United States

Recommender systems have been widely used in recent years. By exploiting historical user-item interactions, recommender systems can model personalized potential interests of users and have been widely applied to a wide range of scenarios. Despite the impressive performance, most of them may be subject to unwanted biases related to sensitive attributes (e.g., race and gender), leading to unfairness. An intuitive idea to alleviate this problem is to ensure that there is no mutual information between recommendation results and sensitive attributes. However, keeping independence conditions solely achieves fairness improvement while causing an obvious degradation of recommendation accuracy, which is not a desired result. To this end, in this paper, we re-define recommendation fairness with a novel two-fold mutual information objective. In concerned details, we define fairness as mutual information minimization between embeddings and sensitive information, and mutual information maximization between embeddings and non-sensitive information. Then, a flexible \textbf{Fair}  \textbf{M}utual \textbf{I}nformation (\textbf{FairMI}) framework is designed to achieve this goal. FairMI first employs a sensitive attribute encoder to capture sensitive information in the data. Then, based on results from the sensitive attribute encoder, an interest encoder is developed to generate sensitive-free  embeddings, which is expected to contain rich non-sensitive information of input data.Moreover, we propose novel mutual information (upper/lower) bounds with contrastive information estimation for model optimization. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FairMI in reducing unfairness and improving recommendation accuracy simultaneously.

AAAI 2023

Fair Representation Learning for Recommendation: A Mutual Information Perspective

dmkm: web personalization & user modeling

dmkm: recommender systems

dmkm: applications

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

Most existing methods realize 3D instance segmentation by extending those models used for 3D object detection or 3D semantic segmentation. However, these non-straightforward methods suffer from two drawbacks: 1) Imprecise bounding boxes or unsatisfactory semantic predictions limit the performance of the overall 3D instance segmentation framework. 2) Existing method requires a time-consuming intermediate step of aggregation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end 3D instance segmentation method based on Superpoint Transformer, named as SPFormer. It groups potential features from point clouds into superpoints, and directly predicts instances through query vectors without relying on the results of object detection or semantic segmentation. The key step in this framework is a novel query decoder with transformers that can capture the instance information through the superpoint cross-attention mechanism and generate the superpoint masks of the instances. Through bipartite matching based on superpoint masks, SPFormer can implement the network training without the intermediate aggregation step, which accelerates the network. Extensive experiments on ScanNetv2 and S3DIS benchmarks verify that our method is concise yet efficient. Notably, SPFormer exceeds compared state-of-the-art methods by 4.3% on ScanNetv2 hidden test set in terms of mAP and keeps fast inference speed (247ms per frame) simultaneously. Code is available at https://github.com/sunjiahao1999/SPFormer.

Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation

Multivariate time series (MTS) analysis and forecasting are crucial in many real-world applications, such as smart traffic management and weather forecasting. However, most existing work either focuses on short sequence forecasting or makes predictions predominantly with time domain features, which is not effective at removing noises with irregular frequencies in MTS. Therefore, we propose WaveForM, an end-to-end graph enhanced Wavelet learning framework for long sequence FORecasting of MTS. WaveForM first utilizes Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to represent MTS in the wavelet domain, which captures both frequency and time domain features with a sound theoretical basis. To enable the effective learning in the wavelet domain, we further propose a graph constructor, which learns a global graph to represent the relationships between MTS variables, and graph-enhanced prediction modules, which utilize dilated convolution and graph convolution to capture the correlations between time series and predict the wavelet coefficients at different levels. Extensive experiments on five real-world forecasting datasets show that our model can achieve considerable performance improvement over different prediction lengths against the most competitive baseline of each dataset.

WaveForM: Graph Enhanced Wavelet Learning for Long Sequence Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series

Learning a categorical distribution comes with its own set of challenges. A successful approach taken by state-of-the-art works is to cast the problem in a continuous domain to take advantage of the impressive performance of the generative models for continuous data. Amongst them are the recently emerging diffusion probabilistic models, which have the observed advantage of generating high-quality samples. Recent advances for categorical generative models have focused on log likelihood improvements. In this work, we propose a generative model for categorical data based on diffusion models with a focus on high-quality sample generation, and propose sampled-based evaluation methods. The efficacy of our method stems from performing diffusion in the continuous domain while having its parameterization informed by the structure of the categorical nature of the target distribution. Our method of evaluation highlights the capabilities and limitations of different generative models for generating categorical data, and includes experiments on synthetic and real-world protein datasets.

Diffusing Gaussian Mixtures for Generating Categorical Data

This paper addresses zero-shot slot filling, which tries to build a system that can generalize to unseen slot types without any training data. The key to zero-shot slot-filling is to match the tokens from the utterance with the semantic definition of the slot without training data in the target domain. This paper tackles this problem by devising a scheme to fully leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs). To this end, we propose a new prompting scheme that utilizes both learnable tokens and slot names to guide the model to focus on the relevant text spans for a given slot. Furthermore, we use attention values between tokens to form a feature descriptor for each token, which is motivated by the fact that the attention value in a PLM naturally characterizes various relationships, e.g., syntactic or semantic, between tokens. By further consolidating those features with an additional transformer-based aggregation module, we create a simple-but-effective zero-shot slot filling system that can achieve significantly better performance than the previous methods, as demonstrated by our experimental studies.

Zero-shot Slot Filling with Slot-Prefix Prompting and Attention Relationship Descriptor

We propose a new paradigm for Belief Change in which the new information is represented as sets of models, while the agent's body of knowledge is represented as a finite set of formulae, that is, a finite base. The focus on finiteness is crucial when we consider limited agents and reasoning algorithms. Moreover, having the input as arbitrary set of models is more general than the usual treatment of formulas as input. In this setting, we define new Belief Change operations akin to traditional expansion and contraction, and we identify the rationality postulates that emerge due to the finite representability requirement. We also analyse different logics concerning compatibility with our framework.

Finite Based Contraction and Expansion via Models

An evaluation criterion for safe and trustworthy deep learning is how well the invariances captured by representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) are shared with humans. We identify challenges in measuring these invariances. Prior works used gradient-based methods to generate identically represented inputs (IRIs), ie, inputs which have identical representations (on a given layer) of a neural network, and thus capture invariances of a given network. One necessary criterion for a network's invariances to align with human perception is for its IRIs look 'similar' to humans. Prior works, however, have mixed takeaways; some argue that later layers of DNNs do not learn human-like invariances (\cite{jenelle2019metamers}) yet others seem to indicate otherwise (\cite{mahendran2014understanding}). We argue that the loss function used to generate IRIs can heavily affect takeaways about invariances of the network and is the primary reason for these conflicting findings. We propose an adversarial regularizer on the IRI generation loss that finds IRIs that make any model appear to have very little shared invariance with humans. Based on this evidence, we argue that there is scope for improving models to have human-like invariances, and further, to have meaningful comparisons between models one should use IRIs generated using the regularizer-free loss. We then conduct an in-depth investigation of how different components (eg architectures, training losses, data augmentations) of the deep learning pipeline contribute to learning models that have good alignment with humans. We find that architectures with residual connections trained using a (self-supervised) contrastive loss with $\ell_p$ ball adversarial data augmentation tend to learn invariances that are most aligned with humans. Code: github.com/nvedant07/Human-NN-Alignment

Do Invariances in Deep Neural Networks Align with Human Perception?

Evolutionary algorithms are popular algorithms for multiobjective optimisation (also called Pareto optimisation) as they use a population to store trade-offs between different objectives. Despite their popularity, the theoretical foundation of multiobjective evolutionary optimisation (EMO) is still in its early development. Fundamental questions such as the benefits of the crossover operator are still not fully understood.

We provide a theoretical analysis of well-known EMO algorithms GSEMO and NSGA-II to showcase the possible advantages of crossover. We propose a class of problems on which these EMO algorithms using crossover find the Pareto set in expected polynomial time. In sharp contrast, they and many other EMO algorithms without crossover require exponential time to even find a single Pareto-optimal point. This is the first example of an exponential performance gap through the use of crossover for the widely used NSGA-II algorithm.

A Proof that Using Crossover Can Guarantee Exponential Speed-Ups in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimisation

Existing natural language understanding (NLU) models often rely on dataset biases rather than intended task-relevant features to achieve high performance on specific datasets. As a result, these models perform poorly on datasets outside the training distribution. Some recent studies address the above issue by reducing the weights of biased samples during the training process. However, these methods still encode biased latent features in representations and neglect the dynamic nature of bias, which hinders model prediction. We propose an NLU debiasing method, named debiasing contrastive learning (DCT), to simultaneously alleviate the above problems based on contrastive learning. We devise a debiasing positive sampling strategy to mitigate biased latent features by selecting the least similar biased positive samples. We also propose a dynamic negative sampling strategy to capture the dynamic influence of biases by employing a bias-only model to dynamically select the most similar biased negative samples. We conduct experiments on three NLU benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that DCT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on out-of-distribution datasets while maintaining in-distribution performance. We also verify that DCT can reduce biased latent features from the model’s representations.

Feature-Level Debiased Natural Language Understanding

We consider a seller faced with buyers which have the ability to delay their decision, which we call patience.
Each buyer's type is composed of value and patience, and it is sampled i.i.d. from a distribution.
The seller, using posted prices, would like to maximize her revenue from selling to the buyer. 
In this paper, we formalize this setting and characterize the resulting Stackelberg equilibrium, where the seller first commits to her strategy, and then the buyers best respond. Following this, we show how to compute both the optimal pure and mixed strategies. 
We then consider a learning setting, where the seller does not have access to the distribution over buyer's types. Our main results are the following. We derive a sample complexity bound for the learning of an approximate optimal pure strategy, by computing the fat-shattering dimension of this setting. Moreover, we provide a general sample complexity bound for the approximate optimal mixed strategy. 
We also consider an online setting and derive a vanishing regret bound with respect to both the optimal pure strategy and the optimal mixed strategy. 

Learning Revenue Maximization using Posted Prices for Stochastic Strategic Patient Buyers

This paper introduces SigMaNet, a generalized Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) capable of handling both undirected and directed graphs with weights not restricted in sign nor magnitude. The cornerstone of SigMaNet is the Sign-Magnetic Laplacian ($L^{\sigma}$), a new Laplacian matrix that we introduce ex novo in this work.
$L^{\sigma}$ allows us to bridge a gap in the current literature by extending the theory of spectral GCNs to (directed) graphs with both positive and negative weights. $L^{\sigma}$ exhibits several desirable properties not enjoyed by other Laplacian matrices on which several state-of-the-art architectures are based, among which encoding the edge direction and weight in a clear and natural way that is not negatively affected by the weight magnitude.
$L^{\sigma}$ is also completely parameter-free, which is not the case of other Laplacian operators such as, e.g., the Magnetic Laplacian.
The versatility and the performance of our proposed approach is amply demonstrated via computational experiments. Indeed, our results show that, for at least a metric, SigMaNet achieves the best performance in 15 out of 21 cases and either the first- or second-best performance in 21 cases out of 21, even when compared to architectures that are either more complex or that, due to being designed for a narrower class of graphs, should---but do not---achieve a better performance.

Fair Representation Learning for Recommendation: A Mutual Information Perspective

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