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The vulnerability of deep neural network models to adversarial example attacks is a practical challenge in many artificial intelligence applications. A recent line of work shows that the use of randomization in adversarial training is the key to find optimal strategies against adversarial example attacks. However, in a fully randomized setting where both the defender and the attacker can use randomized strategies, there are no efficient algorithm for finding such an optimal strategy. To fill the gap, we propose the first algorithm of its kind, called FRAT, which models the problem with a new infinite-dimensional continuous-time flow on probability distribution spaces. FRAT maintains a lightweight mixture of models for the defender, with flexibility to efficiently update mixing weights and model parameters at each iteration. Furthermore, FRAT utilizes lightweight sampling subroutines to construct a random strategy for the attacker. We prove that the continuous-time limit of FRAT converges to a mixed Nash equilibria in a zero-sum game formed by a defender and an attacker. Experimental results also demonstrate the efficiency of FRAT on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.

AAAI 2023

Towards Optimal Randomized Strategies in Adversarial Example Game

adversarial learning

optimization

adversarial attacks

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

Cooperative multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) algorithms have recently attracted wide attention and are regarded as a general scheme for the multi-agent system. Credit assignment plays an important role in MAPG and can induce cooperation among multiple agents. However, most MAPG algorithms cannot achieve good credit assignment because of the game-theoretic pathology known as centralized-decentralized mismatch. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel method, Multi-Agent Polarization Policy Gradient (MAPPG). MAPPG takes a simple but efficient polarization function to transform the optimal consistency of joint and individual actions into easily realized constraints, thus enabling efficient credit assignment in MAPPG. Theoretically, we prove that individual policies of MAPPG can converge to the global optimum. Empirically, we evaluate MAPPG on the well-known matrix game and differential game, and verify that MAPPG can converge to the global optimum for both discrete and continuous action spaces. We also evaluate MAPPG on a set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and demonstrate that MAPPG outperforms the state-of-the-art MAPG algorithms.

Learning Explicit Credit Assignment for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Polarization Policy Gradient

The rapid development of neural network dataset distillation in recent years has provided new ideas in many areas such as continuous learning, neural network architecture search and privacy preservation. Dataset distillation is a very effective method to distill large training datasets into small data, thus ensuring that the test accuracy of models trained on their synthesized small datasets matches that of models trained on the full dataset. Thus, dataset distillation itself is commercially valuable, not only for reducing training costs, but also for compressing storage costs and significantly reducing the training costs of deep learning. However, copyright protection for dataset distillation has not been proposed yet, so we propose the first method to protect intellectual property by embedding watermarks in the dataset distillation process. Our approach not only popularizes the dataset distillation technique, but also authenticates the ownership of the distilled dataset by the models trained on that distilled dataset.

Copyright-certified distillation dataset: Distilling one million coins into one bitcoin with your private key

Travelling salesman problem (TSP) is NP-Hard with exponential search space. Recently, the adoption of encoder-decoder models as neural TSP  solvers has emerged as an attractive topic because they can instantly obtain near-optimal results for small-scale instances. Nevertheless, their training efficiency and solution quality degrade dramatically when dealing with large-scale problems. To address the issue, we propose a novel progressive distillation framework, by adopting curriculum learning to train TSP samples in increasing order of their problem size and progressively distilling high-level knowledge from small models to large models via a distillation loss. In other words, the trained small models are used as the teacher network to guide action selection when training large models. To accelerate training speed, we also propose a Delaunary-graph based action mask and a new attention-based decoder to reduce decoding cost. Experimental results show that our approach  establishes clear advantages over existing encoder-decoder models in terms of training effectiveness and solution quality. In addition, we validate its usefulness as an initial solution generator for the state-of-the-art TSP solvers, whose probability of obtaining the optimal solution can be further improved in such a hybrid manner.

Neural TSP Solver with Progressive Distillation

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that ignoring communication delays has detrimental effects on collaborations, especially in delay-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. To mitigate this impact, we design a delay-aware multi-agent communication model (DACOM) to adapt communication to delays. Specifically, DACOM introduces a component, TimeNet, that is responsible for adjusting the waiting time of an agent to receive messages from other agents such that the uncertainty associated with delay can be addressed. Our experiments reveal that DACOM has a non-negligible performance improvement over other mechanisms by making a better trade-off between the benefits of communication and the costs of waiting for messages.

DACOM: Learning Delay-Aware Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Existing methods of cross-modal domain adaptation for 3D semantic segmentation predict results only via 2D-3D complementarity that is obtained by cross-modal feature matching. However, as lacking supervision in the target domain, the complementarity is not always reliable. The results are not ideal when the domain gap is large. To solve the problem of lacking supervision, we introduce masked modeling into this task and propose a method Mx2M, which utilizes masked cross-modality modeling to reduce the large domain gap. Our Mx2M contains two components. One is the core solution, cross-modal removal and prediction (xMRP), which makes the Mx2M adapt to various scenarios and provides cross-modal self-supervision. The other is a new way of cross-modal feature matching, the dynamic cross-modal filter (DxMF) that ensures the whole method dynamically uses more suitable 2D-3D complementarity. Evaluation of the Mx2M on three DA scenarios, including Day/Night, USA/Singapore, and A2D2/SemanticKITTI, brings large improvements over previous methods on many metrics.

Mx2M: Masked Cross-Modality Modeling in Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation

Physical commonsense reasoning is essential for building reliable and interpretable AI systems, which involves a general understanding of the physical properties and affordances of everyday objects, how these objects can be manipulated, and how they interact with others. It is fundamentally a multi-modal task, as physical properties are manifested through multiple modalities, including vision and acoustics. In this work, we present a unified framework, named Multimodal Commonsense Transformer (MCOMET), for physical audiovisual commonsense reasoning. MCOMET has two intriguing properties: i) it fully mines higher-ordered temporal relationships across modalities (e.g., pairs, triplets, and quadruplets); and ii) it restricts the cross-modal flow through the feature collection and propagation mechanism along with tight fusion bottlenecks, forcing the model to attend the most relevant parts in each modality and suppressing the dissemination of noisy information. We evaluate our model on a very recent public benchmark, PACS. Results show that MCOMET significantly outperforms a variety of strong baselines, revealing powerful multi-modal commonsense reasoning capabilities.

MCoMet: Multimodal Fusion Transformer for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning

Despite the broad application of deep reinforcement learning (RL), transferring and adapting the policy to unseen but similar environments is still a significant challenge. Recently, the language-conditioned policy is proposed to facilitate policy transfer through learning the joint representation of observation and text that catches the compact and invariant information across various environments. Existing studies of language-conditioned RL methods often learn the joint representation as a simple latent layer for the given instances (episode-specific observation and text), which inevitably includes noisy or irrelevant information and cause spurious correlations that dependent on instances, thus hurting generalization performance and training efficiency. To address the above issue, we propose a conceptual reinforcement learning (CRL) framework to learn the concept-like joint representation for language-conditioned policy. The key insight is that concepts are compact and invariant representations in human cognition through extracting similarities from numerous instances in real-world. In CRL, we propose a multi-level attention encoder and two mutual information constraints for learning compact and invariant concepts. Verified in two challenging environments, RTFM and Messenger, CRL significantly improves the training efficiency (up to 70%) and generalization ability (up to 30%) to the new environment dynamics.

Conceptual Reinforcement Learning for Language-Conditioned Tasks

We propose a multimodal data fusion framework to systematically analyze complex human behavioral data from specialized domains that are inherently dynamic, sparse, and heterogeneous. We develop a novel two-tier architecture of probabilistic mixtures, where the lower tier leverages parametric distributions from the exponential family to extract significant behavioral patterns from each data modality. These patterns are then organized into a dynamic latent state space at the higher tier to fuse patterns from different modalities. In addition, our framework jointly performs pattern discovery and maximum-margin learning for downstream classification tasks by using a novel group-wise sparse prior that regularizes the coefficients of the maximum-margin classifier. Therefore, the discovered patterns are highly interpretable and discriminative to support downstream classification tasks. Experiments on real-world behavioral data from medical and psychological domains demonstrate that our framework discovers meaningful multimodal behavioral patterns with outstanding interpretability and prediction performance.

Sparse Maximum Margin Learning From Multimodal Human Behavioral Patterns

This paper proposes a physics-guided neural network model to predict crop yield and maintain the fairness over space. Failures to preserve the spatial fairness in predicted maps of crop yields can result in biased policies and intervention strategies in the distribution of assistance or subsidies in supporting individuals at risk. Existing methods for fairness enforcement are not designed for capturing the complex physical processes that underlie the crop growing process, and thus are unable to produce good predictions over large regions under different weather conditions and soil properties. More importantly, the fairness is often degraded when existing methods are applied to different years due to the change of weather conditions and farming practices. To address these issues, we propose a physics-guided neural network model, which leverages the physical knowledge from existing physics-based models to guide the extraction of representative physical information and discover the temporal data shift across years. In particular, we use a reweighting strategy to discover the relationship between training years and testing years using the physics-aware representation. Then the physics-guided neural network will be refined via a bi-level optimization process based on the reweighted fairness objective. The proposed method has been evaluated using real county-level crop yield data and simulated data produced by a physics-based model. The results demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the predictive performance and preserve the spatial fairness when generalized to different years.

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Learning Explicit Credit Assignment for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Polarization Policy Gradient

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