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Text readability assessment involves categorizing texts based on readers&#39; comprehension levels. Hybrid automatic readability assessment (ARA) models, combining deep and linguistic features, have recently attracted rising attention due to their impressive performance. 
However, existing hybrid ARA models generally ignore the specific-intrinsic information of deep and linguistic representations, and cannot fully explore their common-intrinsic information.
In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised collaborative information bottleneck (SCIB) module for ARA to address these issues. 
Specifically, we collaboratively consider both specific-intrinsic and common-intrinsic information of the linguistic representation and various levels of deep representations including the document-, sentence- and word-level deep representations, and yield their refined representations via a self-supervised information bottleneck scheme. 
Extensive experiments are conducted on four English and two Chinese corpora to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of four important evaluation metrics, and the suggested SCIB module can effectively capture the specific- and common-intrinsic information.

AAAI 2025

Self-Supervised Collaborative Information Bottleneck for Text Readability Assessment

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
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so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Text readability assessment involves categorizing texts based on readers' comprehension levels. Hybrid automatic readability assessment (ARA) models, combining deep and linguistic features, have recently attracted rising attention due to their impressive performance. 
However, existing hybrid ARA models generally ignore the specific-intrinsic information of deep and linguistic representations, and cannot fully explore their common-intrinsic information.
In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised collaborative information bottleneck (SCIB) module for ARA to address these issues. 
Specifically, we collaboratively consider both specific-intrinsic and common-intrinsic information of the linguistic representation and various levels of deep representations including the document-, sentence- and word-level deep representations, and yield their refined representations via a self-supervised information bottleneck scheme. 
Extensive experiments are conducted on four English and two Chinese corpora to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of four important evaluation metrics, and the suggested SCIB module can effectively capture the specific- and common-intrinsic information.

technical paper

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/)

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.



Existing cross-modal retrieval methods typically rely on large-scale vision-language pair data. This makes it challenging to efficiently develop a cross-modal retrieval model for under-resourced languages of interest. Therefore, Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval (CCR), which aims to align vision and the low-resource language (the $\textit{target language}$) without using any human-labeled target-language data, has gained increasing attention. As a general parameter-efficient way, a common solution is to utilize adapter modules to transfer the vision-language alignment ability of Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models from a source language to a target language. However, these adapters are usually $\textit{static}$ once learned,  making it difficult to adapt to target-language captions with $\textit{varied}$ expressions. To alleviate it, we propose $\textit{\textbf{D}ynamic}$ $\textit{\textbf{A}dapter}$ with $\textit{\textbf{S}emantics}$ $\textit{\textbf{D}isentangling}$ (DASD), whose parameters are dynamically generated conditioned on the characteristics of the input captions. Considering that the semantics and expression styles of the input caption largely influence how to encode it, we propose a semantic disentangling module to extract the semantic-related and semantic-agnostic features from the input, ensuring that generated adapters are well-suited to the characteristics of input caption. Extensive experiments on two image-text datasets and one video-text dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for cross-lingual cross-modal retrieval, as well as its good compatibility with various VLP models. Our source code is anonymously released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DASD-BB8B/.

Dynamic Adapter with Semantics Disentangling for Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval

GNN-based approaches for learning general policies across planning domains are limited by the expressive power of $C_2$, namely; first-order logic with two variables and counting. This limitation can be overcomed by transitioning to $k$-GNNs, for $k=3$, wherein object embeddings are substituted with triplet embeddings. Yet, while $3$-GNNs have the expressive power of $C_3$, unlike $1$- and $2$-GNNs that are confined to $C_2$, they require quartic time for message exchange and cubic space to store embeddings, rendering them infeasible. In this work, we introduce a parameterized version R-GNN[$t$] (with parameter $t$) of Relational GNNs. Unlike GNNs, that are designed to perform computation on graphs, Relational GNNs are desgined to do computation on relational structures. When $t=\infty$, R-GNN[$t$] approximates $3$-GNNs over graphs, but  using only quadratic space for embeddings. For lower values of $t$, such as $t=1$ and $t=2$, R-GNN[$t$] achieves a weaker approximation by exchanging fewer messages, yet interestingly, often yield the expressivity required in several planning domains. Furthermore, the new R-GNN[$t$] architecture is the original R-GNN architecture with a suitable transformation applied to the inputs only. Experimental results illustrate the clear performance gains of R-GNN[$1$] and R-GNN[$2$] over the plain R-GNNs, and also over Edge Transformers that also approximate $3$-GNNs.

Learning More Expressive General Policies for Classical Planning Domains

In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism can suffer from incentive issues, it is folklore that contestants will still be roughly truthful as the number of events grows. Yet thus far the literature lacks a formal analysis of this traditional mechanism. This paper gives the first such analysis. We first demonstrate that the ``long-run truthfulness'' folklore is false: even for arbitrary numbers of events, the best forecaster can have an incentive to hedge, reporting more moderate beliefs to increase their win probability. On the positive side, however, we show that two contestants will be approximately truthful when they have sufficient uncertainty over the relative quality of their opponent and the outcomes of the events, a case which may arise in practice.

Hedging and Approximate Truthfulness in Traditional Forecasting Competitions

Label polysemy, where an instance can be associated with multiple labels, is common in real-world tasks.
LDL (label distribution learning) is an effective learning paradigm for handling label polysemy, where each instance is associated with a label distribution. Although numerous LDL algorithms have been proposed and achieved satisfactory performance on most existing datasets, they are typically trained directly on the collected label distributions which often lack quality guarantees in real-world tasks due to annotator subjectivity and algorithm assumptions. Consequently, direct learning from such uncertain label distributions can lead to unpredictable generalization performance.
To address this problem, we propose an adaptive-grained label distribution learning framework whose main idea is to extract relatively reliable supervision information from unreliable label distributions, and thus the label distribution learning task can be decomposed into three subtasks: coarsening label distributions, learning coarse-grained labels and refining coarse-grained labels.
In this framework, we design an adaptive label coarsening algorithm to extract an optimal coarsen-grained labels and a label refining function to enhance the coarse-grained label into the final label distributions.
Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the advantages of our proposal.

Adaptive-Grained Label Distribution Learning

Horiyama et al. (AAAI 2024) considered the problem of generating instances with a unique minimum vertex cover under certain conditions. The Pre-assignment for Uniquification of Minimum Vertex Cover problem (shortly PAU-VC) is the problem, for given a graph $G$, to find a minimum set $S$ of vertices in $G$ such that there is a unique minimum vertex cover of $G$ containing $S$. We show that PAU-VC is fixed parameter tractable parameterized by clique-width, which improves an exponential algorithm for trees given by Horiyama et al. Among natural graph classes with unbounded clique-width, we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time on split graphs and unit interval graphs.

Pre-Assignment Problem for Unique Minimum Vertex Cover on Bounded Clique-Width Graphs

Multi-modal transformers are rapidly gaining attention in video captioning tasks. Existing multi-modal video captioning methods extract a fixed number of frames, but this has critical challenges. If a limited number of frames are extracted, important frames with essential information for caption generation may be missed. Conversely, extracting an excessive number of frames includes consecutive frames, potentially causing redundancy in visual tokens extracted from consecutive video frames. To extract an appropriate number of frames for each video, this paper proposes the first model-agnostic module selection framework in video captioning that has two main functions: (1) selecting a caption generation module with an appropriate size based on visual tokens extracted from video frames, and (2) constructing subsets of visual tokens for the selected caption generation module. Furthermore, we propose a new adaptive attention masking scheme that enhances attention on important visual tokens. Our numerical experiments with three different benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the performances of three recent video captioning models.

MAMS: Model-Agnostic Module Selection Framework for Video Captioning

Traffic classification is crucial for network management and security. Recently, deep learning-based methods have demonstrated good performance in traffic classification. However, they primarily capture features from raw packet bytes, overlooking the significance of inter-packet correlations within flows from a global perspective. Additionally, effectively handling both packet-length and temporal information, while extracting the structural relationships from a graph into the model, remains a challenge for enhancing the performance of traffic prediction. In this paper, we propose DigTraffic, a novel dual-channel interactive graph transformer to address these limitations. DigTraffic employs a message-level graph-structured flow representation combined with message-aware structural aggregation. To learn intrinsic flow representations, DigTraffic constructs traffic interaction graphs, by incorporating three well-designed heterogeneous types of edges to capture client-server interactions. After that, we separately encode lengthy and temporal flow sequences using a dual-channel network and fuse these modalities within a Transformer architecture. Furthermore, DigTraffic introduces a message-aware Graph Transformer that leverages both node embeddings and edge spatial relations to capture complex graph structures and rich structural information.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four real-world traffic datasets.

Dual-Channel Interactive Graph Transformer for Traffic Classification with Message-Aware Flow Representation

The card game Hanabi has recently gained popularity as a benchmark for handling epistemic reasoning in AI systems. However it has until now mostly been approached through the lens of machine learning rather than formal logical analysis. This is mostly due to the fact that modelling Hanabi in the standard epistemic logic DEL is untractable. In this paper we take a different approach to formalizing Hanabi, using the simple epistemic logic EL-O as a starting point. We generalize common knowledge in EL-O to arbitrary groups of agents and show how to overcome some of the limitations EL-O places on agent reasoning by introducing a special reasoning action. Analysing this formalization of Hanabi finally leads us to introduce an alternative semantics for our generalization of EL-O in which models are finite and satisfiability checking is NP-complete, and which is enough to fully describe the evolution of knowledge in a game of Hanabi.

A Logical Analysis of Hanabi

In adaptive systems, predictors are used to anticipate changes in the system’s state or behavior that may require system adaption, e.g., changing its configuration or adjusting resource allocation. Therefore, the quality of predictors is crucial for the overall reliability and performance of the system under control. This paper studies predictors in systems exhibiting probabilistic and non-deterministic behavior modelled as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Main contributions are the introduction of quantitative notions that measure the effectiveness of predictors in terms of their average capability to predict the occurrence of failures or other undesired system behaviors. The average is taken over all memoryless policies. We study two classes of such notions. One class is inspired by concepts that have been introduced in statistical analysis to explain the impact of features on the decisions of binary classifiers (such as precision, recall, f-score). Second, we study a measure that borrows ideas from recent work on probability-raising causality in MDPs and determines the quality of a predictor by the fraction of memoryless policies under which (the set of states in) the predictor is a probabilityraising cause for the considered failure scenario.

Formal Quality Measures for Predictors in Markov Decision Processes

Recommender systems in various applications often encounter the challenge of cold-start, which refers to how to provide recommendations for completely new users. Cross-domain recommendation offers a solution to address this cold-start issue by leveraging user interaction information from other domains and providing recommendations for users in the target domain. However, applying the classic two-tower model in cross-domain scenarios for pure cold-start users proves challenging, and most existing cross-domain cold-start recommendation models adopt an embedding-mapping framework that lacks end-to-end efficiency. The parallel training recommendation method lacks consideration of the domain-level intrinsic characteristics of cross-domain information. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework that Domain-level Disentanglement framework based on information enhancement for Cross-domain Cold-start Recommendation. On one hand, we achieve deep utilization of domain-level information through independent extraction of domain knowledge and fusion using heuristic strategies. On the other hand, our model is incorporated with an information enhancement network based on user attention and a user personalized adaptor. We introduce measures to assess user variability and immutability in cross-domain recommendation, aiming to eliminate inter-domain bias and highlight individual user preferences. Experimental results on widely used cross-domain recommendation datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

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