Canada

The performance of artificial neural networks (ANNs) degrades when training data are limited or imbalanced. In contrast, the human brain can learn quickly from just a few examples. Here, we investigated the role of sleep in improving the performance of ANNs trained with limited data on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Sleep was implemented as an unsupervised phase with local Hebbian type learning rules. We found a significant boost in accuracy after the sleep phase for models trained with limited data in the range of 0.5-10% of total MNIST or Fashion MNIST datasets. When more than 10% of the total data was used, sleep alone had a slight negative impact on performance, but this was remedied by fine-tuning on the original data. This study sheds light on a potential synaptic weight dynamics strategy employed by the brain during sleep to enhance memory performance when training data are limited or imbalanced.

AAAI 2024

Sleep-Like Unsupervised Replay Improves Performance When Data Are Limited or Unbalanced (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

small dataset

sleep replay

brain modeling

low data

memory consolidation

Congratulations to all the researchers who have qualified for the AMA Research Challenge virtual poster symposium and semifinals!

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AMA Research Challenge 2025 

Join the AMA Research Challenge poster symposium and semifinals to explore top research posters and score posters in the semifinals (an AMA member exclusive opportunity).

technical paper

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/)

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. 

As data privacy issues grow, finding the best privacy preservation algorithm for each situation is increasingly essential. This research has focused on understanding the frequency oracles (FO) privacy preservation algorithms. FO conduct the frequency estimation of any value in the domain. The aim is to explore how each can be best used and recommend which one to use with which data type. We experimented with different data scenarios and federated learning settings. Results showed clear guidance on when to use a specific algorithm.

Frequency Oracle for Sensitive Data Monitoring (Student Abstract)

Face video stylization aims to convert real face videos into specified reference styles. While one-shot methods perform well in single-image stylization, ensuring continuity between frames and retaining the original facial expressions present challenges in video stylization. To address these issues, our approach employs a personalized diffusion model with pixel-level control. We propose Local Consistency Guidance(LCG) strategy, composed of local-cross attention and local style transfer, to ensure temporal consistency. This framework enables the synthesis of high-quality stylized face videos with excellent temporal continuity.

Local Consistency Guidance: Personalized Stylization Method of Face Video (Student Abstract)

Cross-domain Graph Meta-learning (CGML) has shown its promise, where meta-knowledge is extracted from few-shot graph data in multiple relevant but distinct domains. However, several recent efforts assume target data available, which commonly does not established in practice. In this paper, we devise a novel Cross-domain Data Augmentation for Graph Meta-Learning (CDA-GML), which incorporates the superiorities of CGML and Data Augmentation， has addressed intractable shortcomings of label sparsity, domain shift, and the absence of target data simultaneously. Specifically, our method simulates instance-level and task-level domain shift to alleviate the cross-domain generalization issue in conventional graph meta-learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

When Sparse Graph Representation Learning Falls into Domain Shift: Data Augmentation for Cross-Domain Graph Meta-Learning (Student Abstract)

In the last years, several variants of transformers have emerged. In this paper, we compare different transformer-based models for solving the reverse dictionary task and explore their use in the context of a serious game called The Dictionary Game.

Towards a Transformer-Based Reverse Dictionary Model for Quality Estimation of Definitions (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

Entity Resolution (ER) is the problem of algorithmically matching records, mentions, or entries that refer to the same underlying real-world entity. Traditionally, the problem assumes (at most) two datasets, between which records need to be matched. There is considerably less research in ER when k > 2 datasets are involved. The evaluation of such multipartite ER (M-ER) is especially complex, since the usual ER metrics assume (whether implicitly or explicitly) k < 3. This paper takes the first step towards motivating a k-tuple approach for evaluating M-ER. Using standard algorithms and k-tuple versions of metrics like precision and recall, our preliminary results suggest a significant difference compared to aggregated pairwise evaluation, which would first decompose the M-ER problem into independent bipartite problems and then aggregate their metrics. Hence, M-ER may be more challenging and warrant more novel approaches than current decomposition-based pairwise approaches would suggest.

Multipartite Entity Resolution: Motivating a K-Tuple Perspective (Student Abstract)

It is necessary to explore an effective point cloud completion mechanism that is of great significance for real-world tasks such as autonomous driving, robotics applications, and multi-target tracking. In this paper, we propose a point cloud completion method using a self-supervised transformer model based on the contextual constraints of scene flow. Our method uses the multi-frame point cloud context relationship as a guide to generate a series of token proposals, this priori condition ensures the stability of the point cloud completion. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper achieves high accuracy and good stability.

Scene Flow Prior Based Point Cloud Completion with Masked Transformer (Student Abstract)

Hashing-based recommendation (HR) methods, whose core idea is mapping users and items into hamming space, are common practice to improve item retrieval efficiency. However, existing HR fails to align optimization objective (i.e., Bayesian Personalized Ranking) and evaluation metric (i.e., Recall), leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a smooth recall loss (termed as SRLoss), which targets Recall as the optimization objective. Due to the existence of discrete constraints, the optimization problem is NP-hard. To this end, we propose an approximation-adjustable gradient estimator to solve our problem. Experimental Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Optimizing Recall in Deep Graph Hashing Framework for Item Retrieval (Student Abstract)

DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism for regulating gene expression, and it plays an important role in many biological processes. While methylation sites can be identified using laboratory techniques, much work is being done on developing computational approaches using machine learning. Here, we present a deep-learning algorithm for determining the 5-methylcytosine status of a DNA sequence. We propose an ensemble framework that treats the self-attention score as an explicit feature that is added to the encoder layer generated by fine-tuned language models. We evaluate the performance of the model under different data distribution scenarios.

Leverage the Explainability of Transformer Models to Improve the DNA 5-Methylcytosine Identification (Student Abstract)

With the abundance of learning resources available on massive open online courses (MOOCs) platforms, the issue of interactive data sparsity has emerged as a significant challenge.This paper introduces MRMLREC, an efficient MOOC video recommendation which consists of two main stages: multi-relational representation and multi-level recommendation, aiming to solve the problem of data sparsity. In the multi-relational representation stage, MRMLREC adopts a tripartite approach, constructing relational graphs based on temporal sequences, courses-videos relation, and knowledge concepts-video relation. These graphs are processed by a Graph Convolution Network (GCN) and two variant Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to derive representations. A variant of the Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) then integrates these multi-dimensional data to enhance the overall representation. The multi-level recommendation stage introduces three prediction tasks at varying levels—courses, knowledge concepts, and videos—to mitigate data sparsity and improve the interpretability of video recommendations. Beam search (BS) is employed to identify top-β items at each level, refining the subsequent level's search space and enhancing recommendation efficiency. Additionally, an optional layer offers both personalization and diversification modes, ensuring variety in recommended videos and maintaining learner engagement. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MRMLREC on two real-world instances from Xuetang X.

MRMLREC: A Two-Stage Approach for Addressing Data Sparsity in MOOC Video Recommendation (Student Abstract)

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL. This work is inspired by humans' ability to imagine the potential outcomes of their actions without actually taking them. In order to emulate this ability, VAAC introduces a new actor called virtual actor (VA), alongside the conventional actor-critic framework. Unlike the conventional actor, the VA takes the virtual action to anticipate the next state without interacting with the environment. With the virtual policy following a Gaussian distribution, the VA is trained to maximize the anticipated novelty of the subsequent state resulting from a virtual action. If any next state resulting from available actions does not exhibit high anticipated novelty, training the VA leads to an increase in the virtual policy entropy. Hence, high virtual policy entropy represents that there is no room for exploration. The proposed VAAC aims to maximize a modified Q function, which combines cumulative rewards and the negative sum of virtual policy entropy. Experimental results show that the VAAC improves the exploration performance compared to existing algorithms.

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Frequency Oracle for Sensitive Data Monitoring (Student Abstract)

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