United States

Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.

AAAI 2021

Exploration-Exploitation in Multi-Agent Learning: Catastrophe Theory Meets Game Theory

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.



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. 

In a collective decision-making process, having the possibility to provide non-expert agents with a justification for why a target outcome is a good compromise given their individual preferences, is an appealing idea. Such questions have recently been addressed in the computational social choice community at large---whether it was to explain the outcomes of a specific rule in voting theory or to seek transparency and accountability in multi-criteria decision making. Ultimately, the development of real-life applications based on these notions depends on their practical feasibility and on the scalability of the approach taken. In this paper, we provide computational complexity results that address the problem of finding and verifying justifications for collective decisions.

In particular, we focus on the recent development of a general notion of justification for outcomes in voting theory. Such a justification consists of a step-by-step explanation, grounded in a normative basis, showing how the selection of the target outcome follows from the normative principles considered. We consider a language in which normative principles can be encoded---either as an explicit list of instances of the principles (by means of quantifier-free sentences), or in a succinct fashion (using quantifiers). We then analyse the computational complexity of identifying and checking justifications. For the case where the normative principles are given in the form of a list of instances, verifying the correctness of a justification is DP-complete and deciding on the existence of such a justification is complete for Sigma 2 P. For the case where the normative principles are given succinctly, deciding whether a justification is correct is in NEXP wedge coNEXP, and NEXP-hard, and deciding whether a justification exists is in EXP with access to an NP oracle  and is NEXP-hard.

On the Complexity of Finding Justifications for Collective Decisions

We address the problem of performing Principal Component Analysis over a family of probability measures on the real line, using the Wasserstein geometry. We present a novel representation of the 2-Wasserstein space, based on a well known isometric bijection and a B-spline expansion. Thanks to this representation, we are able to reinterpret previous work and derive more efficient optimization routines for existing approaches. As shown in our simulations, the solution of these optimization problems can be costly in practice and thus pose a limit to their usage. We propose a novel definition of Principal Component Analysis in the Wasserstein space that, when used in combination with the B-spline representation, yields a straightforward optimization problem that is extremely fast to compute. Through extensive simulation studies, we show how our PCA performs similarly to the ones already proposed in the literature while retaining a much smaller computational cost. We apply our method to a real dataset of mortality rates due to Covid-19 in the US, concluding that our analyses are consistent with the current scientific consensus on the disease.

Fast PCA in 1-D Wasserstein Spaces via B-splines Representation and Metric Projection

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) targets recognizing new categories by learning transferable image representations. Existing methods find that, by aligning image representations with corresponding semantic labels, the semantic-aligned representations can be transferred to unseen categories. However, supervised by only seen category labels, the learned semantic knowledge is highly task-specific, which makes image representations biased towards seen categories. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Contrastive Embedding Network (DCEN) that simultaneously learns task-specific and task-independent knowledge via semantic alignment and instance discrimination. First, DCEN leverages task labels to cluster representations of the same semantic category by cross-modal contrastive learning and exploring semantic-visual complementarity. Besides task-specific knowledge, DCEN then introduces task-independent knowledge by attracting representations of different views of the same image and repelling representations of different images. Compared to high-level seen category supervision, this instance discrimination supervision encourages DCEN to capture low-level visual knowledge, which is less biased toward seen categories and alleviates the representation bias. Consequently, the task-specific and task-independent knowledge jointly make for transferable representations of DCEN, which obtains averaged 4.1% improvement on four public benchmarks.

Task-Independent Knowledge Makes for Transferable Representations for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

In stochastic contextual bandit (SCB) problems, an agent selects an action based on certain observed context to maximize the cumulative reward over iterations. Recently there have been a few studies using a deep neural network (DNN) to predict the expected reward for an action, and the DNN is trained by a stochastic gradient based method. However, convergence analysis has been greatly ignored to examine whether and where these methods converge. In this work, we formulate the SCB that uses a DNN reward function as a non-convex stochastic optimization problem, and design a stage-wised stochastic gradient descent algorithm to optimize the problem and determine the action policy. We prove that with high probability, the action sequence chosen by our algorithm converges to a greedy action policy respecting a local optimal reward function. Extensive experiments have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm on multiple real-world datasets.

An Efficient Algorithm for Deep Stochastic Contextual Bandits

In social choice there often arises a conflict between the majority principle (the search for a candidate that is as good as possible for as many voters as possible), and the protection of minority rights (choosing a candidate that is not overly bad for particular individuals or groups). In a context where the latter is our main concern, veto-based rules -- giving individuals or groups the ability to strike off certain candidates from the list -- are a natural and effective way of ensuring that no minority is left with an outcome they find untenable. However, such rules often fail to be anonymous, or impose specific restrictions on the number of voters and candidates. These issues can be addressed by considering the proportional veto core -- the solution to a cooperative game where every coalition is given the power to veto a number of candidates proportional to its size. However, the naive algorithm for the veto core is exponential, and the only known rules for selecting from the veto core, with an arbitrary number of voters, violate either anonymity or neutrality. In this paper we present a polynomial time algorithm for computing the veto core and present a neutral and anonymous algorithm for selecting a candidate from it. We also show that a pessimist can manipulate the veto core in polynomial time.

Computing the Proportional Veto Core

This paper investigates the indistinguishable points (difficult to predict label) in semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. The indistinguishable points consist of those located in complex boundary, points with similar local textures but different categories, and points in isolate small hard areas, which largely harm the performance of 3D semantic segmentation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Indistinguishable Area Focalization Network (IAF-Net), which select indistinguishable points adaptively by utilizing the hierarchical semantic features and enhance fine-grained features for points especially those indistinguishable points. We also introduce multi-stage loss to improve the feature representation in a progressive way. Moreover, in order to analyze the segmentation performances of indistinguishable areas, we propose a new evaluation metric called Indistinguishable Points Based Metric (IPBM). Our IAF-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several popular 3D point datasets e.g. S3DIS and ScanNet, and clearly outperform other methods on IPBM. Our code will be available at  https://github.com/MingyeXu/IAF-Net.

Investigate Indistinguishable Points in Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Cloud

In explainable artificial intelligence, there is increasing interest in understanding the behaviour of autonomous agents to build trust and validate performance. Modern agent architectures, such as those trained by deep reinforcement learning, are currently so lacking in interpretable structure as to effectively be black boxes, but insights may still be gained from an external, behaviourist perspective. Inspired by conceptual spaces theory, we suggest that a versatile first step towards general understanding is to discretise the state space into convex regions, jointly capturing similarities over the agent's action, value function and temporal dynamics within a dataset of observations. We create such a representation using a novel variant of the CART decision tree algorithm, and demonstrate how it facilitates practical understanding of black box agents through prediction, visualisation and rule-based explanation.

TripleTree: A Versatile Interpretable Representation of Black Box Agents and their Environments

Spherical images taken in all directions (360 degrees by 180 degrees) allow the full surroundings of a subject to be represented, providing an immersive experience to viewers. Generating a spherical image from a single normal-field-of-view (NFOV) image is convenient and expands the usage scenarios considerably without relying on a specific panoramic camera or images taken from multiple directions; however, achieving such images remains a challenging and unresolved problem. The primary challenge is controlling the high degree of freedom involved in generating a wide area that includes all directions of the desired spherical image. We focus on scene symmetry, which is a basic property of the global structure of spherical images, such as rotational symmetry, plane symmetry, and asymmetry. We propose a method for generating a spherical image from a single NFOV image and controlling the degree of freedom of the generated regions using the scene symmetry. To estimate and control the scene symmetry using both a circular shift and flip of the latent image features, we incorporate the intensity of the symmetry as a latent variable into conditional variational autoencoders. Our experiments show that the proposed method can generate various plausible spherical images controlled from symmetric to asymmetric, and can reduce the reconstruction errors of the generated images based on the estimated symmetry.

Spherical Image Generation from a Single Image by Considering Scene Symmetry

In the absence of external rewards, agents can still learn useful behaviors by identifying and mastering a set of diverse skills within their environment. Existing skill learning methods use mutual information objectives to incentivize each skill to be diverse and distinguishable from the rest. However, if care is not taken to constrain the ways in which the skills are diverse, trivially diverse skill sets can arise. To ensure useful skill diversity, we propose a novel skill learning objective, Relative Variational Intrinsic Control (RVIC), which incentivizes learning skills that are distinguishable in how they change the agent's relationship to its environment. The resulting set of skills tiles the space of affordances available to the agent. We qualitatively analyze skill behaviors on multiple environments and show how RVIC skills are more useful than skills discovered by existing methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning.

Relative Variational Intrinsic Control

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) draw their strength from explicitly modeling the topological information of structured data. However, existing GNNs suffer from limited capability in capturing the hierarchical graph representation which plays an important role in graph classification. In this paper, we innovatively propose hierarchical graph capsule network (HGCN) that can jointly learn node embeddings and extract graph hierarchies. Specifically, disentangled graph capsules are established by identifying heterogeneous factors underlying each node, such that their instantiation parameters represent different properties of the same entity. To learn the hierarchical representation, HGCN characterizes the part-whole relationship between lower-level capsules (part) and higher-level capsules (whole) by explicitly considering the structure information among the parts. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HGCN and the contribution of each component. Code: https://github.com/uta-smile/HGCN

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