United States

In sequential machine teaching, a teacher’s objective is to provide the optimal sequence of inputs to sequential learners in order to guide them towards the best model. However, this teaching objective considers a restricted class of learners with fixed inductive biases. In this paper, we extend the machine teaching framework to learners that can improve their inductive biases, represented as latent internal states, in order to generalize to new datasets.
We introduce a novel framework in which learners’ inductive biases may change with the teaching interaction, which affects the learning performance in future tasks. In order to teach such learners, we propose a multi-objective control approach that takes the future performance of the learner after teaching into account. This framework provides tools for modelling learners with internal states, humans and meta-learning algorithms alike. Furthermore, we distinguish manipulative teaching, which can be done by effectively hiding data and also used for indoctrination, from teaching to learn which aims to help the learner become better at learning from new datasets in the absence of a teacher. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework is able to reduce the number of required tasks for online meta-learning, and increases independent learning performance of simulated human users in future tasks.

AAAI 2023

Teaching to Learn: Sequential Teaching of Learners with Internal States

mas: multiagent learning

mas: modeling other agents

hai: human-in-the-loop machine learning

pomdps)

prs: planning with markov models (mdps

ml: probabilistic methods

hai: human-machine teams

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.

poster

We propose and show the efficacy of a new method to address generic inverse problems. Inverse modeling is the task whereby one seeks to determine the hidden parameters of a natural system that produce a given set of observed measurements. Recent work has shown impressive results using deep learning, but we note that there is a trade-off between model performance and computational time. For some applications, the computational time at inference for the best performing inverse modeling method may be overly prohibitive to its use. In seeking a faster, high-performing model, we present a new method that leverages multiple manifolds as a mixture of backward (e.g., inverse) models in a forward-backward model architecture. These multiple backwards models all share a common forward model, and their training is mitigated by generating training examples from the forward model. The proposed method thus has two innovations: 1) the multiple Manifold Mixture Network (MMN) architecture, and 2) the training procedure involving augmenting backward model training data using the forward model. We demonstrate the advantages of our method by comparing to several baselines on four benchmark inverse problems, and we furthermore provide analysis to motivate its design.

Mixture Manifold Networks: A Computationally Efficient Baseline for Inverse Modeling

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have drawn significant attentions over the years and been broadly applied to essential applications requiring solid robustness or vigorous security standards, such as product recommendation and user behavior modeling. Under these scenarios, exploiting GNN's vulnerabilities and further downgrading its performance become extremely incentive for adversaries. Previous attackers mainly focus on structural perturbations or node injections to the existing graphs, guided by gradients from the surrogate models. Although they deliver promising results, several limitations still exist. For the structural perturbation attack, to launch a proposed attack, adversaries need to manipulate the existing graph topology, which is impractical in most circumstances. Whereas for the node injection attack, though being more practical, current approaches require training surrogate models to simulate a white-box setting, which results in significant performance downgrade when the surrogate architecture diverges from the actual victim model. To bridge these gaps, in this paper, we study the problem of black-box node injection attack, without training a potentially misleading surrogate model. Specifically, we model the node injection attack as a Markov decision process and propose Gradient-free Graph Advantage Actor Critic, namely G2A2C, a reinforcement learning framework in the fashion of advantage actor critic. By directly querying the victim model, G2A2C learns to inject highly malicious nodes with extremely limited attacking budgets, while maintaining a similar node feature distribution. Through our comprehensive experiments over eight acknowledged benchmark datasets with different characteristics, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed G2A2C over the existing state-of-the-art attackers. Source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jumxglhf/G2A2C.

Let Graph be the Go Board: Gradient-free Node Injection Attack for Graph Neural Networks via Reinforcement Learning

Consider an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ model for a communication network, where  each edge is owned by a selfish agent, who reports the cost for offering the use of her edge. Note that each edge agent may misreport her own cost for the use of the edge for her own benefit. In such a non-cooperative setting, we aim at designing an approximately truthful mechanism for establishing a Steiner tree, a minimum cost tree spanning over all the terminals. We present a truthful-in-expectation mechanism that achieves the approximation ratio $\ln4+\epsilon \approx 1.39$, which matches the current best algorithmic ratio for STP \cite{GORZ12,BGRS13,TZ21}.

Truthful Mechanisms for Steiner Tree Problems

Deep learning-based digital watermarking frameworks have been widely studied recently. Most existing methods adopt an ``encoder-noise layer-decoder''-based architecture where the embedding and extraction processes are accomplished separately by the encoder and the decoder. However, one potential drawback of such a framework is that the encoder and the decoder may not be well coupled, result in the fact that the encoder may embed some redundant features into the host image thus influencing the invisibility and robustness of the whole algorithm. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a flow-based robust watermarking framework. The basic component of such framework is an invertible up-down-sampling neural block that can realize the embedding and extraction simultaneously. As a consequence, the encoded feature could keep high consistency with the feature that the decoder needed, which effectively avoids the embedding of redundant features. In addition, to ensure the robustness of black-box distortion, an invertible noise layer (INL) is designed to simulate the distortion and is served as a noise layer in the training stage. Benefiting from its reversibility, INL is also applied as a preprocessing before extraction to eliminate the distortion, which further improves the robustness of the algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in terms of visual quality and robustness. Compared with the state-of-the-art architecture, the visual quality (measured by PSNR) of the proposed framework improves by 2dB and the extraction accuracy after JPEG compression (QF=50) improves by more than 4%. Besides, the robustness against black-box distortions can be greatly achieved with more than 95% extraction accuracy.

Flow-based Robust Watermarking with Invertible Noise Layer for Black-box Distortions

Machine learning systems that built upon varying feature space are ubiquitous across the world. When the set of practical or virtual features changes, the online learning approach can adjust the learned model accordingly rather than re-training from scratch and has been an attractive area of research. Despite its importance, most studies for algorithms that are capable of handling online features have no ensurance of stationarity point convergence, while the accuracy guaranteed methods are still limited to some simple cases such as $\ell_1$ or $\ell_2$ norms with square loss. To address this challenging problem, we develop an efficient Dynamic Feature Learning System (DFLS) to perform online learning on the unfixed feature set for more general statistical models and demonstrate how DFLS opens up many new applications. We are the first to achieve accurate & reliable feature-wise online learning for a broad class of models like logistic regression, spline interpolation, group Lasso and Poisson regression. By utilizing DFLS, the updated model is theoretically the same as the model trained from scratch using the entire new feature space. Specifically, we reparameterize the feature-varying procedure and devise the corresponding ordinary differential equation (ODE) system to compute the optimal solutions of the new model status. Simulation studies reveal that the proposed DFLS can substantially ease the computational cost without forgetting.

When Online Learning Meets ODE: Learning without Forgetting on Variable Feature Space

As the COVID-19 pandemic puts pressure on healthcare systems worldwide, the computed tomography image based AI diagnostic system has become a sustainable solution for early diagnosis. However, the model-wise vulnerability under adversarial perturbation hinders its deployment in practical situation. The existing adversarial training strategies are difficult to generalized into medical imaging field challenged by complex medical texture features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Contour Attention Preserving (CAP) method based on lung cavity edge extraction. The contour prior features are injected to attention layer via a parameter regularization and we optimize the robust empirical risk with hybrid distance metric. We then introduce a new cross-nation CT scan dataset to evaluate the generalization capability of the adversarial robustness under distribution shift. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple adversarial defense and generalization tasks. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Quinn777/CAP.

Toward Robust Diagnosis: A Contour Attention Preserving Adversarial Defense for COVID-19 Detection

Spatio-temporal prediction plays a critical role in smart city construction. Jointly modeling multiple spatio-temporal tasks can further promote an intelligent city life by integrating their inseparable relationship. However, existing studies fail to address this joint learning problem well, which generally solve tasks individually or a fixed task combination. The challenges lie in the tangled relation between different properties, the demand for supporting flexible combinations of tasks and the complex spatio-temporal dependency. To cope with the problems above, we propose an Automated Spatio-Temporal multi-task Learning (AutoSTL) method to handle multiple spatio-temporal tasks jointly. Firstly, we propose a scalable architecture consisting of advanced spatio-temporal operations to exploit the complicated dependency. Shared modules and feature fusion mechanism are incorporated to further capture the intrinsic relationship between tasks. Furthermore, our model automatically allocates the operations and fusion weight. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verified that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. As we can know, AutoSTL is the first automated spatio-temporal multi-task learning method.

AutoSTL: Automated Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to simultaneously increase the resolution and legibility of the text images, and the resulting images will significantly affect the performance of downstream tasks. Although numerous progress has been made, existing approaches raise two crucial issues: (1) They neglect the global structure of the text, which bounds the semantic determinism of the scene text. (2) The priors, e.g., text prior or stroke prior, employed in existing works, are extracted from pre-trained text recognizers. That said, such priors suffer from the domain gap including low resolution and blurriness caused by poor imaging conditions, leading to incorrect guidance. Our work addresses these gaps and proposes a plug-and-play module dubbed as Dual Prior Modulation Network (DPMN), which leverages dual image-level priors to bring performance gain over existing approaches. Specifically, two types of prior-guided refinement modules, each using the text mask or graphic recognition result of the low-quality SR image from the preceding layer, are designed to improve the structural clarity and semantic accuracy of the text, respectively. The following attention mechanism hence modulates two quality-enhanced images to attain a superior SR result. Extensive experiments validate that our method improves the image quality and boosts the performance of downstream tasks over five typical approaches on the benchmark. Substantial visualizations and ablation studies demonstrate the advantages of the proposed DPMN. Code is available at: https://github.com/jdfxzzy/DPMN.

Improving Scene Text Image Super-Resolution via Dual Prior Modulation Network

Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning.  However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First, information gained from key-term-level conversations and arm-level recommendations is not appropriately incorporated to speed up learning. Second, it is important to ask explorative key-terms to quickly elicit the user's potential interests in various domains to accelerate the convergence of user preference estimation, which has never been considered in existing works.  To tackle these issues, we first propose ``ConLinUCB", a general framework for conversational bandits with better information incorporation, combining arm-level and key-term-level feedback to estimate user preference in one step at each time. Based on this framework, we further design two bandit algorithms with explorative key-term selection strategies, ConLinUCB-BS and ConLinUCB-MCR. We prove tighter regret upper bounds of our proposed algorithms. Particularly, ConLinUCB-BS achieves a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{dT\log T})$, better than the previous result $O(d\sqrt{T}\log T)$. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data show significant advantages of our algorithms in learning accuracy (up to 54\% improvement) and computational efficiency (up to 72\% improvement), compared to the classic ConUCB algorithm, showing the potential benefit to recommender systems. 

Efficient Explorative Key-term Selection Strategies for Conversational Contextual Bandits

Few-shot slot tagging is an important task in dialogue systems and attracts much attention of researchers. Most previous few-shot slot tagging methods utilize meta-learning procedure for training and strive to construct a large number of different meta tasks to simulate the testing situation of insufficient data. However, there is a widespread phenomenon of overlap slot between two domains in slot tagging. Traditional meta tasks ignore this special phenomenon and cannot simulate such realistic few-shot slot tagging scenarios. It violates the basic principle of meta-learning which the meta task is consistent with the real testing task, leading to historical information forgetting problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel domain-transfer meta task design paradigm to tackle this problem. We distribute a basic domain to each target domain based on the coincidence degree of slot labels between these two domains. Unlike classic meta tasks which only rely on small samples of target domain, our meta tasks aim to correctly infer the class of target domain query samples based on both abundant data in basic domain and scarce data in target domain. To accomplish our meta task, we propose a Task Adaptation Network to effectively transfer the historical information from the basic domain to the target domain. We carry out sufficient experiments on the benchmark slot tagging dataset SNIPS and the name entity recognition dataset NER. Results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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Teaching to Learn: Sequential Teaching of Learners with Internal States

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Mixture Manifold Networks: A Computationally Efficient Baseline for Inverse Modeling

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