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A polymatrix game is a multi-player game over n players, where each player chooses a pure strategy from a list of its own pure strategies. The utility of each player is a sum of payoffs it gains from the two player&#39;s game from all its neighbors, under its chosen strategy and that of its neighbor. As a natural extension to two-player games (a.k.a. bimatrix games), polymatrix games are widely used for multi-agent games in real world scenarios.
  
In this paper we show that the problem of approximating a Nash equilibrium in a polymatrix game within the polynomial precision is PPAD-hard, even in sparse and win-lose ones. This result further challenges the predictability of Nash equilibria as a solution concept in the multi-agent setting. We also propose a simple and efficient algorithm, when the game is further restricted. Together, we establish a new dichotomy theorem for this class of games. It is also of independent interest for exploring the computational and structural properties in Nash equilibria.

AAAI 2021

On the Approximation of Nash Equilibria in Sparse Win-Lose Multi-Player Games

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

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AAAI 2024

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. 

A polymatrix game is a multi-player game over n players, where each player chooses a pure strategy from a list of its own pure strategies. The utility of each player is a sum of payoffs it gains from the two player's game from all its neighbors, under its chosen strategy and that of its neighbor. As a natural extension to two-player games (a.k.a. bimatrix games), polymatrix games are widely used for multi-agent games in real world scenarios.
  
In this paper we show that the problem of approximating a Nash equilibrium in a polymatrix game within the polynomial precision is PPAD-hard, even in sparse and win-lose ones. This result further challenges the predictability of Nash equilibria as a solution concept in the multi-agent setting. We also propose a simple and efficient algorithm, when the game is further restricted. Together, we establish a new dichotomy theorem for this class of games. It is also of independent interest for exploring the computational and structural properties in Nash equilibria.

technical paper

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. 

Automatic chat summarization can help people quickly grasp important information from numerous chat messages. Unlike conventional documents, chat logs usually have fragmented and evolving topics. In addition, these logs contain a quantity of elliptical and interrogative sentences, which make the chat summarization highly context dependent. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework called RankAE to perform chat summarization without employing manually labeled data. RankAE consists of a topic-oriented ranking strategy that selects topic utterances according to centrality and diversity simultaneously, as well as a denoising auto-encoder that is carefully designed to generate succinct but context-informative summaries based on the selected utterances. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a large-scale dataset of chat logs from a customer service environment and build an annotated set only for model evaluation. Experimental results show that RankAE significantly outperforms other unsupervised methods and is able to generate high-quality summaries in terms of relevance and topic coverage.

Unsupervised Summarization for Chat Logs with Topic-Oriented Ranking and Context-Aware Auto-Encoders

Normalization operations are essential for state-of-the-art neural networks and enable us to train a network from scratch with a large learning rate (LR). We attempt to explain the real effect of Batch Normalization (BN) from the perspective of variance transmission by investigating the relationship between BN and Weights Normalization (WN). In this work, we demonstrate that the problem of the shift of the average gradient will amplify the variance of every convolutional (conv) layer. We propose Parametric Weights Standardization (PWS), a fast and robust to mini-batch size module used for conv filters, to solve the shift of the average gradient. PWS can provide the speed-up of BN. Besides, it has less computation and does not change the output of a conv layer. PWS enables the network to converge fast without normalizing the outputs. This result enhances the persuasiveness of the shift of the average gradient and explains why BN works from the perspective of variance transmission. The code and appendix will be made available on https://github.com/lyxzzz/PWSConv.

Delving into Variance Transmission and Normalization: Shift of Average Gradient Makes the Network Collapse

UNMT tackles translation on monolingual corpora in two required languages. Since there is no explicitly cross-lingual signal, pre-training and synthetic sentence pairs are significant to the success of UNMT. In this work, we empirically study the core training procedure of UNMT to analyze the synthetic sentence pairs obtained from back-translation. We introduce new losses to UNMT to regularize the synthetic sentence pairs by jointly training the UNMT objective and the regularization objective. Our comprehensive experiments support that our method can generally improve the performance of currently successful models on three similar pairs {French, German, Romanian} <-> English  and one dissimilar pair Russian <-> English  with acceptably additional cost.

Empirical Regularization for Synthetic Sentence Pairs in Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

Few-shot classification aims to categorize the samples from unseen classes with only few labeled samples. To address such a challenge, many methods exploit a base set consisting of massive labeled samples to learn an instance embedding function, i.e., image feature extractor, and it is expected to possess good transferability among different tasks. Such characteristics of few-shot learning are essentially different from that of traditional image classification only pursuing to get discriminative image representations. In this paper, we propose to learn intact features by erasing-inpainting for few-shot classification. Specifically, 
   we argue that extracting intact features of target objects is more transferable, and then propose a novel cross-set erasing-inpainting (CSEI) method. CSEI processes the images in the support set using erasing and inpainting, and then uses them to augment the query set of the same task. Consequently, the feature embedding produced by our proposed method can contain more complete information of target objects. In addition, we propose task-specific feature modulation to make the features adaptive to the current task. The extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks well demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, which can consistently get considerable performance gains for different baseline methods.

Learning Intact Features by Erasing-Inpainting for Few-Shot Classification

Is chatbot able to completely replace the human agent? The short answer could be â€“ ``it depends...''. For some challenging cases, e.g., dialogue's topical spectrum spreads beyond the training corpus coverage, the chatbot may malfunction and return unsatisfied utterances. This problem can be addressed by introducing the Machine-Human Chatting Handoff (MHCH) which enables human-algorithm collaboration. To detect the normal/transferable utterances, we propose a Difficulty-Assisted Matching Inference (DAMI) network, utilizing difficulty-assisted encoding to enhance the representations of utterances. Moreover, a matching inference mechanism is introduced to capture the contextual matching features. A new evaluation metric, Golden Transfer within Tolerance (GT-T), is proposed to assess the performance by considering the tolerance property of the MHCH. To provide insights into the task and validate the proposed model, we collect two new datasets. Extensive experimental results are presented and contrasted against a series of baseline models to demonstrate the efficacy of our model on MHCH.

Time to Transfer: Predicting and Evaluating Machine-Human Chatting Handoff

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of moving a team of agents to their goal locations without collisions. In this paper, we study the lifelong variant of MAPF, where agents are constantly engaged with new goal locations, such as in large-scale automated warehouses. We propose a new framework Rolling-Horizon Collision Resolution (RHCR) for solving lifelong MAPF by decomposing the problem into a sequence of Windowed MAPF instances, where a Windowed MAPF solver resolves collisions among the paths of the agents only within a bounded time horizon and ignores collisions beyond it. RHCR is particularly well suited to generating pliable plans that adapt to continually arriving new goal locations. We empirically evaluate RHCR with a variety of MAPF solvers and show that it can produce high-quality solutions for up to 1,000 agents (= 38.9% of the empty cells on the map) for simulated warehouse instances, significantly outperforming existing work.

Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding in Large-Scale Warehouses

Recent deep neural networks (DNNs) can easily overfit to biased training data with noisy labels. Label correction strategy is commonly used to alleviate this issue by identifying suspected noisy labels and then correcting them. Current approaches to correcting corrupted labels usually need manually pre-defined label correction rules, which makes it hard to apply in practice due to the large variations of such manual strategies with respect to different problems. To address this issue, we propose a meta-learning model, aiming at attaining an automatic scheme which can estimate soft labels through meta-gradient descent step under the guidance of a small amount of noise-free meta data. By viewing the label correction procedure as a meta-process and using a meta-learner to automatically correct labels, our method can adaptively obtain rectified soft labels gradually in iteration according to current training problems. Besides, our method is model-agnostic and can be combined with any other existing classification models with ease to make it available to noisy label cases. Comprehensive experiments substantiate the superiority of our method in both synthetic and real-world problems with noisy labels compared with current state-of-the-art label correction strategies.

Learning to Purify Noisy Labels via Meta Soft Label Corrector

A majority of research interests in irregular (e.g., nested or discontinuous) named entity recognition (NER) have been paid on nested entities, while discontinuous entities received limited attention. Existing work for discontinuous NER, however, either suffers from decoding ambiguity or predicting using token-level local features. In this work, we present an innovative model for discontinuous NER based on pointer networks, where the pointer simultaneously decides whether a token at each decoding frame constitutes an entity mention and where the next constituent token is. Our model has three major merits compared with previous work: (1) The pointer mechanism is memory-augmented, which enhances the mention boundary detection and interactions between the current decision and prior recognized mentions. (2) The encoder-decoder architecture can linearize the complexity of structure prediction, and thus reduce search costs. (3) The model makes every decision using global information, i.e., by consulting all the input, encoder and previous decoder output in a global view. Experimental results on the CADEC and ShARe13 datasets show that our model outperforms flat and hypergraph models as well as a state-of-the-art transition-based model for discontinuous NER. Further in-depth analysis demonstrates that our model performs well in recognizing various entities including flat, overlapping and discontinuous ones. More crucially, our model is effective on boundary detection, which is the kernel source to NER.

Rethinking Boundaries: End-To-End Recognition of Discontinuous Mentions with Pointer Networks

Despite the recent progress, 3D multi-person pose estimation from monocular videos is still challenging due to the commonly encountered problem of missing information caused by occlusion, partially out-of-frame target persons, and inaccurate person detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework integrating graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to robustly estimate camera-centric multi-person 3D poses that does not require camera parameters. In particular, we introduce a human-joint GCN, which unlike the existing GCN, is based on a directed graph that employs the 2D pose estimator's confidence scores to improve the pose estimation results. We also introduce a human-bone GCN, which models the bone connections and provides more information beyond human joints. The two GCNs work together to estimate the spatial frame-wise 3D poses and can make use of both visible joint and bone information in the target frame to estimate the occluded or missing human-part information. To further refine the 3D pose estimation, we use our temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to enforce the temporal and human-dynamics constraints. We use a joint-TCN to estimate person-centric 3D poses across frames, and propose a velocity-TCN to estimate the speed of 3D joints to ensure the consistency of the 3D pose estimation in consecutive frames. Finally, to estimate the 3D human poses for multiple persons, we propose a root-TCN that estimates camera-centric 3D poses without requiring camera parameters. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Graph and Temporal Convolutional Network for Spatio-Temporal 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation in Monocular Videos

Protein secondary structure prediction (PSSP) is an essential task in computational biology. To achieve the accurate PSSP, the general and vital feature engineering is to use multiple sequence alignment (MSA) for Position-Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) extraction. However, when only low-quality PSSM can be obtained due to poor sequence homology, previous PSSP accuracy (merely around 65%) is far from practical usage for subsequent tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel PSSM-Distil framework for PSSP on low-quality PSSM, which not only enhances the PSSM feature at a lower level but also aligns the feature distribution at a higher level. In practice, the PSSM-Distil first exploits the proteins with high-quality PSSM to achieve a teacher network for PSSP in a full-supervised way. Under the guidance of the teacher network, the low-quality PSSM and corresponding student network with low discriminating capacity are effectively resolved by feature enhancement through EnhanceNet and distribution alignment through knowledge distillation with contrastive learning. Further, our PSSM-Distil supports the input from a pre-trained protein sequence language BERT model to provide auxiliary information, which is designed to address the extremely low-quality PSSM cases, i.e., no homologous sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed PSSM-Distil outperforms state-of-the-art models on PSSP by 6% on average and nearly 8% in extremely low-quality cases on public benchmarks, BC40 and CB513.

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