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In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on complex tasks, but their real-world adoption remains limited because they often require significant amounts of data to succeed. When combined with small sample sizes, these methods can result in unstable learning due to their reliance on high-dimensional sample-based estimates. In this work, we develop techniques to control the uncertainty introduced by these estimates. We leverage these techniques to propose a deep policy optimization approach designed to produce stable performance even when data is scarce. The resulting algorithm, Uncertainty-Aware Trust Region Policy Optimization, generates robust policy updates that adapt to the level of uncertainty present throughout the learning process.

AAAI 2021

Uncertainty-Aware Policy Optimization: A Robust, Adaptive Trust Region Approach

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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. 

Attention is a commonly used mechanism in sequence processing, but it is of O(n^2) complexity which prevents its application to long sequences. The recently introduced neural Shuffle-Exchange network offers a computation-efficient alternative, enabling the modelling of long-range dependencies in O(n log n) time. The model, however, is quite complex, involving a sophisticated gating mechanism derived from the Gated Recurrent Unit. In this paper, we present a simple and lightweight variant of the Shuffle-Exchange network, which is based on a residual network employing GELU and Layer Normalization. The proposed architecture not only scales to longer sequences but also converges faster and provides better accuracy. It surpasses the Shuffle-Exchange network on the LAMBADA language modelling task and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MusicNet dataset for music transcription while being efficient in the number of parameters. We show how to combine the improved Shuffle-Exchange network with convolutional layers, establishing it as a useful building block in long sequence processing applications.

Residual Shuffle-Exchange Networks for Fast Processing of Long Sequences

Traditional deep neural networks (NNs) have significantly contributed to the state-of-the-art performance in the task of classification under various application domains.  However, NNs have not considered inherent uncertainty in data associated with the class probabilities where misclassification under uncertainty may easily introduce high risk in decision making in real-world contexts (e.g., misclassification of objects in roads leads to serious accidents).  Unlike Bayesian NN that indirectly infer uncertainty through weight uncertainties, evidential NNs (ENNs) have been recently proposed to explicitly model the uncertainty of class probabilities and use them for classification tasks.  An ENN offers the formulation of the predictions of NNs as subjective opinions and learns the function by collecting an amount of evidence that can form the subjective opinions by a deterministic NN from data.  However, the ENN is trained as a black box without explicitly considering inherent uncertainty in data with their different root causes, such as vacuity (i.e., uncertainty due to a lack of evidence) or dissonance (i.e., uncertainty due to conflicting evidence).  By considering the multidimensional uncertainty, we proposed a novel uncertainty-aware evidential NN called WGAN-ENN (WENN) for solving an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem.  We took a hybrid approach that combines Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN) with ENNs to jointly train a model with prior knowledge of a certain class, which has high vacuity for OOD samples.  Via extensive empirical experiments based on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrated that the estimation of uncertainty by WENN can significantly help distinguish OOD samples from boundary samples. WENN outperformed in OOD detection when compared with other competitive counterparts.

Multidimensional Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Neural Networks

Upper confidence bound (UCB) based contextual bandit algorithms require one to know the tail property of the reward distribution. Unfortunately, such tail property is usually unknown or difficult to specify in real-world applications. Using a tail property heavier than the ground truth leads to a slow learning speed of the contextual bandit algorithm, while using a lighter one may cause the algorithm to diverge. To address this fundamental problem, we develop an estimator (evaluated from historical rewards) for the contextual bandit UCB based on the multiplier bootstrapping technique. We first establish sufficient conditions under which our estimator converges asymptotically to the ground truth of contextual bandit UCB. We further derive a second order correction for our estimator so as to obtain its confidence level with a finite number of rounds. To demonstrate the versatility of the estimator, we apply it to design a BootLinUCB algorithm for the contextual bandit. We prove that the BootLinUCB has a sub-linear regret upper bound and also conduct extensive experiments to validate its superior performance.

Robust Contextual Bandits via Bootstrapping

In this paper, we study the problem of mobile user profiling, which is a critical component for quantifying users' characteristics in the human mobility modeling pipeline. Human mobility is a sequential decision-making process dependent on the users' dynamic interests. With accurate user profiles, the predictive model can perfectly reproduce users' mobility trajectories. In the reverse direction, once the predictive model can imitate users' mobility patterns, the learned user profiles are also optimal. Such intuition motivates us to propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework by exploiting reinforcement learning, in which the agent is trained to precisely imitate users' mobility patterns for optimal user profiles. Specifically, the proposed framework includes two modules: (1) representation module, that produces state combining user profiles and spatio-temporal context in real-time; (2) imitation module, where Deep Q-network (DQN) imitates the user behavior (action) based on the state that is produced by the representation module. However, there are two challenges in running the framework effectively. First, epsilon-greedy strategy in DQN makes use of the exploration-exploitation trade-off by randomly pick actions with the epsilon probability. Such randomness feeds back to the representation module, causing the learned user profiles unstable. To solve the problem, we propose an adversarial training strategy to guarantee the robustness of the representation module. Second, the representation module updates users' profiles in an incremental manner, requiring integrating the temporal effects of user profiles. Inspired by Long-short Term Memory (LSTM), we introduce a gated mechanism to incorporate new and old user characteristics into the user profile. In the experiment, we evaluate our proposed framework on real-world datasets. The extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our method comparing to baseline algorithms.

Reinforced Imitative Graph Representation Learning for Mobile User Profiling: An Adversarial Training Perspective

The lottery ticket hypothesis suggests that sparse, sub-networks of a given neural network, if initialized properly, can be trained to reach comparable or even better performance to that of the original network. Prior works in lottery tickets have primarily focused on the supervised learning setup, with several papers proposing effective ways of finding winning tickets in classification problems. In this paper, we confirm the existence of winning tickets in deep generative models such as GANs and VAEs. We show that the popular iterative magnitude pruning approach (with late resetting) can be used with generative losses to find the winning tickets. This approach effectively yields tickets with sparsity up to 99% for AutoEncoders, 93% for VAEs and 89% for GANs on CIFAR and Celeb-A datasets. We also demonstrate the transferability of winning tickets across different generative models (GANs and VAEs) sharing the same architecture, suggesting that winning tickets have inductive biases that could help train a wide range of deep generative models. Furthermore, we show the practical benefits of lottery tickets in generative models by detecting tickets at very early stages in training called early-bird tickets. Through early-bird tickets, we can achieve up to 88% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) and 54% reduction in training time, making it possible to train large-scale generative models over tight resource constraints. These results out-perform existing early pruning methods like SNIP (Lee, Ajanthan, and Torr 2019) and GraSP(Wang, Zhang, and Grosse 2020). Our findings shed light towards existence of proper network initializations that could improve convergence and stability of generative models.

Winning Lottery Tickets in Deep Generative Models

Due to the superiority of using geometric information, 3D Face Recognition (FR) has achieved great successes. Existing methods focus on high-quality 3D FR which is unpractical in real scenarios. Low-quality 3D FR is a more realistic scenario but the low-quality data are born with heavy noises. Therefore, exploring noise-robust low-quality 3D FR methods becomes an urgent and challenging problem. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose to learn flexibly distributional representation for low-quality 3D FR. Firstly, we introduce the distributional representation for low-quality 3D faces due to that it can weaken the impact of noises. Generally, the distributional representation of a given 3D face is restricted to a specific distribution such as Gaussian distribution. However, the specific distribution may be not up to describing the complex low-quality face. Therefore, we propose to transform this specific distribution to a flexible one via Continuous Normalizing Flow (CNF), which can get rid of the form limitation. This kind of flexible distribution can approximate the latent distribution of the given noisy face more accurately, which further improves accuracy of low-quality 3D FR. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed method improves both low-quality and cross-quality 3D FR performances on low-quality benchmarks. Furthermore, the improvements are more remarkable on low-quality 3D faces when the intensity of noise increases which indicate the robustness

Learning Flexibly Distributional Representation for Low-Quality 3D Face Recognition

Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems tend to perform poorly when the user-item interactions/ratings are highly scarce. To address this, we propose a learning framework that improves collaborative filtering with a synthetic feedback loop (CF-SFL) to simulate the user feedback. The proposed framework consists of a recommender and a virtual user. The recommender is formulated as a CF model, recommending items according to observed user preference. The virtual user estimates rewards from the recommended items and generates a feedback in addition to the observed user preference. The recommender connected with the virtual user constructs a closed loop, that recommends users with items and imitates the unobserved feedback of the users to the recommended items. The synthetic feedback is used to augment the observed user preference and improve recommendation results. Theoretically, such model design can be interpreted as inverse reinforcement learning, which can be learned effectively via rollout (simulation). Experimental results show that the proposed framework is able to enrich the learning of user preference and boost the performance of existing collaborative filtering methods on multiple datasets.

Learning to Recommend from Sparse Data via Generative User Feedback

In many real-world sequential decision-making tasks, especially in continuous control like robotic control, it is rare that the observations are perfect, that is, the sensory data could be incomplete, noisy or even dynamically polluted due to the unexpected malfunctions or intrinsic low quality of the sensors. Previous methods handle these issues in the framework of POMDPs and are either deterministic by feature memorization or stochastic by belief inference. In this paper, we present a new method that lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of research methodology identified above and combines the strength of both approaches. In particular, the proposed method, named Deep Recurrent Belief Propagation Network (DRBPN), takes a hybrid style belief updating procedure âˆ’ an RNN-type feature extraction step followed by an analytical belief inference, significantly reducing the computational cost while faithfully capturing the complex dynamics and maintaining the necessary uncertainty for generalization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on a collection of benchmark tasks, showing that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods under various challenging scenarios.

Deep Recurrent Belief Propagation Network for POMDPs

Spiking neural networks  (SNNs) have great potential for energy-efficient implementation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on dedicated neuromorphic hardware. Recent studies demonstrated competitive performance of SNNs compared with DNNs on image classification tasks, including CIFAR-10 and ImageNet data. The present work focuses on using SNNs in combination with deep reinforcement learning in ATARI games, which involves additional complexity as compared to image classification. We review the theory of converting DNNs to SNNs and extending the conversion to Deep Q-Networks (DQNs). We propose a robust representation of the firing rate to reduce the error during the conversion process. In addition, we introduce a new metric to evaluate the conversion process by comparing the decisions made by the DQN and SNN, respectively. We also analyze how the simulation time and parameter normalization influence the performance of converted SNNs. We achieve competitive scores on 17 top-performing Atari games. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple Atari games with SNNs. Our work serves as a benchmark for the conversion of DQNs to SNNs and paves the way for further research on solving reinforcement learning tasks with SNNs.

Strategy and Benchmark for Converting Deep Q-Networks to Event-Driven Spiking Neural Networks

Discrete dynamical systems serve as useful formal models to study
diffusion phenomena in social networks.  Motivated by applications
in systems biology, several recent papers have studied algorithmic
and complexity aspects of diffusion problems for dynamical systems
whose underlying graphs are directed, and may contain directed
cycles.  Such problems can be regarded as reachability problems in
the phase space of the corresponding dynamical system. We show that
computational intractability results for reachability problems hold
even for dynamical systems on directed acyclic graphs (dags).  We
also show that for dynamical systems on dags where each local
function is monotone, the reachability problem can be solved
efficiently.

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