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As an asset pricing model in economics and finance, factor model has been widely used in quantitative investment. Towards building more effective factor models, recent years have witnessed the paradigm shift from linear models to more flexible nonlinear data-driven machine learning models. However, due to low signal-to-noise ratio of the financial data, it is quite challenging to learn effective factor models. In this paper, we propose a novel factor model, FactorVAE, as a probabilistic model with inherent randomness for noise modeling. Essentially, our model integrates the dynamic factor model (DFM) with the variational autoencoder (VAE) in machine learning, and we propose a prior-posterior learning method based on VAE, which can effectively guide the learning of model by approximating an optimal posterior factor model with future information. Particularly, considering that risk modeling is important for the noisy stock data, FactorVAE can estimate the variances from the distribution over the latent space of VAE, in addition to predicting returns. The experiments on the real stock market data demonstrate the effectiveness of FactorVAE, which outperforms various baseline methods.

AAAI 2022

FactorVAE: A Probabilistic Dynamic Factor Model Based on Variational Autoencoder for Predicting Cross-Sectional Stock Returns

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/)

AAAI 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.



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. 

The goal of the crime forecasting problem is to predict different types of crimes for each geographical region (like a neighborhood or censor tract) in the near future. Since nearby regions usually have similar socioeconomic characteristics which indicate similar crime patterns, recent state-of-the-art solutions constructed a distance-based region graph and utilized Graph Neural Network (GNN) techniques for crime forecasting, because the GNN techniques could effectively exploit the latent relationships between neighboring region nodes in the graph if the edges reveal high dependency or correlation. However, this distance-based pre-defined graph can not fully capture crime correlation between regions that are far from each other but share similar crime patterns. Hence, to make a more accurate crime prediction, the main challenge is to learn a better graph that reveals the dependencies between regions in crime occurrences and meanwhile captures the temporal patterns from historical crime records. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end graph convolutional recurrent network called HAGEN with several novel designs for crime prediction. Specifically, our framework could jointly capture the crime correlation between regions and the temporal crime dynamics by combining an adaptive region graph learning module with the Diffusion Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DCGRU). Based on the homophily assumption of GNN (i.e., graph convolution works better where neighboring nodes share the same label), we propose a homophily-aware constraint to regularize the optimization of the region graph so that neighboring region nodes on the learned graph share similar crime patterns, thus fitting the mechanism of diffusion convolution. Empirical experiments and comprehensive analysis on two real-world datasets showcase the effectiveness of HAGEN.

HAGEN: Homophily-Aware Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Crime Forecasting

Student assessment is one of the most fundamental tasks in the field of AI Education (AIEd). One of the most common approach to student assessment is Knowledge Tracing (KT), which evaluates a student's knowledge state by predicting whether the student will answer a given question correctly or not. However, in the context of multiple choice (polytomous) questions, conventional KT approaches are limited in that they only consider the binary (dichotomous) correctness label (i.e., correct or incorrect), and disregard the specific option chosen by the student. 
 Meanwhile, Option Tracing (OT) attempts to model a student by predicting which option they will choose for a given question, but overlooks the correctness information. In this paper, we propose Dichotomous-Polytomous Multi-Task Learning (DP-MTL), a multi-task learning framework that combines KT and OT for more precise student assessment. In particular, we show that the KT objective acts as a regularization term for OT in the DP-MTL framework, and propose an appropriate architecture for applying our method on top of existing deep learning-based KT models. We experimentally confirm that DP-MTL significantly improves both KT and OT performances, and also benefits downstream tasks such as Score Prediction (SP).

No Task Left Behind: Multi-Task Learning of Knowledge Tracing and Option Tracing for Better Student Assessment

Classical matrix completion methods focus on data with stationary latent structure and hence are not effective in missing value imputation when the latent structure changes with time.  This paper proposes a dynamic nonlinear matrix completion (D-NLMC) method, which is able to recover the missing values of streaming data when the low-dimensional nonlinear latent structure of the data changes with time.  The paper provides an efficient approach to updating the nonlinear model dynamically.  D-NLMC incorporates the information of new data and remove the information of earlier data recursively.  The paper shows that the missing data can be estimated if the change of latent structure is slow enough.  Different from existing online or adaptive low-rank matrix completion methods,  D-NLMC does not require the local low-rank assumption and is able to adaptively recover high-rank matrices with low-dimensional latent structures. Note that existing high-rank matrix completion methods have high-computational costs and are not applicable to streaming data with varying latent structures, which fortunately can be handled by D-NLMC efficiently and accurately.  Numerical results show that D-NLMC outperforms the baselines in real applications.

Dynamic Nonlinear Matrix Completion for Time-Varying Data Imputation

The goal of a summary is to concisely state the most important information in a document. With this principle in mind, we introduce new reference-free summary evaluation metrics that use a pretrained language model to estimate the information content shared between a document and its summary. These metrics are a modern take on the Shannon Game, a method for summary quality scoring proposed decades ago, where we replace human annotators with language models. We also view these metrics as an extension of BLANC, a recently proposed approach to summary quality measurement based on the performance of a language model with and without the help of a summary. Using transformer based language models, we empirically verify that our metrics achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgement of the summary quality dimensions of both coherence and relevance, as well as competitive correlation with human judgement of consistency and fluency.

Play the Shannon Game With Language Models: A Human-Free Approach to Summary Evaluation

Combined modeling and verification of dynamic systems and the data they operate on has gained momentum in AI and in several application domains. We investigate the expressive yet concise framework of data-aware dynamic systems (DDS), extending it with linear arithmetic, and providing the following contributions. 
 First, we introduce a new, semantic property of â€œfinite summaryâ€, which guarantees the existence of a faithful finite-state abstraction. We rely on this to show that checking whether a witness exists for a linear-time, finite-trace property is decidable for DDSs with finite summary. Second, we demonstrate that several decidability conditions studied in formal methods and database theory can be seen as concrete, checkable instances of this property. This also gives rise to new decidability results. Third, we show how the abstract, uniform property of finite summary leads to modularity results: a system enjoys finite summary if it can be partitioned appropriately into smaller systems that possess the property. Our results allow us to analyze systems that were out of reach in earlier approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in a prototype implementation.

Linear-Time Verification of Data-Aware Dynamic Systems with Arithmetic

The use of deep neural networks as function approximators has led to striking progress for reinforcement learning algorithms and applications. Yet the knowledge we have on decision boundary geometry and the loss landscape of neural policies is still quite limited. In this paper, we propose a framework to investigate the decision boundary and loss landscape similarities across states and across MDPs. We conduct experiments in various games from Arcade Learning Environment, and discover that high sensitivity directions for neural policies are correlated across MDPs. We argue that these high sensitivity directions support the hypothesis that non-robust features are shared across training environments of reinforcement learning agents. We believe our results reveal fundamental properties of the environments used in deep reinforcement learning training, and represent a tangible step towards building robust and reliable deep reinforcement learning agents.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies Learn Shared Adversarial Features Across MDPs

We propose a new framework for tensor decomposition based on trace invariants, which are particular cases of tensor networks. In general, tensor networks are diagrams/graphs that specify a way to "multiply" a collection of tensors together to produce another tensor, matrix or scalar. The particularity of trace invariants is that the operation of multiplying copies of a certain input tensor that produces a scalar obeys specific symmetry constraints. In other words, the scalar resulting from this multiplication is invariant under some specific transformations of the involved tensor. We focus our study on the O(N)-invariant graphs, i.e. invariant under orthogonal transformations of the input tensor. The proposed approach is novel and versatile since it allows to address different theoretical and practical aspects of both CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) and Tucker decomposition models. In particular we obtain several results: (i) we generalize the computational limit of Tensor PCA (a rank-one tensor decomposition) to the case of a tensor with axes of different dimensions (ii) we introduce new algorithms for both decomposition models (iii) we obtain theoretical guarantees for these algorithms and (iv) we show improvements with respect to state of the art on synthetic and real data which also highlights a promising potential for practical applications.

Random Tensor Theory for Tensor Decomposition

The classic Cluster Editing problem (also known as Correlation Clustering) asks to transform a given graph into a disjoint union of cliques (clusters) by a small number of edge modifications. When applied to vertex-colored graphs (the colors representing subgroups), standard algorithms for the NP-hard Cluster Editing problem may yield  solutions that are biased towards subgroups of data (e.g., demographic groups), measured in the number of modifications incident to the members of the subgroups.
We propose a modification fairness constraint which ensures that the number of edits incident to each subgroup is proportional to its size. To start with, we study Modification-Fair Cluster Editing for graphs with two vertex colors. We show that the problem is NP-hard even if one may only insert edges within a subgroup; note that in the classic "non-fair" setting, this case is trivially polynomial-time solvable. However, in the more general editing form, the modification-fair variant remains fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the number of edge edits. We complement these and further theoretical results with an empirical analysis of our model on real-world social networks where we find that the price of modification-fairness is surprisingly low, that is, the cost of optimal modification-fair differs from the cost of optimal "non-fair" solutions only by a small percentage.

Modification-Fair Cluster Editing

Tree ensembles (TEs) denote a prevalent machine learning model that do not offer guarantees of interpretability, that represent a challenge from the perspective of explainable artificial intelligence. Besides model agnostic approaches, recent work proposed to explain TEs with formally-defined explanations, which are computed with oracles for propositional satisfiability (SAT) and satisfiability modulo theories. The computation of explanations for TEs involves linear constraints to express the prediction. In practice, this deteriorates scalability of the underlying reasoners. Motivated by the inherent propositional nature of TEs, this paper proposes to circumvent the need for linear constraints and instead employ an optimization engine for pure propositional logic to efficiently handle the prediction. Concretely, the paper proposes to use a MaxSAT solver and exploit the objective function to determine a winning class. This is achieved by devising a propositional encoding for computing explanations of TEs. Furthermore, the paper proposes additional heuristics to improve the underlying MaxSAT solving procedure. Experimental results obtained on a wide range of publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed MaxSAT-based approach is either on par or outperforms the existing reasoning-based explainers, thus representing a robust and efficient alternative for computing formal explanations for TEs.

Using MaxSAT for Efficient Explanations of Tree Ensembles

As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is high, a major challenge is to learn different tasks with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. To better utilize the power of PLMs, this paper proposes Comprehensive Instruction (CINS) that exploits PLMs with extra task-specific instructions. We design a schema (definition, constraint, prompt) of instructions and their customized realizations for three important downstream tasks in ToD, ie. intent classification, dialog state tracking, and natural language generation. A sequence-to-sequence model (T5) is adopted to solve these three tasks in a unified framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on these ToD tasks in realistic few-shot learning scenarios with small validation data. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed CINS approach consistently improves techniques that finetune PLMs with raw input or short prompt.

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HAGEN: Homophily-Aware Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Crime Forecasting

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HAGEN: Homophily-Aware Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Crime Forecasting

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