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For time series data, certain types of outliers are intrinsically more harmful for parameter estimation and future predictions than others, irrespective of their frequency. In this paper, for the first time, we study the characteristics of such outliers through the lens of the influence functional from robust statistics. In particular, we consider the input time series as a contaminated process, with the recurring outliers generated from an unknown contaminating process. Then we leverage the influence functional to understand the impact of the contaminating process on parameter estimation. The influence functional results in a multi-dimensional vector that measures the sensitivity of the predictive model to the contaminating process, which can be challenging to interpret especially for models with a large number of parameters. To this end, we further propose a comprehensive single-valued metric (the SIF) to measure outlier impacts on future predictions. It provides a quantitative measure regarding the outlier impacts, which can be used in a variety of scenarios, such as the evaluation of outlier detection methods, the creation of more harmful outliers, etc. The empirical results on multiple real data sets demonstrate the effectivenss of the proposed SIF metric.

AAAI 2021

Outlier Impact Characterization for Time Series 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. 

Kidney transplant is the preferred method of treatment for patients suffering from kidney failure. However, not all patients can find a donor which matches their physiological characteristics. Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) seek to match such incompatible patient-donor pairs together, usually with the main objective of maximizing the total number of transplants.  Since selecting one optimal solution translates to a decision on who receives a transplant, it has a major effect on the lives of patients. The current practice in selecting an optimal solution does not necessarily ensure fairness in the selection process. In this paper, the existence of multiple optimal plans for a KEP is explored as a mean to achieve individual fairness. We propose the use of randomized policies for selecting an optimal solution in which patients' equal opportunity to receive a transplant is promoted. Our approach gives rise to the problem of enumerating all optimal solutions, which we tackle using a hybrid of constraint programming and linear programming. The advantages of our proposed method over the common practice of using the optimal solution obtained by a solver are stressed through computational experiments. Our methodology enables decision makers to fully control KEP outcomes, overcoming any potential bias or vulnerability intrinsic to a deterministic solver.

Individual Fairness in Kidney Exchange Programs

It has been observed that in many of the benchmark planning domains, atomic goals can be reached with a simple polynomial exploration procedure, called IW, that runs in time exponential in the problem width. Such problems have indeed a bounded width: a width that does not grow with the number of problem variables and is often no greater than two. Yet, while the notion of width has become part of the state- of-the-art planning algorithms like BFWS, there is still no good explanation for why so many benchmark domains have bounded width. In this work, we address this question by relating bounded width and serialized width to ideas of generalized planning, where general policies aim to solve multiple instances of a planning problem all at once. We show that bounded width is a property of planning domains that admit optimal general policies in terms of features that are explicitly or implicitly represented in the domain encoding. The results are extended to the larger class of domains with bounded serialized width where the general policies do not have to be optimal. The study leads also to a new simple, meaningful, and expressive language for specifying domain serializations in the form of policy sketches which can be used for encoding domain control knowledge by hand or for learning it from traces. The use of sketches and the meaning of the theoretical results are all illustrated through a number of examples.

General Policies, Representations, and Planning Width

Health literacy has emerged as a crucial factor in making appropriate health decisions and ensuring treatment outcomes. However, medical jargon and the complex structure of professional language in this domain make health information especially hard to interpret. Thus, there is an urgent unmet need for automated methods to enhance the accessibility of the biomedical literature to the general population. This problem can be framed as a type of translation problem between the language of healthcare professionals, and that of the general public.  In this paper, 
we introduce the novel task of automated generation of lay language summaries of biomedical scientific reviews, and construct a dataset to support the development and evaluation of automated methods through which to enhance the accessibility of the biomedical literature.  We conduct analyses of the various challenges in performing this task, including not only summarization of the key points but also explanation of background knowledge and simplification of professional language. We experiment with state-of-the-art summarization models as well as several data augmentation techniques, and evaluate their performance using both automated metrics and human assessment. Results indicate that automatically generated summaries produced using contemporary neural architectures can achieve promising quality and readability as compared with reference summaries developed for the lay public by experts (best ROUGE-L of 50.24 and Flesch-Kincaid readability score of 13.30). We also discuss the limitations of the current effort, providing insights and directions for future work.

Automated Lay Language Summarization of Biomedical Scientific Reviews

Document-level relation extraction (RE) poses new challenges compared to its sentence-level counterpart. One document commonly contains multiple entity pairs, and one entity pair occurs multiple times in the document associated with multiple possible relations. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques, adaptive thresholding and localized context pooling, to solve the multi-label and multi-entity problems. The adaptive thresholding replaces the global threshold for multi-label classification in the prior work with a learnable entities-dependent threshold. The localized context pooling directly transfers attention from pre-trained language models to locate relevant context that is useful to decide the relation. We experiment on three document-level RE benchmark datasets: DocRED, a recently released large-scale RE dataset, and two datasets CDRand GDA in the biomedical domain. Our ATLOP (Adaptive Thresholding and Localized cOntext Pooling) model achieves an F1 score of 63.4, and also significantly outperforms existing models on both CDR and GDA. We have released our code at https://github.com/wzhouad/ATLOP.

Document-Level Relation Extraction with Adaptive Thresholding and Localized Context Pooling

We study the problem of verifying whether a given parameterized multi-agent system (PMAS) is safe, namely whether none of its possible executions can lead to bad states. These are captured by a state formula existentially quantifying over agents. As the MAS is parameterized, it only describes the finite set of possible agent templates, while the actual number of concrete agent instances that will be present at runtime, for each template, is unbounded and cannot be foreseen. 
We solve this problem via infinite-state model checking based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), relying on the theory of array-based systems. We formally characterize the soundness, completeness and termination guarantees of our approach under specific assumptions. This gives us a technique that is implementable on top of third-party, SMT-based model checkers. Finally, we discuss how this approach lends itself to richer parameterized and data-aware MAS settings beyond the state-of-the-art solutions in the literature.

SMT-Based Safety Checking of Parameterized Multi-Agent Systems

This paper proposes DeepSynth, a method for effective training of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents when the reward is sparse and non-Markovian, but at the same time progress towards the reward requires achieving an unknown sequence of high-level objectives. Our method employs a novel algorithm for synthesis of compact automata to uncover this sequential structure automatically. We synthesise a human-interpretable automaton from trace data collected by exploring the environment. The state space of the environment is then enriched with the synthesised automaton so that the generation of a control policy by deep RL is guided by the discovered structure encoded in the automaton. The proposed approach is able to cope  with both high-dimensional, low-level features and unknown sparse non-Markovian rewards. We have evaluated DeepSynth's performance in a set of experiments that includes the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Compared to existing approaches, we obtain a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the number of iterations required for policy synthesis, and also a significant improvement in scalability.

DeepSynth: Automata Synthesis for Automatic Task Segmentation in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Forecasting influenza in a timely manner aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, effective influenza forecasting still remains a challenge despite increasing research interest. It is even more challenging amidst the COVID pandemic, when the influenza-like illness (ILI) counts are affected by various factors such as symptomatic similarities with COVID-19 and shift in healthcare seeking patterns of the general population. Under the current pandemic, historical influenza models carry valuable expertise about the disease dynamics but face difficulties adapting. Therefore, we propose CALI-Net, a neural transfer learning architecture which allows us to 'steer' a historical disease forecasting model to new scenarios where flu and COVID co-exist. Our framework enables this adaptation by automatically learning when it should emphasize learning from COVID-related signals and when it should learn from the historical model. Thus, we exploit representations learned from historical ILI data as well as the limited COVID-related signals. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is successful in adapting a historical forecasting model to the current pandemic. In addition, we show that success in our primary goal, adaptation, does not sacrifice overall performance as compared with state-of-the-art influenza forecasting approaches.

Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PTLMs), such as BERT and its better variant RoBERTa, has been a common practice for advancing performance in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Recent advance in representation learning shows that isotropic (i.e., unit-variance and uncorrelated) embeddings can significantly improve performance on downstream tasks with faster convergence and better generalization. The isotropy of the pre-trained embeddings in PTLMs, however, is relatively under-explored. In this paper, we analyze the isotropy of the pre-trained [CLS] embeddings of PTLMs with straightforward visualization, and point out two major issues: high variance in their standard deviation, and high correlation between different dimensions. We also propose a new network regularization method, isotropic batch normalization (IsoBN) to address the issues, towards learning more isotropic representations in fine-tuning by dynamically penalizing dominating principal components. This simple yet effective fine-tuning method yields about 1.0 absolute increment on the average of seven NLU tasks.

IsoBN: Fine-Tuning BERT with Isotropic Batch Normalization

Vaccination is the primary intervention for controlling the spread of infectious diseases. A certain level of vaccination rate (referred to as "herd immunity'') is needed for this intervention to be effective. However, there are concerns that herd immunity might not be achieved due to an increasing level of hesitancy and opposition to vaccines. One of the primary reasons for this is the cost of non-conformance with one's peers. We use the framework of network coordination games to study the persistence of anti-vaccine sentiment in a population. We extend it to incorporate the opposing forces of the pressure of conforming to peers, herd-immunity and vaccination benefits. We study the structure of the equilibria in such games, and the characteristics of unvaccinated nodes. We also study Stackelberg strategies to reduce the number of nodes with anti-vaccine sentiment. Finally, we evaluate our results on different kinds of real world social networks.

Persistence of Anti-Vaccine Sentiment in Social Networks through Strategic Interactions

Successor-style representations have many advantages for reinforcement learning: for example, they can help an agent generalize from past experience to new goals, and they have been proposed as explanations of behavioral and neural data from human and animal learners. They also form a natural bridge between model-based and model-free RL methods: like the former they make predictions about future experiences, and like the latter they allow efficient prediction of total discounted rewards. However, successor-style representations are not optimized to generalize across policies: typically, we maintain a limited-length list of policies, and share information among them by representation learning or GPI. Successor-style representations also typically make no provision for gathering information or reasoning about latent variables. To address these limitations, we bring together ideas from predictive state representations, belief space value iteration, successor features, and convex analysis: we develop a new, general successor-style representation, together with a Bellman equation that connects multiple sources of information within this representation, including different latent states, policies, and reward functions. The new representation is highly expressive: for example, it lets us efficiently read off an optimal policy for a new reward function, or a policy that imitates a new demonstration. For this paper, we focus on exact computation of the new representation in small, known environments, since even this restricted setting offers plenty of interesting questions. Our implementation does not scale to large, unknown environments --- nor would we expect it to, since it generalizes POMDP value iteration, which is difficult to scale. However, we believe that future work will allow us to extend our ideas to approximate reasoning in large, unknown environments. We conduct experiments to explore which of the potential barriers to scaling are most pressing.

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