United States

As the representations output by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes important to ensure that these representations are fair and stable. In this work, we establish a key connection between counterfactual fairness and stability and leverage it to propose a novel framework, NIFTY (uNIfying Fairness and stabiliTY), which can be used with any GNN to learn fair and stable representations. We introduce a novel objective function that simultaneously accounts for fairness and stability and develop a layer-wise weight normalization using the Lipschitz constant to enhance neural message passing in GNNs. In doing so, we enforce fairness and stability both in the objective function as well as in the GNN architecture. Further, we show theoretically that our layer-wise weight normalization promotes counterfactual fairness and stability in the resulting representations. We introduce three new graph datasets comprising of high-stakes decisions in criminal justice and financial lending domains. Extensive experimentation with the above datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our framework.

UAI 2021

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

gnns

stability

representation learning

fairness

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).
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A ticket is required to attend this event, please register using the link below:

https://aamas2022-conference.auckland.ac.nz/attending/registration/

Registration Is Required

AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

lightning talk

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
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<br>Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
<br>UAI 2021 Program Chairs
<br>uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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  <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cri0lsViAGK?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=526  height=226  frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
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A ticket is required to access this conference. Please use the provided link to register for the event.

https://auai.org/uai2021/registration

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

People can learn new visual concepts without any samples, from information given by language or by deductive reasoning. For instance, people can use \textit{elimination} to infer the meaning of novel labels from their context. While recognizing novel concepts was intensively studied in zero-shot learning with semantic descriptions, training models to learn by elimination is much less studied. Here we describe the first approach to train an agent to reason-by-elimination, by providing instructions that contain both familiar concepts and unfamiliar ones ( ``pick the red box and the green wambim''). In our framework, the agent combines a perception module with a reasoning module that includes internal memory. It uses reinforcement learning to construct a reasoning policy that, by considering all available items in a room, can make a correct inference even for never-seen objects or concepts. Furthermore, it can then perform one-shot learning and use newly learned concepts for inferring additional novel concepts. We evaluate this approach in a new set of environments, showing that agents successfully learn to reason by elimination, and can also learn novel concepts and use them for further reasoning. This approach paves the way to handle open-world environments by extending the abundant supervised learning approaches with reasoning frameworks that can handle novel concepts.

Known unknowns: Learning novel concepts using reasoning-by-elimination

Influence maximization is the problem of finding a small subset of nodes in a network that can maximize the diffusion of information. Recently, it has also found application in HIV prevention, substance abuse prevention, micro-finance adoption, etc., where the goal is to identify the set of peer leaders in a real-world physical social network who can disseminate information to a large group of people. Unlike online social networks, real-world networks are not completely known, and collecting information about the network is costly as it involves surveying multiple people. In this paper, we focus on this problem of network discovery for influence maximization. The existing work in this direction proposes a reinforcement learning framework. As the environment interactions in real-world settings are costly, so it is important for the reinforcement learning algorithms to have minimum possible environment interactions, i.e, to be sample efficient. In this work, we propose CLAIM - Curriculum LeArning Policy for Influence Maximization to improve the sample efficiency of RL methods. We conduct experiments on real-world datasets and show that our approach can outperform the current best approach.

Curriculum Learning Policy for Influence Maximization in UnknownSocial Networks

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are known to provide accurate predictions and uncertainty estimates even with small amounts of labeled data by capturing similarity between data points through their kernel function. However traditional GP kernels are not very effective at capturing similarity between high dimensional data points. Neural networks can be used to learn good representations that encode intricate structures in high dimensional data, and can be used as inputs to the GP kernel. However the huge data requirement of neural networks makes this approach ineffective in small data settings. To solves the conflicting problems of representation learning and data efficiency, we propose to learn deep kernels on probabilistic embeddings by using a probabilistic neural network. Our approach maps high-dimensional data to a probability distribution in a low dimensional subspace and then computes a kernel between these distributions to capture similarity. To enable end-to-end learning, we derive a functional gradient descent procedure for training the model. Experiments on a variety of datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in GP kernel learning in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. We also extend our approach to other small-data paradigms such as few-shot classification where it outperforms previous approaches on mini-Imagenet and CUB datasets.

Deep Kernels with Probabilistic Embeddings for Small-Data Learning

In this paper, we propose deep architectures for learning instance specific abstain (reject option) binary classifiers. The proposed approach uses double sigmoid loss function as described by Kulin Shah and Naresh Manwani in ("Online Active Learning of Reject Option Classifiers", AAAI, 2020), as a performance measure. We show that the double sigmoid loss is classification calibrated. We also show that the excess risk of 0-d-1 loss is upper bounded by the excess risk of double sigmoid loss. We derive the generalization error bounds for the proposed architecture for reject option classifiers. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we experiment with several real world datasets. We observe that the proposed approach not only performs comparable to the state-of-the-art approaches, it is also robust against label noise. We also provide visualizations to observe the important features learned by the network corresponding to the abstaining decision.

Robust Instance Specific Deep Abstention Network

In order to safely deploy Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) within the perception pipelines of real-time decision making systems, there is a need for safeguards that can detect out-of-training-distribution (OoD) inputs both efficiently and accurately.

Sketching Curvature for Efficient Out-of-Distribution Detection for Deep Neural Networks

Deep learning architectures with a huge number of parameters are often compressed using pruning techniques to ensure computational efficiency of inference during deployment. Despite multitude of empirical advances, there is a lack of theoretical understanding of the effectiveness of different pruning methods. We inspect different pruning techniques under the statistical mechanics formulation of a teacher-student framework and derive their generalization error (GE) bounds. It has been shown that Determinantal Point Process (DPP) based node pruning method is notably superior to competing approaches when tested on real datasets. Using GE bounds in the aforementioned setup we provide theoretical guarantees for their empirical observations. Another consistent finding in literature is that sparse neural networks (edge pruned) generalize better than dense neural networks (node pruned) for a fixed number of parameters. We use our theoretical setup to prove this finding and show that even the baseline random edge pruning method performs better than the DPP node pruning method. We also validate this empirically on real datasets.

Statistical Mechanical Analysis of Neural Network Pruning

Infinite width limits of deep neural networks often have tractable forms. They have been used to analyse the behaviour of finite networks, as well as being useful methods in their own right. When investigating infinitely wide convolutional neural networks (CNNs), it was observed that the correlations arising from spatial weight sharing disappear in the infinite limit. This is undesirable, as spatial correlation is the main motivation behind CNNs. We show that the loss of this property is not a consequence of the infinite limit, but rather of choosing an independent weight prior. Correlating the weights maintains the correlations in the activations. Varying the amount of correlation interpolates between independent-weight limits and mean-pooling. Empirical evaluation of the infinitely wide network shows that optimal performance is achieved between the extremes, indicating that correlations can be useful.

Correlated Weights in Infinite Limits of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Inspired by recent advances in the field of expert-based approximations of Gaussian processes (GPs), we present an expert-based approach to large-scale multi-output regression using single-output GP experts. Employing a deeply structured mixture of single-output GPs encoded via a probabilistic circuit allows us to capture correlations between multiple output dimensions accurately. By recursively partitioning the covariate space and the output space, posterior inference in our model reduces to inference on single-output GP experts, which only need to be conditioned on a small subset of the observations. We show that inference can be performed exactly and efficiently in our model, that it can capture correlations between output dimensions and, hence, often outperforms approaches that do not incorporate inter-output correlations, as demonstrated on several data sets in terms of the negative log predictive density.

Leveraging Probabilistic Circuits for Nonparametric Multi-Output Regression

Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams (PSDDs) are effective tools for combining uncertain knowledge in the form of (learned) probabilities and certain knowledge in the form of logical constraints. Despite some promising recent advances in the topic, very little attention has been given to the problem of effectively learning PSDDs from data and logical constraints in large domains. In this paper we show that a simple strategy of sampling and averaging PSDDs leads to state-of-the-art performance in many tasks. We overcome some of the issues with previous methods by employing a top-down generation of circuits from a logic formula represented as a BDD. We discuss how to locally grow the circuit while achieving a good trade-off between complexity and goodness-of-fit of the resulting model. Generalization error is further decreased by aggregating sampled circuits through Bayesian model combination. Experiments with various domains show that the approach efficiently learns good models even in very low data regimes, while remaining competitive for large sample sizes.

Learning Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams Under Logic Constraints by Sampling and Averaging

Natural data are often well-described as belonging to latent clusters. When the number of clusters is unknown, Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) models can provide a flexible and powerful technique to model the data. However, algorithms for inference in nonparametric mixture models fail to meet two critical requirements for practical use: (1) that inference can be performed online, and (2) that inference is efficient in the large time/sample limit. In this work, we propose a novel Bayesian recursion to efficiently infer a posterior distribution over discrete latent variables from a sequence of observations in an online manner, assuming a Chinese Restaurant Process prior on the sequence of latent variables. Our recursive filter, which we call the Recursive Chinese Restaurant Process (R-CRP), has quasilinear average time complexity and logarithmic average space complexity in the total number of observations. We experimentally compare our filtering method against both online and offline inference algorithms including Markov chain Monte Carlo, variational approximations and DP-Means, and demonstrate that our inference algorithm achieves comparable or better performance for a fraction of the runtime.

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

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Known unknowns: Learning novel concepts using reasoning-by-elimination

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