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Attention mechanism has become a standard fixture in many state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models, not only due to its outstanding performance, but also because it provides plausible innate explanations for neural architectures. However, recent studies show that attention is unstable against randomness and perturbations during training or testing, such as random seeds and slight perturbation of embeddings, which impedes it from being a faithful explanation tool. Thus, a natural question is whether we can find an alternate of the vanilla attention, which is more stable and could keep the key characteristics of the explanation. In this paper, we provide a rigorous definition of such an attention method named SEAT (Stable and Explainable ATtention). Specifically, SEAT has the following three properties: (1) Its prediction distribution is close to the prediction of the vanilla attention; (2) Its top- k indices largely overlap with those of the vanilla attention; (3) It is robust w.r.t perturbations, i.e., any slight perturbation on SEAT will not change the attention and prediction distribution too much, which implicitly indicates that it is stable to randomness and perturbations. Furthermore, we propose an optimization method for obtaining SEAT, which could be considered as revising the vanilla attention. Finally, through in- tensive experiments on various datasets, we compare our SEAT with other baseline methods using RNN, BiLSTM and BERT architectures, with different evaluation metrics on model interpretation, stability and accuracy. Results show that, besides preserving the original explainability and model performance, SEAT is more stable against input perturbations and training randomness, which indicates it is a more faithful explanation.

AAAI 2023

SEAT: Stable and Explainable Attention

interpretability & analysis of nlp models

explainable ml

robustness

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. 
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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

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot length, the number of candidates a voter is allowed to rank on their ballot. We theoretically and empirically analyze how ballot length can influence the outcome of an election, given fixed voter preferences. We show that there exist preference profiles over $k$ candidates such that up to $k-1$ different candidates win at different ballot lengths. We derive exact lower bounds on the number of voters required for such profiles and provide a construction matching the lower bound for unrestricted voter preferences. Additionally, we characterize which sequences of winners are possible over ballot lengths and provide explicit profile constructions achieving any feasible winner sequence. We also examine how classic preference restrictions influence our results---for instance, single-peakedness makes $k-1$ different winners impossible but still allows at least $\Omega(\sqrt k)$. Finally, we analyze a collection of 168 real-world elections, where we truncate rankings to simulate shorter ballots. We find that shorter ballots could have changed the outcome in one quarter of these elections. Our results highlight ballot length as a consequential degree of freedom in the design of IRV elections.


Ballot Length in Instant Runoff Voting

Multi-player multi-armed bandit is an increasingly relevant decision-making problem, motivated by applications to cognitive radio systems.  Most research for this problem focuses exclusively on the settings that players have full access to all arms and receive no reward when pulling the same arm.  Hence all players solve the same bandit problem with the goal of maximizing their cumulative reward. However, these settings neglect several important factors in many real-world applications, where players have limited access to a dynamic local subset of arms (i.e., an arm could sometimes be ``walking'' and not accessible to the player).  To this end, this paper proposes a multi-player multi-armed walking bandits model, aiming to address aforementioned modeling issues. The goal now is to maximize the reward, however, players can only pull arms from the local subset and only collect a full reward if no other players pull the same arm.  We adopt Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) to deal with the exploration-exploitation tradeoff and employ distributed optimization techniques to properly handle collisions.  By carefully integrating these two techniques, we propose a decentralized algorithm with near-optimal guarantee on the regret, and can be easily implemented to obtain competitive empirical performance.

Decentralized Stochastic Multi-Player Multi-Armed Walking Bandits

Mathematical reasoning is one of the crucial abilities of general artificial intelligence, which requires machines to master mathematical logic and knowledge from solving problems. However, existing approaches are not transparent (thus not interpretable) in terms of what knowledge has been learned and applied in the reasoning process. In this paper, we propose a general Learning by Applying (LeAp) framework to enhance existing models (backbones) in a principled way by explicit knowledge learning. In LeAp, we perform knowledge learning in a novel problem-knowledge-expression paradigm, with a Knowledge Encoder to acquire knowledge from problem data and a Knowledge Decoder to apply knowledge for expression reasoning. The learned mathematical knowledge, including word-word relations and word-operator relations, forms an explicit knowledge graph, which bridges the knowledge “learning” and “applying” organically. Moreover, for problem solving, we design a semantics-enhanced module and a reasoning-enhanced module that apply knowledge to improve the problem comprehension and symbol reasoning abilities of any backbone, respectively. We theoretically prove the superiority of LeAp's autonomous learning mechanism. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that LeAp improves all backbones' performances, learns accurate knowledge, and achieves a more interpretable reasoning process.

Learning by Applying: A General Framework for Mathematical Reasoning via Enhancing Explicit Knowledge Learning

Molecular structures and Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) are recognized as important knowledge to guide medication recommendation (MR) tasks, and medical concept embedding has been applied to boost their performance. Though promising performance has been achieved by leveraging Graph Neural Network (GNN) models to encode the molecular structures of medications or/and DDI, we observe that existing models are still defective: 1) to differentiate medications with similar molecules but different functionality; or/and 2) to properly capture the unintended reactions between drugs in the embedding space. To alleviate this limitation, we propose Carmen, a cautiously designed graph embedding-based MR framework. Carmen consists of four components, including patient representation learning, context information extraction, a context-aware GNN, and DDI encoding. Carmen incorporates the visit history into the representation learning of molecular graphs to distinguish molecules with similar topology but dissimilar activity. Its DDI encoding module is specially devised for the non-transitive interaction DDI graphs. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that Carmen achieves remarkable performance improvement over state-of-the-art models and can improve the safety of recommended drugs with a proper DDI graph encoding.

Context-aware Safe Medication Recommendations with Molecular Graph and DDI Graph Embedding

We investigate the complexity of the model-checking problem for a family of modal logics capturing the notion of “knowing how”. We consider the most standard ability-based knowing how logic, for which we show that model-checking is PSpace-complete. By contrast, a multi-agent variant based on an uncertainty relation between plans in which uncertainty is encoded by a regular language, is shown to admit a PTime model-checking problem. We extend with budgets the above-mentioned ability-logics, as done for ATL-like logics. We show that for the former logic enriched with budgets, the complexity increases to at least ExpSpace-hardness, whereas for the latter, the PTime bound is preserved. Other variant logics are discussed along the paper.

Model-Checking for Ability-Based Logics with Constrained Plans

Vision-language alignment learning for video-text retrieval arouses a lot of attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods either transfer the knowledge of image-text pretraining model to video-text retrieval task without fully exploring the multi-modal information of videos, or simply fuse multi-modal features in a brute force manner without explicit guidance. In this paper, we integrate multi-modal information in an explicit manner by tagging, and use the tags as the anchors for better video-text alignment. Various pretrained experts are utilized for extracting the information of multiple modalities, including object, person, motion, audio, etc. To take full advantage of these information, we propose the TABLE (TAgging Before aLignmEnt) network, which consists of a visual encoder, a tag encoder, a text encoder, and a tag-guiding cross-modal encoder for jointly encoding multi-frame visual features and multi-modal tags information. Furthermore, to strengthen the interaction between video and text, we build a joint cross-modal encoder with the triplet input of [vision, tag, text] and perform two additional supervised tasks, Video Text Matching (VTM) and Masked Language Modeling (MLM). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the TABLE model is capable of achieving State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance on various video-text retrieval benchmarks, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC and DiDeMo. 

Tagging before Alignment: Integrating Multi-Modal Tags for Video-Text Retrieval

Over recent years, graph convolutional networks emerged as powerful node clustering methods and have set state of the art results for this task. In this paper, we argue that some of these methods are unnecessarily complex and propose a node clustering model that is more scalable while being more effective. The proposed model uses Laplacian smoothing to learn an initial representation of the graph before applying an efficient self-expressive subspace clustering procedure.
This is performed via learning a factored coefficient matrix. These factors are then embedded into a new feature space in such a way as to generate a valid affinity matrix (symmetric and non-negative) on which an implicit spectral clustering algorithm is performed. 
Experiments on several real-world attributed datasets demonstrate the cost-effective nature of our method with respect to the state of the art.

Scalable Attributed-Graph Subspace Clustering

In the Colored Clustering problem, one is asked to cluster edge-colored (hyper-)graphs whose colors represent interaction types. More specifically, the goal is to select as many edges as possible without choosing two edges that share an endpoint and are colored differently. Equivalently, the goal can also be described as assigning colors to the vertices in a way that fits the edge-coloring as well as possible.

As this problem is NP-hard, we build on previous work by studying its parameterized complexity. We give a  $2^{O(k)} · n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm where k is the number of edges to be selected and n the number of vertices. We also prove the existence of a problem kernel of size $O(k^{5/2})$, resolving an open problem posed in the literature. We consider parameters that are smaller than k, the number of edges to be selected, and r, the number of edges that can be deleted. Such smaller parameters are obtained by considering the difference between k or r and some lower bound on these values. We give both algorithms and lower bounds for Colored Clustering with such parameterizations. Finally, we settle the parameterized complexity of Colored Clustering with respect to structural graph parameters by showing that it is W[1]-hard with respect to both vertex cover number and tree-cut width, but fixed-parameter tractable with respect to local feedback edge number.

Parameterized Algorithms for Colored Clustering

Text-to-speech (TTS) and singing voice synthesis (SVS) aim at generating high-quality speaking and singing voice according to textual input and music scores, respectively. Unifying TTS and SVS into a single system is crucial to the applications requiring both of them. Existing methods usually suffer from some limitations, which rely on either both singing and speaking data from the same person or cascaded models of multiple tasks. To address these problems, a simplified elegant framework for TTS and SVS, named UniSyn, is proposed in this paper. It is an end-to-end unified model that can make a voice speak and sing with only singing or speaking data from this person. To be specific, a multi-conditional variational autoencoder (MC-VAE), which constructs two independent latent sub-spaces with the speaker- and style-related (i.e. speak or sing) conditions for flexible control, is proposed in UniSyn. Moreover, supervised guided-VAE and timbre perturbation with the Wasserstein distance constraint are leveraged to further disentangle the speaker timbre and style. Experiments conducted on two speakers and two singers demonstrate that UniSyn can generate natural speaking and singing voice without corresponding training data. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art end-to-end voice generation work, which proves the effectiveness and advantages of UniSyn.

UniSyn: An end-to-end unified model for text-to-speech and singing voice synthesis

Sample re-weighting strategies provide a promising mechanism to deal with imperfect training data in machine learning, such as noisily labeled or class-imbalanced data. One such strategy involves formulating a bi-level optimization problem called the meta re-weighting problem, whose goal is to optimize performance on a small set of perfect pivotal samples, called meta samples. Many approaches have been proposed to efficiently solve this problem. However, all of them assume that a perfect meta sample set is already provided while we observe that the selections of meta sample set is performance-critical. In this paper, we study how to learn to identify such a meta sample set from a large, imperfect training set, that is subsequently cleaned and used to optimize performance in the meta re-weighting setting. We propose a learning framework which reduces the meta samples selection problem to a weighted K-means clustering problem through rigorously theoretical analysis. We propose two clustering methods within our learning framework, Representation-based clustering method (RBC) and Gradient-based clustering method (GBC), for balancing performance and computational efficiency. Empirical studies demonstrate the performance advantage of our methods over various baseline methods

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Ballot Length in Instant Runoff Voting

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