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The efficacy of topological data analysis (TDA) has been demonstrated in many different machine learning pipelines, particularly those in which structural characteristics of data are highly relevant. However, TDA&#39;s usability in large scale machine learning applications is hindered by the significant computational cost of generating persistence diagrams. In this work, a method that allows this computationally expensive process to be approximated by deep neural networks is proposed. Moreover, the method&#39;s practicality in estimating 0-dimensional persistence diagrams across a diverse range of images is shown.

AAAI 2023

Persistent Homology through Image Segmentation (Student Abstract)

ml: applications

cv: applications

cv: segmentation

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

The efficacy of topological data analysis (TDA) has been demonstrated in many different machine learning pipelines, particularly those in which structural characteristics of data are highly relevant. However, TDA's usability in large scale machine learning applications is hindered by the significant computational cost of generating persistence diagrams. In this work, a method that allows this computationally expensive process to be approximated by deep neural networks is proposed. Moreover, the method's practicality in estimating 0-dimensional persistence diagrams across a diverse range of images is shown.

lightning talk

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).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


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.

Applications such as employees sharing office spaces over
a workweek can be modeled as problems where agents are
matched to resources over multiple rounds. Agents’ require-
ments limit the set of compatible resources and the rounds in
which they want to be matched. Viewing such an application
as a multi-round matching problem on a bipartite compati-
bility graph between agents and resources, we show that a
solution can be found efficiently if one exists. To cope with
situations where a solution does not exist, we consider two
extensions. In the first extension, a benefit function is defined
for each agent and the objective is to find a solution to maxi-
mize the total benefit. For a general class of benefit functions
satisfying certain properties (including diminishing returns),
we show that this multi-round matching problem is efficiently
solvable. This class includes utilitarian and Rawlsian wel-
fare functions. For another benefit function, we show that the
maximization problem is NP-hard. In the second extension,
the objective is to generate advice to each agent (i.e., a subset
of requirements to be relaxed) subject to a budget constraint
so that the agent can be matched. We show that this budget-
constrained advice generation problem is NP-hard. For this
problem, we develop an integer linear programming formu-
lation as well as a heuristic based on local search. We exper-
imentally evaluate our algorithms on synthetic networks and
apply them to two real-world situations: shared office spaces
and matching courses to classrooms.

Resource Sharing Through Multi-Round Matchings

Although weakly-supervised techniques can reduce the labeling effort, it is unclear whether a saliency model trained with weakly-supervised data (e.g., point annotation) can achieve the equivalent performance of its fully-supervised version. This paper attempts to answer this unexplored question by proving a hypothesis: there is a point-labeled dataset where saliency models trained on it can achieve equivalent performance when trained on the densely annotated dataset. To prove this conjecture, we proposed a novel yet effective adversarial trajectory-ensemble active learning (ATAL). Our contributions are three-fold:  1) Our proposed adversarial attack triggering uncertainty can conquer the overconfidence of existing active learning methods and accurately locate these uncertain pixels. {2)} Our proposed trajectory-ensemble uncertainty estimation method maintains the advantages of the ensemble networks while significantly reducing the computational cost. {3)} Our proposed relationship-aware diversity sampling algorithm can conquer oversampling while boosting performance.
Experimental results show that our ATAL can find such a point-labeled dataset, where a saliency model trained on it obtained $97\%$ -- $99\%$ performance of its fully-supervised version with only ten annotated points per image.

Pixel is All You Need: Adversarial Trajectory-Ensemble Active Learning for Salient Object Detection

Evolutionary anti-coordination games on networks capture real-world strategic situations such as traffic routing and market competition. In such games, agents maximize their utility by choosing strategies (i.e., actions) that differ from their neighbors’ strategies. Two important problems concerning evolutionary games are the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium (NE) and the convergence time of the dynamics. In this work, we study these two problems for anti-coordination games under sequential and synchronous dynamics. For each type of dynamics, we examine two decision-making modes based on whether an agent considers its own previous action (self essential mode) or not (self non-essential mode) in choosing its next action. Using a relationship between anti-coordination games and discrete graphical dynamical systems, we show that for both forms of dynamics, finding an NE can be done efficiently for the self non-essential mode but is computationally intractable under the self essential mode. To cope with this hardness, we identify some special cases for which an NE can be found efficiently, and present the corresponding algorithms. With respect to convergence time, we show that the dynamics converges in a polynomial number of steps in the synchronous case for both modes; for the sequential case, the convergence time is polynomial only for the self non-essential mode. Through experiments, we empirically examine the convergence time and the equilibria for both synthetic and real-world networks.

Networked Anti-Coordination Games Meet Graphical Dynamical Systems: Equilibria and Convergence

The facility location game is an extensively studied problem in mechanism design. In the classical model, the cost of each agent is her distance to the nearest facility. In this paper, we consider a novel model where each facility charges an entrance fee, which is a function of the facility's location. Thus, in our model, the cost of each agent is the sum of the distance to the facility and the entrance fee of the facility. The generalized model captures more real-life scenarios. In our model, the entrance fee function can be an arbitrary function, and the corresponding preferences of agents may not be single-peaked anymore: this makes the problem complex and requires new techniques in the analysis. We systematically study the model and design strategyproof mechanisms with nice approximation ratios and also complement these with nearly-tight impossibility results. Specifically, for one-facility and two-facility games, we provide upper and lower bounds for the approximation ratios given by deterministic and randomized mechanisms, with respect to the utilitarian and egalitarian objectives. Most of our bounds are tight, and these bounds are independent of the entrance fee functions. Our results also match the results of the classical model.

Facility Location Games with Entrance Fees

Neural network pruning is a technique of network compression by removing weights of lower importance from an optimized neural network. Often, pruned networks are compared in terms of accuracy, which is realized in terms of rewards for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) networks. However, networks that estimate control actions for safety-critical tasks, must also adhere to safety requirements along with obtaining rewards. We propose a methodology to iteratively refine the weights of a pruned neural network such that we get a sparse high-performance network without significant side effects on safety.

Safety Aware Neural Pruning for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Feature selection (FS) is a crucial procedure in machine learning pipelines for its significant benefits in removing data redundancy and mitigating model overfitting. Since concept drift is a widespread phenomenon in streaming data and could severely affect model performance, effective FS on concept drifting data streams is imminent. However, existing state-of-the-art FS algorithms fail to adjust their selection strategy adaptively when the effective feature subset changes, making them unsuitable for drifting streams. In this paper, we propose a dynamic FS method that selects effective features on concept drifting data streams via deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we present two novel designs: (i) a skip-mode reinforcement learning environment that shrinks action space size for high-dimensional FS tasks; (ii) a curiosity mechanism that generates intrinsic rewards to address the long-horizon exploration problem. The experiment results show that our proposed method outperforms other FS methods and can dynamically adapt to concept drifts.

Anti-drifting Feature Selection via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Previous research on the comprehensive negotiation strategy using deep reinforcement learning (RL) has scalability issues of not performing effectively in the large-sized domains.
We improve negotiation strategy via deep RL by considering an issue-based represented deep policy network to deal with multi-issue negotiation.
The architecture of the proposed learning agent considers the characteristics of multi-issue negotiation domains and policy-based learning.
We demonstrate that proposed method achieve equivalent or higher utility than existing negotiation agents in the large-sized domains.

Scalable Negotiating Agent Strategy via Multi-Issue Policy Network (Student Abstract)

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has been increasingly used in safety-critical applications but has no safety guarantees, especially during training. In this paper, we propose dynamic shielding, a novel decentralized MARL framework to ensure safety in both the training and deployment phases. Our framework leverages Shield, a reactive system running in parallel with the reinforcement learning algorithm, to monitor and correct agents’ behavior. In our algorithm, shields dynamically split and merge according to the environment state in order to maintain decentralization and avoid conservative behaviors while enjoying formal safety guarantees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MARL with dynamic shielding in the mobile navigation scenario.

Tackling Safe and Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Dynamic Shielding (Student Abstract)

Learning to recover clear images from images having a combination of degrading factors is a challenging task. That being said, autonomous surveillance in low visibility conditions caused by high pollution/smoke, poor air quality index, low light, atmospheric scattering and haze during a blizzard, etc, becomes even more important to prevent accidents. It is thus crucial to form a solution that can not only result in a high-quality image but also which is efficient enough to be deployed for everyday use. However, the lack of proper datasets available to tackle this task limits the performance of the previous methods proposed. To this end, we generate the LowVis-AFO dataset, containing 3647 paired dark-hazy and clear images. We also introduce a new lightweight deep learning model called Low-Visibility Restoration Network (LVRNet). It outperforms previous image restoration methods with low latency, achieving a PSNR value of 25.744 and an SSIM of 0.905, hence making our approach scalable and ready for practical use.

LVRNet: Lightweight Image Restoration for Aerial Images under Low Visibility(Student Abstract)

This work investigates the evolution of the latent space when deep learning models are trained incrementally in non-stationary environments. We propose a methodology for visualizing the latent representations. We then show that classes that are not even targeted by the concept drift can be negatively affected, suggesting that some classes may regularize the latent space.

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Resource Sharing Through Multi-Round Matchings

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