United States

Data heterogeneity has been identified as one of the key features in federated learning but often overlooked in the lens of robustness to adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on characterizing and understanding its impact on backdooring attacks in federated learning through comprehensive experiments using synthetic and the LEAF benchmarks. The initial impression driven by our experimental results suggests that data heterogeneity is the dominant factor in the effectiveness of attacks and it may be a redemption for defending against backdooring as it makes the attack less efficient, more challenging to design effective attack strategies, and the attack result also becomes less predictable. However, with further investigations, we found data heterogeneity is more of a curse than a redemption as the attack effectiveness can be significantly boosted by simply adjusting the client-side backdooring timing. More importantly, data heterogeneity may result in overfitting at the local training of benign clients, which can be utilized by attackers to disguise themselves and fool skewed-feature based defenses. In addition, effective attack strategies can be made by adjusting attack data distribution. Finally, we discuss the potential directions of defending the curses brought by data heterogeneity. The results and lessons learned from our extensive experiments and analysis offer new insights for designing robust federated learning methods and systems.

AAAI 2021

Curse or Redemption? How Data Heterogeneity Affects the Robustness of Federated Learning

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.

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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. 

Link prediction (LP) algorithms propose to each node a ranked list of nodes that are currently non-neighbors, as the most likely candidates for future linkage. Owing to increasing concerns about privacy, users (nodes) may prefer to keep some of their connections protected or private. Motivated by this observation, our goal is to design a differentially private LP  algorithm, which trades off between privacy of the protected node-pairs and the link prediction accuracy. More specifically, we first propose a form of differential privacy on graphs, which models the privacy loss only of those node-pairs which are marked as protected. Next, we develop DPLP, a learning to rank algorithm, which applies a monotone transform to base scores from a non-private LP system, and then adds noise.  DPLP is trained with a privacy induced ranking loss, which optimizes the ranking utility for a given maximum allowed level of privacy leakage of the protected node-pairs. Under a recently introduced latent node embedding model, we present a formal trade-off between privacy and LP utility. Extensive experiments with several real-life graphs and several LP heuristics show that DPLP can trade off between privacy and predictive performance more effectively than several alternatives.

Differentially Private Link Prediction with Protected Connections

Learning causal models with latent variables from observational and experimental data is an important problem. In this paper we present a polynomial-time algorithm that PAC learns the structure and parameters of a rooted  tree-structured causal network of bounded degree where the internal nodes of the tree cannot be observed or manipulated. Our algorithm is the first of its kind to provably learn the structure and parameters of tree-structured causal models with latent internal variables from random examples and active experiments.

PAC Learning of Causal Trees with Latent Variables

Competing Risk Analysis (CRA) aims at the correct estimation of the marginal probability of occurrence of an event in the presence of competing events. Many of the statistical approaches developed for CRA are limited by strong assumptions about the underlying stochastic processes. To overcome these issues and to handle censoring, machine learning approaches for CRA have designed specialized cost functions. However, these approaches are not generalizable, and are computationally expensive. This paper formulates CRA as a cause-specific regression problem and proposes DeepPseudo models, which use simple and effective feed-forward deep neural networks, to predict the cumulative incidence function (CIF) using Aalen-Johansen estimator-based pseudo values. DeepPseudo models capture the time-varying covariate effect on CIF while handling the censored observations. We show how DeepPseudo models can address co-variate dependent censoring by using modified pseudo values. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed models obtain promising and statistically significant results compared to the state-of-the-art CRA approaches. Furthermore, we show that explainable methods such as Layer-wise Relevance Propagation can be used to interpret the predictions of our DeepPseudo models.

DeepPseudo: Pseudo Value Based Deep Learning Models for Competing Risk Analysis

After observing a snapshot of a social network, a link prediction (LP) algorithm identifies node pairs between which new edges will likely materialize in future. Most LP algorithms estimate a score for currently non-neighboring node pairs, and rank them by this score.   Recent LP systems compute this score by comparing dense, low dimensional vector representations of nodes.  Graph neural networks (GNNs), in particular graph convolutional networks (GCNs), are popular examples.  For two nodes to be meaningfully compared, their embeddings should be indifferent to reordering of their neighbors.  GNNs typically use simple, symmetric set aggregators to ensure this property, but this design decision has been shown to produce representations with limited expressive power.  Sequence encoders are more expressive, but are permutation sensitive by design.  Recent efforts to overcome this dilemma turn out to be unsatisfactory for LP tasks. In response, we propose PermGNN, which aggregates neighbor features using a recurrent, order-sensitive aggregator and directly minimizes an LP loss while it is `attacked' by adversarial generator of neighbor permutations.  PermGNN has superior expressive power compared to earlier GNNs.  Next, we devise an optimization framework to map PermGNN's node embeddings to a suitable locality-sensitive hash, which speeds up reporting the top-K most likely edges for the LP task. Our experiments on diverse datasets show that PermGNN outperforms several state-of-the-art link predictors by a significant margin, and can predict the most likely edges fast.

Adversarial Permutation Guided Node Representations for Link Prediction

As 3D point clouds become the representation of choice for multiple vision and graphics applications, such as autonomous driving, robotics, etc., the generation of them by deep neural networks has attracted increasing attention in the research community. Despite the recent success of deep learning models in classification and segmentation, synthesizing point clouds remains challenging, especially from a single image. State-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches can generate a point cloud from a hidden vector, however, they treat 2D and 3D features equally and disregard the rich shape information within the 3D data. In this paper, we address this problem by integrating image features with 3D prototype features. Specifically, we propose to learn a set of 3D prototype features from a real point cloud dataset and dynamically adjust them through the training. These prototypes are then integrated with incoming image features to guide the point cloud generation process. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms SOTA methods on single image based 3D reconstruction tasks.

Single View Point Cloud Generation via Unified 3D Prototype

Social recommendation task aims to predict users' preferences over items with the incorporation of social connections among users, so as to alleviate the sparse issue of collaborative filtering. While many recent efforts show the effectiveness of neural network-based social recommender systems, several important challenges have not been well addressed yet: (i) The majority of models only consider usersâ€™ social connections, while ignoring the inter-dependent knowledge across items; (ii) Most of existing solutions are designed for singular type of user-item interactions, making them infeasible to capture the interaction heterogeneity; (iii) The dynamic nature of user-item interactions has been less explored in many social-aware recommendation techniques. To tackle the above challenges, this work proposes a Knowledge-aware Coupled Graph Neural Network (KCGN) that jointly injects the inter-dependent knowledge across items and users into the recommendation framework. KCGN enables the high-order user- and item-wise relation encoding by exploiting the mutual information for global graph structure awareness. Additionally, we further augment KCGN with the capability of capturing dynamic multi-typed user-item interactive patterns. Experimental studies on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our method against many strong baselines in a variety of settings. Source codes are available at: https://github.com/xhcdream/KCGN.

Knowledge-Aware Coupled Graph Neural Network for Social Recommendation

In the classical discrete Colonel Blotto gameâ€”introduced
by Borel in 1921â€”two colonels simultaneously distribute
their troops across multiple battlefields. The winner of each
battlefield is determined by a winner-take-all rule, independently
of other battlefields. In the original formulation, each
colonelâ€™s goal is to win as many battlefields as possible. The
Blotto game and its extensions have been used in a wide
range of applications from political campaignâ€”exemplified
by the U.S presidential electionâ€”to marketing campaign,
from (innovative) technology competition to sports competition.
Despite persistent efforts, efficient methods for finding
the optimal strategies in Blotto games have been elusive
for almost a centuryâ€”due to exponential explosion in
the organic solution spaceâ€”until Ahmadinejad, Dehghani,
Hajiaghayi, Lucier, Mahini, and Seddighin developed the
first polynomial-time algorithm for this fundamental gametheoretical
problem in 2016. However, that breakthrough
polynomial-time solution has some structural limitation. It
applies only to the case where troops are homogeneous with
respect to battlegruounds, as in Borelâ€™s original formulation:
For each battleground, the only factor that matters to the winnerâ€™s
payoff is how many troops as opposed to which sets of
troops are opposing one another in that battleground.


In this paper, we consider a more general setting of the
two-player-multi-battleground game, in which multifaceted
resources (troops) may have different contributions to different
battlegrounds. In the case of U.S presidential campaign,
for example, one may interpret this as different types
of resourcesâ€”human, financial, politicalâ€”that teams can invest
in each state. We provide a complexity-theoretical evidence
that, in contrast to Borelâ€™s homogeneous setting, finding
optimal strategies in multifaceted Colonel Blotto games
is intractable. We complement this complexity result with
a polynomial-time algorithm that finds approximately optimal
strategies with provable guarantees. We also study a further
generalization when two competitors do not have zerosum/
constant-sum payoffs. We show that optimal strategies
in these two-player-multi-battleground games are as hard to
compute and approximate as Nash equilibria in general noncooperative 
games and economic equilibria in exchange markets.

Computational Analyses of the Electoral College: Campaigning Is Hard but Approximately Manageable

Recent years have brought about a renewed interest in commonsense representation and reasoning in the field of natural language understanding. The development of new commonsense knowledge graphs (CSKG) has been central to these advances as their diverse facts can be used and referenced by machine learning models for tackling new and challenging tasks. At the same time, there remain questions about the quality and coverage of these resources due to the massive scale required to comprehensively encompass general commonsense knowledge.

In this work, we posit that manually constructed CSKGs will never achieve the coverage necessary to be applicable in all situations encountered by NLP agents. Therefore, we propose a new evaluation framework for testing the utility of KGs based on how effectively implicit knowledge representations can be learned from them.
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With this new goal, we propose Atomic 2020, a new CSKG of general-purpose commonsense knowledge containing knowledge that is not readily available in pretrained language models. We evaluate its properties in comparison with other leading CSKGs, performing the first large-scale pairwise study of commonsense knowledge resources. Next, we show that Atomic 2020 is better suited for training knowledge models that can generate accurate, representative knowledge for new, unseen entities and events. Finally, through human evaluation, we show that the few-shot performance of GPT-3 (175B parameters), while impressive, remains ~12 absolute points lower than a BART-based knowledge model trained on Atomic 2020 despite using over 430x fewer parameters.

(Comet-) Atomic 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs

Motivated by the recent successful application of span-based models to entity-based information extraction tasks, we investigate span-based models for event coreference resolution, focusing on determining (1) whether the successes of span-based models of entity coreference can be extended to event coreference; (2) whether exploiting the dependency between event coreference and the related subtask of trigger detection; and (3) whether automatically computed entity coreference information can benefit span-based event coreference resolution.  Empirical results on the standard evaluation dataset provide affirmative answers to all three questions.

Span-Based Event Coreference Resolution

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) significantly reduce energy consumption by replacing weight multiplications with additions. This makes SNNs suitable for energy-constrained platforms. However, due to its discrete activation, training of SNNs remains a challenge. A popular approach is to first train an equivalent CNN using traditional backpropagation, and then transfer the weights to the intended SNN. Unfortunately, this often results in significant accuracy loss, especially in deeper networks. In this paper, we propose CQ training (Clamped and Quantized training), an SNN-compatible CNN training algorithm with clamp and quantization that achieves near-zero conversion accuracy loss. Essentially, CNN training in CQ training accounts for certain SNN characteristics. Using a 7 layer VGG-* and a 21 layer VGG-19, running on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we achieved 94.16% and 93.44% accuracy in the respective equivalent SNNs. It outperforms other existing comparable works that we know of. We also demonstrate the low-precision weight compatibility for the VGG-19 structure. Without retraining, an accuracy of 93.43% and 92.82% using quantized 9-bit and 8-bit weights, respectively, was achieved. The framework was developed in PyTorch and is publicly available.

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