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Non-IID data present a tough challenge for federated learning. In this paper, we explore a novel idea of facilitating pairwise collaborations between clients with similar data. We propose FedAMP, a new method employing federated attentive message passing to facilitate similar clients to collaborate more. We establish the convergence of FedAMP for both convex and non-convex models, and propose a heuristic method to further improve the performance of FedAMP when clients adopt deep neural networks as personalized models. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.

AAAI 2021

Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

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.<br><br><br><br>

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

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

A set of divisible resources becomes available over a sequence of rounds and needs to be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Our goal is to distribute these resources to maximize fairness and efficiency. Achieving any non-trivial guarantees in an adversarial setting is impossible. However, we show that normalizing the agent values, a very common assumption in fair division, allows us to escape this impossibility. Our main result is an online algorithm for the case of two agents that ensures the outcome is fair while guaranteeing 91.6% of the optimal social welfare. We also show that this is near-optimal: there is no fair algorithm that guarantees more than 93.3% of the optimal social welfare.

Fair and Efficient Online Allocations with Normalized Valuations

Machine learning systems are increasingly being used to make impactful decisions such as loan applications and criminal justice risk assessments, and as such, ensuring fairness of these systems is critical. This is often challenging as the labels in the data are biased. This paper studies learning fair probability distributions from biased data by explicitly modeling a latent variable that represents a hidden, unbiased label. In particular, we aim to achieve demographic parity by enforcing certain independencies in the learned model. We also show that group fairness guarantees are meaningful only if the distribution used to provide those guarantees indeed captures the real-world data. In order to closely model the data distribution, we employ probabilistic circuits, an expressive and tractable probabilistic model, and propose an algorithm to learn them from incomplete data. We show on real-world datasets that our approach not only is a better model of how the data was generated than existing methods but also achieves competitive accuracy. Moreover, we also evaluate our approach on a synthetic dataset in which observed labels indeed come from fair labels but with added bias, and demonstrate that the fair labels are successfully retrieved.

Group Fairness by Probabilistic Modeling with Latent Fair Decisions

This paper studies regret minimization with randomized value functions in reinforcement learning. In tabular finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes, we introduce a clipping variant of one classical Thompson Sampling (TS)-like algorithm, randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI). Our $\tilde{\mathrm{O}}(H^2S\sqrt{AT})$ high-probability worst-case regret bound improves the previous sharpest worst-case regret bounds for RLSVI and matches the existing state-of-the-art worst-case TS-based regret bounds.

Improved Worst-Case Regret Bounds for Randomized Least-Squares Value Iteration

We study PAC learning in the presence of strategic manipulation, where data points may modify their features in certain predefined ways in order to receive a better outcome. We show that the vanilla ERM principle fails to achieve any nontrivial guarantee in this context. Instead, we propose an incentive-aware version of the ERM principle which has asymptotically optimal sample complexity. We then focus our attention on incentive-compatible classifiers, which provably prevent any kind of strategic manipulation. We give a sample complexity bound that is, curiously, independent of the hypothesis class, for the ERM principle restricted to incentive-compatible classifiers. This suggests that incentive compatibility alone can act as an effective means of regularization. We further show that it is without loss of generality to consider only incentive-compatible classifiers when opportunities for strategic manipulation satisfy a transitivity condition. As a consequence, in such cases, our hypothesis-class-independent sample complexity bound applies even without incentive compatibility. Our results set the foundations of incentive-aware PAC learning.

Incentive-Aware PAC Learning

Predicting the future interaction of objects when they come into contact with their environment is key for  autonomous agents to take intelligent and anticipatory actions. This paper presents a perception framework that fuses  visual and tactile feedback to make predictions about the expected motion of objects in dynamic scenes. Visual information captures object properties such as 3D shape and location, while tactile information provides critical cues about interaction forces and resulting object motion when it 
makes contact with the environment. Utilizing a novel See-Through-your-Skin (STS) sensor that provides high resolution  multimodal sensing of contact surfaces, our system captures both the visual appearance and the tactile properties of objects. We interpret the dual stream signals from the sensor using a Multimodal Variational Autoencoder (MVAE), allowing us to capture both modalities of contacting objects and to develop a mapping from visual to tactile interaction and vice-versa. Additionally, the perceptual system can be used to infer the outcome of future physical interactions, which we validate through simulated and real-world experiments in which the resting state of an object  is predicted from given initial conditions.

Learning Intuitive Physics with Multimodal Generative Models

We address six different classification tasks related to fine-grained building attributes: construction type, number of floors, pitch and geometry of the roof, facade material, and occupancy class. Tackling such a remote building analysis problem became possible only recently due to growing large-scale datasets of urban scenes. To this end, we introduce a new benchmarking dataset, consisting of 49426 images (top-view and street-view) of 9674 buildings. These photos are further assembled, together with the geometric metadata. The dataset showcases various real-world challenges, such as occlusions, blur, partially visible objects, and a broad spectrum of buildings. We propose a new \emph{projection pooling layer}, creating a unified, top-view representation of the top-view and the side views in a high-dimensional space. It allows us to utilize the building and imagery metadata seamlessly. Introducing this layer improves classification accuracy -- compared to highly tuned baseline models -- indicating its suitability for building analysis.

Holistic Multi-View Building Analysis in the Wild with Projection Pooling

This paper develops a new approach for estimating an interpretable, relational model of a black-box autonomous agent that can plan and act. Our main contributions are a new paradigm for estimating such models using a rudimentary query interface with the agent and a hierarchical querying algorithm that generates an interrogation policy for estimating the agent's internal model in a user-interpretable vocabulary. Empirical evaluation of our approach shows that despite the intractable search space of possible agent models, our approach allows correct and scalable estimation of interpretable agent models for a wide class of black-box autonomous agents. Our results also show that this approach can use predicate classifiers to learn interpretable models of planning agents that represent states as images.

Asking the Right Questions: Learning Interpretable Action Models through Query Answering

Federated learning is a setting where agents, each with access to their own data source, combine models learned from local data to create a global model. If agents are drawing their data from different distributions, though, federated learning might produce a biased global model that is not optimal for each agent. This means that agents faceÂ a fundamental question: should they join the global model or stay with their local model? In this work, we show how this situation can be naturally analyzed through the framework of coalitional game theory.Â 

Motivated by these considerations, we propose the following game:Â there are heterogeneous players withÂ different model parametersÂ governing their data distribution and different amounts of data they have noisily drawn from their own distribution. Each player's goal is to obtain a model with minimal expected mean squared error (MSE) on their own distribution. They have a choice of fitting a model based solely on their own data, or combining their learned parameters with those of some subset of the other players. Combining models reduces the variance component of their error through access to more data, but increases the bias because of the heterogeneity of distributions. In this work, we derive exact expected MSE values for problems in linear regression and mean estimation. We use these values to analyze the resulting game in the framework of hedonic game theory; we study how players might divide into coalitions, where each set of players within a coalition jointly constructs a single model.Â  In a case with arbitrarily many players that each have either a "small" or "large" amount of data, we constructively show that there always exists a stable partition of players into coalitions.Â 

Model-Sharing Games: Analyzing Federated Learning under Voluntary Participation

Combining the increasing availability and abundance of healthcare data and the current advances in machine learning methods have created renewed opportunities to improve clinical decision support systems. However, in healthcare risk prediction applications, the proportion of cases with the condition (label) of interest is often very low relative to the available sample size. Though very prevalent in healthcare, such imbalanced classification settings are also common and challenging in many other scenarios. So motivated, we propose a variational disentanglement approach to semi-parametrically learn from rare events in heavily imbalanced classification problems. Specifically, we leverage the imposed extreme-distribution behavior on a latent space to extract information from low-prevalence events, and develop a robust prediction arm that joins the merits of the generalized additive model and isotonic neural nets. Results on synthetic studies and diverse real-world datasets, including mortality prediction on a COVID-19 cohort, demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing alternatives.

Variational Disentanglement for Rare Event Modeling

Knowledge distillation (KD) has proved to be an effective approach for deep neural network compression, which learns a compact network (student) by transferring the knowledge from a pre-trained, over-parameterized network (teacher). In traditional KD, the transferred knowledge is usually obtained by feeding training samples to the teacher network to obtain the class probabilities. However, the original training dataset is not always available due to storage costs or privacy issues. In this study, we propose a novel data-free KD approach by modeling the intermediate feature space of the teacher with a multivariate normal distribution and leveraging the soft targeted labels generated by the distribution to synthesize pseudo samples as the transfer set. Several student networks trained with these synthesized transfer sets present competitive performance compared to the networks trained with the original training set and other data-free KD approaches.

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