United States

Causal analysis for time series data, in particular estimating individualized treatment effect (ITE), is a key task in many real world applications, such as finance, retail, healthcare,  etc. Real world time series, i.e., large-scale irregular or sparse and intermittent time series, raise significant challenges to existing work attempting to estimate treatment effects. Specifically, the existence of hidden confounders can lead to  biased treatment estimates and complicate the causal inference process. In particular, anomaly hidden confounders which exceed the typical range can lead to high variance estimates. Moreover,  in continuous time settings with irregular samples, it is challenging to directly handle the dynamics of causality. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in Lipschitz regularization and neural controlled differential equations (CDE)  to develop an effective and scalable solution, namely LipCDE, to address the above challenges. LipCDE can directly model the dynamic causal relationships between historical data and outcomes with irregular samples by considering the boundary of hidden confounders given by Lipschitz constrained neural networks. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of LipCDE. 

AAAI 2023

Estimating Treatment Effects from Irregular Time Series Observations with Hidden Confounders

and causality

krr: action

ru: causality

ml: causal learning

time-series/data streams

ml: applications

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.

poster

Self Attention has shown the excellent performance in tracking due to its global modeling capability. However, it brings two challenges: First, its global receptive field has less attention on local structure and inter-channel associations, which limits the semantics to distinguish objects and backgrounds; Second, its feature fusion with linear process cannot avoid the interference of non-target semantic objects. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a robust tracking method named GdaTFT by defining the Global Dilated Attention (GDA) and Target Focusing Network (TFN). The GDA provides a new global semantics modeling approach to enhance the semantic objects while eliminating the background. It is defined via the local focusing module, dilated attention and channel adaption module. Thus, it promotes semantics by focusing local key information, building long-range dependencies and enhancing the semantics of channels. Subsequently, to distinguish the target and non-target objects both with rich semantics, the TFN is proposed to accurately focus the target region. Different from the present feature fusion, it uses the template as the query to build a point-to-point correlation between the template and search region, and finally achieves part-level augmentation of target feature in the search region. Thus, the TFN efficiently augments the target embedding while weakening the non-target objects. Experiments on challenging benchmarks (LaSOT, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, OTB-100) demonstrate that the GdaTFT outperforms many state-of-the-art trackers and achieves leading performance. Code will be available.

Global Dilated Attention and Target Focusing Network for Robust Tracking

We study the problem of learning a single occurrence regular expression with interleaving (SOIRE) from a set of text strings possibly with noise. SOIRE fully supports interleaving and covers a large portion of regular expressions used in practice. Learning SOIREs is challenging because it requires heavy computation and text strings usually contain noise in practice. Most of the previous studies only learn restricted SOIREs and are not robust on noisy data. To tackle these issues, we propose a noise-tolerant differentiable learning approach SOIREDL for SOIRE. We design a neural network to simulate SOIRE matching and theoretically prove that certain assignments of the set of parameters learnt by the neural network, called faithful encodings, are one-to-one corresponding to SOIREs for a bounded size. Based on this correspondence, we interpret the target SOIRE from an assignment of the set of parameters of the neural network by exploring the nearest faithful encodings. Experimental results show that SOIREDL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially on noisy data.

A Noise-tolerant Differentiable Learning Approach for Single Occurrence Regular Expression with Interleaving

Micro-Expression Recognition (MER) is challenging because the Micro-Expressions' (ME) motion is too weak to distinguish. This hurdle can be tackled by enhancing intensity for a more accurate acquisition of movements. However, existing magnification strategies tend to use the features of facial images that include not only intensity clues as intensity features, leading to the intensity representation deficient of credibility. In addition, the intensity variation over time, which is crucial for encoding movements, is also neglected. To this end, we provide a reliable scheme to extract intensity clues while considering their variation on the time scale. First, we devise an Intensity Distillation (ID) loss to acquire the intensity clues by contrasting the difference between frames, given that the difference in the same video lies only in the intensity. Then, the intensity clues are calibrated to follow the trend of the original video. Specifically, we build the intensity tendency in the original video as a prototype, wherein the intensity values are presumptive and can dynamically change during each iteration, enabling the network to perceive the overall tendency of the video. Then, the intensity clues are encouraged to converge towards this prototype, achieved by a Wilcoxon rank sum test (Wrst) method. Experimental results on three public ME databases i.e. CASME II, SAMM, and SMIC-HS validate the superiority against state-of-the-art methods.

CMNet: Contrastive Magnification Network for Micro-Expression Recognition

Graph pooling is a crucial operation for encoding hierarchical structures within graphs. Most existing graph pooling approaches formulate the problem as a node clustering task which effectively captures the graph topology. Conventional methods ask users to specify an appropriate number of clusters as a hyperparameter, then assuming that all input graphs share the same number of clusters. In inductive settings where the number of clusters could vary, however, the model should be able to represent this variation in its pooling layers in order to learn suitable clusters. Thus we propose GMPool, a novel differentiable graph pooling architecture that automatically determines the appropriate number of clusters based on the input data. The main intuition involves a grouping matrix defined as a quadratic form of the pooling operator, which induces use of binary classification probabilities of pairwise combinations of nodes. GMPool obtains the pooling operator by first computing the grouping matrix, then decomposing it. Extensive evaluations on molecular property prediction tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional methods.

Grouping Matrix based Graph Pooling with Adaptive Number of Clusters

It is well believed that the higher uncertainty in a word of the caption, the more inter-correlated context information is required to determine it. However, current image captioning methods usually consider the generation of all words in a sentence sequentially and equally. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware image captioning framework, which parallelly and iteratively operates insertion of discontinuous candidate words between existing words from easy to difficult until converged. We hypothesize that high-uncertainty words in a sentence need more prior information to make a correct decision and should be produced at a later stage. The resulting non-autoregressive hierarchy makes the caption generation explainable and intuitive. Specifically, we utilize an image-conditioned bag-of-word model to measure the word uncertainty and apply a dynamic programming algorithm to construct the training pairs. During inference, we devise an uncertainty-adaptive parallel beam search technique that yields an empirically logarithmic time complexity. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO benchmark reveal that our approach outperforms the strong baseline and related methods on both captioning quality as well as decoding speed.  

Uncertainty-Aware Image Captioning

In this work, we propose Fair-CDA, a fine-grained data augmentation strategy for imposing fairness constraints. We use a feature disentanglement method to extract the features highly related to the sensitive attributes. Then we show that group fairness can be achieved by regularizing the models on transition paths of sensitive features between groups. By adjusting the perturbation strength in the direction of the paths, our proposed augmentation is controllable and auditable. To alleviate the accuracy degradation caused by fairness constraints, we further introduce a calibrated model to impute labels for the augmented data. Our proposed method does not assume any data generative model and ensures good generalization for both accuracy and fairness. Experimental results show that Fair-CDA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on widely-used benchmarks, e.g., Adult, CelebA and MovieLens. Especially, Fair-CDA obtains an 86.3% relative improvement for fairness while maintaining the accuracy on the Adult dataset. Moreover, we evaluate Fair-CDA in an online recommendation system to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of accuracy and fairness.

Fair-CDA: Continuous and Directional Augmentation for Group Fairness

Real-world applications often involve irregular time series, for which the time intervals between successive observations are non-uniform. Irregularity across multiple features in a multi-variate time series further results in a different subset of features at any given time (i.e., asynchronicity). Existing pre-training schemes for time-series, however, often assume regularity of time series and make no special treatment of irregularity. We argue that such irregularity offers insight about domain property of the data—for example, frequency of hospital visits may signal patient health condition—that can guide representation learning. In this work, we propose PrimeNet to learn a self-supervised representation for irregular multivariate time-series. Specifically, we design a time sensitive contrastive learning and data reconstruction task to pre-train a model. Irregular time-series exhibits considerable variations in sampling density over time. Hence, our triplet generation strategy follows the density of the original data points, preserving its native irregularity. Moreover, the sampling density variation over time makes data reconstruction difficult for different regions. Therefore, we design a data masking technique that always masks a constant time duration to accommodate reconstruction for regions of different sampling density. We learn with these tasks using unlabeled data to build a pre-trained model and fine-tune on a downstream task with limited labeled data, in contrast with existing fully supervised approach for irregular time-series, requiring large amounts of labeled data. Experiment results show that PrimeNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on naturally irregular and asynchronous data from Healthcare and IoT applications for several downstream tasks, including classification, interpolation, and regression.

PrimeNet: Pre-Training for Irregular Multivariate Time Series

Deep learning (DL) based methods have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art for image restoration (IR) task. Nevertheless, DL-based IR models are highly computation- and memory-intensive, and the surging demands for processing higher-resolution images and multi-task paralleling in practical mobile usage further add to their computation and memory burdens. In this paper, we reveal the overlooked memory redundancy of the IR models and propose a Memory-Oriented Structural Pruning (MOSP) method. In order to properly compress the long-range skip connections (a major source of the memory burden), we introduce a compactor module onto each skip connection to decouple the pruning of the skip connections and the main branch. MOSP progressively prunes the original model layers and the compactors to cut down the peak memory while maintaining high IR quality. Experiments on real image denoising show that MOSP can yield models with higher memory efficiency while better preserving IR performance compared with baseline pruning methods and hand-crafted models.

Memory-Oriented Structural Pruning for Efficient Image Restoration

Search engines are essential internet services, enabling users to efficiently find the information they need. Session search employs users’ session logs of queries to solve complex retrieval tasks, in which users search multiple times until interested documents are found. Most existing session search models focus on the contextual information within the current search, ignoring the evidence from historical search sessions. Considering the fact that many ongoing retrieval tasks should have already been carried out by other users with a similar intent, we argue that historical sessions with similar intents can help improve the accuracy of the current search task. We propose a novel Similar Session-enhanced Ranking (SSR) model to improve the session search performance using historical sessions with similar intents. Specifically, the candidate historical sessions are matched by query-level and session-level semantic similarity, and then query-level neighbor behaviors are aggregated by a Query-guided GNN (QGNN) while session-level neighbor behaviors are aggregated using the attention mechanism. Finally, we integrate the refined and aggregated historical neighbor information into the current search session. Experimental results on AOL and Tiangong-ST datasets show that our SSR model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Learning from the Wisdom of Crowds: Exploiting Similar Sessions for Session Search

Pretraining molecular representation models without labels is fundamental to various applications. Conventional methods mainly process 2D molecular graphs and focus solely on 2D tasks, making their pretrained models incapable of characterizing 3D geometry and thus defective for downstream 3D tasks. In this work, we tackle 3D molecular pretraining in a complete and novel sense. In particular, we first propose to adopt an equivariant energy-based model as the backbone for pretraining, which enjoys the merits of fulfilling the symmetry of 3D space. Then we develop a node-level pretraining loss for force prediction, where we further exploit the Riemann-Gaussian distribution to ensure the loss to be E(3)-invariant, enabling more robustness. Moreover, a graph-level noise scale prediction task is also leveraged to further promote the eventual performance. We evaluate our model pretrained from a large-scale 3D dataset GEOM-QM9 on two challenging 3D benchmarks: MD17 and QM9. The experimental results support the better efficacy of our method against current state-of-the-art pretraining approaches, and verify the validity of our design for each proposed component. 

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Estimating Treatment Effects from Irregular Time Series Observations with Hidden Confounders

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