United States

AAAI 2023

AnimateSVG: Autonomous Creation and Aesthetics Evaluation of Scalable Vector Graphics Animations for the Case of Brand Logos

animation

scalable vector graphics

computational creativity

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

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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. 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).

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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.

Data scarcity is a very common real-world problem that poses a major  challenge to data-driven analytics. Although a lot of data-balancing approaches have been proposed to mitigate this problem, they may drop some useful information or fall into the overfitting problem. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based data synthesis methods can alleviate such a problem but lack of quality control over the generated samples. Moreover, the latent associations between the attribute set and the class labels in a relational data cannot be easily captured by a vanilla GAN. In light of this, we introduce an end-to-end self-training scheme (namely, Quality-Aware Self-Training) for rare relational data synthesis, which generates labeled synthetic data via pseudo labeling on GAN-based synthesis. We design a semantic pseudo labeling module to first control the quality of the generated features/samples, then calibrate their semantic labels via a classifier committee consisting of multiple pre-trained shallow classifiers. The high-confident generated samples with calibrated pseudo labels are then fed into a semantic classification network as augmented samples for self-training. We conduct extensive experiments on 20 benchmark datasets of different domains, including 14 industrial datasets. The results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including two recent GAN-based data synthesis schemes. Codes are available at https://github.com/yaxinhou/QAST.

Quality-Aware Self-Training on Differentiable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data

Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) represents a challenging scenario for lifelong learning because it does not access any task information. The Dynamic Expansion Model (DEM) has shown promising results in this scenario due to its scalability and generalisation power. However, existing work from DEM focuses only on addressing forgetting and ignores model compression, which is hardly deployed in practical systems. In this work, we aim to simultaneously address network forgetting and model compression by developing the Lifelong Compression Mixture Model (LGMM) equipped with the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) based expansion criterion for model expansion. A diversity-aware sample selection approach is proposed to selectively store a variety of samples to promote information diversity among the components of the LGMM, which allows more knowledge to be captured with an appropriate model size. Since we can not access the past data and task information in TFCL, it is challenging to apply the existing compression technologies in LCMM. Inspired by this, we propose a data-free component discarding mechanism that evaluates a knowledge relation graph matrix describing the relevance between each pair of components. A greedy selection procedure is proposed to statistically select  overlapping components and remove them from the LGMM. The proposed discarding mechanism can be performed during or after the training. Experiments on different datasets show that LGMM achieves the best performance for TFCL.

Lifelong Compression Mixture Model via Knowledge Relationship Graph

Graphic sketch representations are effective for representing sketches. Existing methods take the patches cropped from sketches as the graph nodes, and construct the edges based on sketch's drawing order or Euclidean distances on the canvas. However, the drawing order of a sketch may not be unique, while the patches from semantically related parts of a sketch may be far away from each other on the canvas. In this paper, we propose an order-invariant, semantics-aware method for graphic sketch representations. The cropped sketch patches are linked according to their global semantics or local geometric shapes, namely the synonymous proximity, by computing the cosine similarity between the captured patch embeddings. Such constructed edges are learnable to adapt to the variation of sketch drawings, which enable the message passing among synonymous patches. Aggregating the messages from synonymous patches by graph convolutional networks plays a role of denoising, which is beneficial to produce robust patch embeddings and accurate sketch representations. Furthermore, we enforce a clustering constraint over the embeddings jointly with the network learning. The synonymous patches are self-organized as compact clusters, and their embeddings are guided to move towards their assigned cluster centroids. It raises the accuracy of the computed synonymous proximity. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance on both controllable sketch synthesis and sketch healing.

Linking Sketch Patches by Learning Synonymous Proximity for Graphic Sketch Representation

Efficient planning in continuous state and action spaces is fundamentally hard, even when the transition model is deterministic and known. One way to alleviate this challenge is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a high-level search for abstract plans is used to guide planning in the original transition space. Previous work has shown that when state abstractions in the form of symbolic predicates are hand-designed, operators and samplers for bilevel planning can be learned from demonstrations. In this work, we propose an algorithm for learning predicates from demonstrations, eliminating the need for manually specified state abstractions. Our key idea is to learn predicates by optimizing a surrogate objective that is tractable but faithful to our real efficient-planning objective. We use this surrogate objective in a hill-climbing search over predicate sets drawn from a grammar. Experimentally, we show across four robotic planning environments that our learned abstractions are able to quickly solve held-out tasks, outperforming six baselines.

Predicate Invention for Bilevel Planning

The use of machine learning models in consequential decision making often exacerbates societal inequity, in particular yielding disparate impact on members of marginalized groups defined by race and gender. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is widely used to evaluate the performance of a scoring function in machine learning, but is studied in algorithmic fairness less than other performance metrics. Due to the pairwise nature of the AUC, defining an AUC-based group fairness metric is pairwise-dependent and may involve both \emph{intra-group} and \emph{inter-group} AUCs. Importantly, considering only one category of AUCs is not sufficient to mitigate unfairness in AUC optimization. In this paper, we propose a minimax learning and bias mitigation framework that incorporates both intra-group and inter-group AUCs while maintaining utility. Based on this Rawlsian framework, we design an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm and prove its convergence to the minimum group-level AUC. We conduct numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of the minimax framework and the proposed optimization algorithm.

Minimax AUC Fairness: Efficient Algorithm with Provable Convergence

Normal estimation for unstructured point clouds is an important task in 3D computer vision. Current methods achieve encouraging results by mapping local patches to normal vectors or learning local surface fitting using neural networks. However, these methods are not generalized well to unseen scenarios and are sensitive to parameter settings.
To resolve these issues, we propose an implicit function to learn an angle field around the normal of each point in the spherical coordinate system, which is dubbed as Neural Angle Fields (NeAF). Instead of directly predicting the normal of an input point, we predict the angle offset between the ground truth normal and a randomly sampled query normal. This strategy pushes the network to observe more diverse samples, which leads to higher prediction accuracy in a more robust manner. To predict normals from the learned angle fields at inference time, we randomly sample query vectors in a unit spherical space and take the vectors with minimal angle values as the predicted normals. To further leverage the prior learned by NeAF, we propose to refine the predicted normal vectors by minimizing the angle offsets. The experimental results with synthetic data and real scans show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art under widely used benchmarks. 

NeAF: Learning Neural Angle Fields for Point Normal Estimation

Recently, some mixture algorithms of pointwise and pairwise learning (PPL) have been formulated by employing the hybrid error metric of “pointwise loss + pairwise loss” and have shown empirical effectiveness on feature selection, ranking and recommendation tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, the learning theory foundation of PPL has not been touched in the existing works. In this paper, we try to fill this theoretical gap by investigating the generalization properties of PPL. After extending the definitions of algorithmic stability to the PPL setting, we establish the high-probability generalization bounds for uniformly stable PPL algorithms. Moreover, explicit convergence rates of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and regularized risk minimization (RRM) for PPL are stated by developing the stability analysis technique of pairwise learning. In addition, the refined generalization bounds of PPL are obtained by replacing uniform stability with on-average stability.

Stability-based Generalization Analysis for Mixtures of Pointwise and Pairwise Learning

Adversarial training is an effective way to defend deep neural networks (DNN) against adversarial examples. However, there are atypical samples that are rare and hard to learn, or even hurt DNNs' generalization performance on test data. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to reweight the training samples based on self-supervised techniques to mitigate the negative effects of the atypical samples. 
Specifically, a memory bank is built to record the popular samples as prototypes and calculate the memorization weight for each sample, evaluating the "typicalness" of a sample. All the training samples are reweigthed based on the proposed memorization weights to reduce the negative effects of atypical samples. Experimental results show the proposed method is flexible to boost state-of-the-art adversarial training methods, improving both robustness and standard accuracy of DNNs.

Memorization Weights for Instance Reweighting in Adversarial Training

From the observation that users reading news tend to not click outdated news, we propose the notion of 'lifetime' of news, with two hypotheses: (i) news has a shorter lifetime, compared to other types of items such as movies or e-commerce products; (ii) news only competes with other news whose lifetimes have not ended, and which has an overlapping lifetime (i.e., limited competitions). By further developing the characteristics of the lifetime of news, then we prenset a novel approach for news recommendation, namely, Lifetime-Aware News reCommEndeR System (LANCER) that carefully exploits the lifetime of news during training and recommendation. Using real-world news datasets (e.g., Adressa and MIND), we successfully demonstrate that state-of-the-art news recommendation models can get significantly benefited by integrating the notion of lifetime and LANCER, by up to about 40% increases in recommendation accuracy.

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Quality-Aware Self-Training on Differentiable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data

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