSL: the absence of trajectory stitching capabilities. In response, goal data augmentation strategies have been proposed to enhance these methods. However, existing techniques often fail to effectively sample appropriate augmented goals for GCWSL. In this paper, we establish unified principles for goal data augmentation, emphasizing goal diversity, action optimality, and goal reachability. Building on these principles, we propose a Model-based Goal Data Augmentation (MGDA) approach, which leverages a dynamics model to sample more appropriate augmented goals. MGDA uniquely incorporates the local Lipschitz continuity assumption within the learned model to mitigate the effects of compounding errors. Empirical results demonstrate that MGDA significantly improves the performance of GCWSL methods on both state-based and vision-based maze datasets, outperforming previous goal data augmentation techniques in their ability to enhancing stitching capabilities.

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Situation Calculus Temporally Lifted Abstractions for Generalized Planning

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