United States

We study the combinatorial assignment domain, which includes combinatorial auctions and course allocation. The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, several papers have recently proposed machine learning-based preference elicitation algorithms that aim to elicit only the most important information from agents. However, the main shortcoming of this prior work is that it does not model a mechanism&#39;s uncertainty over values for not yet elicited bundles. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by presenting a Bayesian Optimization-based Combinatorial Assignment (BOCA) mechanism. Our key technical contribution is to integrate a method for capturing model uncertainty into an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism. Concretely, we design a new method for estimating an upper uncertainty bound that can be used to define an acquisition function to determine the next query to the agents. This enables the mechanism to properly explore (and not just exploit) the bundle space during its preference elicitation phase. We run computational experiments in several spectrum auction domains to evaluate BOCA&#39;s performance. Our results show that BOCA achieves higher allocative efficiency than state-of-the-art approaches.

AAAI 2023

Bayesian Optimization-based Combinatorial Assignment

monotonic regression

combinatorial auctions

market design

gtep: auctions and market-based systems

gtep: mechanism design

bayesian optimization

epistemic uncertainty

neural networks

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).

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AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

We study the combinatorial assignment domain, which includes combinatorial auctions and course allocation. The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, several papers have recently proposed machine learning-based preference elicitation algorithms that aim to elicit only the most important information from agents. However, the main shortcoming of this prior work is that it does not model a mechanism's uncertainty over values for not yet elicited bundles. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by presenting a Bayesian Optimization-based Combinatorial Assignment (BOCA) mechanism. Our key technical contribution is to integrate a method for capturing model uncertainty into an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism. Concretely, we design a new method for estimating an upper uncertainty bound that can be used to define an acquisition function to determine the next query to the agents. This enables the mechanism to properly explore (and not just exploit) the bundle space during its preference elicitation phase. We run computational experiments in several spectrum auction domains to evaluate BOCA's performance. Our results show that BOCA achieves higher allocative efficiency than state-of-the-art approaches.

poster

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.

This paper studies learning meaningful node representations for signed graphs, where both positive and negative links exist. This problem has been widely studied by meticulously designing expressive signed graph neural networks, as well as capturing the structural information of the signed graph through traditional structure decomposition methods, e.g., spectral graph theory. In this paper, we propose a novel signed graph representation learning framework, called Signed Laplacian Graph Neural Network (SLGNN), which combines the advantages of both. Specifically, based on spectral graph theory and graph signal processing, we first design different low-pass and high-pass graph convolution filters to extract low-frequency and high-frequency information on positive and negative links, respectively, and then combine them into a unified message passing framework. To effectively model signed graphs, we further propose a self-gating mechanism to estimate the impacts of low-frequency and high-frequency information during message passing. We mathematically establish the relationship between the aggregation process in SLGNN and signed Laplacian regularization in signed graphs, and theoretically analyze the expressiveness of SLGNN. Experimental results demonstrate that SLGNN outperforms various competitive baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Signed Laplacian Graph Neural Networks

This paper presents Uncertainty-aware Contrastive Learning (UCoL): a fully unsupervised framework for discriminative facial representation learning. Our UCoL is built upon a momentum contrastive network, referred to as Dual-path Momentum Network. Specifically, two flows of pairwise contrastive training are conducted simultaneously:  one is formed with intra-instance self augmentation, and the other is to identify positive pairs collected by online pairwise prediction. We introduce a novel uncertainty-aware consistency K-nearest neighbors algorithm to generate predicted positive pairs, which enables efficient discriminative learning from large-scale open-world unlabeled data. Experiments show that UCoL significantly improves the baselines of unsupervised models and performs on par with the semi-supervised and supervised face representation learning methods. 

UCoL: Unsupervised Learning of Discriminative Facial Representations via Uncertainty-aware Constrast

The advent of the big data era brought new opportunities and challenges to draw treatment effect in data fusion, that is, a mixed dataset collected from multiple sources (each source with an independent treatment assignment mechanism). Due to possibly omitted source labels and unmeasured confounders, traditional methods cannot estimate individual treatment assignment probability and infer treatment effect effectively. Therefore, we propose to reconstruct the source label and model it as a Group Instrumental Variable (GIV) to implement IV-based Regression for treatment effect estimation. In this paper, we conceptualize this line of thought and develop a unified framework (Meta-EM) to (1) map the raw data into a representation space to construct Linear Mixed Models for the assigned treatment variable; (2) estimate the distribution differences and model the GIV for the different treatment assignment mechanisms; and (3) adopt an alternating training strategy to iteratively optimize the representations and the joint distribution to model GIV for IV regression. Empirical results demonstrate the advantages of our Meta-EM compared with state-of-the-art methods. The project page with the code and the Supplementary materials is available at https://github.com/causal-machine-learning-lab/meta-em.

Learning Instrumental Variable from Data Fusion for Treatment Effect Estimation

In this work, we study the problem of Embodied Referring Expression Grounding, where an agent needs to navigate in a previously unseen environment and localize a remote object described by a concise high-level natural language instruction. When facing such a situation, a human tends to imagine what the destination may look like and to explore the environment based on prior knowledge of the environmental layout, such as the fact that a bathroom is more likely to be found near a bedroom than a kitchen. We have designed an autonomous agent called Layout-aware Dreamer (LAD), including two novel modules, that is, the Layout Learner and the Goal Dreamer to mimic this cognitive decision process. The Layout Learner learns to infer the room category distribution of neighboring unexplored areas along the path for coarse layout estimation, which effectively introduces layout common sense of room-to-room transitions to our agent. To learn an effective exploration of the environment, the Goal Dreamer imagines the destination beforehand. Our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the public leaderboard of REVERIE dataset in challenging unseen test environments with improvement on navigation success rate (SR) by 4.02% and remote grounding success (RGS) by 3.43% comparing to previous previous state of the art.

Layout-aware Dreamer for Embodied Visual Referring Expression Grounding

Semantic segmentation is still a challenging task for parsing diverse contexts in different scenes, thus the fixed classifier might not be able to well address varying feature distributions during testing.  Different from the mainstream literature where the efficacy of strong backbones and effective decoder heads has been well studied, in this paper, additional contextual hints are instead exploited via learning a context-aware classifier whose content is data-conditioned, decently adapting to different latent distributions. Since only the classifier is dynamically altered, our method is model-agnostic and can be easily applied to generic segmentation models. Notably, with only negligible additional parameters and +2\% inference time, decent performance gain has been achieved on both small (e.g., MobileNet-V2) and large models (e.g., Swin-Large) with challenging benchmarks, manifesting substantial practical merits brought by our simple yet effective method. Code and models will be made publicly available. 

Learning Context-aware Classifier for Semantic Segmentation

Conditional variational models, using either continuous or discrete latent variables, are powerful for open-domain dialogue response generation. However, previous works show that continuous latent variables tend to reduce the coherence of generated responses. In this paper, we also found that discrete latent variables have difficulty capturing more diverse expressions. To tackle these problems, we combine the merits of both continuous and discrete latent variables and propose a \textbf{H}ybrid \textbf{L}atent \textbf{V}ariable (HLV) method. Specifically, HLV constrains the global semantics of responses through discrete latent variables and enriches responses with continuous latent variables. Thus, we diversify the generated responses while maintaining relevance and coherence. In addition, we propose \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{H}ybrid \textbf{V}ariational \textbf{T}ransformer (CHVT) to construct and to utilize HLV with transformers for dialogue generation. Through fine-grained symbolic-level semantic information and \textit{additive Gaussian mixing}, we construct the distribution of continuous variables, prompting the generation of diverse expressions. Meanwhile, to maintain the relevance and coherence, the discrete latent variable is optimized by \textit{self-separation training}. Experimental results on two dialogue generation datasets (DailyDialog and Opensubtitles) show that CHVT is superior to traditional transformer-based variational mechanism w.r.t. diversity, relevance and coherence metrics. Moreover, we also demonstrate the benefit of applying HLV to fine-tuning two pre-trained dialogue models (PLATO and BART-base).

Towards Diverse, Relevant and Coherent Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Hybrid Latent Variables

We propose an end-to-end learning framework based on hierarchical reinforcement learning, called H-TSP, for addressing the large-scale Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed H-TSP constructs a solution of a TSP instance starting from the scratch relying on two components: the upper-level policy chooses a small subset of nodes (up to 200 in our experiment) from all nodes that are to be traversed, while the lower-level policy takes the chosen nodes as input and outputs a tour connecting them to the existing partial route (initially only containing the depot). After jointly training the upper-level and lower-level policies, our approach can directly generate solutions for the given TSP instances without relying on any time-consuming search procedures. To demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have conducted extensive experiments on randomly generated TSP instances with different numbers of nodes. We show that H-TSP can achieve comparable results (gap 3.42% vs. 7.32%) as SOTA search-based approaches, and more importantly, we reduce the time consumption up to two orders of magnitude (3.32s vs. 395.85s). To the best of our knowledge, H-TSP is the first end-to-end deep reinforcement learning approach that can scale to TSP instances of up to 10000 nodes. Although there are still gaps to SOTA results with respect to solution quality, we believe that H-TSP will be useful for practical applications, particularly those that are time-sensitive e.g., on-call routing and ride hailing service.

H-TSP: Hierarchically Solving the Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problem

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is a prototypical constraint optimization problem, and its generalized version is the (Weighted) Partial MaxSAT problem, denoted as (W)PMS, which deals with hard and soft clauses. Considerable progress has been made on stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms for solving (W)PMS, which mainly focus on clause weighting techniques. In this work, we identify two issues of existing clause weighting techniques for (W)PMS, and propose two ideas correspondingly. First, we observe that the initial values of soft clause weights have a big effect on the performance of the SLS solver for solving (W)PMS, and propose a weight initialization method. Second, we propose a new clause weighting scheme that for the first time employs different conditions for updating hard and soft clause weights. Based on these two ideas, we develop a new SLS solver for (W)PMS named NuWLS. Through extensive experiments, NuWLS performs much better than existing SLS solvers on all 6 benchmarks from the incomplete tracks of MaxSAT Evaluations (MSEs) 2019, 2020, and 2021. In terms of the number of winning instances, NuWLS outperforms state-of-the-art SAT-based incomplete solvers on all the 6 benchmarks. More encouragingly, a hybrid solver that combines NuWLS and an SAT-based solver won all four categories in the incomplete track of the MaxSAT Evaluation 2022.

NuWLS: Improving Local Search for (Weighted) Partial MaxSAT by New Weighting Techniques

Capturing uncertainty in models of complex dynamical systems is crucial to designing safe controllers. Stochastic noise causes aleatoric uncertainty, whereas imprecise knowledge of model parameters leads to epistemic uncertainty. Several approaches use formal abstractions to synthesize policies that satisfy temporal specifications related to safety and reachability. However, the underlying models exclusively capture aleatoric but not epistemic uncertainty, and thus require that model parameters are known precisely. Our contribution to overcoming this restriction is a novel abstraction-based controller synthesis method for continuous-state models with stochastic noise and uncertain parameters. By sampling techniques and robust analysis, we capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, with a user-specified confidence level, in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). We synthesize an optimal policy on this iMDP, which translates (with the specified confidence level) to a feedback controller for the continuous model with the same performance guarantees. Our experimental benchmarks confirm that accounting for epistemic uncertainty leads to controllers that are more robust against variations in parameter values.

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