United States

We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent as in current automation-based approaches, we give the assistant an advisory role and keep the agent in the loop as the main decision maker. The difficulty is that we must account for potential biases of the agent which may cause it to seemingly irrationally reject advice. To do this we introduce a novel formalization of assistance that models these biases, allowing the assistant to infer and adapt to them. We then introduce a new method for planning the assistant&#39;s actions which can scale to large decision making problems. We show experimentally that our approach adapts to these agent biases, and results in higher cumulative reward for the agent than automation-based alternatives. Lastly, we show that an approach combining advice and automation outperforms advice alone at the cost of losing some safety guarantees.

AAAI 2023

Zero-Shot Assistance in Sequential Decision Problems

human-ai interaction

multiagent systems

human-in-the-loop machine learning

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.

We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent as in current automation-based approaches, we give the assistant an advisory role and keep the agent in the loop as the main decision maker. The difficulty is that we must account for potential biases of the agent which may cause it to seemingly irrationally reject advice. To do this we introduce a novel formalization of assistance that models these biases, allowing the assistant to infer and adapt to them. We then introduce a new method for planning the assistant's actions which can scale to large decision making problems. We show experimentally that our approach adapts to these agent biases, and results in higher cumulative reward for the agent than automation-based alternatives. Lastly, we show that an approach combining advice and automation outperforms advice alone at the cost of losing some safety guarantees.

poster

Federated learning (FL) is a popular distributed machine learning paradigm which enables jointly training a global model without sharing clients' data. However, its repetitive server-client communication gives room for possible backdoor attacks which aims to mislead the global model into a targeted misprediction when a specific trigger pattern is presented. In response to such backdoor threats on federated learning, various defense measures have been proposed. In this paper, we study whether the current defense mechanisms truly neutralize the backdoor threats from federated learning in a practical setting by proposing a new federated backdoor attack framework for possible countermeasures. Different from traditional training (on triggered data) and rescaling (the malicious client model) based backdoor injection, the proposed backdoor attack framework (1) directly modifies (a small proportion of) local model weights to inject the backdoor trigger via sign flips; (2) jointly optimize the trigger pattern with the client model,  thus is more persistent and stealthy for circumventing existing defenses. In a case study, we examine the strength and weaknesses of several recent federated backdoor defenses from three major categories and provide suggestions to the practitioners when training federated models in practice.

On the Vulnerability of Backdoor Defenses for Federated Learning

Local graph neighborhood sampling is a fundamental computational problem that is at the heart of algorithms for node representation learning. 
Several works have presented algorithms for learning discrete node embeddings where graph nodes are represented by discrete features such as attributes of neighborhood nodes. Discrete embeddings offer several advantages compared to continuous word2vec-like node embeddings: ease of computation, scalability, and interpretability. We present LoNe Sampler, a suite of algorithms for generating discrete node embeddings by Local Neighborhood Sampling, and address two shortcomings of previous work. First, our algorithms have rigorously understood theoretical properties. Second, we show how to generate approximate explicit vector maps that avoid the expensive computation of a Gram matrix for the training of a kernel model. Experiments on benchmark datasets confirm the theoretical findings and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods. 

LoNe Sampler: Graph node embeddings by coordinated local neighborhood sampling

Recent investigations on rotation invariance for 3D point clouds have been devoted to devising rotation-invariant feature descriptors or learning canonical spaces where objects are semantically aligned.
Examinations of learning frameworks for invariance have seldom been looked into.
In this work, we review rotation invariance (RI) in terms of point cloud registration (PCR) and propose an effective framework for rotation invariance learning via three sequential stages, namely rotation-invariant shape encoding, aligned feature integration, and deep feature registration.
We first encode shape descriptors constructed with respect to reference frames defined over different scales, e.g., local patches and global topology, to generate rotation-invariant latent shape codes.
Within the integration stage, we propose an Aligned Integration Transformer (AIT) to produce a discriminative feature representation by integrating point-wise self- and cross-relations established within the shape codes.
Meanwhile, we adopt rigid transformations between reference frames to align the shape codes for feature consistency across different scales.
Finally, the deep integrated feature is registered to both rotation-invariant shape codes to maximize their feature similarities, such that rotation invariance of the integrated feature is preserved and shared semantic information is implicitly extracted from shape codes.
Experimental results on 3D shape classification, part segmentation, and retrieval tasks prove the feasibility of our framework.

Rethinking Rotation Invariance with Point Cloud Registration

When inferring reward functions from human behavior (be it demonstrations, comparisons, physical corrections, or e-stops), it has proven useful to model the human as making noisy-rational choices, with a ``rationality coefficient" capturing how much noise or entropy we expect to see in the human behavior. Prior work typically sets the rationality level to a constant value, regardless of the type, or quality, of human feedback. However, in many settings, giving one type of feedback (e.g. a demonstration) may be much more difficult than a different type of feedback (e.g. answering a comparison query). Thus, we expect to see more or less noise or suboptimality depending on the type of human feedback. In this work, we advocate that grounding the rationality coefficient in real data for each feedback type, rather than assuming a default value, has a significant positive effect on reward learning. We test this in both simulated experiments and in a user study with real human feedback. We find that overestimating human rationality can have dire effects on reward learning accuracy and regret. We also find that fitting the rationality coefficient to human data enables better reward learning, even when the human deviates significantly from the noisy-rational choice model due to systematic biases. Further, we find that the rationality level affects the informativeness of each feedback type: surprisingly, demonstrations are not always the most informative---when the human acts very suboptimally, comparisons actually become more informative, even when the rationality level is the same for both.  Ultimately, our results emphasize the importance and advantage of paying attention to the assumed human-rationality-level, especially when agents actively learn from multiple types of human feedback.

The Effect of Modeling Human Rationality Level on Learning Rewards from Multiple Feedback Types

Secure aggregation is a critical component in federated learning (FL), which enables the server to learn the aggregate model of the users without observing their local models. Conventionally, secure aggregation algorithms focus only on ensuring the privacy of individual users in a single training round. We contend that such designs can lead to significant privacy leakages over multiple training rounds, due to partial user selection/participation at each round of FL. In fact, we show that the conventional random user selection strategies in FL lead to leaking users' individual models within number of rounds that is linear in the number of users.
To address this challenge, we introduce a secure aggregation framework, Multi-RoundSecAgg, with multi-round privacy guarantees.
In particular, we introduce a new metric to quantify the privacy guarantees of FL over multiple training rounds, and develop a structured user selection strategy that guarantees the long-term privacy of each user (over any number of training rounds). 
Our framework also carefully accounts for the fairness and the average number of participating users at each round.
Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets in the IID and the non-IID settings demonstrate the performance improvement over the baselines, both in terms of privacy protection and test accuracy. 

Securing Secure Aggregation: Mitigating Multi-Round Privacy Leakage in Federated Learning

Target Propagation (TP) is a biologically more plausible algorithm than the error backpropagation (BP) to train deep networks, and improving practicality of TP is an open issue. TP methods  require the feedforward and feedback networks to form layer-wise autoencoders for propagating the target values generated at the output layer. However, this causes certain drawbacks; e.g., careful hyperparameter tuning is required to synchronize the feedforward and feedback training, and frequent updates of the feedback path are usually required than that of the feedforward path. Learning of the feedforward and feedback networks is sufficient to make TP methods capable of training, but is having these layer-wise autoencoders a necessary condition for TP to work? We answer this question by presenting Fixed-Weight Difference Target Propagation (FW-DTP) that keeps the feedback weights constant during training. We confirmed that this simple method, which naturally resolves the abovementioned problems of TP, can still deliver informative target values to hidden layers for a given task; indeed, FW-DTP consistently achieves higher test performance than a baseline, the Difference Target Propagation (DTP), on four classification datasets. We also present a novel propagation architecture that explains the exact form of the feedback function of DTP to analyze FW-DTP.

Fixed-Weight Difference Target Propagation

Given a square matrix with noisy dissimilarity measures between pairs of data samples, the metric nearness model computes the best approximation of the matrix from a set of valid distance metrics. Despite its wide applications in machine learning and data processing tasks, the model faces non-trivial computational requirements in seeking the solution due to the large number of metric constraints associated with the feasible region. To tackle the challenge and improve the model's scalability and applicability, our work designed a practical approach that operates in two stages. The first stage computes a fast yet high-quality approximate solution from a set of isometrically embeddable metrics, which is further improved by an effective heuristic. The second stage refines the approximate solution with the Halpern-Lions-Wittmann-Bauschke projection algorithm, which converges quickly to the optimal solution. In empirical evaluations, the proposed approach runs at least an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art solutions, with significantly improved scalability, complete conformity to constraints, less memory consumption, and other desirable features in real applications.

Metric Nearness Made Practical

 We present a novel method for exemplar-based image translation, called matching interleaved diffusion models (MIDMs). Most existing methods for this task were formulated as GAN-based matching-then-generation framework. However, in this framework, matching errors induced by the difficulty of semantic matching across cross-domain, e.g., sketch and photo, can be easily propagated to the generation step, which in turn leads to the degenerated results. Motivated by the recent success of diffusion models, overcoming the shortcomings of GANs, we incorporate the diffusion models to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we formulate a diffusion-based matching-and-generation framework that interleaves cross-domain matching and diffusion steps in the latent space by iteratively feeding the intermediate warp into the noising process and denoising it to generate a translated image. In addition, to improve the reliability of diffusion process, we design confidence-aware process using cycle-consistency to consider only confident regions during translation. Experimental results show that our MIDMs generate more plausible images than state-of-the-art methods.

MIDMs: Matching Interleaved Diffusion Models for Exemplar-based Image Translation

The marginal distribution shift of covariates from training to test phase, named covariate-shift, is prone to make a predictive model with model misspecification perform unstably across agnostic testing data. The recent literature on invariant learning attempts to learn an invariant predictor from heterogeneous environments. However, the performance of the learned predictor depends heavily on the availability and quality of provided environments. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective non-parametric method for generating heterogeneous environments via Random Sample Weighting (RSW). Given the training dataset from a single source environment, we randomly generate a set of covariate-determining sample weights and use each weighted training distribution to simulate an environment. We theoretically show that under appropriate conditions, such random sample weighting can produce sufficient heterogeneity to be exploited by common invariance constraints to find invariant variables for stable prediction under covariate shifts. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of our method.

Covariate-Shift Generalization via Random Sample Weighting

Transformer-based autoregressive (AR) methods have achieved appealing performance for varied sequence-to-sequence generation tasks, e.g., neural machine translation, summarization, and code generation, but suffer from low inference efficiency. To speed up the inference stage, many non-autoregressive (NAR) strategies have been proposed in the past few years. Among them, the conditional masked language model (CMLM) is one of the most versatile frameworks, as it can support many different sequence generation scenarios and achieve very competitive performance on these tasks. In this paper, we further introduce a simple yet effective adaptive masking over masking strategy to enhance the refinement capability of the decoder and make the encoder optimization easier. Experiments on \textbf{3} different tasks (neural machine translation, summarization, and code generation) with \textbf{15} datasets in total confirm that our proposed simple method achieves significant performance improvement over the strong CMLM model. Surprisingly, our proposed model yields state-of-the-art performance on neural machine translation (\textbf{34.62} BLEU on WMT16 EN$\to$RO, \textbf{34.82} BLEU on WMT16 RO$\to$EN, and \textbf{34.84} BLEU on IWSLT De$\to$En) and even better performance than the \textbf{AR} Transformer on \textbf{7} benchmark datasets with at least \textbf{2.2$\times$} speedup. Our anonymous code is available at GitHub\footnote{\url{ https://github.com/amom-nar/AMOM}}.

Zero-Shot Assistance in Sequential Decision Problems

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