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Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural networks. While most of the studies focus on single-task neural networks with computer vision datasets, very little research has considered complex multi-task models that are common in real applications. In this paper, we evaluate the design choices that impact the robustness of multi-task deep learning networks. We provide evidence that blindly adding auxiliary tasks, or weighing the tasks provides a false sense of robustness. Thereby, we tone down the claim made by previous research and study the different factors which may affect robustness. In particular, we show that the choice of the task to incorporate in the loss function are important factors that can be leveraged to yield more robust models. We provide the appendix, all our algorithms, models, and open source-code at https://github.com/yamizi/taskaugment

AAAI 2022

Adversarial Robustness in Multi-Task Learning: Promises and Illusions

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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. 

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focus on the identification of the most relevant concepts but do not provide concise, formal explanations of how such concepts are leveraged by the classifier to make predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end differentiable approach enabling the extraction of logic explanations from neural networks using the formalism of First-Order Logic. The method relies on an entropy-based criterion which automatically identifies the most relevant concepts. We consider four different case studies to demonstrate that: (i) this entropy-based criterion enables the distillation of concise logic explanations in safety-critical domains from clinical data to computer vision; (ii) the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art white-box models in terms of classification accuracy.

Entropy-Based Logic Explanations of Neural Networks

Point cloud registration is a fundamental step for many tasks. In this paper, we propose a neural network named DetarNet to decouple the translation t and rotation R, so as to overcome the performance degradation due to their mutual interference in point cloud registration. First, a Siamese Network based Progressive and Coherent Feature Drift (PCFD) module is proposed to align the source and target points in high-dimensional feature space, and accurately recover translation from the alignment process. Then we propose a Consensus Encoding Unit (CEU) to construct more distinguishable features for a set of putative correspondences. After that, a Spatial and Channel Attention (SCA) block is adopted to build a classification network for finding good correspondences. Finally, the rotation is obtained by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). In this way, the proposed network decouples the estimation of translation and rotation, resulting in better performance for both of them. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DetarNet improves registration performance on both indoor and outdoor scenes. Our code will be available in https://github.com/ZhiChen902/DetarNet.

DeTarNet: Decoupling Translation and Rotation by Siamese Network for Point Cloud Registration

Explanations shed light on a machine learning model's rationales and can aid in identifying deficiencies in its reasoning process. Explanation generation models are typically trained in a supervised way given human explanations. When such annotations are not available, explanations are often selected as those portions of the input that maximise a downstream task's performance, which corresponds to optimising an explanation's Faithfulness to a given model. Faithfulness is one of several so-called diagnostic properties, which prior work has identified as useful for gauging the quality of an explanation without requiring annotations. Other diagnostic properties are Data Consistency, which measures how similar explanations are for similar input instances, and Confidence Indication, which shows whether the explanation reflects the confidence of the model. In this work, we show how to directly optimise for these diagnostic properties when training a model to generate sentence-level explanations, which markedly improves explanation quality, agreement with human rationales, and downstream task performance on three complex reasoning tasks.

Diagnostics-Guided Explanation Generation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification aims at learning on an unlabeled target domain with only labeled data in source domain. Currently, the state-of-the-arts usually solve this problem by pseudo-label-based clustering and fine-tuning in target domain. However, the reason behind the noises of pseudo labels is not sufficiently explored, especially for the popular multi-branch models. We argue that the consistency between different feature spaces is the key to the pseudo labels' quality. Then a SElf-Consistent pseudo label RefinEmenT method, termed as SECRET, is proposed to improve consistency by mutually refining the pseudo labels generated from different feature spaces. The proposed SECRET gradually encourages the improvement of pseudo labels' quality during training process, which further leads to better cross-domain Re-ID performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method. Specifically, our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts by 6.3% in terms of mAP on the challenging dataset MSMT17. In the purely unsupervised setting, our method also surpasses existing works by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/SECRET.

SECRET: Self-Consistent Pseudo Label Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

The developmental approach, simulating a cognitive development of a human, arises as a way to nurture a human-level commonsense and overcome the limitations of data-driven approaches. However, neither a virtual environment nor an evaluation platform exists for the overall development of core cognitive skills. We present the VECA(Virtual Environment for Cognitive Assessment), which consists of two main components: (i) a first benchmark to assess the overall cognitive development of an AI agent, and (ii) a novel toolkit to generate diverse and distinct cognitive tasks. VECA benchmark virtually implements the cognitive scale of Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-IV(Bayley-4), the gold-standard developmental assessment for human infants and toddlers. Our VECA toolkit provides a human toddler-like embodied agent with various human-like perceptual features crucial to human cognitive development, e.g., binocular vision, 3D-spatial audio, and tactile receptors. We compare several modern RL algorithms on our VECA benchmark and seek their limitations in modeling human-like cognitive development. We further analyze the validity of the VECA benchmark, as well as the effect of human-like sensory characteristics on cognitive skills.

VECA: A New Benchmark and Toolkit for General Cognitive Development

We consider a novel queuing problem where the decision-maker must choose to accept or reject randomly arriving tasks into a no buffer queue which are processed by N identical servers. Each task has a price, which is a positive real number, and a class. Each class of task has a different price distribution, service rate, and arrives according to an inhomogenous Poisson process. The objective is to decide which tasks to accept so that the total price of tasks processed is maximised over a finite horizon. We formulate the problem using a discrete time Markov Decision Process (MDP) with a hybrid state space. We show that the optimal value function has a specific structure, which enables us to solve the hybrid MDP exactly. Moreover, we rigorously prove that as the gap between successive decision epochs grows smaller, the discrete time solution approaches the optimal solution to the original continuous time problem. To improve the scalability of our approach to a greater number of servers and task classes, we present an approximation based on state abstraction. We validate our approach on synthetic data, as well as a real financial fraud data set, which is the motivating application for this work.

Optimal Admission Control for Multiclass Queues with Time-Varying Arrival Rates via State Abstraction

Although deep learning has made significant progress on fixed large-scale datasets, it typically encounters challenges regarding improperly detecting unknown/unseen classes in the open-world scenario, over-parametrized, and overfitting small samples. Since biological systems can overcome the above difficulties very well, individuals inherit an innate gene from collective creatures that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years and then learn new skills through few examples. Inspired by this, we propose a practical collective-individual paradigm where an evolution (expandable) network is trained on sequential tasks and then recognize unknown classes in real-world. Moreover, the learngene, i.e., the gene for learning initialization rules of the target model, is proposed to inherit the meta-knowledge from the collective model and reconstruct a lightweight individual model on the target task. Particularly, a novel criterion is proposed to discover learngene in the collective model, according to the gradient information. Finally, the individual model is trained only with few samples on the target learning tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in an extensive empirical study and theoretical analysis.

Learngene: From Open-World to Your Learning Task

In few-shot imitation learning (FSIL), using behavioral cloning (BC) to solve unseen tasks with few expert demonstrations becomes a popular research direction. The following capabilities are essential in robotics applications: (1) Behaving in compound tasks that contain multiple stages. (2) Retrieving knowledge from few length-variant and misalignment demonstrations. (3) Learning from an expert different from the agent. No previous work can achieve these abilities at the same time. In this work, we conduct FSIL problem under the union of above settings and introduce a novel stage conscious attention network (SCAN) to retrieve knowledge from few demonstrations simultaneously. SCAN uses an attention module to identify each stage in length-variant demonstrations. Moreover, it is designed under demonstration-conditioned policy that learns the relationship between experts and agents. Experiment results show that SCAN can perform in complicated compound tasks without fine-tuning and provide the explainable visualization. Project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/scan-aaai2022.

Stage Conscious Attention Network (SCAN) : A Demonstration-Conditioned Policy for Few-Shot Imitation

Exiting simple samples in adaptive multi-exit networks through early modules is an effective way to achieve high computational efficiency. One can observe that deployments of multi-exit architectures on resource-constrained devices are easily limited by high memory footprint of early modules. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named recurrent aggregation operator (ReX), which uses recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to effectively aggregate intra-patch features within a large receptive field to get delicate local representations, while bypassing large early activations. The resulting model, named ReXNet, can be easily extended to dynamic inference by introducing a novel consistency-based early exit criteria, which is based on the consistency of classification decisions over several modules, rather than the entropy of the prediction distribution. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., Visual Wake Words, ImageNet-1k, demonstrate that our method consistently reduces the peak RAM and average latency of a wide variety of adaptive models on low-power devices.

ReX: An Efficient Approach to Reducing Memory Cost in Image Classification

Discovering the underneath causal relations is the fundamental ability for reasoning about the surrounding environment and predicting the future states in the physical world. Counterfactual prediction from visual input, which requires simulating future states based on unrealized situations in the past, is a vital component in causal relation tasks. In this paper, we work on the confounders that have effect on the physical dynamics, including masses, friction coefficients, etc., to bridge relations between the intervened variable and the affected variable whose future state may be altered. We propose a neural network framework combining Global Causal Relation Attention (GCRA) and Confounder Transmission Structure (CTS). The GCRA looks for the latent causal relations between different variables and estimates the confounders by capturing both spatial and temporal information. The CTS integrates and transmits the learnt confounders in a residual way, so that the estimated confounders can be encoded into the network as a constraint for object positions when performing counterfactual prediction. Without any access to ground truth information about confounders, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method on various benchmarks by fully utilizing the constraints of confounders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can generalize to unseen environments and maintain good performance.

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