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Neural controlled differential equations (NCDEs), which are continuous analogues to recurrent neural networks (RNNs), are a specialized model in (irregular) time-series processing. In comparison with similar models, e.g., neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs), the key distinctive characteristics of NCDEs are i) the adoption of the continuous path created by an interpolation algorithm from each raw discrete time-series sample and ii) the adoption of the Riemann--Stieltjes integral. It is the continuous path which makes NCDEs be analogues to continuous RNNs. However, NCDEs use existing interpolation algorithms to create the path, which is unclear whether they can create an optimal path. To this end, we present a method to generate another latent path (rather than relying on existing interpolation algorithms), which is identical to learning an appropriate interpolation method. We design an encoder-decoder module based on NCDEs and NODEs, and a special training method for it. Our method shows the best performance in both time-series classification and forecasting.

AAAI 2023

Learnable Path in Neural Controlled Differential Equations

time series data

neural controlled differential equations

interpolation

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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.

Large-scale commonsense knowledge bases empower a broad range of AI applications, where the automatic extraction of commonsense knowledge (CKE) is a fundamental and challenging problem. CKE from text is known for suffering from the inherent sparsity and reporting bias of commonsense in text. Visual perception, on the other hand, contains rich commonsense knowledge about real-world entities, e.g., (person, can_hold, bottle), which can serve as promising sources for acquiring grounded commonsense knowledge. In this work, we present CLEVER, which formulates CKE as a distantly supervised multi-instance learning problem, where models learn to summarize commonsense relations from a bag of images about an entity pair without any human annotation on image instances. To address the problem, CLEVER leverages vision-language pre-training models for deep understanding of each image in the bag, and selects informative instances from the bag to summarize commonsense entity relations via a novel contrastive attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results in held-out and human evaluation show that CLEVER can extract commonsense knowledge in promising quality, outperforming pre-trained language model-based methods by 3.9 AUC and 6.4 mAUC points. The predicted commonsense scores show strong correlation with human judgment with a 0.78 Spearman coefficient. Moreover, the extracted commonsense can also be grounded into images with reasonable interpretability. The data and codes can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/CLEVER.

Visually Grounded Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition

Modern machine learning models may be susceptible to learning spurious correlations that hold on average but not for the atypical group of samples. To address the problem, previous approaches minimize the empirical worst-group risk. Despite the promise, they often assume that each sample belongs to one and only one group, which does not allow expressing the uncertainty in group labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel framework PG-DRO, which explores the idea of probabilistic group membership for distributionally robust optimization. Key to our framework, we consider soft group membership instead of hard group annotations. The group probabilities can be flexibly generated using either supervised learning or zero-shot approaches. Our framework accommodates samples with group membership ambiguity, offering stronger flexibility and generality than the prior art. We comprehensively evaluate PG-DRO on both image classification and natural language processing benchmarks, establishing superior performance.

Distributionally Robust Optimization with Probabilistic Group

Sequence generation demonstrates promising performance in recent information extraction efforts, by incorporating large-scale pre-trained Seq2Seq models. This paper investigates the merits of employing sequence generation in relation extraction, finding that with relation names or synonyms as generation targets, their textual semantics and the correlation (in terms of word sequence pattern) among them affect model performance. We then propose Relation Extraction with Label Augmentation (RELA), a Seq2Seq model with automatic label augmentation for RE. By saying label augmentation, we mean prod semantically synonyms for each relation name as the generation target. Besides, we present an in-depth analysis of the Seq2Seq model's behavior when dealing with RE. Experimental results show that RELA achieves competitive results compared with previous methods on four RE datasets.

Sequence Generation with Label Augmentation for Relation Extraction

MinMax Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (mTSP) is an important class of combinatorial optimization problems with many practical applications, of which the goal is to minimize the longest tour of all vehicles. Due to its high computational complexity, existing methods for solving this problem cannot obtain a solution of satisfactory quality with fast speed, especially when the scale of the problem is large. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method named SplitNet to transform the single TSP solutions into the MinMax mTSP solutions of the same instances. Specifically, we generate single TSP solution sequences and split them into mTSP subsequences using an attention-based model trained by reinforcement learning. We also design a decision region for the splitting policy, which significantly reduces the policy action space on instances of various scales and thus improves the generalization ability of SplitNet. The experimental results show that SplitNet generalizes well and outperforms existing learning-based baselines and Google OR-Tools on widely-used random datasets of different scales and public datasets with fast solving speed.

SplitNet: A Reinforcement Learning based Sequence Splitting Method for the MinMax Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem

We present regret minimization algorithms for stochastic contextual MDPs under minimum reachability assumption, using an access to an offline least square regression oracle.
    We analyze three different settings: where the dynamics is known, where the dynamics is unknown but independent of the context and the most challenging setting where the dynamics is unknown and context-dependent. For the latter, our algorithm obtains regret bound of
    $\widetilde{O}( (H+{1}/{p_{min}})H|S|^{3/2}\sqrt{|A|T\log(\max\{|\mathcal{G}|,|\mathcal{P}|\}/\delta)})$ with probability $1-\delta$, where $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{G}$ are finite and realizable function classes used to approximate the dynamics and rewards respectively, $p_{min}$ is the minimum reachability parameter, $S$ is the set of states, $A$ the set of actions, $H$ the horizon, and $T$ the number of episodes.
    To our knowledge, our approach is the first optimistic approach applied to contextual MDPs with general function approximation (i.e., without additional knowledge regarding the function class, such as it being linear and etc.).
    We present a lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{T  H |S| |A| \ln(|\mathcal{G}|)/\ln(|A|)})$, on the expected regret which holds even in the case of known dynamics.
    Lastly, we discuss an extension of our results to CMDPs without minimum reachability, that obtains $\widetilde{O}(T^{3/4})$ regret.

Optimism in Face of a Context:Regret Guarantees for Stochastic Contextual MDP

Learning models that are robust to test-time distribution shifts is a key concern in domain generalization, and in the wider context of their real-life applicability. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is one particular framework that aims to learn deep invariant features from multiple domains, and has subsequently led to further variants. A key assumption for the success of these methods requires that the underlying causal mechanisms/features remain invariant across domains and the true invariant features be sufficient to learn the optimal predictor. In practical problem settings, these assumptions are often not satisfied, which leads to IRM learning a sub-optimal predictor for that task. In this work, we propose the notion of partial invariance as a relaxation of the IRM framework. Under our problem setting, we first highlight the sub-optimality of the IRM solution. We then demonstrate how partitioning the training domains, assuming access to some meta-information about the domains, can help improve the performance of invariant models via partial invariance. Finally, we conduct several experiments, in linear settings as well as with classification tasks in language and images with deep models, which verify our conclusions.

Learning Optimal Features via Partial Invariance

Self-supervised anomaly detection and localization are critical to real-world scenarios in which collecting anomalous samples and pixel-wise labeling is tedious or even infeasible, even worse when a wide variety of unseen anomalies could surface at test time. Our approach involves a pretext task in the context of masked image modeling, where the goal is to impose agreement between cluster assignments obtained from the representation of an image view containing saliency-aware masked patches and the uncorrupted image view. We harness the self-attention map extracted from the transformer to mask non-salient image patches without destroying the crucial structure associated with the foreground object. Subsequently, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned to detect and localize simulated anomalies generated under the guidance of the transformer's self-attention map. We conducted extensive validation and ablations on the benchmark of industrial images and achieved superior performance against competing methods. We also show the adaptability of our method to the medical images of the chest X-rays benchmark. 

Attention-Conditioned Augmentations for Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection and Localization

In NLP annotation, it is common to have multiple annotators label the text and then obtain the ground truth labels based on major annotators’ agreement. However, annotators are individuals with different backgrounds and various voices. When annotation tasks become subjective, such as detecting politeness, offense, and social norms, annotators’ voices differ and vary. Their diverse voices may represent the true distribution of people’s opinions on subjective matters. Therefore, it is crucial to study the disagreement from annotation to understand which content is controversial from the annotators. In our research, we extract disagreement labels from five subjective datasets, then fine-tune language models to predict annotators’ disagreement. Our results show that knowing annotators’ demographic information (e.g., gender, ethnicity, education level), in addition to the task text, helps predict the disagreement. To investigate the effect of annotators’ demographics on their disagreement level, we simulate different combinations of their artificial demographics and explore the variance of the prediction to distinguish the disagreement from the inherent controversy from text content and the disagreement in the annotators’ perspective. Overall, we propose an innovative disagreement prediction mechanism for better design of the annotation process that will achieve more accurate and inclusive results for NLP systems. Our code and dataset are publicly available.

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