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This paper focuses on a core task in computational sustainability and statistical ecology: species distribution modeling (SDM). In SDM, the occurrence pattern of a species on a landscape is predicted by environmental features based on observations at a set of locations. At first, SDM may appear to be a binary classification problem, and one might be inclined to employ classic tools (e.g., logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks) to tackle it. However, wildlife surveys introduce structured noise (especially under-counting) in the species observations. If unaccounted for, these observation errors systematically bias SDMs. To address the unique challenges of SDM, this paper proposes a framework called StatEcoNet. Specifically, this work employs a graphical generative model in statistical ecology to serve as the skeleton of the proposed computational framework and carefully integrates neural networks under the framework. The advantages of StatEcoNet over related approaches are demonstrated on simulated datasets as well as bird species data. Since SDMs are critical tools for ecological science and natural resource management, StatEcoNet may offer boosted computational and analytical powers to a wide range of applications that have significant social impacts, e.g., the study and conservation of threatened species.

AAAI 2021

StatEcoNet: Statistical Ecology Neural Networks for Species Distribution Modeling

**BRACIS** originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – **SBIA** (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – **SBRN** (13 editions). **ENIAC** is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. **STIL** is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: **CE-IA**, **CE-IC** and **CE-PLN**.

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BRACIS 2021

BRACIS originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – SBIA (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – SBRN (13 editions). 
ENIAC is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. 
STIL is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: CE-IA, CE-IC and CE-PLN

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. 

Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models' propensity to "hallucinate" facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.

A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

In survival analysis, deep learning approaches have been proposed for estimating an individual's probability of survival over some time horizon. Such approaches can capture complex non-linear relationships, without relying on restrictive assumptions regarding the relationship between an individual's characteristics and their underlying survival process. To date, however, these methods have focused primarily on optimizing discriminative performance and have ignored model calibration. Well-calibrated survival curves present realistic and meaningful probabilistic estimates of the true underlying survival process for an individual. However, due to the lack of ground-truth regarding the underlying stochastic process of survival for an individual, optimizing and measuring calibration in survival analysis is an inherently difficult task. In this work, we i) highlight the shortcomings of existing approaches in terms of calibration and ii) propose a new training scheme for optimizing deep survival analysis models that maximizes discriminative performance, subject to good calibration. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches across two publicly available datasets, our proposed training scheme leads to significant improvements in calibration, while maintaining good discriminative performance.

Estimating Calibrated Individualized Survival Curves with Deep Learning

The black-box nature of neural models has motivated a line of research that aims to generate natural language rationales to explain why a model made certain predictions. Such rationale generation models, to date, have been trained on dataset-specific crowdsourced rationales, but this approach is costly and is not generalizable to new tasks and domains. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which neural models can reason about natural language rationales that explain model predictions, relying only on distant supervision with no additional annotation cost for human-written rationales. We investigate multiple ways to automatically generate rationales using pre-trained language models, neural knowledge models, and distant supervision from related tasks, and train generative models capable of composing explanatory rationales for unseen instances. We demonstrate our approach on the defeasible inference task, a nonmonotonic reasoning task in which an inference may be strengthened or weakened when new information (an update) is introduced. Our model shows promises at generating post-hoc rationales explaining why an inference is more or less likely given the additional information, however, it mostly generates trivial rationales reflecting the fundamental limitations of neural language models. Conversely, the more realistic setup of jointly predicting the update or its type and generating rationale is more challenging, suggesting an important future direction.

Learning to Rationalize for Nonmonotonic Reasoning with Distant Supervision

Controlling bias in training datasets is vital for ensuring equal treatment, or parity, between different groups in downstream applications. A naive solution is to transform the data so that it is statistically independent of group membership, but this may throw away too much information when a reasonable compromise between fairness and accuracy is desired. Another common approach is to limit the ability of a particular adversary who seeks to maximize parity. Unfortunately, representations produced by adversarial approaches may still retain biases as their efficacy is tied to the complexity of the adversary used during training. To this end, we theoretically establish that by limiting the mutual information between representations and protected attributes, we can assuredly control the parity of any downstream classifier. We demonstrate an effective method for controlling parity through mutual information based on contrastive information estimators and show that they outperform approaches that rely on variational bounds based on complex generative models. We test our approach on UCI Adult and Heritage Health datasets and demonstrate that our approach provides more informative representations across a range of desired parity thresholds while providing strong theoretical guarantees on the parity of any downstream algorithm.

Controllable Guarantees for Fair Outcomes via Contrastive Information Estimation

Many smartphone applications use inertial measurement units (IMUs) to sense movement, but the use of these sensors for pedestrian localization can be challenging due to their noise characteristics. Recent data-driven inertial odometry approaches have demonstrated the increasing feasibility of inertial navigation. However, they still rely upon conventional smartphone orientation estimates that they assume to be accurate, while in fact these orientation estimates can be a significant source of error. To address the problem of inaccurate orientation estimates, we present a two-stage, data-driven pipeline using a commodity smartphone that first estimates device orientations and then estimates device position. The orientation module relies on a recurrent neural network and Extended Kalman Filter to obtain orientation estimates that are used to then rotate raw IMU measurements into the appropriate reference frame. The position module then passes those measurements through another recurrent network architecture to perform localization. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both orientation and position error on a large dataset we constructed that contains 20 hours of pedestrian motion across 3 buildings and 15 subjects. Code and data are available at https://github.com/KlabCMU/IDOL.

IDOL: Inertial Deep Orientation-Estimation and Localization

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.

Graph Neural Networks with Heterophily

Recent work introduced XDP and XUP priority functions for best-first bounded-suboptimal search that do not need to perform state re-expansions as long as the search heuristic is consistent. However, that work had several limitations that are rectified here. This paper analyzes the sufficiency and necessity of the conditions used to formulate XDP and XUP. The analysis presents a simpler proof and generalizes the result in three aspects: (1) the priority function no longer has to be differentiable everywhere, (2) the quality of the solution does not have to be bounded by a constant factor, and (3) directed graphs are handled correctly. These results allow the introduction of more priority functions, such as piecewise linear functions, and more variants of bounded-suboptimal search, such as constant suboptimality. Several new priority functions are presented in this paper that, according to empirical results, can significantly outperform existing approaches including XDP.

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Avoiding Reopenings in Best First Suboptimal Search with General Bounding Functions

Lexical cohesion is a fundamental mechanism for text which requires a pair of words to be interpreted as a certain type of lexical relation (e.g., similarity) to understand a coherent context; we refer to such relations as the contextual lexical relation. However, work on lexical cohesion has not modeled context comprehensively in considering lexical relations due to the lack of linguistic resources. In this paper, we take initial steps to address contextual lexical relations by focusing on the contrast relation, as it is a well-known relation though it is more subtle and relatively less resourced. We present a corpus named Cont 2 Lex to make Contextual Lexical Contrast Recognition a computationally feasible task. We benchmark this task with widely-adopted semantic representations; we discover that contextual embeddings (e.g. BERT) generally outperform static embeddings (e.g. Glove), but barely go beyond 70% in accuracy performance. In addition, we ï¬nd that all embeddings perform better when CLC occurs within the same sentence, suggesting possible limitations of current computational coherence models. Another intriguing discovery is the improvement of BERT in CLC is largely attributed to its modeling of CLC word pairs co-occurring with other word repetitions. Such observations imply that the progress made in lexical coherence modeling remains relatively primitive even for semantic representations such as BERT that have been empowering numerous standard NLP tasks to approach human benchmarks. Through presenting our corpus and benchmark, we attempt to seed initial discussions and endeavors in advancing semantic representations from modeling syntactic and semantic levels to coherence and discourse levels.

Have We Solved the Hard Problem? It’s Not Easy! Contextual Lexical Contrast as a Means to Probe Neural Coherence

We propose a novel distributed user-car matching method based on a contract between users to mitigate the imbalance problem between vehicle distribution and demand in free-floating car sharing. Previous regulation methods involved an incentive system based on the predictions of origin-destination (OD) demand obtained from past usage history. However, the difficulty these methods have in obtaining accurate data limits their applicability. To overcome this drawback, we introduce contract-based coordination among drop-off and pick-up users in which an auction is conducted for drop-off users' intended drop-off locations. We theoretically analyze the proposed method regarding the upper bound of its efficiency. We also compare it with a baseline method and non-regulation scenario on a free-floating car-sharing simulator. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher social surplus than the existing method.

Contract-Based Inter-User Usage Coordination in Free-Floating Car Sharing

Post-hoc explanation methods are gaining popularity for interpreting, understanding, and debugging neural networks. Most analyses using such methods explain decisions in response to inputs drawn from the test set. However, the test set may have few 
examples that trigger some model behaviors, such as high-confidence failures or ambiguous classifications. To address these challenges, we introduce a flexible model inspection framework: Bayes-TrEx. Given a data distribution, Bayes-TrEx finds in-distribution examples which trigger a specified prediction confidence. We demonstrate several use cases of Bayes-TrEx, including revealing highly confident (mis)classifications, visualizing class boundaries via ambiguous examples, understanding novel-class extrapolation behavior, and exposing neural network overconfidence. We use Bayes-TrEx to study classifiers trained on CLEVR, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST, and we show that this framework enables more flexible holistic model analysis than just inspecting the test set. Code and supplemental material are available at https://github.com/serenabooth/Bayes-TrEx.

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A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

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A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

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Handling uncertainty through Bayesian inference for Species Distribution Modelling in the Amazon Basin region

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