United States

The integration of discrete algorithmic components in deep learning architectures has numerous applications. Recently, Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE, Niepert, Minervini, and Franceschi 2021), a class of gradient estimators for discrete exponential family distributions, was proposed by combining implicit differentiation through perturbation with the path-wise gradient estimator. However, due to the finite difference approximation of the gradients, it is especially sensitive to the choice of the finite difference step size which needs to be specified by the user. In this work, we present Adaptive IMLE (AIMLE) the first adaptive gradient estimator for complex discrete distributions: it adaptively identifies the target distribution for IMLE by trading off the density of gradient information with the degree of bias in the gradient estimates. We empirically evaluate our estimator on synthetic examples, as well as on Learning to Explain, Discrete Variational Auto-Encoders, and Neural Relational Inference tasks. In our experiments, we show that our adaptive gradient estimator can produce faithful estimates while requiring orders of magnitude fewer samples than other gradient estimators.

AAAI 2023

Adaptive Perturbation-Based Gradient Estimation for Discrete Latent Variable Models

implicit mle

discrete latent variable models

neuro-symbolic

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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. 
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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.

The real-world Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets usually exhibit complex scenarios with coupled noise annotations and imbalanced classes distribution, which undoubtedly impede the development of FER methods. To address the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we propose a novel and flexible method to spot noisy labels by leveraging adversarial attack, termed as Geometry Aware Adversarial Vulnerability Estimation (GAAVE). Different from existing state-of-the-art methods of noisy label learning (NLL), our method has no reliance on additional information and is thus easy to generalize to the large-scale real-world FER datasets. Besides, the combination of Dataset Splitting module and Subset Refactoring module mitigates the impact of class imbalance, and the Self-Annotator module facilitates the sufficient use of all training data. Extensive experiments on RAF-DB, FERPlus, AffectNet, and CIFAR-10 datasets validate the effectiveness of our method. The stabilized enhancement based on different methods demonstrates the flexibility of our proposed GAAVE.

Attack can Benefit: An Adversarial Approach to Recognizing Facial Expressions under Noisy Annotations

Personal knowledge bases (PKBs) are crucial for a broad range of applications such as personalized recommendation and Web-based chatbots. A critical challenge to build PKBs is extracting personal attribute knowledge from users' conversation data. Given some users of a conversational system, a personal attribute and these users' utterances, our goal is to predict the ranking of the given personal attribute values for each user. Previous studies often rely on a relative number of resources such as labeled utterances and external data, yet the attribute knowledge embedded in unlabeled utterances is underutilized and their performance of predicting some difficult personal attributes is still unsatisfactory. In addition, it is found that some text classification methods could be employed to resolve this task directly. However, they also perform not well over those difficult personal attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework PEARL to predict personal attributes from conversations by leveraging the abundant personal attribute knowledge from utterances under a low-resource setting in which no labeled utterances or external data are utilized. PEARL combines the biterm semantic information with the word co-occurrence information seamlessly via employing the updated prior attribute knowledge to refine the biterm topic model's Gibbs sampling process in an iterative manner. The extensive experimental results show that PEARL outperforms all the baseline methods not only on the task of personal attribute prediction from conversations over two data sets, but also on the more general weakly supervised text classification task over one data set.

Low-resource Personal Attribute Prediction from Conversations

Fractals are geometric shapes that can display complex and self-similar patterns found in nature (e.g., clouds and plants). Recent works in visual recognition have leveraged this property to create random fractal images for model pre-training. In this paper, we study the inverse problem --- given a target image (not necessarily a fractal), we aim to generate a fractal image that looks like it. We propose a novel approach that learns the parameters underlying a fractal image via gradient descent. We show that our approach can find fractal parameters of high visual quality and be compatible with different loss functions, opening up several potentials, e.g., learning fractals for downstream tasks, scientific understanding, etc.

Learning Fractals by Gradient Descent

This paper addresses the challenges in accurate and real-time traffic congestion prediction under uncertainty by proposing Ising-Traffic, a dual-model Ising-based traffic prediction framework that delivers higher accuracy and lower latency than SOTA solutions. While traditional solutions face the dilemma from the trade-off between algorithm complexity and computational efficiency, our Ising-based method breaks away from the trade-off leveraging the Ising model's strong expressivity and the Ising machine's strong computation power. In particular, Ising-Traffic formulates traffic prediction under uncertainty into two Ising models: Reconstruct-Ising and Predict-Ising. Reconstruct-Ising is mapped onto modern Ising machines and handles uncertainty in traffic accurately with negligible latency and energy consumption, while Predict-Ising is mapped onto traditional processors and predicts future congestion precisely with only at most 1.8% computational demands of existing solutions. Our evaluation shows Ising-Traffic delivers on average 98X speedups and 5% accuracy improvement over SOTA.

Ising-Traffic: Using Ising Machine Learning to Predict Traffic Congestion under Uncertainty

Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) could lead to various unexpected adverse consequences, so-called DDI events. Predicting DDI events can reduce the potential risk of combinatorial therapy and improve the safety of medication use, and has attracted much attention in the deep learning community. Recently, graph neural network (GNN)-based models have aroused broad interest and achieved satisfactory results in the DDI event prediction. Most existing GNN-based models ignore either drug structural information or drug interactive information, but both aspects of information are important for DDI event prediction. Furthermore, accurately predicting rare DDI events is hindered by their inadequate labeled instances. In this paper, we propose a new method, Multi-Relational Contrastive learning Graph Neural Network, MRCGNN for brevity, to predict DDI events. Specifically, MRCGNN integrates the two aspects of information by deploying a GNN on the multi-relational DDI event graph attributed with the drug features extracted from drug molecular graphs. Moreover, we implement a multi-relational graph contrastive learning with a designed dual-view negative counterpart augmentation strategy, to capture implicit information about rare DDI events. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that MRCGNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we observe that MRCGNN achieves satisfactory performance when predicting rare DDI events.

Multi-relational Contrastive Learning Graph Neural Network for Drug-drug Interaction Event Prediction

In recent years, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has presented impressive performance in various applications. However, physical limitations, budget restrictions, and many other factors usually impose constraints on a multi-agent system (MAS), which cannot be handled by traditional MARL frameworks. Specifically, this paper focuses on constrained MASes where agents work cooperatively to maximize the expected team-average return under various constraints on expected team-average costs, and develops a constrained cooperative MARL framework, named DeCOM, for such MASes. In particular, DeCOM decomposes the policy of each agent into two modules, which empowers information sharing among agents to achieve better cooperation. In addition, with such modularization, the training algorithm of DeCOM separates the original constrained optimization into an unconstrained optimization on reward and a constraints satisfaction problem on costs. DeCOM then iteratively solves these problems in a computationally efficient manner, which makes DeCOM highly scalable. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the convergence of DeCOM's policy update algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of DeCOM with various types of costs in both moderate-scale and large-scale (with 500 agents) environments that originate from real-world applications.

DeCOM: Decomposed Policy for Constrained Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

With the success of the sequence-to-sequence model, end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems (EToDs) have obtained remarkable progress. However, most existing EToDs are limited to single KB settings where dialogues can be supported by a single KB, which is still far from satisfying the requirements of some complex applications (multi-KBs setting). In this work, we first empirically show that the existing single-KB EToDs fail to work on multi-KB settings that require models to reason across various KBs. To solve this issue, we take the first step to consider the multi-KBs scenario in EToDs and introduce a KB-over-KB Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (KoK-HAN) to facilitate model to reason over multiple KBs. The core module is a triple-connection graph interaction layer that can model different granularity levels of interaction information across different KBs (i.e., intra-KB connection, inter-KB connection and dialogue-KB connection). Experimental results confirm the superiority of our model for multiple KBs reasoning.

Towards Complex Scenarios: Building End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue System across Multiple Knowledge Bases

Simulating the human mobility and generating large-scale trajectories are of great use in many real-world applications, such as urban planning, epidemic spreading analysis, and geographic privacy protect. Although many previous works have studied the problem of trajectory generation, the continuity of the generated trajectories has been neglected, which makes these methods useless for practical urban simulation scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose a novel two-stage generative adversarial framework to generate the continuous trajectory on the road network, namely TS-TrajGen, which efficiently integrates prior domain knowledge of human mobility with model-free learning paradigm. Specifically, we build the generator under the human mobility hypothesis of the A* algorithm to learn the human mobility behavior. For the discriminator, we combine the sequential reward with the mobility yaw reward to enhance the effectiveness of the generator. Finally, we propose a novel two-stage generation process to overcome the weak point of the existing stochastic generation process. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and two case studies demonstrate that our framework yields significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

Continuous Trajectory Generation Based on Two-Stage GAN

The mainstream of the existing approaches for video prediction builds up their models based on a Single-In-Single-Out (SISO) architecture, which takes the current frame as input to predict the next frame in a recursive manner. This way often leads to severe performance degradation when they try to extrapolate a longer period of future, thus limiting the practical use of the prediction model. Alternatively, a Multi-In-Multi-Out (MIMO) architecture that outputs all the future frames at one shot naturally breaks the recursive manner and therefore prevents error accumulation. However, only a few MIMO models for video prediction are proposed and they only achieve inferior performance due to the date. 
The real strength of the MIMO model in this area is not well noticed and is largely under-explored. Motivated by that, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in this paper to thoroughly exploit how far a simple MIMO architecture can go. Surprisingly, our empirical studies reveal that a simple MIMO model can outperform the state-of-the-art work with a large margin much more than expected, especially in dealing with long-term error accumulation. 
After exploring a number of ways and designs, we propose a new MIMO architecture based on extending the pure Transformer with local spatio-temporal blocks and a new multi-output decoder, namely MIMO-VP, to establish a new standard in video prediction. We evaluate our model in four highly competitive benchmarks (\textbf{Moving MNIST, Human3.6M, Weather, KITTI}). 
Extensive experiments show that our model wins 1st place on all the benchmarks with remarkable performance gains and surpasses the best SISO model in all aspects including efficiency, quantity, and quality. A dramatic 26.9\% MSE / 15.9\% MAE error reduction is achieved when predicting 10 frames on Moving MNIST and Weather datasets respectively. We believe our model can serve as a new baseline to facilitate the future research of video prediction tasks. The code will be released.

MIMO is all you need：A Strong Multi-In-Multi-Out Baseline for Video Prediction

Self-supervised multiplex graph representation learning (SMGRL) has attracted increasing interest, but previous SMGRL methods still suffer from the following issues: (i) they focus on the common information only (but ignore the private information in graph structures) to lose some essential characteristics related to downstream tasks, and (ii) they ignore the redundant information in node representations of each graph. To solve these issues, this paper proposes a new SMGRL method by jointly mining the common information and the private information in the multiplex graph while minimizing the redundant information within node representations. Specifically, the proposed method investigates the decorrelation losses to extract the common information and minimize the redundant information, while investigating the reconstruction losses to maintain the private information. Comprehensive experimental results verify the superiority of the proposed method, on four public benchmark datasets.

Adaptive Perturbation-Based Gradient Estimation for Discrete Latent Variable Models

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