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Rising usage of deep neural networks to perform decision making in critical applications like medical diagnosis and fi- nancial analysis have raised concerns regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. As automated systems become more mainstream, it is important their decisions be transparent, reliable and understandable by humans for better trust and confidence. To this effect, concept-based models such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) and Self-Explaining Neural Networks (SENN) have been proposed which constrain the latent space of a model to represent high level concepts easily understood by domain experts in the field. Although concept-based models promise a good approach to both increasing explainability and reliability, it is yet to be shown if they demonstrate robustness and output consistent concepts under systematic perturbations to their inputs. To better understand performance of concept-based models on curated malicious samples, in this paper, we aim to study their robustness to adversarial perturbations, which are also known as the imperceptible changes to the input data that are crafted by an attacker to fool a well-learned concept-based model. Specifically, we first propose and analyze different malicious attacks to evaluate the security vulnerability of concept based models. Subsequently, we propose a potential general adversarial training-based defense mechanism to increase robustness of these systems to the proposed malicious attacks. Extensive experiments on one synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks and the defense approach.

AAAI 2023

Understanding and Enhancing Robustness of Concept-based Models

explainable ml

interpretable

transparent

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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

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. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


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.

Deep Neural Networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Among many defense strategies, adversarial training with untargeted attacks is one of the most effective methods. Theoretically, adversarial perturbation in untargeted attacks can be added along arbitrary directions and the predicted labels of untargeted attacks should be unpredictable. However, we find that the naturally imbalanced inter-class semantic similarity makes those hard-class pairs become virtual targets of each other. This study investigates the impact of such closely-coupled classes on adversarial attacks and develops a self-paced reweighting strategy in adversarial training accordingly. Specifically, we propose to upweight hard-class pair losses in model optimization, which prompts learning discriminative features from hard classes. We further incorporate a term to quantify hard-class pair consistency in adversarial training, which greatly boosts model robustness. Extensive experiments show that the proposed adversarial training method achieves superior robustness performance over state-of-the-art defenses against a wide range of adversarial attacks. The code of the proposed SPAT is published at https://github.com/puerrrr/Self-Paced-Adversarial-Training.

Improving Adversarial Robustness with Self-Paced Hard-Class Pair Reweighting

Federated learning (FL) has gained significant attention recently as a privacy-enhancing tool to jointly train a machine learning model by multiple participants. 
The prior work on FL has mostly studied how to protect label privacy during model training. However, model evaluation in FL might also lead to potential leakage of private label information.
In this work, we propose an evaluation algorithm that can  accurately compute the widely used AUC (area under the curve) metric when using the label differential privacy (DP) in FL. Through extensive experiments, we show our algorithms can compute accurate AUCs compared to the ground truth. The code is available at {\url{https://github.com/bytedance/fedlearner/tree/master/example/privacy/DPAUC}}

DPAUC: Differentially Private AUC Computation in Federated Learning

The partially occluded image recognition (POIR) problem has been a challenge for artificial intelligence for a long time. A common strategy to handle the POIR problem is using the non-occluded features for classification. Unfortunately, this strategy will lose effectiveness when the image is severely occluded, since the visible parts can only provide limited information. Several studies in neuroscience reveal that feature restoration which fills in the occluded information and is called amodal completion is essential for human brains to recognize partially occluded images. However, feature restoration is commonly ignored by CNNs, which may be the reason why CNNs are ineffective for the POIR problem. Inspired by this, we propose a novel brain-inspired feature restoration network (BIFRNet) to solve the POIR problem. It mimics a ventral visual pathway to extract image features and a dorsal visual pathway to distinguish occluded and visible image regions. In addition, it also uses a knowledge module to store classification prior knowledge and uses a completion module to restore occluded features based on visible features and prior knowledge. Thorough experiments on synthetic and real-world occluded image datasets show that BIFRNet outperforms the existing methods in solving the POIR problem. Especially for severely occluded images, BIRFRNet surpasses other methods by a large margin and is close to the human brain performance. Furthermore, the brain-inspired design makes BIFRNet more interpretable.

BIFRNet A Brain-Inspired Feature Restoration DNN for Partially Occluded Image Recognition

Procuring expressive molecular representations underpins AI-driven molecule design and scientific discovery. The research mainly focuses on atom-level homogeneous molecular graphs, ignoring the rich information in subgraphs or motifs. However, it has been widely accepted that substructures play a dominant role in identifying and determining molecular properties. To address such issues, we formulate heterogeneous molecular graphs (HMGs) and introduce a novel architecture to exploit both molecular motifs and 3D geometry. Precisely, we extract functional groups as motifs for small molecules and employ reinforcement learning to adaptively select quaternary amino acids as motif candidates for proteins. Then HMGs are constructed with both atom-level and motif-level nodes. To better accommodate those HMGs, we introduce a variant of Transformer named Molformer, which adopts a heterogeneous self-attention layer to distinguish the interactions between multi-level nodes. Besides, it is also coupled with a multi-scale mechanism to capture fine-grained local patterns with increasing contextual scales. An attentive farthest point sampling algorithm is also proposed to obtain the molecular representations. We validate Molformer across a broad range of domains, including quantum chemistry, physiology, and biophysics. Extensive experiments show that Molformer outperforms or achieves the comparable performance of several state-of-the-art baselines. Our work provides a promising way to utilize informative motifs from the perspective of multi-level graph construction. 

Molformer: Motif-based Transformer on 3D Heterogeneous Molecular Graphs

With an increased focus on incorporating fairness in machine learning models, it becomes imperative not only to assess and mitigate bias at each stage of the machine learning pipeline but also to understand the downstream impacts of bias across stages. Here we consider a general, but realistic, scenario in which a predictive model is learned from (potentially biased) training data, and model predictions are assessed post-hoc for fairness by some auditing method. We provide a theoretical analysis of how a specific form of data bias, differential sampling bias, propagates from the data stage to the prediction stage. Unlike prior work, we evaluate the downstream impacts of data biases quantitatively rather than qualitatively and prove theoretical guarantees for detection. Under reasonable assumptions, we quantify how the amount of bias in the model predictions varies as a function of the amount of differential sampling bias in the data, and at what point this bias becomes provably detectable by the auditor. Through experiments on two criminal justice datasets-- the well-known COMPAS dataset and historical data from NYPD's stop and frisk policy-- we demonstrate that the theoretical results hold in practice even when our assumptions are relaxed.

Provable Detection of Propagating Sampling Bias in Prediction Models

In neural networks, continual learning results in gradient interference among sequential tasks, leading to catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while learning new ones. This issue is addressed in recent methods by storing the important gradient spaces for old tasks and updating the model orthogonally during new tasks. However, such restrictive orthogonal gradient updates hamper the learning capability of the new tasks resulting in sub-optimal performance. To improve new learning while minimizing forgetting, in this paper we propose a Scaled Gradient Projection (SGP) method, where we combine the orthogonal gradient projections with scaled gradient steps along the important gradient spaces for the past tasks. The degree of gradient scaling along these spaces depends on the importance of the bases spanning them. We propose an efficient method for computing and accumulating importance of these bases using the singular value decomposition of the input representations for each task. We conduct extensive experiments ranging from continual image classification to reinforcement learning tasks and report better performance with less training overhead than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Continual Learning with Scaled Gradient Projection

Data-driven medium-range weather forecasting has attracted much attention in recent years. However, the forecasting accuracy at high resolution is unsatisfactory currently. Pursuing high-resolution and high-quality weather forecasting, we develop a data-driven model SwinRDM which integrates an improved version of SwinRNN with a diffusion model. SwinRDM performs predictions at $0.25^\circ$ resolution and achieves superior forecasting accuracy to IFS (Integrated Forecast System), the state-of-the-art operational NWP model, on representative atmospheric variables including 500 hPa geopotential (Z500), 850 hPa temperature (T850), 2-m temperature (T2M), and total precipitation (TP), at lead times of up to 5 days. We propose to leverage a two-step strategy to achieve high-resolution predictions at $0.25^\circ$ considering the trade-off between computation memory and forecasting accuracy. Recurrent predictions for future atmospheric fields are firstly performed at $1.40625^\circ$ resolution, and then a diffusion-based super-resolution model is leveraged to recover the high spatial resolution and finer-scale atmospheric details. SwinRDM pushes forward the performance and potential of data-driven models for a large margin towards operational applications.

SwinRDM: Integrate SwinRNN with Diffusion Model Towards High-Resolution and High-Quality Weather Forecasting

Recent years we have witnessed rapid development in NeRF-based image rendering due to its high quality. However, point clouds rendering is somehow less explored. Compared to NeRF-based rendering which suffers from dense spatial sampling, point clouds rendering is naturally less computation intensive, which enables its deployment in mobile computing device. In this work, we focus on boosting the image quality of point clouds rendering with a compact model design. We first analyze the adaption of the volume rendering formulation on point clouds. Based on the analysis, we simplify the NeRF representation to a spatial mapping function which only requires single evaluation per pixel. Further, motivated by ray marching, we rectify the the noisy raw point clouds to the estimated intersection between rays and surfaces as queried coordinates, which could avoid \textit{spatial frequency collapse} and neighbor point disturbance. Composed of rasterization, spatial mapping and the refinement stages, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on point clouds rendering, outperforming prior works by notable margins, with a smaller model size. We obtain a PSNR of 31.74 on NeRF-Synthetic, 25.88 on ScanNet and 30.81 on DTU. Code and data are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/seanywang0408/RadianceMapping}}.

Boosting Point Clouds Rendering via Radiance Mapping

It is assumed that pre-training provides the feature extractor with strong class transferability and that high novel class generalization can be achieved by simply reusing the transferable feature extractor. In this work, our motivation is to explicitly learn some fine-grained and transferable meta-knowledge so that feature reusability can be further improved. Concretely, inspired by the fact that humans can use learned concepts or components to help them recognize novel classes, we propose Compositional Prototypical Networks (CPN) to learn a transferable prototype for each human-annotated attribute, which we call a component prototype. We empirically demonstrate that the learned component prototypes have good class transferability and can be reused to construct compositional prototypes for novel classes. Then a learnable weight generator is utilized to adaptively fuse the compositional and visual prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on different datasets and settings. The performance gains are especially remarkable in the 5-way 1-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/fikry102/CPN.

Compositional Prototypical Networks for Few-Shot Classification

Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPMs) have been widely used to evaluate the visual reasoning ability of humans. To tackle the challenges of visual perception and logic reasoning on RPMs, we propose a Hierarchical ConViT with Attention-based Relational Reasoner (HCV-ARR). Traditional solution methods often apply relatively shallow convolution networks to visually perceive shape patterns in RPM images, which may not fully model the long-range dependencies of complex pattern combinations in RPMs. The proposed ConViT consists of a convolutional block to capture the low-level attributes of visual patterns, and a transformer block to capture the high-level image semantics such as pattern formations. Furthermore, the proposed hierarchical ConViT captures visual features from multiple receptive fields, where the shallow layers focus on the image fine details while the deeper layers focus on the image semantics. To better model the underlying reasoning rules embedded in RPM images, an Attention-based Relational Reasoner (ARR) is proposed to establish the underlying relations among images. The proposed ARR well exploits the hidden relations among question images through the developed element-wise attentive reasoner. Experimental results on three RPM datasets demonstrate that the proposed HCV-ARR achieves a significant performance gain compared with the state-of-the-art models.

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