United States

We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents&#39; utilities, the principal also acts as a correlation device to correlate the agents&#39; actions. We consider the setting where the agents are categorized into a small number of types. Agents of the same type share identical utility functions and are treated equitably in the utility functions of both other agents and the principal. We study the problem of computing optimal signaling strategies for the principal, under three different types of signaling channels: public, private, and semi-private.  Our results include revelation-principle-style characterizations of optimal signaling strategies, linear programming formulations, and analysis of in/tractability of the optimization problems. It is demonstrated that when the maximum number of deviating agents is bounded by a constant, our LP-based formulations compute optimal signaling strategies in polynomial time. Otherwise, the problems are NP-hard.

AAAI 2025

Bayesian Persuasion with Externalities: Exploiting Agent Types

gtep

mechanism design

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. 

AAAI 2022

We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents' utilities, the principal also acts as a correlation device to correlate the agents' actions. We consider the setting where the agents are categorized into a small number of types. Agents of the same type share identical utility functions and are treated equitably in the utility functions of both other agents and the principal. We study the problem of computing optimal signaling strategies for the principal, under three different types of signaling channels: public, private, and semi-private.  Our results include revelation-principle-style characterizations of optimal signaling strategies, linear programming formulations, and analysis of in/tractability of the optimization problems. It is demonstrated that when the maximum number of deviating agents is bounded by a constant, our LP-based formulations compute optimal signaling strategies in polynomial time. Otherwise, the problems are NP-hard.

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.



We present a novel language for reasoning about agents' cognitive attitudes of both epistemic and motivational type. We interpret it by means of a computationally grounded semantics using belief bases. Our language includes five types of modal operators for implicit belief, complete attraction, complete repulsion, realistic attraction and realistic repulsion. We give an axiomatization of our logic and show that our operators are not mutually expressible and that they can be combined to represent a large variety of psychological concepts including ambivalence, indifference, being motivated, being demotivated and preference. We present a dynamic extension of the language that supports reasoning about the effects of belief change operations. We provide a succinct formulation of model checking for our languages and a PSPACE model checking procedure relying on a reduction into TQBF. Moreover, we provide some experimental results for the implemented procedure on computation time in a concrete example.

A Computationally Grounded Framework for Cognitive Attitudes

The world model's ability to simulate the interaction between agent and the real environment through reasoning modules can overcome the challenge of low sample efficiency in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms. Many methods directly use known state sequences for reasoning, however, this approach fails to enhance the quality of reasoning by capturing the subtle variations between states. Much like how humans infer trends in event development from these variations, in this work, we introduce Gobal-Local variation Awareness Mamba-based world model (GLAM), that improves reasoning quality by perceiving and predicting variations between states. GLAM comprises two Mamba-based parallel reasoning modules, GMamba and LMamba, which focus on perceiving variations from global and local perspectives, respectively, during the reasoning process. GMamba focuses on identifying patterns of variation between states in the input sequence and leverages these patterns to enhance the prediction of future state variations. LMamba emphasizes reasoning about unknown information, such as rewards, termination signals, and visual representations, by perceiving variations in adjacent states. By integrating the strengths of the two modules, GLAM accounts for higher-value variations in environmental changes, providing the agent with more efficient imagination-based training. We demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in normalized human scores on the Atari 100k benchmark. It offers a novel approach to multi-module parallel inference, contributing to the design of world model frameworks.

GLAM: Global-Local Variation Awareness in Mamba-based World Model

Text-to-Image generation (TTI) technologies are advancing rapidly, especially in the English language communities. However, apart from the user input language barrier problem, English-native TTI models inherently carry biases from their English world centric training data, which creates a dilemma for development of other language-native TTI models. One common choice is to fine-tune the English-native TTI model with translated samples. It falls short of fully addressing the model bias problem. Alternatively, training non-English language native models from scratch can effectively resolve the English world bias, but model trained this way would diverge from the English TTI communities, thus not able to utilize the strides continuously gaining in the English TTI communities any more. To build Chinese TTI model meanwhile keep compatibility with the English TTI communities, we propose a novel model structure referred as "Bridge Diffusion Model" (BDM). The proposed BDM employs a backbone-branch network structure to learn the Chinese semantics while keep the latent space compatible with the English-native TTI backbone, in an end-to-end manner. The unique advantages of the proposed BDM are that it's not only adept at generating images that precisely depict Chinese semantics, but also compatible with various English-native TTI plugins, such as different checkpoints, LoRA, ControlNet, Dreambooth, and Textual Inversion, \etc. Moreover, BDM can concurrently generate content seamlessly combining both Chinese-native and English-native semantics within a single image, fostering cultural interaction.

Bridge Diffusion Model: Bridge Chinese Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with English Communities

Artificial intelligence (AI) models for computer vision trained with supervised machine learning are assumed to solve classification tasks by imitating human behavior learned from training labels. Most efforts in recent vision research focus on measuring the model task performance using standardized benchmarks such as accuracy. However limited work has sought to understand the perceptual difference between humans and machines. To fill this gap, this study first analyzes the statistical distributions of mistakes from the two sources, and then explores how task difficulty level affects these distributions. We find that even when AI learns an excellent model from the training data, one that outperforms humans in overall accuracy, these AI models have significant and consistent differences from human perception. We demonstrate the importance of studying these differences with a simple human-AI teaming algorithm that outperforms humans alone, AI alone, or AI-AI teaming.

Human and AI Perceptual Differences in Image Classification Errors

Sequential recommendation systems aim to predict the next item based on users' historical interactions. While traditional methods focus on learning feature representations or user preferences, they often struggle with detecting subtle demand shifts in short sequences, especially when these shifts are obscured by noise or biases. To address these issues, we propose CoDeR (Counterfactual Demand Reasoning), a novel framework designed to handle demand shifts in sequential recommendations with greater precision. CoDeR features two key modules: (1) the User Demand Extraction module, which utilizes self-attention mechanisms and demand graphs to identify and model demand shifts from minimal user interactions; and (2) the Counterfactual Demand Reasoning module, which employs causal effect analysis and backdoor adjustment techniques to distinguish true demand shifts from noisy or biased signals. Our approach represents the first application of counterfactual reasoning to sequential recommendation systems. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CoDeR significantly outperforms existing baselines. The datasets and codes are released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CoDeR-E743.

CoDeR: Counterfactual Demand Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation

Traffic prediction is pivotal in intelligent transportation systems. Existing works mainly focus on improving overall accuracy, overlooking a crucial problem of whether prediction results will lead to biased decisions by transportation authorities. In practice, the uneven deployment of traffic sensors in different urban areas produces imbalanced data, making the traffic prediction model fail in some areas and leading to unfair regional decision-making that eventually severely affects residents' equity and quality of life. Additionally, existing fairness machine learning models fail to preserve fair traffic prediction for a prolonged time. Although they can achieve fairness at certain time points, such static fairness will be broken as the traffic conditions change. To fill this research gap, we investigate prolonged fair traffic prediction, introduce two novel fairness definitions tailored to dynamic traffic scenarios, and propose a prolonged fairness traffic prediction framework, namely FairTP.  We argue that fairness in traffic scenarios changes dynamically over time and across areas. The prediction accuracy of each traffic sensor or city area should take turns to "sacrifice" or "benefit" in order for the model to achieve fairness, eventually achieving prolonged fairness when such "sacrifice" and "benefit" are similar within a period of time. Accordingly, we first defined region-based static fairness and sensor-based dynamic fairness. Next, we designed a state identification module in FairTP to discriminate between states of "sacrifice" or "benefit" to enable prolonged fairness-aware traffic predictions. Lastly, a state-guided balanced sampling strategy is designed to select training examples to promote prediction fairness further, mitigating the performance disparities among regions with imbalanced traffic sensors. Extensive experiments in two real-world datasets show that FairTP significantly improves prediction fairness without causing much accuracy degradation.

FairTP: A Prolonged Fairness Framework for Traffic Prediction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in various intelligent tasks but still struggle with complex action reasoning tasks that require systematic search. To address this limitation, we introduce a method that bridges the natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs with the symbolic reasoning capabilities of action languages---a formal language for reasoning about actions. Our approach, termed  LLM+AL, leverages the LLM's strengths in semantic parsing and commonsense knowledge generation alongside the action language's expertise in automated reasoning based on encoded knowledge. We compare LLM+AL against state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini Ultra 1.0, as well as other related works that use LLMs as a semantic parser, using benchmarks for complex reasoning about actions. Our findings indicate that while all methods exhibit various errors, LLM+AL, with relatively simple human corrections, consistently leads to correct answers, whereas using LLMs alone does not yield improvements even after human intervention. LLM+AL also contributes to automated generation of action languages.

LLM+AL: Bridging Large Language Models and Action Languages for Complex Reasoning About Actions

Medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are becoming an instrumental part of healthcare systems, assisting medical personnel with decision making and results analysis. Models for radiology report generation are able to interpret medical imagery, thus reducing the workload of radiologists. As medical data is scarce and protected by privacy regulations, medical MLLMs represent valuable intellectual property. However, these assets are potentially vulnerable to model stealing, where attackers aim to replicate their functionality via black-box access. So far, model stealing for the medical domain has focused on image classification; however, existing attacks are not effective against MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce Adversarial Domain Alignment (ADA-Steal), the first stealing attack against medical MLLMs. ADA-Steal relies on natural images, which are public and widely available, as opposed to their medical counterparts. We show that data augmentation with adversarial noise is sufficient to overcome the data distribution gap between natural images and the domain-specific distribution of the victim MLLM. Experiments on the IU X-RAY and MIMIC-CXR radiology datasets demonstrate that Adversarial Domain Alignment enables attackers to steal the medical MLLM without any access to medical data.

Medical Multimodal Model Stealing Attacks via Adversarial Domain Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in linguistic tasks but struggle with mathematical reasoning, particularly in non- English languages like Hindi. This research aims to en- hance the mathematical reasoning skills of smaller, resource- efficient open-source LLMs in both Hindi and English. We evaluate models like OpenHathi 7B, LLaMA-2 7B, Wizard- Math 7B, Mistral 7B, LLeMMa 7B, MAmmoTH 7B, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 using zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) methods, and supervised fine-tuning. Our approach in- corporates curriculum learning, progressively training mod- els on increasingly difficult problems, a novel Decompo- sition Strategy to simplify complex arithmetic operations, and a Structured Solution Design that divides solutions into phases. Our experiments result in notable performance en- hancements. WizardMath 7B exceeds Gemini’s accuracy on English datasets by +6% and matches Gemini’s performance on Hindi datasets. Adopting a bilingual approach that com- bines English and Hindi samples achieves results comparable to individual language models, demonstrating the capability to learn mathematical reasoning in both languages. This re- search highlights the potential for improving mathematical reasoning in open-source LLMs.

Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Advancing Open-Source LLMs in Hindi and English

Multi-robot task planning and collaboration are crucial challenges in robotics. While Behavior Trees (BTs) have been established as a popular control architecture and are plannable for a single robot, the development of effective multi-robot BT planning algorithms remains challenging due to the complexity of coordinating diverse action spaces. We propose the Multi-Robot Behavior Tree Planning (MRBTP) algorithm, with theoretical guarantees of both soundness and completeness. MRBTP features cross-tree expansion to coordinate heterogeneous actions across different BTs to achieve the team's goal. For homogeneous actions, we retain backup structures among BTs to ensure robustness and prevent redundant execution through intention sharing. While MRBTP is capable of generating BTs for both homogeneous and heterogeneous robot teams, its efficiency can be further improved. We then propose an optional plugin for MRBTP when Large Language Models (LLMs) are available to reason goal-related actions for each robot. These relevant actions can be pre-planned to form long-horizon subtrees, significantly enhancing the planning speed and collaboration efficiency of MRBTP. We evaluate our algorithm in warehouse management and everyday service scenarios. Results demonstrate MRBTP's robustness and execution efficiency under varying settings, as well as the ability of the pre-trained LLM to generate effective task-specific subtrees for MRBTP.

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