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Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a popular multi-agent path finding (MAPF) solver that employs a low-level single agent planner and a high-level constraint tree to resolve conflicts. The vast majority of modern MAPF solvers focus on improving CBS by reducing the size of this tree through various strategies with few methods modifying the low level planner. Typically low level planners in existing CBS methods use an unweighted cost-to-go heuristic, with suboptimal CBS methods also using a conflict heuristic to help the high level search. In this paper, we show that, contrary to prevailing CBS beliefs, a weighted cost-to-go heuristic can be used effectively alongside the conflict heuristic in two possible variants. In particular, one of these variants can obtain large speedups, 2-100x, across several  scenarios and suboptimal CBS methods. Importantly, we discover that performance is related not to the weighted cost-to-go heuristic but rather to the relative conflict heuristic weight&#39;s ability to effectively balance low-level and high-level work. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, we show the first theoretical relation of prioritized planning and bounded suboptimal CBS and demonstrate that our methods are their natural generalization.

AAAI 2023

Effective Integration of Weighted Cost-to-go and Conflict Heuristic within Suboptimal CBS

mas: other foundations of multiagent systems

so: heuristic search

mas: multiagent planning

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.

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a popular multi-agent path finding (MAPF) solver that employs a low-level single agent planner and a high-level constraint tree to resolve conflicts. The vast majority of modern MAPF solvers focus on improving CBS by reducing the size of this tree through various strategies with few methods modifying the low level planner. Typically low level planners in existing CBS methods use an unweighted cost-to-go heuristic, with suboptimal CBS methods also using a conflict heuristic to help the high level search. In this paper, we show that, contrary to prevailing CBS beliefs, a weighted cost-to-go heuristic can be used effectively alongside the conflict heuristic in two possible variants. In particular, one of these variants can obtain large speedups, 2-100x, across several  scenarios and suboptimal CBS methods. Importantly, we discover that performance is related not to the weighted cost-to-go heuristic but rather to the relative conflict heuristic weight's ability to effectively balance low-level and high-level work. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, we show the first theoretical relation of prioritized planning and bounded suboptimal CBS and demonstrate that our methods are their natural generalization.

poster

Heavy computation is a bottleneck limiting deep-learning-based feature matching algorithms to be applied in many real-time applications. However, existing lightweight networks optimized for Euclidean data cannot address classical feature matching tasks, since sparse keypoint based descriptors are expected to be matched. This paper tackles this problem and proposes two concepts: 1) a novel parallel attention model entitled ParaFormer and 2) a graph based U-Net architecture with attentional pooling. First, ParaFormer fuses features and keypoint positions through the concept of amplitude and phase, and integrates self- and cross-attention in a parallel manner which achieves a win-win performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Second, with U-Net architecture and proposed attentional pooling, the ParaFormer-U variant significantly reduces computational complexity, and minimize performance loss caused by downsampling. Sufficient experiments on various applications, including homography estimation, pose estimation, and image matching, demonstrate that ParaFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency. The efficient ParaFormer-U variant achieves comparable performance with less than 50% FLOPs of the existing attention-based models. 

ParaFormer: Parallel Attention Transformer for Efficient Feature Matching

Learning an autonomous highlight video detector with good transferability across video categories,  called Cross-Category Video Highlight Detection(CC-VHD),  is crucial for the practical application on video-based media platforms. To tackle this problem, we first propose a framework that treats the CC-VHD as learning category-independent highlight feature representation. Under this framework,  we propose a novel module, named Multi-task Feature Decomposition Branch which jointly conducts label prediction,  cyclic feature reconstruction, and adversarial feature reconstruction to decompose the video features into two independent components: highlight-related component and category-related component. Besides,  we propose to align the visual and audio modalities to one aligned feature space before conducting modality fusion, which has not been considered in previous works. Finally, the extensive experimental results on three challenging public benchmarks validate the efficacy of our paradigm and the superiority over the existing state-of-the-art approaches to video highlight detection.

Cross-Category Highlight Detection via Feature Decomposition and Modality Alignment

The StyleGAN family succeed in high-fidelity image generation and allow for flexible and plausible editing of generated images by manipulating the semantic-rich latent style space. However, projecting a real image into its latent space encounters an inherent trade-off between inversion quality and editability. Existing encoder-based or optimization-based StyleGAN inversion methods attempt to mitigate the trade-off but see limited performance. To fundamentally resolve this problem, we propose a novel two-phase framework by designating two separate networks to tackle editing and reconstruction respectively, instead of balancing the two. Specifically, in Phase I, a W-space-oriented StyleGAN inversion network is trained and used to perform image inversion and edit- ing, which assures the editability but sacrifices reconstruction quality. In Phase II, a carefully designed rectifying network is utilized to rectify the inversion errors and perform ideal reconstruction. Experimental results show that our approach yields near-perfect reconstructions without sacrificing the editability, thus allowing accurate manipulation of real images. Further, we evaluate the performance of our rectifying net- work, and see great generalizability towards unseen manipulation types and out-of-domain images.

ReGANIE: Rectifying GAN Inversion Errors for Accurate Real Image Editing

Syntax splitting is a property of inductive inference operators that ensures we can restrict our attention to parts of the conditional belief base that share atoms with a given query. To apply syntax splitting, a conditional belief base needs to consist of syntactically disjoint conditionals. This requirement is often too strong in practice, as conditionals might share atoms. In this paper, we introduce the concept of conditional syntax splitting, inspired by the notion of conditional independence as known from probability theory. We show that lexicographic inference and system W satisfy conditional syntax splitting, and connect conditional syntax splitting to several known properties from the literature on non-monotonic reasoning, including the drowning effect.

Conditional syntax splitting for non-monotonic inference operators

Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) plays an essential role in many applications ranging from information retrieval, recommender systems to natural language processing. However, exhaustive MIPS is often expensive and impractical when there are a large number of candidate items. 
The state-of-the-art quantization method of approximated MIPS is product quantization with a score-aware loss, developed by assuming that queries are uniformly distributed in the unit sphere. However, in real-world datasets, the above assumption about queries does not necessarily hold. 
To this end, we propose a quantization method based on the distribution of queries combined with sampled softmax.
Further, we introduce a general framework encompassing the proposed method and multiple quantization methods, and we develop an effective optimization for the proposed general framework. The proposed method is evaluated on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. 

Query-aware Quantization for Maximum Inner Product Search

Behavioral scientists have classically documented aversion to algorithmic decision aids, from simple linear models to AI. Sentiment, however, is changing and possibly accelerating AI helper usage. AI assistance is, arguably, most valuable when humans must make complex choices. We argue that classic experimental methods used to study heuristics and biases are insufficient for studying complex choices made with AI helpers. We adapted an experimental paradigm designed for studying complex choices in such contexts. We show that framing and anchoring effects impact how people work with an AI helper and are predictive of choice outcomes. The evidence suggests that some participants, particularly those in a loss frame, put too much faith in the AI helper and experienced worse choice outcomes by doing so. The paradigm also generates computational modeling-friendly data allowing future studies of human-AI decision making.

The Role of Heuristics and Biases During Complex Choices with an AI Teammate

Through in-context learning (ICL), large-scale language models are effective few-shot learners without additional model fine-tuning. 
However, the ICL performance does not scale well with the number of available training sample as it is limited by the inherent input length constraint of the underlying language model. 
Meanwhile, many studies have revealed that language models are also powerful feature extractors, allowing them to be utilized in a black-box manner and enabling the linear probing paradigm, where lightweight discriminators are trained on top of the pre-extracted input representations.
This paper proposes prompt-augmented linear probing (PALP), a hybrid of linear probing and ICL, which leverages the best of both worlds.
PALP inherits the scalability of linear probing and the capability of enforcing language models to derive more meaningful representations via tailoring input into a more conceivable form.
Throughout in-depth investigations on various datasets, we verified that PALP significantly closes the gap between ICL in the data-hungry scenario and fine-tuning in the data-abundant scenario with little training overhead, potentially making PALP a strong alternative. 

Prompt-Augmented Linear Probing: Scaling Beyond The Limit of Few-shot In-Context Learners

We extend the notion of regret with a welfarist perspective. Focussing on the classic multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework, the current work quantifies the performance of bandit algorithms by applying a fundamental welfare function, namely the Nash social welfare (NSW) function. This corresponds to equating algorithm's performance to the geometric mean of its expected rewards and leads us to the study of  {\it Nash regret}, defined as the difference between the---a priori unknown---optimal mean (among the arms) and the algorithm's performance. Since NSW is known to satisfy fairness axioms, our approach complements the utilitarian considerations of average (cumulative) regret, wherein the algorithm is evaluated via the arithmetic mean of its expected rewards. 

This work develops an algorithm that, given the horizon of play $T$, achieves a Nash regret of $O \left( \sqrt{\frac{{k \log T}}{T}} \right)$, here $k$ denotes the number of arms in the MAB instance. Since, for any algorithm, the Nash regret is at least as much as its average regret (the AM-GM inequality), the known lower bound on average regret holds for Nash regret as well. Therefore, our Nash regret guarantee is essentially tight.  In addition, we develop an anytime algorithm with a Nash regret guarantee of $O \left( \sqrt{\frac{{k\log T}}{T}} \log T \right)$.

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ParaFormer: Parallel Attention Transformer for Efficient Feature Matching

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