United States

AAAI 2023

AHPA: Adaptive Horizontal Pod Autoscaling Systems on Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes

autoscaling

time series forecasting

machine learning

optimization

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.

poster

The use of neural networks in safety-critical systems requires safe and robust models, due to the existence of adversarial attacks. Knowing the minimal adversarial perturbation of any input x, or, equivalently, knowing the distance of x from the classification boundary, allows evaluating the classification robustness, providing certifiable predictions. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art techniques for computing such a distance are computationally expensive and hence not suited for online applications. This work proposes a novel family of classifiers, namely Signed Distance Classifiers (SDCs), that, from a theoretical perspective, directly output the exact distance of x from the classification boundary, rather than a probability score (e.g., SoftMax). SDCs represent a family of robust-by-design classifiers. To practically address the theoretical requirements of a SDC, a novel network architecture named Unitary-Gradient Neural Network is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture approximates a signed distance classifier, hence allowing an online certifiable classification of x at the cost of a single inference.

Robust-by-Design Classification via Unitary-Gradient Neural Networks

Power grids, across the world, play an important societal and economical role by providing uninterrupted, reliable and transient-free power to several industries, businesses and household consumers. With the advent of renewable power resources and EVs resulting into uncertain generation and highly dynamic load demands, it has become ever so important to ensure robust operation of power networks through suitable management of transient stability issues and localize the events of blackouts. In the light of ever increasing stress on the modern grid infrastructure and the grid operators, this paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, PowRL, to mitigate the effects of unexpected network events, as well as reliably maintain electricity everywhere on the network at all times. The PowRL leverages a novel heuristic for overload management, along with the RL-guided decision making on optimal topology selection to ensure that the grid is operated safely and reliably (with no overloads). PowRL is benchmarked on a variety of competition datasets hosted by the L2RPN (Learning to Run a Power Network). Even with its reduced action space, PowRL tops the leaderboard in the L2RPN NeurIPS 2020 challenge (Robustness track) at an aggregate level, while also being the top performing agent in the L2RPN WCCI 2020 challenge. Moreover, detailed analysis depicts state-of-the-art performances by the PowRL agent in some of the test scenarios.

PowRL: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Management of Power Networks

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial to the safe deployment of a classifier in the real world. However, deep neural networks are known to be overconfident for abnormal data. Existing works directly design score function by mining the inconsistency from classifier for in-distribution (ID) and OOD. In this paper, we further complement this inconsistency with reconstruction error, based on the assumption that an autoencoder trained on ID data can not reconstruct OOD as well as ID. We propose a novel method, READ (\textbf{R}econstruction \textbf{E}rror \textbf{A}ggregated \textbf{D}etector), to unify inconsistencies from classifier and autoencoder. Specifically, the reconstruction error of raw pixels is transformed to latent space of classifier. We show that the transformed reconstruction error bridges the semantic gap and inherits detection performance from the original. Moreover, we propose an adjustment strategy to alleviate the overconfidence problem of autoencoder according to a fine-grained characterization of OOD data. Under two scenarios of pre-training and retraining, we respectively present two variants of our method, namely READ-MD (\textbf{M}ahalanobis \textbf{D}istance) only based on pre-trained classifier and READ-ED (\textbf{E}uclidean \textbf{D}istance) which retrains the classifier. Our methods do not require access to test time OOD data for fine-tuning hyperparameters. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art OOD detection algorithms. On a CIFAR-10 pre-trained WideResNet, our method reduces the average FPR@95TPR by up to 9.8\% compared with previous state-of-the-art.

READ: Aggregating Reconstruction Error into Out-of-Distribution Detection

Prior work has successfully incorporated optimization layers as the last layer in neural networks for various problems, thereby allowing joint learning and planning in one neural network forward pass. In this work, we identify a weakness in such a set-up where inputs to the optimization layer lead to undefined output of the neural network. Such undefined decision outputs can lead to possible catastrophic outcomes in critical real time applications. We show that an adversary can cause such failures by forcing rank deficiency on the matrix fed to the optimization layer which results in the optimization failing to produce a solution. We provide a defense for the failure cases by controlling the condition number of the input matrix. We study the problem in the settings of synthetic data, Jigsaw Sudoku, and in speed planning for autonomous driving. We show that our proposed defense effectively prevents the framework from failing with undefined output. Finally, we surface a number of edge cases which lead to serious bugs in popular optimization solvers which can be abused as well.

Beyond NaN: Resiliency of Optimization Layers in The Face of Infeasibility

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely adopted in many decision-making industrial applications. Their fairness issues, i.e., whether there exist unintended biases in the DNN, receive much attention and become critical concerns, which can directly cause negative impacts in our daily life and potentially undermine the fairness of our society, especially with their increasing deployment at an unprecedented speed. Recently, some early attempts have been made to provide fairness assurance of DNNs, such as fairness testing, which aims at finding discriminatory samples empirically, and fairness certification, which develops sound but not complete analysis to certify the fairness of DNNs. Nevertheless, how to formally compute discriminatory samples and fairness scores (i.e., the percentage of fair input space), is still largely uninvestigated. In this paper, we propose DeepGemini, a novel fairness formal analysis technique for DNNs, which contains two key components: discriminatory sample discovery and fairness score computation. To uncover discriminatory samples, we encode the fairness of DNNs as safety properties and search for discriminatory samples by means of state-of-the-art verification techniques for DNNs. This reduction enables us to be the first to formally compute discriminatory samples. To compute the fairness score, we develop counterexample guided fairness analysis, which utilizes four heuristics to efficiently approximate a lower bound of fairness score. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DeepGemini on commonly-used benchmarks, and DeepGemini outperforms state-of-the-art DNN fairness certification approaches in terms of both efficiency and scalability.

AHPA: Adaptive Horizontal Pod Autoscaling Systems on Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes

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Robust-by-Design Classification via Unitary-Gradient Neural Networks

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