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Role-based learning is a promising approach to improving the performance of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Nevertheless, without manual assistance, current role-based methods cannot guarantee stably discovering a set of roles to effectively decompose a complex task, as they assume either a predefined role structure or practical experience for selecting hyperparameters. In this article, we propose a mathematical Structural Information principles-based Role Discovery method, namely SIRD, and then present a SIRD optimizing MARL framework, namely SR-MARL, for multi-agent collaboration. The SIRD transforms role discovery into a hierarchical action space clustering. Specifically, the SIRD consists of structuralization, sparsification, and optimization modules, where an optimal encoding tree is generated to perform abstracting to discover roles. The SIRD is agnostic to specific MARL algorithms and flexibly integrated with various value function factorization approaches. Empirical evaluations on the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art MARL algorithms, the SR-MARL framework improves the average test win rate by 0.17%, 6.08%, and 3.24%, and reduces the deviation by 16.67%, 30.80%, and 66.30%, under easy, hard, and super hard scenarios. 

AAAI 2023

Effective and Stable Role-based Multi-Agent Collaboration by Structural Information Principles

role-based learning

marl

structural information principles

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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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. 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.

Many challenges from natural world can be formulated as a graph matching problem. Previous deep learning-based methods mainly consider a full two-graph matching setting. In this work, we study the more general partial matching problem with multi-graph cycle consistency guarantees. Building on a recent progress in deep learning on graphs, we propose a novel data-driven method (URL) for partial multi-graph matching, which uses an object-to-universe formulation and learns latent representations of abstract universe points. The proposed approach advances the state of the art in semantic keypoint matching problem, evaluated on Pascal VOC, CUB, and Willow datasets. Moreover, the set of controlled experiments on a synthetic graph matching dataset demonstrates the scalability of our method to graphs with large number of nodes and its robustness to high partiality. 

Universe Points Representation Learning for Partial Multi-Graph Matching

This paper presents an inverse kinematic optimization layer (IKOL) for 3D human pose and shape estimation that leverages the strength of both optimization- and regression-based methods within an end-to-end framework. IKOL involves a nonconvex optimization that establishes an implicit mapping from an image’s 3D keypoints and body shapes to the relative body-part rotations. The 3D keypoints and the body shapes are the inputs and the relative body-part rotations are the solutions. However, this procedure is implicit and hard to make differentiable. So, to overcome this issue, we designed a Gauss-Newton differentiation (GN-Diff) procedure to differentiate IKOL. GN-Diff iteratively linearizes the nonconvex objective function to obtain Gauss-Newton directions with closed form solutions. Then, an automatic differentiation procedure is directly applied to generate a Jacobian matrix for end-to-end training. Notably, the GN-Diff procedure works fast because it does not rely on a time-consuming implicit differentiation procedure. The twist rotation and shape parameters are learned from the neural networks and, as a result, IKOL has a much lower computational overhead than most existing optimization-based methods. Additionally, compared to existing regression-based methods, IKOL provides a more accurate mesh-image correspondence. This is because it iteratively reduces the distance between the keypoints and also enhances the reliability of the pose structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over a wide range of 3D human pose and shape estimation methods. 

IKOL: Inverse kinematics optimization layer for 3D human pose and shape estimation via Gauss-Newton differentiation

Adversarial training is an effective learning technique to improve the robustness of deep neural networks. In this study, the influence of adversarial training on deep learning models in terms of fairness, robustness, and generalization is theoretically investigated under more general perturbation scope that different samples can have different perturbation directions (the adversarial and anti-adversarial directions) and varied perturbation bounds. Our theoretical explorations suggest that the combination of adversaries and anti-adversaries (samples with anti-adversarial perturbations) in training can be more effective in achieving better fairness between classes and a better tradeoff between robustness and generalization in some typical learning scenarios (e.g., noisy label learning and imbalance learning) compared with standard adversarial training. On the basis of our theoretical findings, a more general learning objective that combines adversaries and anti-adversaries with varied bounds on each training sample is presented. Meta learning is utilized to optimize the combination weights. Experiments on benchmark datasets under different learning scenarios verify our theoretical findings and the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Combining Adversaries with Anti-adversaries in Training

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) has a wide range of potential real-world applications, including manipulation and navigation problems in robotics. Especially in such robotics tasks, sample efficiency is of the utmost importance for GCRL since, by default, the agent is only rewarded when it reaches its goal. While several methods have been proposed to improve the sample efficiency of GCRL, one relatively under-studied approach is the design of neural architectures to support sample efficiency.
In this work, we introduce a novel neural architecture for GCRL that achieves significantly better sample efficiency than the commonly-used monolithic network architecture. 
The key insight is that the 
optimal action-value function $Q^*(s, a, g)$ must satisfy the triangle inequality in a specific sense.
Furthermore, we introduce the \emph{metric residual network} (MRN)  that deliberately decomposes the action-value function $Q(s,a,g)$ into the negated summation of a metric plus a residual asymmetric component. MRN provably approximates any optimal action-value function $Q^*(s,a,g)$, thus making it a fitting neural architecture for GCRL.
We conduct comprehensive experiments across 12 standard benchmark environments in GCRL. The empirical results demonstrate that MRN uniformly outperforms other state-of-the-art GCRL neural architectures in terms of sample efficiency. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Cranial-XIX/metric-residual-network}.

Metric Residual Network for Sample Efficient Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning

There may exist multiple models that perform almost equally well for any given prediction task. We examine how predictions change across these competing models. In particular, we study predictive multiplicity -- in probabilistic classification. We formally define measures for our setting and develop optimization-based methods to compute these measures for convex empirical risk minimization problems. We apply our methodology to gain insight into why predictive multiplicity arises. We demonstrate the incidence and prevalence of predictive multiplicity in real-world risk assessment tasks. Our results emphasize the need to report multiplicity more widely.

Predictive Multiplicity in Probabilistic Classification

We study the problem of composition learning for image retrieval, for which we learn to retrieve target images with search queries in the form of a composition of a reference image and a modification text that describes desired modifications of the image. Existing models of composition learning for image retrieval are generally built with large-scale datasets, demanding extensive training samples, i.e., query-target pairs, as supervision, which restricts their application for the scenario of few-shot learning with only few query-target pairs available. Recently, prompt tuning with frozen pretrained language models has shown remarkable performance when the amount of training data is limited. Inspired by this, we propose a prompt tuning mechanism with the pretrained CLIP model for the task of few-shot composition learning for image retrieval, Specifically, we regard the representation of the reference image as a trainable visual prompt, prefixed to the embedding of the text sequence. One challenge is to efficiently train visual prompt with few-shot samples. To deal with this issue, we further propose a self-upervised auxiliary task via ensuring that the reference image can re-
trieve itself when no modification information is given from the text, which facilitates training for the visual prompt, while not requiring additional annotations for query-target pairs. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our proposed model can yield superior performance when trained with only
few query-target pairs.

Few-Shot Composition Learning for Image Retrieval with Prompt Tuning

Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for sub-region analysis of brain tumors. Plenty of methods have been proposed for automatic brain tumor segmentation using four common MRI modalities and achieved remarkable performance. In practice, however, it is common to have one or more modalities missing due to image corruption, artifacts, acquisition protocols, allergy to contrast agents, or simply cost. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage framework for brain tumor segmentation with missing modalities. In the first stage, a multimodal masked autoencoder (M3AE) is proposed, where both random modalities (i.e., modality dropout) and random patches of the remaining modalities are masked for a reconstruction task, for self-supervised learning of robust multimodal representations against missing modalities. To this end, we name our framework M3AE. Meanwhile, we employ model inversion to optimize a representative full-modal image at marginal extra cost, which will be used to substitute for the missing modalities and boost performance during inference. Then in the second stage, a memory-efficient self distillation is proposed to distill knowledge between heterogenous missing-modal situations while fine-tuning the model for supervised segmentation. Our M3AE belongs to the ‘catch-all’ genre where a single model can be applied to all possible subsets of modalities, thus is economic for both training and deployment. Extensive experiments on BraTS 2018 and 2020 datasets demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods with missing modalities, as well as the efficacy of its components. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ccarliu/m3ae.

M3AE: Multimodal Representation Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Prototype-based interpretability methods provide intuitive explanations of model prediction by comparing samples to a reference set of memorized exemplars or typical representatives in terms of similarity. In the field of sequential data modeling, similarity calculations of prototypes are usually based on encoded representation vectors. However, due to highly recursive functions, there is usually a non-negligible disparity between the prototype-based explanations and the original input. In this work, we propose a Self-Explaining Selective Model (SESM) that uses a linear combination of prototypical concepts to explain its own predictions. The model employs the idea of case-based reasoning by selecting sub-sequences of the input that mostly activate different concepts as prototypical parts, which users can compare to sub-sequences selected from different example inputs to understand model decisions. For better interpretability, we design multiple constraints including diversity, stability, and locality as training objectives. Extensive experiments in different domains demonstrate that our method exhibits promising interpretability and competitive accuracy.

Learning to Select Prototypical Parts for Interpretable Sequential Data Modeling

The theoretical analysis of spectral clustering is mainly devoted to consistency, while there is little research on its generalization performance. In this paper, we study the excess risk bounds of the popular spectral clustering algorithms: \emph{relaxed} RatioCut and \emph{relaxed} NCut. Our analysis follows the two practical steps of spectral clustering algorithms: continuous solution and discrete solution. Firstly, we provide the convergence rate of the excess risk bounds between the empirical continuous optimal solution and the population-level continuous optimal solution. Secondly, we show the fundamental quantity influencing the excess risk between the empirical discrete optimal solution and the population-level discrete optimal solution. At the empirical level, algorithms can be designed to reduce this quantity. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose two novel algorithms that can penalize this quantity and, additionally, can cluster the out-of-sample data without re-eigendecomposition on the overall samples. Numerical experiments on toy and real datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Understanding the Generalization Performance of Spectral Clustering Algorithms

Designing neural architectures requires immense manual efforts. This has promoted the development of neural architecture search (NAS) to automate the design. While previous NAS methods achieve promising results but run slowly, zero-cost proxies run extremely fast but are less promising. Therefore, it’s of great potential to accelerate NAS via those zero-cost proxies. The existing method has two limitations, which are unforeseeable reliability and one-shot usage. To address the limitations, we present ProxyBO, an efficient Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that utilizes the zero-cost proxies to accelerate neural architecture search. We apply the generalization ability measurement to estimate the fitness of proxies on the task during each iteration and design a novel acquisition function to combine BO with zero-cost proxies based on their dynamic influence. Extensive empirical studies show that ProxyBO consistently outperforms competitive baselines on five tasks from three public benchmarks. Concretely, ProxyBO achieves up to 5.41× and 3.86× speedups over the state-of-the-art approaches REA and BRP-NAS.

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