United States

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.

AAAI 2021

Parallel Constraint Acquisition

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

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. 

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.

Revealing Hidden Preconditions and Effects of Compound HTN Planning Tasks – A Complexity Analysis

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a powerful framework for modeling sequential decision making problems with model uncertainty. This paper proposes the first first-order framework for solving robust MDPs. Our algorithm interleaves primal-dual first-order updates with approximate Value Iteration updates. By carefully controlling the tradeoff between the accuracy and cost of Value Iteration updates, we achieve an ergodic convergence rate that is significantly better than classical Value Iteration algorithms in terms of the number of states S and the number of actions A on ellipsoidal and Kullback-Leibler s-rectangular uncertainty sets. In numerical experiments on ellipsoidal uncertainty sets we show that our algorithm is significantly more scalable than state-of-the-art approaches. Our framework is also the first one to solve robust MDPs with s-rectangular KL uncertainty sets.

Scalable First-Order Methods for Robust MDPs

As a technology ML is oblivious to societal good or bad, and thus, the field of fair machine learning has stepped up to propose multiple mathematical definitions, algorithms, and systems to ensure different notions of fairness in ML applications. Given the multitude of propositions, it has become imperative to formally verify the fairness metrics satisfied by different algorithms on different datasets. In this paper, we propose a stochastic satisfiability (SSAT) framework, Justicia, that formally verifies different fairness measures of supervised learning algorithms with respect to the underlying data distribution. We instantiate Justicia on multiple classification and bias mitigation algorithms, and datasets to verify different fairness metrics, such as disparate impact, statistical parity, and equalized odds. Justicia is scalable, accurate, and operates on non-Boolean and compound sensitive attributes unlike existing distribution-based verifiers, such as FairSquare and VeriFair. Being distribution-based by design, Justicia is more robust than the verifiers, such as AIF360, that operate on specific test samples. We also theoretically bound the finite-sample error of the verified fairness measure.

Justicia: A Stochastic SAT Approach to Formally Verify Fairness

We propose a novel distance-based regularization method for deep metric learning called Multi-level Distance Regularization (MDR). 
MDR explicitly disturbs a learning procedure by regularizing pairwise distances between embedding vectors into multiple levels that represents a degree of similarity between a pair. 
In the training stage, the model is trained with both MDR and an existing loss function of deep metric learning, simultaneously; the two losses interfere with the objective of each other, and it makes the learning process difficult. 
Moreover, MDR prevents some examples from being ignored or overly influenced in the learning process.
These allow the parameters of the embedding network to be settle on a local optima with better generalization.
Without bells and whistles, MDR with simple Triplet loss achieves the-state-of-the-art performance in various benchmark datasets: CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products, and In-Shop Clothes Retrieval.
We extensively perform ablation studies on its behaviors to show the effectiveness of MDR.
By easily adopting our MDR, the previous approaches can be improved in performance and generalization ability.

Multi-Level Distance Regularization for Deep Metric Learning

Advances in NLP have yielded impressive results for the task of machine reading comprehension (MRC), with approaches having been reported to achieve performance comparable to that of humans. In this paper, we investigate whether state-of-the-art MRC models are able to correctly process Semantics Altering Modifications (SAM): linguistically-motivated phenomena that alter the semantics of a sentence while preserving most of its lexical surface form. We present a method to automatically generate and align challenge sets featuring original and altered examples. We further propose a novel evaluation methodology to correctly assess the capability of MRC systems to process these examples independent of the data they were optimised on, by discounting for effects introduced by domain shift. In a large-scale empirical study, we apply the methodology in order to evaluate extractive MRC models with regard to their capability to correctly process SAM-enriched data. We comprehensively cover 12 different state-of-the-art neural architecture configurations and four training datasets and find that -- despite their well-known remarkable performance -- optimised models consistently struggle to correctly process semantically altered data.

Semantics Altering Modifications for Evaluating Comprehension in Machine Reading

Voice Assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant typically use a two-stage Spoken Language Understanding pipeline; first, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component to process customer speech and generate text transcriptions, followed by a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component to map transcriptions to an actionable hypothesis. An end-to-end (E2E) system that goes directly from speech to a hypothesis is a more attractive option. These systems were shown to be smaller, faster, and better optimized. However, they require massive amounts of end-to-end training data and in addition, don't take advantage of the already available ASR and NLU training data.

In this work, we propose an E2E system that is designed to jointly train on multiple speech-to-text tasks, such as ASR (speech-transcription) and SLU (speech-hypothesis), and text-to-text tasks, such as NLU (text-hypothesis). We call this the Audio-Text All-Task (AT-AT) Model and we show that it beats the performance of E2E models trained on individual tasks, especially ones trained on limited data. We show this result on an internal music dataset and two public datasets, FluentSpeech and SNIPS Audio, where we achieve state-of-the-art results. Since our model can process both speech and text input sequences and learn to predict a target sequence, it also allows us to do zero-shot E2E SLU by training on only text-hypothesis data (without any speech) from a new domain. We evaluate this ability of our model on the Facebook TOP dataset and set a new benchmark for zeroshot E2E performance. We release the audio data collected for the TOP dataset for future research.

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