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Post-hoc explanation methods for machine learning models have been widely used to support decision-making. One of the popular methods is Counterfactual Explanation (CE), also known as Actionable Recourse, which provides a user with a perturbation vector of features that alters the prediction result. Given a perturbation vector, a user can interpret it as an &quot;action&quot; for obtaining one&#39;s desired decision result. In practice, however, showing only a perturbation vector is often insufficient for users to execute the action. The reason is that if there is an asymmetric interaction among features, such as causality, the total cost of the action is expected to depend on the order of changing features. Therefore, practical CE methods are required to provide an appropriate order of changing features in addition to a perturbation vector. For this purpose, we propose a new framework called Ordered Counterfactual Explanation (OrdCE). We introduce a new objective function that evaluates a pair of an action and an order based on feature interaction. To extract an optimal pair, we propose a mixed-integer linear optimization approach with our objective function. Numerical experiments on real datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our OrdCE in comparison with unordered CE methods.

AAAI 2021

Ordered Counterfactual Explanation by Mixed-Integer Linear Optimization

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



Post-hoc explanation methods for machine learning models have been widely used to support decision-making. One of the popular methods is Counterfactual Explanation (CE), also known as Actionable Recourse, which provides a user with a perturbation vector of features that alters the prediction result. Given a perturbation vector, a user can interpret it as an "action" for obtaining one's desired decision result. In practice, however, showing only a perturbation vector is often insufficient for users to execute the action. The reason is that if there is an asymmetric interaction among features, such as causality, the total cost of the action is expected to depend on the order of changing features. Therefore, practical CE methods are required to provide an appropriate order of changing features in addition to a perturbation vector. For this purpose, we propose a new framework called Ordered Counterfactual Explanation (OrdCE). We introduce a new objective function that evaluates a pair of an action and an order based on feature interaction. To extract an optimal pair, we propose a mixed-integer linear optimization approach with our objective function. Numerical experiments on real datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our OrdCE in comparison with unordered CE methods.

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. 

Traditional studies on recommender systems usually leverage only one type of user behaviors (the optimization target, such as purchase), despite the fact that users also generate a large number of various types of interaction data (e.g., view, click, add-to-cart, etc). Generally, these heterogeneous multi-relational data provide well-structured information and can be used for high-quality recommendation. Early efforts towards leveraging these heterogeneous data fail to capture the high-hop structure of user-item interactions, which are unable to make full use of them and may only achieve constrained recommendation performance. In this work, we propose a new multi-relational recommendation model named Graph Heterogeneous Collaborative Filtering (GHCF). To explore the high-hop heterogeneous user-item interactions, we take the advantages of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and further improve it to jointly embed both representations of nodes (users and items) and relations for multi-relational prediction. Moreover, to fully utilize the whole heterogeneous data, we perform the advanced efficient non-sampling optimization under a multi-task learning framework. Experimental results on two public benchmarks show that GHCF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods, especially for cold-start users who have few primary item interactions. Further analysis verifies the importance of the proposed embedding propagation for modelling high-hop heterogeneous user-item interactions, showing the rationality and effectiveness of GHCF. Our implementation has been released (https://github.com/chenchongthu/GHCF).

Graph Heterogeneous Multi-Relational Recommendation

Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive  annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to  regularize  the  model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation and then regularization for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods.

Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dual-Task Consistency

We show that an interesting class of feed-forward neural networks can be understood as quantitative argumentation frameworks. 
This connection creates a bridge between research in Formal Argumentation and Machine Learning.
We generalize the semantics of feed-forward neural networks to acyclic graphs and study the resulting
computational and semantical properties in argumentation
graphs. As it turns out, the semantics gives stronger guarantees than existing semantics 
that have been tailor-made for the argumentation setting. 
From a machine-learning perspective, the connection does not seem immediately helpful. While it gives intuitive meaning
to some feed-forward-neural networks, they remain difficult to understand due to their size and density.
However, the connection seems helpful for combining background knowledge in form of
sparse argumentation networks with dense neural networks that have been trained for complementary purposes
and for learning the parameters of quantitative argumentation frameworks in an end-to-end fashion from data.

Interpreting Neural Networks as Quantitative Argumentation Frameworks

Camouflaged objects, similar to the background, show indefinable boundaries and deceptive textures, which increases the difficulty of detection task and makes the model rely on features with more information. Herein, we design a texture label to facilitate our network for accurate camouflaged object segmentation. Motivated by the complementary relationship between texture labels and camouflaged object labels, we propose an interactive guidance framework named TINet, which focuses on finding the indefinable boundary and the texture difference by progressive interactive guidance. It maximizes the guidance effect of refined multi-level texture cues on segmentation. Specifically, texture perception decoder (TPD) makes a comprehensive analysis of texture information in multiple scales. Feature interaction guidance decoder (FGD) interactively refines multi-level features of camouflaged object detection and texture detection level by level. Holistic perception decoder (HPD) enhances FGD results by multi-level holistic perception. In addition, we propose a boundary weight map to help the loss function pay more attention to the object boundary. Sufficient experiments conducted on COD and SOD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against 23 state-of-the-art methods.

Inferring Camouflage Objects by Texture-Aware Interactive Guidance Network

Constraint acquisition systems assist the non-expert user in
modelling her problem as a constraint network. QUACQ is
a sequential constraint acquisition algorithm that generates
queries as (partial) examples to be classified as positive or
negative. The drawbacks are that the user may need to answer
a great number of such examples, within a significant waiting
time between two examples, to learn all the constraints. In
this paper, we propose PACQ, a portfolio-based parallel constraint
acquisition system. The design of PACQ benefits from
having several users sharing the same target problem. Moreover,
each user is involved in a particular acquisition session,
opened in parallel to improve the overall performance of the
whole system.We prove the correctness of PACQ and we give
an experimental evaluation that shows that our approach improves
on QUACQ.

Parallel Constraint Acquisition

Acquiring sufficient ground-truth supervision to train deep vi- sual models has been a bottleneck over the years due to the data-hungry nature of deep learning. This is exacerbated in some structured prediction tasks, such as semantic segmen- tation, which requires pixel-level annotations. This work ad- dresses weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), with the goal of bridging the gap between image-level anno- tations and pixel-level segmentation. We formulate WSSS as a novel group-wise learning task that explicitly models se- mantic dependencies in a group of images to estimate more reliable pseudo ground-truths, which can be used for training more accurate segmentation models. In particular, we devise a graph neural network (GNN) for group-wise semantic min- ing, wherein input images are represented as graph nodes, and the underlying relations between a pair of images are char- acterized by an efficient co-attention mechanism. Moreover, in order to prevent the model from paying excessive atten- tion to common semantics only, we further propose a graph dropout layer, encouraging the model to learn more accurate and complete object responses. The whole network is end-to- end trainable by iterative message passing, which propagates interaction cues over the images to progressively improve the performance. We conduct experiments on the popular PAS- CAL VOC 2012 and COCO benchmarks, and our model yields state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Lixy1997/Group-WSSS.

Group-Wise Semantic Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

The predicament in semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) is to maximize the value of the extra unlabeled data to boost the few-shot learner. In this paper, we propose a Poisson Transfer Network (PTN) to mine the unlabeled information for SSFSL from two aspects. First, the Poisson Merrimanâ€“Benceâ€“Osher (MBO) model builds a bridge for the communications between labeled and unlabeled examples. This model serves as a more stable and informative classifier than traditional graph-based SSFSL methods in the message-passing process of the labels. Second, the extra unlabeled samples are employed to transfer the knowledge from base classes to novel classes through contrastive learning. Specifically, we force the augmented positive pairs close while push the negative ones distant. Our contrastive transfer scheme implicitly learns the novel-class embeddings to alleviate the over-fitting problem on the few labeled data. Thus, we can mitigate the degeneration of embedding generality in novel classes. Extensive experiments indicate that PTN outperforms the state-of-the-art few-shot and SSFSL models on miniImageNet and tieredImageNet benchmark datasets.

PTN: A Poisson Transfer Network for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning

Adversarial examples are input examples that are specifically crafted to deceive machine learning classifiers. State-of-the-art adversarial example detection methods characterize an input example as adversarial either by quantifying the magnitude of feature variations under multiple perturbations or by measuring its distance from estimated benign example distribution. Instead of using such metrics, the proposed method is based on the observation that the directions of adversarial gradients when crafting (new) adversarial examples play a key role in characterizing the adversarial space. Compared to detection methods that use multiple perturbations, the proposed method is efficient as it only applies a single random perturbation on the input example. Experiments conducted on two different databases, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, show that the proposed detection method achieves, respectively, 97.9% and 98.6% AUC-ROC (on average) on five different adversarial attacks, and outperforms multiple state-of-the-art detection methods. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of using adversarial gradient directions for adversarial example detection.

Beating Attackers at Their Own Games: Adversarial Example Detection Using Adversarial Gradient Directions

Triple extraction is an essential task in information extraction for natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we revisit the end-to-end triple extraction task for sequence generation. Since generative triple extraction may struggle to capture long-term dependencies and generate unfaithful triples, we introduce a novel model, contrastive triple extraction with a generative transformer. Specifically, we introduce a single shared transformer module for encoder-decoder-based generation. To generate faithful results, we propose a novel triplet contrastive training object.  Moreover, we introduce two mechanisms to further improve model performance (i.e., batch-wise dynamic attention-masking and triple-wise calibration).  Experimental results on three datasets (i.e., NYT, WebNLG, and MIE) show that our approach achieves better performance than that of baselines.

Contrastive Triple Extraction with Generative Transformer

In Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, compound tasks need to be refined into executable (primitive) action sequences. In contrast to their primitive counterparts, compound tasks do not specify preconditions or effects. Thus, their implications on the states in which they are applied are not explicitly known: they are "hidden" in and depending on the decomposition structure. We formalize several kinds of preconditions and effects that can be inferred for compound tasks in totally ordered HTN domains. As relevant special case we introduce a problem relaxation which admits reasoning about preconditions and effects in polynomial time. We provide procedures for doing so, thereby extending previous work, which could only deal with acyclic models. We prove our procedures to be correct and complete for any totally ordered input domain. These results are embedded into an encompassing complexity analysis of the inference of preconditions and effects of compound tasks, an investigation that has not been made so far.

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