United States

Time series data, prevalent in fields like medical, e-commerce, finance, etc., is used for forecasting, such as predicting next quarter’s product demand based on past trends. However, some problems necessitate causal models to answer questions like “What the product demand would have been without a specific intervention (e.g., products with slower delivery time suppressed from the search results)?” 
Such questions require causal models to estimate unobserved counterfactual outcome. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Causal Forecasting (GCF) model, that predicts the unobserved demand leveraging the relationship of a product with other similar products in the marketplace (spatial aspect), along with change in demand over time for each product (temporal aspect). The core idea is to estimate the counterfactual outcome using a synthetic control unaffected by the treatment. Our approach uses RGCN-dilated CNN based network, which leverages domain knowledge to automatically design a synthetic control during training. Using GCF for our demand forecasting problem, we achieve 75.3% lower MAPE compared to baseline. We use the forecasted values to recommend high demand products, in terms of our business metric (discussed later) which tracks the quality of these recommendations, we achieve a significant jump of 61.2%. Moreover, it adds 67.8% more high demand products to the marketplace, compared to existing model in production.
Deployment of GCF in 2023, led to +1399 bps improvement in number of products with a view from customers, and +310 bps improvement in number of products with a sale. We also compare GCF with state of the art forecasting methods on a semi-synthetic data, created by simulating a treatment on open source traffic data METR-LA. We achieve 30% lower MSE against TGCN, a time series forecasting approach and 30% lower MSE against CRN and 25% lower MSE against Google Causal Impact model, both of which are causal forecasting approaches.

AAAI 2025

GCF: Estimating Unobserved Demand Using Graph Causal Forecasting

AIAI 2020 (16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations) should be held in Halkidiki, Greece. Due to current Covid-19 situation the conference will be held virtually. Underline will host a repository of video talks and preserve them for the future. Videos will be released on Underline one day after the conference.

AIAI 2020

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.



Cotton is a critical agricultural product and industrial raw material, playing a key role in the national economies and people's living conditions, particularly in developing countries. However, cotton picking and processing often result in the contamination with various foreign fibers, such as hair, hemp rope, plastic film, and polypropylene rope. These contaminants are difficult to remove during textile processing and tend to break into small fragments, significantly reducing the quality of cotton products and negatively impacting the cotton industry. In this paper, we present an AI-enabled hardware-software integrated system--XCotton, for identifying and removing foreign fibers. Our system has been deployed in actual cotton production environments in the multiple regions in China, Central Asia, and Africa. XCotton achieves a cleaning efficiency of 1000kg/h, representing a 43% improvement, with only 14 kWh energy consumption (63% less). Moreover, XCotton brings significant business values to its manufacturer and clients. XCotton not only enhances the quality of cotton products but also contributes to the value-adding and upgrading of the cotton industry in developing regions, supporting economic growth and improving living conditions.

XCotton: Advancing AI-Enabled Hardware/Software Integrated System for Foreign Fiber Cleaning

In the domain of merchant-oriented risk control decisions within e-commerce, balancing the effectiveness of risk management with merchant satisfaction remains a critical challenge. Strict risk control strategies, while effectively mitigating risks, often lead to increased merchant dissatisfaction. Conversely, loose policies could enhance the merchant experience but raise the likelihood of incidents, potentially incurring substantial financial losses. Additionally, determining personalized risk control strategies for different merchants to achieve optimal overall risk management effectiveness is crucial. Given the high uncertainty in the outcomes of different risk control decisions, manual strategy allocation and real-time adjustments are commonly implemented in practice, leading to significant human and resource costs. In this work, we present a novel automated risk control decision framework that utilizes unbiased data-driven decision-making and dynamic optimization to automate the allocation and adjustment of risk control strategies. Our proposed solution adapts to various online business requirements, demonstrating exceptional risk management performance and significantly reducing overall costs. This approach has been extensively deployed and validated in Alibaba's risk control operations, achieving large-scale automated risk control decisions.

Adaptive Merchant-Centric Risk Control via Unbiased Decision-Making and Dynamic Optimization in E-Commerce

Recent years have witnessed tremendous successes of learning for sequential decision-making, and in particular, Reinforcement Learning (RL). Prominent application examples include playing Go and video games, robotics, autonomous driving, and recently large language models. Most such success stories naturally involve "multi-agents". Hence, there has been surging research interest in advancing Multi-Agent Learning in Dynamic Environments, particularly, multi-agent RL (MARL), to which my research has led and made significant contributions. My work has established both sample and computational complexities of learning in Stochastic Games, the most fundamental model of MARL, and advocated a unique Economics perspective of independent learning in Stochastic Games. My work has also initiated the recent studies of distributed and networked MARL, with applications in robust adversarial RL, offline RL, and Robotics. This paper will survey my notable contributions along this journey of developing the foundations of multi-agent learning in dynamic environments.

Foundations of Multi-Agent Learning in Dynamic Environments: Where Reinforcement Learning Meets Strategic Decision-Making

We introduce LLM Stinger, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate adversarial suffixes for jailbreak attacks. Unlike traditional methods, which require complex prompt engineering or white-box access, LLM Stinger uses a reinforcement learning (RL) loop to fine-tune an attacker LLM, generating new suffixes based on existing attacks for harmful questions from the HarmBench benchmark. Our method significantly outperforms existing red-teaming approaches (we compared against 15 of the latest methods), achieving a +57.2% improvement in Attack Success Rate (ASR) on LLaMA2-7B-chat and a +50.3% ASR increase on Claude 2, both models known for their extensive safety measures. Additionally, we achieved a 94.97% ASR on GPT-3.5 and 99.4% on Gemma-2B-it, demonstrating the robustness and adaptability of LLM Stinger across open and closed-source models.

LLM Stinger: Jailbreaking LLMs Using RL Fine-Tuned LLMs (Student Abstract)

The quality of interactions between parents and children is a critical factor in child development. Recent years have seen programs to improve parenting behaviors through evidence-based approaches, such as attachment-based interventions. A vital element of these programs is to assess the quality of parenting behaviors via video recordings of parent-child interactions, which is often time-intensive. In our previous work, we explored machine learning models to predict expert ratings of parenting behaviors from video recordings of semi-structured parent-child play. However, the large set of low-level multimodal features struggled to provide explainable insights, which created barriers to communicating with domain experts and improving the models further. In this work, we developed a machine learning pipeline that combines sparse multiple canonical correlation analysis with causal discovery techniques to uncover explainable causal relationships between nine categories of behavioral features and the quality ratings of parent-child interactions. This approach offers valuable insights into the otherwise black-box models and contributes to the growing body of work on transparent and trustworthy machine learning models of parenting behaviors.

Causal Explanation of Quality of Parent-Child Interactions with Multimodal Behavioral Features (Student Abstract)

Knowledge bases traditionally require manual optimization to ensure reasonable performance when answering queries. We build on previous neurosymbolic approaches by improving the training of an embedding model for logical statements that maximizes similarity between unifying atoms and minimizes similarity of non-unifying atoms. In particular, we evaluate different approaches to training this model.

An Evaluation of Approaches to Train Embeddings for Logical Inference (Student Abstract)

Phone scams pose a significant threat to individuals and communities, causing substantial financial losses and emotional distress. Despite ongoing efforts to combat these scams, scammers continue to adapt and refine their tactics, making it imperative to explore innovative countermeasures. This research explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide detection of fraudulent phone calls. By analyzing the conversational dynamics between scammers and victims, LLM-based detectors can identify potential scams as they occur, offering immediate protection to users. While such approaches demonstrate promising results, we also acknowledge the challenges of biased datasets, relatively low recall, and hallucinations that must be addressed for further advancement in this field.

Combating Phone Scams with LLM-based Detection: Where Do We Stand? (Student Abstract)

This paper makes a novel combination of a recently proposed bias audit framework and a recently proposed jailbreaking technique for Llama3. On an audit comprising several disadvantaged groups, our experiments reveal that a jailbroken Llama3 exhibits worrisome antisemitism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia (to list a few) much akin to a broad suite of LLMs that were susceptible to similar biases.

All You Need Is S P A C E: When Jailbreaking Meets Bias Audit and Reveals What Lies Beneath the Guardrails (Student Abstract)

Semantic segmentation of marine environments is essential for autonomous navigation of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) as well as the detection of environmental hazards such as oil spills. To tackle the challenges of accurate environmental perception, we propose a lightweight semantic segmentation network, LAqua (Laplacians for Aquatic Segmentation), which leverages Laplacian pyramids to enhance edge detection in marine imagery. Our method drastically reduces computational requirements while maintaining high accuracy in generating semantic masks for marine environments. We evaluate LAqua on two distinct datasets: one focused on detecting oil spills in port environments and another on environmental segmentation for USVs. Results show that LAqua not only performs well across varied marine settings but also achieves comparable or superior segmentation accuracy with far fewer parameters than other models. This efficiency highlights LAqua's potential for applications in real-time detection for marine environments.

LAqua: Laplacian Pyramids for Aquatic Segmentation (Student Abstract)

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labelling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model opti- mization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimisations are not ineffective on their own.

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