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Given multiple datasets over a fixed set of random variables, each collected from a different environment, we are interested in discovering the shared underlying causal network and the local interventions per environment, without assuming prior knowledge on which datasets are observational or interventional, and without assuming the shape of the causal dependencies. We formalize this problem using the Algorithmic Model of Causation, instantiate a consistent score via the Minimum Description Length principle, and show under which conditions the network and interventions are identifiable. To efficiently discover causal networks and intervention targets in practice, we introduce the ORION algorithm, which through extensive experiments we show outperforms the state of the art in causal inference over multiple environments.

AAAI 2023

Information-Theoretic Causal Discovery and Intervention Detection over Multiple Environments

causal learning

causal discovery

information theory

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

Standard multi-modal models assume the use of the same modalities in training and inference stages. However, in practice, the environment in which multi-modal models operate may not satisfy such assumption. As such, their performances degrade drastically if any modality is missing in the inference stage. We ask: how can we train a model that is robust to missing modalities? This paper seeks a set of good practices for multi-modal action recognition, with a particular interest in circumstances where some modalities are not available at an inference time. First, we show how to effectively regularize the model during training (e.g., data augmentation). Second, we investigate on fusion methods for robustness to missing modalities: we find that transformer-based fusion shows better robustness for missing modality than summation or concatenation. Third, we propose a simple modular network, ActionMAE, which learns missing modality predictive coding by randomly dropping modality features and tries to reconstruct them with the remaining modality features. Coupling these good practices, we build a model that is not only effective in multi-modal action recognition but also robust to modality missing. Our model achieves the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmarks and maintains competitive performances even in missing modality scenarios.

Towards Good Practices for Missing Modality Robust Action Recognition

We study PAC learnability and PAC stabilizability of Hedonic Games (HGs), i.e., efficiently inferring preferences or core-stable partitions from samples. We first expand the known learnability/stabilizability landscape for some of the most prominent HGs classes, providing results for Friends and Enemies Games, Bottom Responsive, and Anonymous HGs. Then, having a broader view in mind, we attempt to shed light on the structural properties leading to learnability/stabilizability, or lack thereof, for specific HGs classes. Along this path, we focus on the fully expressive Hedonic Coalition Nets representation of HGs. We identify two sets of conditions that lead to efficient learnability, and which encompass all of the known positive learnability results. On the side of stability, we reveal that, while the freedom of choosing an ad hoc adversarial distribution is the most obvious hurdle to achieving PAC stability, it is not the only one. First, we show a distribution independent necessary condition for PAC stability. Then, we focus on $\W$-games, where players have individual preferences over other players and evaluate coalitions based on the least preferred member. We prove that these games are PAC stabilizable under the class of bounded distributions, which assign positive probability mass to all coalitions. Finally, we discuss why such a result is not easily extendable to other HGs classes even in this promising scenario. Namely, we establish a purely computational property necessary for achieving PAC stability.

PAC learning and stabilizing Hedonic Games: towards a unifying approach.

Behavioral metrics can calculate the distance between states or state-action pairs from the rewards and transitions difference. By virtue of their capability to filter out task-irrelevant information in theory, using them to shape a state embedding space becomes a new trend of representation learning for deep reinforcement learning (RL), especially when there are explicit distracting factors in observation backgrounds. However, due to the tight coupling between the metric and the RL policy, such metric-based methods may result in less informative embedding spaces which can weaken their aid to the baseline RL algorithm and even consume more samples to learn. We resolve this by proposing a new behavioral metric. It decouples the learning of RL policy and metric owing to its independence on RL policy. We theoretically justify its scalability to continuous state and action spaces and design a practical way to incorporate it into an RL procedure as a representation learning target. We evaluate our approach on DeepMind control tasks with default and distracting backgrounds. By statistically reliable evaluation protocols, our experiments demonstrate our approach is superior to previous metric-based methods in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance in both backgrounds.

Policy-Independent Behavioral Metric-Based Representation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

AI and Parallelism in CS1: Experiences and Analysis

Some of the most powerful reinforcement learning frameworks use planning for action selection. Interestingly, their planning horizon is either fixed or determined arbitrarily by the state visitation history. Here, we expand beyond the naive fixed horizon and propose a theoretically justified strategy for adaptive selection of the planning horizon as a function of the state-dependent value estimate. We propose two variants for lookahead selection and analyze the trade-off between iteration count and computational complexity per iteration. We then devise a corresponding deep Q-network algorithm with an adaptive tree search horizon. We separate the value estimation per depth to compensate for the off-policy discrepancy between depths. Lastly, we demonstrate the efficacy of our adaptive lookahead method in a maze environment and Atari.

Planning and Learning with Adaptive Lookahead

Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors hurt accuracy. In this work, we explore the use of an often unused source of auxiliary supervision: language. Inspired by recent advances in transformer-based models, we train agents with an instruction prediction loss that encourages learning temporally extended representations that operate at a high level of abstraction. Concretely, we demonstrate that instruction modeling significantly improves performance in planning environments when training with a limited number of demonstrations on the BabyAI and Crafter benchmarks. In further analysis we find that instruction modeling is most important for tasks that require complex reasoning, while understandably offering smaller gains in environments that require simple plans. Our code will be publicly released.

Improving Long-Horizon Imitation Through Instruction Prediction

Transferring knowledge from task-agnostic pre-trained deep models for downstream tasks is an important topic in computer vision research. Along with the growth of computational capacity, we now have open-source vision-language pre-trained models in large scales of the model architecture and amount of data. In this study, we focus on transferring knowledge for video classification tasks. Conventional methods randomly initialize the linear classifier head for vision classification, but they leave the usage of the text encoder for downstream visual recognition tasks undiscovered. In this paper, we revise the role of the linear classifier and replace the classifier with the different knowledge from pre-trained model. We utilize the well-pretrained language model to generate good semantic target for efficient transferring learning. The empirical study shows that our method improves both the performance and the training speed of video classification, with a negligible change in the model. Our simple yet effective tuning paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficient training on various video recognition scenarios, i.e., zero-shot, few-shot, general recognition. In particular, our paradigm achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 87.8% on Kinetics-400, and also surpasses previous methods by 20~50% absolute top-1 accuracy under zero-shot, few-shot settings on five popular video datasets. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/whwu95/Text4Vis.


Revisiting Classifier: Transferring Vision-Language Models for Video Recognition

In the literature on hyper-parameter tuning, a number of recent solutions rely on low-fidelity observations (e.g., training with sub-sampled datasets) to identify promising configurations to be tested via high-fidelity observations (e.g., using the full dataset). Among these, HyperBand is arguably one of the most popular solutions, due to its efficiency and theoretically provable robustness. In this work, we introduce HyperJump, a new approach that builds on HyperBand’s robust search strategy and complements it with novel model-based risk analysis techniques that accelerate the search by skipping the evaluation of low risk configurations, i.e., configurations that are likely to be eventually discarded by HyperBand. We evaluate HyperJump on a suite of hyper-parameter optimization problems and show that it provides over one-order of magnitude speed-ups, both in sequential and parallel deployments, on a variety of deep-learning, kernel-based learning and neural architectural search problems when compared to HyperBand and to several state-of-the-art optimizers.

HyperJump: Accelerating HyperBand via Risk Modelling

Consider a network of $N$ decentralized computing agents collaboratively solving a nonconvex stochastic composite problem. In this work, we propose a single-loop algorithm, called DEEPSTORM, that achieves optimal sample complexity for this setting. Unlike double-loop algorithms that require a large batch size to compute the (stochastic) gradient once in a while, DEEPSTORM uses a small batch size, creating advantages in occasions such as streaming data and online learning. This is the first method achieving optimal sample complexity for decentralized nonconvex stochastic composite problems, requiring $\mathcal{O}(1)$ batch size. We conduct convergence analysis for DEEPSTORM with both constant and diminishing step sizes. Additionally, under proper initialization and a small enough desired solution error, we show that DEEPSTORM with a constant step size achieves a network-independent sample complexity, with an additional linear speed-up with respect to $N$ over centralized methods. All codes are made available at https://github.com/gmancino/DEEPSTORM.

Proximal Stochastic Recursive Momentum Methods for Nonconvex Composite Decentralized Optimization

There has been a surge of interest in learning optimal decision trees using mixed-integer programs (MIP) in recent years, as heuristic-based methods do not guarantee optimality and find it challenging to incorporate constraints that are critical for many practical applications.    However, existing MIP methods which build on an \emph{arc-based} formulation do not scale well as the number of binary variables is in the order of $\mathcal{O}(2^dN)$, where $d$ and $N$ refer to the depth of the tree and the size of the dataset. Moreover, they can only handle sample-level constraints and linear metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel \emph{path-based} MIP formulation where the number of decision variables is independent of %both $d$ and $N$. We present a scalable column generation framework to solve the MIP to optimality. Our framework produces a multiway-split tree which is more interpretable than the typical binary-split trees due to its shorter rules. Our framework is more general as it can handle nonlinear metrics such as F1 score, and incorporate a broader class of constraints. We demonstrate its efficacy with extensive experiments. We present results on datasets containing up to 1,008,372  samples while existing MIP-based decision tree models do not scale well on data beyond a few thousand points. We report superior or competitive results compared to the state-of-art MIP-based methods with up to a 24X reduction in runtime.

Information-Theoretic Causal Discovery and Intervention Detection over Multiple Environments

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