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One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a linear hierarchy of abstraction layers of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) underlying the target domain. Each layer is an MDP representing a coarser model of the one immediately below in the hierarchy. In this work, we propose a novel form of Reward Shaping where the solution obtained at the abstract level is used to offer rewards to the more concrete MDP, in such a way that the abstract solution guides the learning in the more complex domain. In contrast with other works in Hierarchical RL, our technique has few requirements in the design of the abstract models and it is also tolerant to modeling errors, thus making the proposed approach practical. We formally analyze the relationship between the abstract models and the exploration heuristic induced in the lower-level domain. Moreover, we prove that the method guarantees optimal convergence and we demonstrate its effectiveness experimentally.

AAAI 2023

Exploiting Multiple Abstractions in Episodic RL via Reward Shaping

abstract markov decision processes

hierarchical reinforcement learning

reinforcement learning theory

reward shaping

reinforcement learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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. 
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.

Most programmers make mistakes when writing code. Some of these mistakes are small and require few edits to the original program -- a class of errors recently termed last mile mistakes. These errors break the flow for experienced developers and can stump novice programmers. Existing automated repair techniques targeting this class of errors are language-specific and do not easily carry over to new languages. Transferring symbolic approaches requires substantial engineering and neural approaches require data and retraining. We introduce RING, a multilingual repair engine powered by a large language model trained on code (LLMC) such as Codex. Such a multilingual engine enables a flipped model for programming assistance, one where the programmer writes code and the AI assistance suggests fixes, compared to traditional code suggestion technology. Taking inspiration from the way programmers manually fix bugs, we show that a prompt-based strategy that conceptualizes repair as localization, transformation, and candidate ranking, can successfully repair programs in multiple languages with minimal effort. We present the first results for such a multilingual repair engine by evaluating on 6 different languages and comparing performance to language-specific repair engines. We show that RING can outperform language-specific repair engines for three of these languages.

Repair Is Nearly Generation: Multilingual Program Repair with LLMs

Domain generalisation (i.e. out-of-distribution generalisation)
is an open problem in machine learning, where the goal is
to train a model via one or more source domains, that will
generalise well to unknown target domains. While the topic is
attracting increasing interest, it has not been studied in detail
in the context of object detection. The established approaches
all operate under the covariate shift assumption, where the
conditional distributions are assumed to be approximately
equal across source domains. This is the first paper to address
domain generalisation in the context of object detection, with
a rigorous mathematical analysis of domain shift, without
the covariate shift assumption. "We focus on improving the
generalisation ability of object detection by proposing new
regularisation terms to address the domain shift that arises due
to both classification and bounding box regression. Also, we
include an additional consistency regularisation term to align
the local and global level predictions. The proposed approach
is evaluated using four object detection datasets which provide
domain metadata (GWHD, Cityscapes, BDD100K, Sim10K)
where it exhibits a consistent performance improvement over
the baselines.

Domain Generalised Faster R-CNN

In this paper, we identify symmetry property in adversarial scenario by viewing adversarial attack in a fine-grained manner. A newly designed metric called attack proportion, is thus proposed to count the proportion of the adversarial examples misclassified between classes. We observe that the distribution of attack proportion is unbalanced as each class shows vulnerability to particular classes. Further, some class pairs correlate strongly and have the same degree of attack proportion for each other. We call this intriguing phenomenon symmetry property. We empirically prove this phenomenon is widespread and then analyze the reason behind the existence of symmetry property. This explanation, to some extent, could be utilized to understand robust models, which also inspires us to strengthen adversarial defenses.

Towards Interpreting and Utilizing Symmetry Property in Adversarial Examples

We introduce equi-tuning, a novel fine-tuning method that transforms (potentially non-equivariant) pretrained models into group equivariant models while incurring minimum $L_2$ loss between the feature representations of the pretrained and the equivariant models. Large pretrained models can be equi-tuned for different groups to satisfy the needs of various downstream tasks. Equi-tuned models benefit from both group equivariance as an inductive bias and semantic priors from pretrained models. We provide applications of equi-tuning on three different tasks: image classification, compositional generalization in language, and fairness in natural language generation (NLG). We also provide a novel group-theoretic definition for fairness in NLG. The effectiveness of this definition is shown by testing it against a standard empirical method of fairness in NLG. We provide experimental results for equi-tuning using a variety of pretrained models: Alexnet, Resnet, VGG, and Densenet for image classification; RNNs, GRUs, and LSTMs for compositional generalization; and GPT2 for fairness in NLG. We test these models on benchmark datasets across all considered tasks to show the generality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Equi-Tuning: Group Equivariant Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Models

We propose ordering-based approaches for learning the maximal ancestral graph (MAG) of a structural equation model (SEM) up to its Markov equivalence class (MEC) in the presence of unobserved variables. Existing ordering-based methods in the literature recover a graph through learning a causal order (c-order). We advocate for a novel order called removable order (r-order) as they are advantageous over c-orders for structure learning. This is because r-orders are the minimizers of an appropriately defined optimization problem that could be either solved exactly (using a reinforcement learning approach) or approximately (using a hill-climbing search). Moreover, the r-orders (unlike c-orders) are invariant among all the graphs in a MEC and include c-orders as a subset. Given that set of r-orders is often significantly larger than the set of c-orders, it is easier for the optimization problem to find an r-order instead of a c-order. We evaluate the performance and the scalability of our proposed approaches on both real-world and randomly generated networks.

Novel Ordering-based Approaches for Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Unobserved Variables

  Herein, we propose a Spearman rank correlation-based screening procedure for ultrahigh-dimensional data with censored response cases. The proposed method is model-free without specifying any regression forms of predictors or response variables and is robust under the unknown monotone transformations of these response variable and predictors. The sure-screening and rank-consistency properties are established under some mild regularity conditions. Simulation studies demonstrate that the new screening method performs well in the presence
of a heavy-tailed distribution, strongly dependent predictors or outliers, and offers superior performance over the existing nonparametric screening procedures. In particular, the new screening method still works well when a response variable is observed under a high censoring rate. An illustrative example is provided.

Spearman Rank Correlation Screening for Ultrahigh-dimensional Censored Data

Determining kernels' sizes of a CNN model is a crucial and non-trivial design choice and has a significant impact on its performance. The majority of kernel size design methods rely on complex heuristic tricks or leverage neural architecture search that requires extreme computational resources. Thus, learning kernels' sizes jointly with the classifier's weights has been proposed as a workaround. However, the proposed methods cannot achieve satisfactory results or are inefficient for large-scale datasets. To fill in this gap, we design a novel efficient kernel size learning method in which a size predictor model learns to predict optimal kernels' sizes for a classifier given a desired number of parameters. It does so in collaboration with a hypernetwork that predicts the weights of the classifier's kernels - given kernel sizes predicted by the kernel predictor - to minimize the training objective and both models are trained end-to-end. Our method only needs a small fraction of training epochs of the original classifier to train these two models and find proper kernel sizes for it. Thus, it offers an efficient and effective solution for the kernel size learning problem. Our extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, and ImageNet-32 clearly demonstrates that our method can achieve the best training time vs. accuracy trade-off compared to previous kernel size learning methods and significantly outperform them on challenging datasets such as STL-10 and ImageNet-32.

EffConv: Efficient Learning of Kernel Sizes for Convolution Layers of CNNs

Due to the more complicated population dynamics of the NSGA-II, none of the existing runtime guarantees for this algorithm is accompanied by a non-trivial lower bound. Via a first mathematical understanding of the population dynamics of the NSGA-II, that is, by estimating the expected number of individuals having a certain objective value, we prove that the NSGA-II with suitable population size needs $\Omega(Nn\log n)$ function evaluations to find the Pareto front of the \oneminmax problem and $\Omega(Nn^k)$  evaluations on the \ojzj problem with jump size~$k$. These bounds are asymptotically tight (that is, they match previously shown upper bounds) and show that the NSGA-II here does not even in terms of the parallel runtime (number of iterations) profit from larger population sizes. For the \ojzj problem and when the same sorting is used for the computation of the crowding distance contributions of the two objectives, we even obtain a runtime estimate that is tight including the leading constant.

From Understanding the Population Dynamics of the NSGA-II to the First Proven Lower Bounds

Fairness has been considered as a critical problem in federated learning (FL). In this work, we analyze two direct causes of unfairness in FL - an unfair direction and an improper step size when updating the model. To solve these issues, we introduce an effective way to measure fairness of the model through the cosine similarity, and then propose a federated multiple gradient descent algorithm with fair guidance (FedMDFG) to drive the model fairer. We first convert FL into a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) and design an advanced multiple gradient descent algorithm to calculate a fair descent direction by adding a fair-driven objective to MOP. A low-communication-cost line search strategy is then designed to find a better step size for the model update. We further show the theoretical analysis on how it can enhance fairness and guarantee the convergence. Finally, extensive experiments in several FL scenarios verify that FedMDFG is robust and outperforms the SOTA FL algorithms in convergence and fairness.

FedMDFG: Federated Learning with Multi-Gradient Descent and Fair Guidance

Recently, word enhancement has become very popular for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER), reducing segmentation errors and increasing the semantic and boundary information of Chinese words. However, these methods tend to ignore the semantic relationship before and after the sentence after integrating lexical information. Therefore, the regularity of word length information has not been fully explored in various word-character fusion methods. In this work, we propose a Lexicon-Attention and Data-Augmentation (LADA) method for Chinese NER. We discuss the challenges of using existing methods in incorporating word information for NER and show how our proposed methods could be leveraged to overcome those challenges. LADA is based on a Transformer Encoder that utilizes lexicon to construct a directed graph and fuses word information through updating the optimal edge of the graph. Specially, we introduce the advanced data augmentation method to obtain the optimal representation for the NER task. Experimental results show that the augmentation done using LADA can considerably boost the performance of our NER system and achieve significantly better results than previous state-of-the-art methods and variant models in the literature on four publicly available NER datasets, namely Resume, MSRA, Weibo, and OntoNotes v4. We also observe better generalization and application to a real-world setting from LADA on multi-source complex entities.

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Repair Is Nearly Generation: Multilingual Program Repair with LLMs

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