United States

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. Even though recent advancements in AI-driven digital agriculture can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers&#39; trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market, and in turn accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability against a changing climate. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers&#39; cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results revealed that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

AAAI 2023

Evaluating Digital Agriculture Recommendations with Causal Inference

aisi: agriculture/food

and causality

krr: action

decision support systems

change

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.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. Even though recent advancements in AI-driven digital agriculture can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers' trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market, and in turn accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability against a changing climate. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results revealed that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

poster

Machine unlearning has become an important area of research due to an increasing need for machine learning (ML) applications to comply with the emerging data privacy regulations. It facilitates the provision for removal of certain set or class of data from an already trained ML model without requiring retraining from scratch. Recently, several efforts have been put in to make unlearning to be effective and efficient. We propose a novel machine unlearning method by exploring the utility of competent and incompetent teachers in a student-teacher framework to induce forgetfulness. The knowledge from the competent and incompetent teachers is selectively transferred to the student to obtain a model that doesn't contain any information about the forget data. We experimentally show that this method generalizes well, is fast and effective. Furthermore, we introduce the zero retrain forgetting (ZRF) metric to evaluate any unlearning method. Unlike the existing unlearning metrics, the ZRF score does not depend on the availability of the expensive retrained model. This makes it useful for analysis of the unlearned model after deployment as well. We present results of experiments conducted for random subset forgetting and class forgetting on various deep networks and across different application domains. Code is at: https://github.com/vikram2000b/bad-teaching- unlearning

Can Bad Teaching Induce Forgetting? Unlearning in Deep Networks using an Incompetent Teacher

Discriminability and transferability are two goals of feature learning for domain adaptation, as we aim to find the transferable features from the source domain that are helpful for discriminating the class label in the target domain. Modern domain adaptation approaches optimize discriminability and transferability by adopting two separate modules for the two goals upon a feature extractor, but lack fully exploiting their relationship. In this paper, we argue that by letting the discriminative module and transfer module help each other, better domain adaptation can be achieved. We propose Cooperative and Adversarial LEarning (CALE) to combine the optimization of discriminability and transferability into a whole, provide one solution for making the discriminative module and transfer module guide each other. Specifically, CALE generates cooperative (easy) examples and adversarial (hard) examples with both discriminative module and transfer module. While the easy examples that contain the module knowledge can be used to enhance each other, the hard ones are used to enhance the robustness of the corresponding goal. Experimental results show the effectiveness of CALE for unifying the learning of discriminability and transferability, as well as its superior performance.

Cooperative and Adversarial Learning: Co-Enhancing Discriminability and Transferability in Domain Adaptation

Despite that convolution neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for video super-resolution (VSR), efficiently training competitive VSR models remains a challenging problem. It usually takes an order of magnitude more time than training their counterpart image models, leading to long research cycles. Existing VSR methods typically train models with fixed spatial and temporal sizes from beginning to end. The fixed sizes are usually set to large values for good performance, resulting to slow training. However, is such a rigid training strategy necessary for VSR? In this work, we show that it is possible to gradually train video models from small to large spatial/temporal sizes, \ie, in an easy-to-hard manner. In particular, the whole training is divided into several stages and the earlier stage has smaller training spatial shape. Inside each stage, the temporal size also varies from short to long while the spatial size remains unchanged. Training is accelerated by such a multigrid training strategy, as most of computation is performed on smaller spatial and shorter temporal shapes. For further acceleration with GPU parallelization, we also investigate the large minibatch training without the loss in accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of largely speeding up training (up to $6.2\times$ speedup in wall-clock training time) without performance drop for various VSR models.

Accelerating the Training of Video Super-Resolution Models

Improving machine translation (MT) systems with translation memories (TMs) is of great interest to practitioners in the MT community. However, previous approaches require either a significant update of the model architecture and/or additional training efforts to make the models well-behaved when TMs are taken as additional input. In this paper, we present a simple but effective method to introduce TMs into neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Specifically, we treat TMs as prompts to the NMT model at test time, but leave the training process unchanged. The result is a slight update of an existing NMT system, which can be implemented in a few hours by anyone who is familiar with NMT. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms strong baselines.

Prompting Neural Machine Translation with Translation Memories

Camera relocalization has various applications in autonomous driving. Previous camera pose regression models consider only ideal scenarios where there is little environmental perturbation. To deal with challenging driving environments that may have changing seasons, weather, illumination, and the presence of unstable objects, we propose RobustLoc, which derives its robustness against perturbations from neural differential equations. Our model uses a convolutional neural network to extract feature maps from multi-view images, a robust neural differential equation diffusion block module to diffuse information interactively, and a branched pose decoder with multi-layer training to estimate the vehicle poses. Experiments demonstrate that RobustLoc surpasses current state-of-the-art camera pose regression models and achieves robust performance in various environments.

RobustLoc: Robust Camera Pose Regression in Challenging Driving Environments

Deep generative models have demonstrated superior performance in lossless compression on identically distributed data. However, in real-world scenarios, data to be compressed are of various distributions and usually cannot be known in advance. Thus, commercially expected neural compression must have strong Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization capabilities. Compared with traditional compression methods, deep learning methods have intrinsic flaws for OoD generalization. In this work, we make the attempt to tackle this challenge via exploiting a zoo of Deep Autoregressive models (DAMix). We build a model zoo consisting of autoregressive models trained on data from diverse distributions. In the test phase, we select useful expert models by a simple model evaluation score and adaptively aggregate the predictions of selected models. By assuming the outputs from each expert models are biased in favor of their training distributions, a von Mises-Fisher based filter is proposed to recover the value of unbiased predictions that provides more accurate density estimations than single model. We derive the posterior of unbiased predictions as well as concentration parameters in the filter, and a novel temporal Stein variational gradient descent for sequential data is proposed to adaptively update the posterior distributions. We evaluate DAMix on 22 image datasets, including in-distribution and OoD data, and demonstrate that making use of unbiased predictions has up to 45.6\% improvement over the single model trained on ImageNet.

DAMix: Exploiting Deep Autoregressive Model Zoo for Improving Lossless Compression Generalization

Transformer networks are able to capture patterns in data coming from many domains (text, images, videos, proteins, etc.) with little or no change to architecture components. We perform a theoretical analysis of the core component responsible for signal propagation between elements, i.e. the self-attention matrix. We ask the following question: Can self-attention matrix approximate arbitrary patterns? How small is the query dimension $d$ required for such approximation? Our first result shows that the task of deciding whether approximation of a given pattern is possible or not is NP-hard for a fixed $d > 1$. In practice, self-attention matrix typically exhibits two properties: it is sparse, and it changes dynamically depending on the input to the module. Motivated by this observation, we show that the self-attention matrix can provably approximate sparse matrices. While the parameters of self-attention are fixed, various sparse matrices can be approximated by only modifying the inputs. Our proof is based on the random projection technique and uses the seminal Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. In particular, we show that, in order to approximate any sparse matrix up to a given precision defined in terms of preserving matrix element ratios, $d$ grows only logarithmically with the sequence length $n$ (i.e. $d = O(\log n)$).

On the Expressive Flexibility of Self-Attention Matrices

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. 
GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function.
Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. 
In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. 
Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. 
This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. 
This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. 
The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks. 

Graph Ordering Attention Networks

Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF) has emerged as a central formalism in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning.
Preferences in AF allow to represent the comparative strength of arguments in a simple yet expressive way. 
Preference-based AF (PAF) has been proposed to extend AF with preferences of the form a > b, whose intuitive meaning is that argument a is better than b. 
In this paper we generalize PAF by introducing conditional preferences of the form a > b \leftarrow body that informally state that a is better than b whenever the condition expressed by body is true.
The resulting framework, namely Conditional Preference-based AF (CPAF), extends the PAF semantics under three well-known preference criteria, i.e. democratic, elitist, and KTV.  
After introducing CPAF, we study the complexity of the verification problem (deciding whether a set of arguments is a ``best'' extension) as well as of the credulous and skeptical acceptance problems (deciding whether a given argument belongs to any or all ``best'' extensions, respectively) under multiple-status semantics (that is, complete, preferred, stable, and semi-stable semantics) for the above-mentioned preference criteria. 

Abstract Argumentation Framework with Conditional Preferences

Taxonomy expansion is the process of incorporating a large number of additional nodes (i.e., ''queries'') into an existing taxonomy (i.e., ''seed''), with the most important step being the selection of appropriate positions for each query.
Enormous efforts have been made by exploring the seed's structure.
However, existing approaches are deficient in their mining of structural information in two ways: poor modeling of the hierarchical semantics and failure to capture directionality of is-a relation.
This paper seeks to address these issues by explicitly denoting each node as the combination of inherited feature (i.e., structural part) and incremental feature (i.e., supplementary part).
Specifically, the inherited feature originates from ''parent'' nodes and is weighted by an inheritance factor.
With this node representation, the hierarchy of semantics in taxonomies (i.e., the inheritance and accumulation of features from ''parent'' to ''child'') could be embodied.
Additionally, based on this representation, the directionality of is-a relation could be easily translated into the irreversible inheritance of features.
Inspired by the Darmois-Skitovich Theorem, we implement this irreversibility by a non-Gaussian constraint on the supplementary feature.
A log-likelihood learning objective is further utilized to optimize the proposed model (dubbed DNG), whereby the required non-Gaussianity is also theoretically ensured.
Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets verify the superiority of DNG relative to several strong baselines.

Evaluating Digital Agriculture Recommendations with Causal Inference

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