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It is possible for agents operating in a shared environment to interfere with one another. One mechanism of coordination is called Social Law. Enacting such a law in a multi-agent setting restricts agents&#39; behaviors. Robustness, in this case, ensures that the agents do not harmfully interfere with each other and that each agent achieves its goals regardless of what other agents do. Previous work on social law verification examined only the case of boolean state variables. However, many real-world problems require reasoning with numeric variables. Moreover, numeric fluents allow a more compact representation of multiple planning problems.

In this paper, we develop a method to verify whether a given social law is robust via compilation to numeric planning. A solution to this compilation constitutes a counterexample to the robustness of the problem, i.e., evidence of cross-agent conflict. Thus, the social law is robust if and only if the proposed compilation is unsolvable. We empirically verify robustness in multiple domains using state-of-the-art numeric planners. Additionally, this compilation raises a challenge by generating a set of non-trivial numeric domains where unsolvability should be either proved or disproved.

AAAI 2023

Automated Verification of Social Laws in Numeric Settings

numeric planning

coordination

planning

multi-agent

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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.

It is possible for agents operating in a shared environment to interfere with one another. One mechanism of coordination is called Social Law. Enacting such a law in a multi-agent setting restricts agents' behaviors. Robustness, in this case, ensures that the agents do not harmfully interfere with each other and that each agent achieves its goals regardless of what other agents do. Previous work on social law verification examined only the case of boolean state variables. However, many real-world problems require reasoning with numeric variables. Moreover, numeric fluents allow a more compact representation of multiple planning problems.

In this paper, we develop a method to verify whether a given social law is robust via compilation to numeric planning. A solution to this compilation constitutes a counterexample to the robustness of the problem, i.e., evidence of cross-agent conflict. Thus, the social law is robust if and only if the proposed compilation is unsolvable. We empirically verify robustness in multiple domains using state-of-the-art numeric planners. Additionally, this compilation raises a challenge by generating a set of non-trivial numeric domains where unsolvability should be either proved or disproved.

poster

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been actively studied due to its ability to alleviate the reliance of deep learning models on labeled data. Although existing SSL methods based on pseudo-labeling strategies have made great progress, they rarely consider time-series data's intrinsic properties (e.g., temporal dependence). Learning representations by mining the inherent properties of time series has recently gained much attention. Nonetheless, how to utilize feature representations to design SSL paradigms for time series has not been explored. To this end, we propose a Time Series SSL framework via Temporal-Frequency Co-training (TS-TFC), leveraging the complementary information from two distinct views for unlabeled data learning. In particular, TS-TFC employs time-domain and frequency-domain views to train two deep neural networks simultaneously, and each view's pseudo-labels generated by label propagation in the representation space are adopted to guide the training of the other view's classifier. To enhance the discriminative of representations between categories, we propose a temporal-frequency supervised contrastive learning module, which integrates the learning difficulty of categories to improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Through co-training the pseudo-labels obtained from temporal-frequency representations, the complementary information in the two distinct views is exploited to enable the model to better learn the distribution of categories. Extensive experiments on 106 UCR datasets show that TS-TFC outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed model.

Temporal-Frequency Co-Training for Time Series Semi-Supervised Learning

Given a sequence of sets, where each set contains an arbitrary number of elements, temporal sets prediction aims to predict which elements will appear in the subsequent set. Existing methods for temporal sets prediction are developed on sophisticated components (e.g., recurrent neural networks, attention or gating mechanisms and graph neural networks), which inevitably increase the model complexity due to more trainable parameters and higher computational costs. Moreover, the involved nonlinear activation may contribute little or even degrade the performance. In this paper, we present a succinct architecture that is solely built on the Simplified Fully Connected Networks (SFCNs) for temporal sets prediction to bring both effectiveness and efficiency together. In particular, given a user's sequence of sets, we employ SFCNs to derive representations of the user by learning inter-set temporal dependencies, intra-set element relationships and intra-embedding channel correlations. Two families of general functions are introduced to preserve the permutation-invariant property of each set and the permutation-equivariant property of elements in each set. Moreover, we design a user representations adaptive fusing module to aggregate user representations according to each element for improving the prediction performance. Experiments on four benchmarks show the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-arts under both transductive and inductive settings. We also theoretically and empirically demonstrate that our model has lower space and time complexity than baselines. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/yule-BUAA/SFCNTSP.

Predicting Temporal Sets with Simplified Fully Connected Networks

Over the years, learning-based multi-view stereo methods have achieved great success based on their coarse-to-fine depth estimation frameworks.  However, 3D CNN-based cost volume regularization inevitably leads to over-smoothing problems at object boundaries due to its smooth properties. Moreover, discrete and sparse depth hypothesis sampling exacerbates the difficulty in recovering the depth of thin structures and object boundaries. To this end, we present an Efficient edge-Preserving multi-view stereo Network (EPNet) for practical depth estimation. To keep delicate estimation at details, a Hierarchical Edge-Preserving Residual learning (HEPR) module is proposed to progressively rectify the upsampling errors and help refine multi-scale depth estimation. After that, a Cross-view Photometric Consistency (CPC) is proposed to enhance the gradient flow for detailed structures, which further boosts the estimation accuracy. Last, we design a lightweight cascade framework and inject the above two strategies into it to achieve better efficiency and performance trade-offs. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fast inference speed and low memory usage. Notably, our method tops the first place on challenging Tanks and Temples advanced dataset and ETH3D high-res benchmark among all published learning-based methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/susuwj/EPNet.

Efficient Edge-Preserving Multi-view Stereo Network for Depth Estimation

We devise a new regularization for learning denoising in a self-supervised manner. This regularization is formulated using a deep image prior learned by the network, rather than a traditional predefined prior. Specifically, we treat the output of the network as a ``prior'' that we denoise again after ``re-noising''. The network is updated to minimize the discrepancy between the again denoised image and its prior. Based on the assumption of zero mean and spatially independent noise, we demonstrate that the network can learn to denoise even if it has not seen any clean images. The denoising ability of our method is derived from the fact that CNNs naturally tend to capture low-level image statistics. Since our method utilizes the image prior implicitly captured by the deep denoising CNN to guide denoising, we refer to this training strategy as Implicit Deep Denoiser Prior (IDDP). IDDP can be seen as a mixture of learning-based methods and traditional model-based denoising methods, in which regularization is adaptively formulated using the output of the network. We show the application of IDDP to various denoising tasks using only observed corrupted data. It can achieve the denoising performance close to supervised CNNs.

Self-Supervised Image Denoising using Implicit Deep Denoiser Prior

Bayesian optimal experimental design is a sub-field of statistics focused on developing methods to make efficient use of experimental resources. Any potential design is evaluated in terms of a utility function, such as the (theoretically well-justified) expected information gain (EIG); unfortunately however, under most circumstances the EIG is intractable to evaluate. In this work we build off of successful variational approaches, which optimize a parameterized variational model with respect to bounds on the EIG. Past work focused on learning a new variational model from scratch for each new design considered. Here we present a novel neural architecture that allows experimenters to optimize a single variational model that can estimate the EIG for potentially infinitely many designs. To further improve computational efficiency, we also propose to train the variational model on a significantly cheaper-to-evaluate lower bound, and show empirically that the resulting model provides an excellent guide for more accurate, but expensive to evaluate  bounds on the EIG. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on generalized linear models, a class of statistical models that is widely used in the analysis of controlled experiments. Experiments show that our method is able to greatly improve accuracy over existing approximation strategies, and achieve these results with far better sample efficiency.

Design Amortization for Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design

Learning representations for graph-structured data is essential for graph analytical tasks.
While remarkable progress has been made on static graphs, researches on temporal graphs are still in its beginning stage.
The bottleneck of the temporal graph representation learning approach is the neighborhood aggregation strategy, based on which graph attributes share and gather information explicitly.
Existing neighborhood aggregation strategies fail to capture either the short-term features or the long-term features of temporal graph attributes, leading to unsatisfactory model performance and even poor robustness and domain generality of the representation learning method.
To address this problem, we propose a Frame-level Timeline Modeling (FTM) method that helps to capture both short-term and long-term features, and thus learns more informative representations on temporal graphs.
In particular, we present a novel link-based framing technique to preserve the short-term features
and then incorporate a timeline aggregator module to capture the intrinsic dynamics of graph evolution as long-term features.
Our method can be easily assembled with most temporal GNNs. 
Extensive experiments on common datasets show that our method brings great improvements to the capability, the robustness, and the domain generality of backbone methods in downstream tasks. We also achieve new state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks.

FTM: A Frame-level Timeline Modeling Method for Temporal Graph Representation Learning

This paper targets unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning and proposes a new Hierarchical Contrast (HiCo) framework. Different from the existing contrastive-based solutions that typically represent an input skeleton sequence into instance-level features and perform contrast holistically, our proposed HiCo represents the input into multiple-level features and performs contrast in a hierarchical manner. Specifically, given a human skeleton sequence, we represent it into multiple feature vectors of different granularities from both temporal and spatial domains via sequence-to-sequence (S2S) encoders and unified downsampling modules. Besides, the hierarchical contrast is conducted in terms of four levels: instance level, domain level, clip level, and part level. Moreover, HiCo is orthogonal to the S2S encoder, which allows us to flexibly embrace state-of-the-art S2S encoders. Extensive experiments on four datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, PKU-MMD I and II, show that HiCo achieves a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning in two downstream tasks including action recognition and retrieval, and its learned action representation is of good transferability. Besides, we also show that our framework is effective for semi-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/HiCo.

Hierarchical Contrast for Unsupervised Skeleton-based Action Representation Learning

Hard-label textual adversarial attack is a challenging task, as only the predicted label information is available, and the text space is discrete and non-differentiable. Relevant research work is still in fancy and just a handful of methods are proposed. However, existing methods suffer from either the high complexity of genetic algorithms or inaccurate gradient estimation, thus are arduous to obtain adversarial examples with high similarity and low perturbation rate under the tight-budget scenario. In this paper, we propose a simple and sweet paradigm for hard-label textual adversarial attack, named SSPAttack. Specifically, SSPAttack first utilizes initialization to generate an adversarial example, and removes unnecessary replacement words to reduce the number of changed words. Then it determines the replacement order and searches for an anchor synonym, thus avoiding going through all the synonyms. Finally, it pushes substitution words towards original words until an appropriate adversarial example is obtained. The core idea of SSPAttack is just swapping words whose mechanism is simple. Extensive experimental results on eight benchmark datasets and two real-world APIs have shown that the performance of SSPAttack is sweet in terms of similarity, perturbation rate and query efficiency.

SSPAttack: A Simple and Sweet Paradigm for Black-box Hard-label Textual Adversarial Attack

New information in the context of real life settings usually is accompanied by some kind of supplementary information that indicates context, reliability, or expertise of the information's source.
Bounded Revision (BR) displays an iterated belief revision mechanism that takes as input a new information accompanied by a reference sentence acting as supplementary information, which specifies the depth with which the new input shall be integrated in the posterior belief state. The reference sentence specifies which worlds in the prior belief state are affected by the change mechanism. We show that Bounded Revision can be characterized by three simple, yet elegant postulates and corresponds to a special case of a lexicographic revision, which inherits all relevant features of BR. Furthermore, we present methodological implementations of BR including conditional revision with c-revisions, making it directly usable for conditional revision tools.

Implementing Bounded Revision via Lexicographic Revision and c-Revision

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a popular multi-agent path finding (MAPF) solver that employs a low-level single agent planner and a high-level constraint tree to resolve conflicts. The vast majority of modern MAPF solvers focus on improving CBS by reducing the size of this tree through various strategies with few methods modifying the low level planner. Typically low level planners in existing CBS methods use an unweighted cost-to-go heuristic, with suboptimal CBS methods also using a conflict heuristic to help the high level search. In this paper, we show that, contrary to prevailing CBS beliefs, a weighted cost-to-go heuristic can be used effectively alongside the conflict heuristic in two possible variants. In particular, one of these variants can obtain large speedups, 2-100x, across several  scenarios and suboptimal CBS methods. Importantly, we discover that performance is related not to the weighted cost-to-go heuristic but rather to the relative conflict heuristic weight's ability to effectively balance low-level and high-level work. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, we show the first theoretical relation of prioritized planning and bounded suboptimal CBS and demonstrate that our methods are their natural generalization.

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