Canada

We develop a general algorithmic framework that allows us to obtain fixed-parameter tractability for computing smallest symbolic models that represent given data. Our framework applies to all ML model types that admit a certain extension property. By showing this extension property for decision trees, decision sets, decision lists, and binary decision diagrams, we obtain that minimizing these fundamental model types is fixed-parameter tractable. Our framework even applies to ensembles, which combine individual models by majority decision.

AAAI 2024

A General Theoretical Framework for Learning Smallest Interpretable Models

learning symbolic models

parameterized complexity

decision trees

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. 

technical paper

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision and natural language process fields. Although the ``pre-training & finetuning'' learning paradigm significantly improves the VQA performance, the adversarial robustness of such a paradigm has not been explored. 
In this paper, we delve into a new problem: using a pre-trained multimodal source model to create adversarial image-text pairs and then transferring them to attack the target VQA models.
Correspondingly, we propose a novel VQAttack model, which can iteratively generate both image and text perturbations with the designed modules: the large language model (LLM)-enhanced image attack and the cross-modal joint attack module.
At each iteration, the LLM-enhanced image attack module first optimizes the latent representation-based loss to generate feature-level image perturbations. Then it incorporates an LLM to further enhance the image perturbations by optimizing the designed masked answer anti-recovery loss. 
The cross-modal joint attack module will be triggered at a specific iteration, which updates the image and text perturbations sequentially. Notably, the text perturbation updates are based on both the learned gradients in the word embedding space and word synonym-based substitution.
Experimental results on two VQA datasets with five validated models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VOAttack in the transferable attack setting, compared with state-of-the-art baselines. This work also reveals a significant blind spot in the ``pre-training \& fine-tuning'' paradigm on VQA tasks.

VQAttack: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Question Answering via Pre-trained Models

The deployment of multi-stream fusion strategy on behavioral recognition from skeletal data can extract complementary features from different information streams and improve the recognition accuracy, but suffers from high model complexity and a large number of parameters. Besides, existing multi-stream methods using a fixed adjacency matrix homogenizes the model’s discrimination process across diverse actions, causing reduction of the actual lift for the multi-stream model. Finally, attention mechanisms are commonly applied to the multi-dimensional features, including spatial, temporal and channel dimensions. But their attention scores are typically fused in a concatenated manner, leading to the ignorance of the interrelation between joints in complex actions. To alleviate these issues, the Front-Rear dual Fusion Graph Convolutional Network (FRF-GCN) is proposed to provide a lightweight model based on skeletal data. Targeted adjacency matrices are also designed for different front fusion streams, allowing the model to focus on actions of varying magnitudes. Simultaneously, the mechanism of Spatial-Temporal-Channel Parallel Attention (STC-P), which processes attention in parallel and places greater emphasis on useful information, is proposed to further improve model’s performance. FRF-GCN demonstrates significant competitiveness compared to the current state-of-the-art methods on the NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and Kinetics-Skeleton 400 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sunbeam-kkt/FRF-GCN-master.

Behavioral Recognition of Skeletal Data Based on Targeted Dual Fusion Strategy

Fragment assembly involves restoring broken objects to their original geometries, and has many applications, such as archaeological restoration. Existing learning-based frameworks have shown potential for solving part assembly problems with semantic decomposition, but cannot handle such geometrical decomposition problems. In this work, we propose a novel assembly framework, proxy-level hybrid Transformer, with the core idea of using a hybrid graph to model and reason complex structural relationships between patches of fragments, dubbed as proxies. To this end, we propose a hybrid attention module, composed of intra- and inter-attention layers, enabling capturing of crucial contextual information within fragments and relative structural knowledge across fragments. Furthermore, we propose an adjacency-aware hierarchical pose estimator, exploiting a decompose-and-integrate strategy. It progressively predicts adjacent probability and relative poses between fragments, and then implicitly infers their absolute poses by dynamic information integration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively reduces assembly errors while maintaining fast inference speed.

PHFormer: Multi-Fragment Assembly Using Proxy-Level Hybrid Transformer

Time-series anomaly detection deals with the problem of detecting anomalous timesteps by learning normality from the sequence of observations. However, the concept of normality evolves over time, leading to a "new normal problem", where the distribution of normality can be changed due to the distribution shifts between training and test data. This paper highlights the prevalence of the new normal problem in unsupervised time-series anomaly detection studies. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy based on trend estimation and a self-supervised approach to learning new normalities during inference. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that incorporating the proposed strategy into the anomaly detector consistently improves the model's performances compared to the existing baselines, leading to robustness to the distribution shifts.

When Model Meets New Normals: Test-Time Adaptation for Unsupervised Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Accurately predicting pedestrian movements in complex environments is challenging due to social interactions, scene constraints, and pedestrians' multimodal behaviors. Sequential models like long short-term memory fail to effectively integrate scene features to make predicted trajectories comply with scene constraints due to disparate feature modalities of scene and trajectory. Though existing convolution neural network (CNN) models can extract scene features, they are ineffective in mapping these features into scene constraints for pedestrians and struggle to model pedestrian interactions due to the loss of target pedestrian information. To address these issues, we propose a unified environmental network based on CNN for pedestrian trajectory prediction. We introduce a polar-based method to reflect the distance and direction relationship between any position in the environment and the target pedestrian. This enables us to simultaneously model scene constraints and pedestrian social interactions in the form of feature maps. Additionally, we capture essential local features in the feature map, characterizing potential multimodal movements of pedestrians at each time step to prevent redundant predicted trajectories. We verify the performance of our proposed model on four trajectory prediction datasets, encompassing both short-term and long-term predictions. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods.

A Unified Environmental Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

In the quest for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) one of the  questions that frequently arises given a decision made by an AI system is, ``why was the decision made in this way?'' Formal approaches to explainability build a formal model of the AI system and use this to reason about the properties of the system.  Given a set of feature values for an instance to be explained, and a resulting decision, a formal abductive explanation  is a  set of features, such that if they take the given value will always lead to the same decision. This explanation is useful, it shows that only some features were used in making the final decision. But it is narrow, it only shows that if the selected features take their given values the decision is unchanged. It is possible that some features may change values and still lead to the same decision. In this paper we formally define  inflated explanations  which is a set of features, and for  each feature a set of values (always including the  value of the instance being explained), such that the decision will remain unchanged, for any of the values allowed for any of the  features in the (inflated) abductive explanation.
Inflated formal explanations are more informative than common abductive explanations since e.g. they allow us to see if the exact value of a feature is important, or it could be any nearby value.  Overall they allow us to better understand the role of each feature in the decision. We show that we can compute inflated explanations for not that much greater cost than abductive explanations, and that we can extend duality results for abductive explanations also to inflated explanations.

Delivering Inflated Explanations

Knowledge distillation is a simple but powerful way to transfer knowledge between a teacher model to a student model. Existing work suffers from at least one of the following key limitations in terms of direction and scope of transfer which restrict its use: all knowledge is transferred from teacher to student regardless of whether or not that knowledge is useful, the student is the only one learning in this exchange, and typically distillation transfers knowledge only from a single teacher to a single student. We formulate a novel form of knowledge distillation in which many models can act as both students and teachers which we call cooperative distillation. The models cooperate as follows: a model (the student) identifies specific deficiencies in it's performance and searches for another model (the teacher) who encodes learned knowledge into instructional virtual instances via counterfactual instance generation. Because different models may have different strengths and weaknesses, all models can act as either students or teachers (cooperation) when appropriate and only distill knowledge in areas specific to their strengths (focus). Since counterfactuals as a paradigm are not tied to any specific algorithm, we can use this method to distill knowledge between learners of different architectures, algorithms, and even feature spaces. We demonstrate our approach not only outperforms baselines such as transfer learning, self-supervised learning, and multiple knowledge distillation algorithms on several datasets, but it can also be used in settings where the aforementioned techniques cannot.

Cooperative Knowledge Distillation: A Learner Agnostic Approach | VIDEO

Recent research on predicting the binding affinity between drug molecules and proteins use representations learned, through unsupervised learning techniques, from large databases of molecule SMILES and protein sequences. While these representations have significantly enhanced the predictions, they are usually based on a limited set of modalities, and they do not exploit available knowledge about existing relations among molecules and proteins. Our study reveals that enhanced representations, derived from multimodal knowledge graphs describing relations among molecules and proteins, lead to state-of-the-art results in well-established benchmarks (first place in the leaderboard for Therapeutics Data Commons benchmark ``Drug-Target Interaction Domain Generalization Benchmark", with an improvement of 8 points with respect to previous best result). Moreover, our results significantly surpass those achieved in standard benchmarks by using conventional pre-trained representations that rely only on sequence or SMILES data. We release our multimodal knowledge graphs, integrating data from seven public data sources, and which contain over 30 million triples.  Pretrained models from our proposed graphs and benchmark task source code are also released.

Knowledge Enhanced Representation Learning for Drug Discovery

Few-shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) aims to extract relational facts from a sparse set of labeled corpora. Recent studies have shown promising results in FSRE by employing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) within the framework of supervised contrastive learning, which considers both instances and label facts. However, how to effectively harness massive instance-label pairs to encompass the learned representation with semantic richness in this learning paradigm is not fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel synergistic anchored contrastive pre-training framework. This framework is motivated by the insight that the diverse viewpoints conveyed through instance-label pairs capture incomplete yet complementary intrinsic textual semantics. Specifically, our framework involves a symmetrical contrastive objective that encompasses both sentence-anchored and label-anchored contrastive losses. By combining these two losses, the model establishes a robust and uniform representation space. This space effectively captures the reciprocal alignment of feature distributions among instances and relational facts, simultaneously enhancing the maximization of mutual information across diverse perspectives within the same relation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant performance enhancements compared to baseline models in downstream FSRE tasks. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior adaptability to handle the challenges of domain shift and zero-shot relation extraction. Our code is available online at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/FSRE-SaCon.

Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

In this work, we focus on label efficient learning for video
action detection. We develop a novel semi-supervised active
learning approach which utilizes both labeled as well as un-
labeled data along with informative sample selection for ac-
tion detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal
localization along with classification, which poses several
challenges for both active learning (informative sample se-
lection) as well as semi-supervised learning (pseudo label
generation). First, we propose NoiseAug, a simple augmenta-
tion strategy which effectively selects informative samples for
video action detection. Next, we propose fft-attention, a novel
technique based on high-pass filtering which enables effective
utilization of pseudo label for SSL in video action detection
by emphasizing on relevant activity region within a video.
We evaluate the proposed approach on three different bench-
mark datasets, UCF-101-24, JHMDB-21, and Youtube-VOS.
First, we demonstrate its effectiveness on video action detec-
tion where the proposed approach outperforms prior works in
semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning along with
several baseline approaches in both UCF101-24 and JHMDB-
21. Next, we also show its effectiveness on Youtube-VOS for
video object segmentation demonstrating its generalization
capability for other dense prediction tasks in videos.

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Next from AAAI 2024

VQAttack: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Question Answering via Pre-trained Models

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