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The prevailing graph neural network models have achieved significant progress in graph representation learning. However, in this paper, we uncover an ever-overlooked phenomenon: the pre-trained graph representation learning model tested with full graphs underperforms the model tested with well-pruned graphs. This observation reveals that there exist confounders in graphs, which may interfere with the model learning semantic information, and current graph representation learning methods have not eliminated their influence. To tackle this issue, we propose Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning (RCGRL) to learn robust graph representations against confounding effects. RCGRL introduces an active approach to generate instrumental variables under unconditional moment restrictions, which empowers the graph representation learning model to eliminate confounders, thereby capturing discriminative information that is causally related to downstream predictions. We offer theorems and proofs to guarantee the theoretical effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and multiple benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art methods, RCGRL achieves better prediction performance and generalization ability.

AAAI 2023

Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning against Confounding Effects

ml: causal learning，ml: graph-based machine learning，ml: representation learning

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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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.

poster

Face reenactment and reconstruction benefit various applications in self-media, VR, etc. Recent face reenactment methods use 2D facial landmarks to implicitly retarget facial expressions and poses from driving videos to source images,
while they suffer from pose and expression preservation issues for cross-identity scenarios, i.e., when the source and the driving subjects are different. Current self-supervised face reconstruction methods also demonstrate impressive results.
However, these methods do not handle large expressions well, since their training data lacks samples of large expressions, and 2D facial attributes are inaccurate on such samples. To mitigate the above problems, we propose to explore the inner connection between the two tasks, i.e., using face reconstruction to provide 
sufficient 3D information for reenactment, and synthesizing videos paired with captured face model parameters through face reenactment to enhance the
expression module of face reconstruction. In particular, we propose a novel cascade framework named JR2Net for Joint Face Reconstruction and Reenactment, which begins with the training of a coarse reconstruction network, followed by a 3D-aware face reenactment network based on the coarse reconstruction results. In the end, we train an expression tracking network based on our synthesized videos composed by image-face model parameter pairs. Such an expression tracking network can further enhance the coarse face reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our JR2Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several face reconstruction and reenactment benchmarks.

JR2Net: Joint Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction and Reenactment

Conductance-based graph clustering has been recognized as a fundamental operator in numerous graph analysis applications. Despite the significant success of conductance-based graph clustering, existing algorithms are either hard to obtain satisfactory clustering qualities, or have high time and space complexity to achieve provable clustering qualities. To overcome these limitations, we devise a powerful \textit{peeling}-based graph clustering framework \textit{PCon}. We show that many existing solutions can be reduced to our framework. Namely, they first define a score function for each vertex, then iteratively remove the vertex with the smallest score.  Finally, they output the result with the smallest conductance during the peeling process. Based on our framework, we propose two novel algorithms \textit{PCon\_core} and \emph{PCon\_de} with linear time and space complexity, which can efficiently and effectively identify clusters from massive graphs with more than a few billion edges. Surprisingly, we prove that \emph{PCon\_de} can identify clusters with near-constant approximation ratio, resulting in an important theoretical improvement over the well-known quadratic Cheeger bound. Empirical results on real-life and synthetic datasets show that our algorithms can achieve 5$\sim$42 times speedup with a high clustering accuracy, while using 1.4$\sim$7.8 times less memory than the baseline algorithms.

Scalable and Effective Conductance-Based Graph Clustering

Truth discovery is a general name for a broad range of statistical methods aimed to extract the correct answers to questions, based on multiple answers coming from noisy sources. For example, workers in a crowdsourcing platform.
In this paper, we consider an extremely simple heuristic for estimating workers' competence using  average proximity to other workers. We prove that this  estimates well the actual competence level and enables separating high and low quality workers in a wide spectrum of domains and statistical models. Under Gaussian noise,  this simple estimate is the unique solution to the MLE with a constant regularization factor.  

Finally,  weighing workers according to their average proximity in a crowdsourcing setting, results in  substantial improvement over unweighted aggregation and other truth discovery algorithms in practice.

Frustratingly Easy Truth Discovery

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment variable and independent of all other variables in the system. However, it is challenging to search for a standard IV from data directly due to the strict conditions. The conditional IV (CIV) method has been proposed to allow a variable to be an instrument conditioning on a set of variables, allowing a wider choice of possible IVs and enabling broader practical applications of the IV approach. Nevertheless, there is not a data-driven method to discover a CIV and its conditioning set directly from data. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose to learn the representations of the information of a CIV and its conditioning set from data with latent confounders for average causal effect estimation. By taking advantage of deep generative models, we develop a novel data-driven approach for simultaneously learning the representation of a CIV from measured variables and generating the representation of its conditioning set given measured variables. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method outperforms the existing IV methods.

Causal Inference with Conditional Instruments using Deep Generative Models

Cross-lingual topic models have been prevalent for cross-lingual text analysis by revealing aligned latent topics. However, most existing methods suffer from producing repetitive topics that hinder further analysis and performance decline caused by low-coverage dictionaries. In this paper, we propose the Cross-lingual Topic Modeling with Mutual Information (InfoCTM). Instead of the direct alignment in previous work, we propose a topic alignment with mutual information method. This works as a regularization to properly align topics and prevent degenerate topic representations of words, which mitigates the repetitive topic issue. To address the low-coverage dictionary issue, we further propose a cross-lingual vocabulary linking method that finds more linked cross-lingual words for topic alignment beyond the translations of a given dictionary. Extensive experiments on English, Chinese, and Japanese datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, producing more coherent, diverse, and well-aligned topics and showing better transferability for cross-lingual classification tasks.

InfoCTM: A Mutual Information Maximization Perspective of Cross-lingual Topic Modeling

Predicting neural architecture performance is a challenging task and is crucial to neural architecture design and search. Existing approaches either rely on neural performance predictors which are limited to modeling architectures in a predefined design space involving specific sets of operators and connection rules, and cannot generalize to unseen architectures, or resort to zero-cost proxies which are not always accurate. In this paper, we propose GENNAPE, a Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimator, which is pretrained on open neural architecture benchmarks, and aims to generalize to completely unseen architectures through combined innovations in network representation, contrastive pretraining, and fuzzy clustering-based predictor ensemble. Specifically, GENNAPE represents a given neural network as a Computation Graph (CG) of atomic operations which can model an arbitrary architecture. It first learns a graph encoder via Contrastive Learning to encourage network separation by topological features, and then trains multiple predictor heads, which are soft-aggregated according to the fuzzy membership of a neural network. Experiments show that GENNAPE pretrained on NAS-Bench-101 can achieve superior transferability to 5 different public neural network benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-301, MobileNet and ResNet families under no or minimum fine-tuning. 
We further introduce 3 challenging newly labelled neural network benchmarks: HiAML, Inception and Two-Path, which can concentrate in narrow accuracy ranges. Extensive experiments show that GENNAPE can correctly discern high-performance architectures in these families. Finally, when paired with a search algorithm, GENNAPE can find architectures that improve accuracy while reducing FLOPs on three families.

GENNAPE: Towards Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimators

Local search has been demonstrated as an efficient approach for two practical generalizations of the MaxSAT problem, namely Partial MaxSAT (PMS) and Weighted PMS (WPMS). In this work, we observe that most local search (W)PMS solvers usually flip a single variable per iteration. Such a mechanism may lead to relatively low-quality local optimal solutions, and may limit the diversity of search directions to escape from local optima. To address this issue, we propose a general strategy, called farsighted probabilistic sampling (FPS), to replace the single flipping mechanism so as to boost the local search (W)PMS algorithms. FPS considers the benefit of continuously flipping a pair of variables in order to find higher-quality local optimal solutions. Moreover, FPS proposes an effective approach to escape from local optima by preferring the best to flip among the best sampled single variable and the best sampled variable pair. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed FPS strategy significantly improves the state-of-the-art (W)PMS solvers, and FPS has an excellent generalization capability to various local search MaxSAT solvers.

Farsighted Probabilistic Sampling: A General Strategy for Boosting Local Search MaxSAT Solvers

Because widely used real-world ontologies are often complex and large, one important challenge has emerged: designing tools for users to focus on sub-ontologies corresponding to their specific interests. To this end, various modules have been introduced to provide concise ontology views. This work concentrates on extracting deductive modules that preserve logical entailment over a given vocabulary. Existing deductive module proposals are either inefficient from a computing point of view or unsatisfactory from a quality point of view because the modules extracted are not concise enough. For example, minimal modules guarantee the most concise results, but their computation is highly time-consuming, while ⊥⊤∗-modules are easy to compute but usually contain many redundant items. To overcome computation cost and lack of quality, we propose to compute two kinds of deductive modules called pseudo-minimal modules and complete modules for EL-ontology. Our deductive module definitions rely on associating a tree representation with an ontology, and their computation is based on SAT encoding. Our experiments on real-world ontologies show that our pseudo-minimal modules are indeed minimal modules in almost all cases (98.9\%), and computing pseudo-minimal modules is more efficient (99.79 times faster on average) than the state-of-the-art method Zoom for computing minimal modules. Also, our complete modules are more compact than ⊥⊤∗-modules, but their computation time remains comparable. Finally, note that our proposal applies to EL-ontologies while Zoom only works for EL-terminologies. 

Efficient extraction of EL-ontology deductive modules

Given a connected graph on whose edges we can build roads to connect the nodes, a number of agents hold possibly different perspectives on which edges should be selected by assigning different edge weights. Our task is to build a minimum number of roads so that every agent has a spanning tree in the built subgraph whose weight is the same as a minimum spanning tree in the original graph. We first show that this problem is NP-hard and does not admit better than ((1-o(1)) ln k)-approximation polynomial-time algorithms unless P = NP, where k is the number of agents. We then give a simple voting algorithm with an optimal approximation ratio. Moreover, our algorithm only needs to access the agents' rankings on the edges. Finally, we extend our problem to submodular objective functions and Matroid rank constraints.

Multiagent MST Cover: Pleasing All Optimally via A Simple Voting Rule

Temporal Planning is the problem of synthesizing a course of actions given a predictive model of a system subject to temporal constraints. This kind of planning finds natural applications in the automation of industrial processes and in robotics when the timing and deadlines are important. Finding any plan in temporal planning is often not enough as it is sometimes needed to optimize a certain objective function: particularly interesting are the minimization of the makespan and the optimization of the costs of actions. Despite the importance of the problem, only few works in the literature tackled the problem of optimal temporal planning because of the complicated intermix of planning and scheduling.
In this paper, we address the problem of optimal temporal planning for a very expressive class of problems using a reduction of the bounded planning problem to Optimization Modulo Theory (OMT) a powerful discrete/continuous optimization framework. We theoretically and empirically show the expressive power of this approach and we set a baseline for future research in this area.

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Next from AAAI 2023

JR2Net: Joint Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction and Reenactment

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