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With the increasing scale of machine learning tasks, it has become essential to reduce the communication between computing nodes. Early work on gradient compression focused on the bottleneck between CPUs and GPUs, but  communication-efficiency is now needed in a variety of  different system architectures, from high-performance clusters to energy-constrained IoT devices. In the current practice, compression levels are typically chosen before training and settings that work well for one task may be vastly suboptimal for another dataset on another architecture. In this paper, we propose a flexible framework which adapts the compression level to the true gradient at each iteration, maximizing the improvement in the objective function that is achieved per communicated bit. Our framework is easy to adapt from one technology to the next by modeling how the communication cost depends on the compression level for the specific technology. Theoretical results and practical experiments indicate that the automatic tuning strategies significantly increase communication efficiency on several state-of-the-art compression schemes.

AAAI 2021

A Flexible Framework for Communication-Efficient Machine 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.

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-26 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.<br><br>

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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. 

Knowledge graph (KG for short) alignment aims at building a complete KG by linking the shared entities across complementary KGs. Existing approaches assume that KGs are static, despite the fact that almost every KG evolves over time. In this paper, we introduce the task of dynamic knowledge graph alignment, the main challenge of which is how to efficiently update entity embeddings for the evolving graph topology. Our key insight is to view the parameter matrix of GCN as a feature transformation operator and decouple the transformation process from the aggregation process. Based on that, we first propose a novel base algorithm (DINGAL-B) with topology-invariant mask gate and highway gate, which consistently outperforms 14 existing knowledge graph alignment methods in the static setting. More importantly, it naturally leads to two effective and efficient algorithms to align dynamic knowledge graph, including (1) DINGAL-O which leverages previous parameter matrices to update the embeddings of affected entities; and (2) DINGAL-U which resorts to newly obtained anchor links to fine-tune parameter matrices. Compared with their static counterpart (DINGAL-B), DINGAL-U and DINGAL-O are 10Ã— and 100Ã— faster respectively, with little alignment accuracy loss.

Dynamic Knowledge Graph Alignment

Many applications of machine learning on discrete domains, such as learning preference functions in recommender systems
or auctions, can be reduced to estimating a set function that is sparse in the Fourier domain. In this work, we present a new
family of algorithms for learning Fourier-sparse set functions. They require at most nk âˆ’ k log k + k queries (set function
evaluations), under mild conditions on the Fourier coefficients, where n is the size of the ground set and k the number of
non-zero Fourier coefficients. In contrast to other work that focused on the orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT),
our novel algorithms operate with recently introduced non-orthogonal Fourier transforms that offer different notions of
Fourier-sparsity. These naturally arise when modeling, e.g., sets of items forming substitutes and complements. We 
demonstrate effectiveness on several real-world applications.

Learning Set Functions that are Sparse in Non-Orthogonal Fourier Bases

Multi-task learning has gained popularity due to the advantages it provides with respect to resource usage and performance. Nonetheless, the joint optimization of parameters with respect to multiple tasks remains an active research topic. Sub-partitioning the parameters between different tasks has proven to be an efficient way to relax the optimization constraints over the shared weights, may the partitions be disjoint or overlapping. However, one drawback of this approach is that it can weaken the inductive bias generally set up by the joint task optimization. In this work, we present a novel way to partition the parameter space without weakening the inductive bias. Specifically, we propose Maximum Roaming, a method inspired by dropout that randomly varies the parameter partitioning, while forcing them to visit as many tasks as possible at a regulated frequency, so that the network fully adapts to each update. We study the properties of our method through experiments on a variety of visual multi-task data sets. Experimental results suggest that the regularization brought by roaming has more impact on performance than usual partitioning optimization strategies. The overall method is flexible, easily applicable, provides superior regularization and consistently achieves improved performances compared to recent multi-task learning formulations.

Maximum Roaming Multi-Task Learning

This paper studies the problem of clustering in metric spaces while preserving the privacy of individual data. Specifically, we examine differentially private variants of the k-medians and Euclidean k-means problems. We  present polynomial algorithms with constant multiplicative error and lower additive error than the previous state-of-the-art for each problem. Additionally, our algorithms use a clustering algorithm without differential privacy as a black-box. This allows  practitioners to control the trade-off between runtime and approximation factor by choosing a suitable clustering algorithm to use.

Differentially Private Clustering via Maximum Coverage

This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.

The Causal Learning of Retail Delinquency

The increasing demand for democratizing machine learning algorithms calls for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) solutions at low cost. Many machine learning algorithms have hyperparameters which can cause a large variation in the training cost. But this effect is largely ignored in existing HPO methods, which are incapable to properly control cost during the optimization process. To address this problem, we develop a new cost-frugal HPO solution. The core of our solution is a simple but new randomized direct-search method, for which we provide theoretical guarantees on the convergence rate and the total cost incurred to achieve convergence. We provide strong empirical results in comparison with state-of-the-art HPO methods on large AutoML benchmarks.

Frugal Optimization for Cost-Related Hyperparameters

Recent automatic storytelling methods mainly rely on keyword planning or plot skeleton generation to model long-range dependencies and create consistent narrative texts.
However, these approaches generate story plans or plots sequentially, leaving the non-sequential conception and structural design processes of human writers unexplored.
To mimic human writers and exploit the fine-grained, intrinsic structural information of each story, we decompose automatic story generation into sub-problems of graph construction, graph generation, and graph-infused sequence generation.
Specifically, we propose a graph-infused dual conditional variational autoencoder model to capture multi-level intra-story structures (i.e., graph) by continuous variational latent variables and generate consistent stories through dual-infusion of story structure planning and content learning.
Experimental results on the ROCStories dataset and the CMU Movie Summary corpus confirm that our proposed model outperforms strong baselines in both human judges and widely-used automatic metrics.

Content Learning with Structure-Aware Writing: A Graph-Infused Dual Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Automatic Storytelling

The recent success of deep learning techniques for abstractive summarization is predicated on the availability of large-scale datasets.  When summarizing reviews (e.g., for products or movies), such training data is neither available nor can be easily sourced, motivating the development of methods which rely on synthetic datasets for supervised training.  We show that explicitly incorporating content planning in a summarization model not only yields output of higher quality, but also allows the creation of synthetic datasets which are more natural, resembling real world document-summary pairs.  Our content plans take the form of aspect and sentiment distributions which we induce from data without access to expensive annotations. Synthetic datasets are created by sampling pseudo-reviews from a Dirichlet distribution parametrized by our content planner, while our model generates summaries based on input reviews and induced content plans.  Experimental results on three domains show that our approach outperforms competitive models in generating informative, coherent, and fluent summaries that capture opinion consensus.

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization with Content Planning

Generative models can be trained to emulate complex empirical data, but are they useful to make predictions in the context of previously unobserved environments? An intuitive idea to promote such extrapolation capabilities is to have the architecture of such model reflect a causal graph of the true data generating process, such that one can intervene on each node independently of the others. However, the nodes of this graph are usually unobserved, leading to overparameterization and lack of identifiability of the causal structure. We develop a theoretical framework to address this challenging situation by defining a weaker form of identifiability, based on the principle of independence of mechanisms. We demonstrate on toy examples that classical stochastic gradient descent can hinder the model's extrapolation capabilities, suggesting independence of mechanisms should be enforced explicitly during training. Experiments on deep generative models trained on real world data support these insights and illustrate how the extrapolation capabilities of such models can be leveraged.

A Theory of Independent Mechanisms for Extrapolation in Generative Models

The progress in Query-focused Multi-Document Summarization (QMDS) has been limited by the lack of sufficient largescale high-quality training datasets. We present two QMDS training datasets, which we construct using two data augmentation methods: (1) transferring the commonly used single-document CNN/Daily Mail summarization dataset to create the QMDSCNN dataset, and (2) mining search-query logs to create the QMDSIR dataset. These two datasets have complementary properties, i.e., QMDSCNN has real summaries but queries are simulated, while QMDSIR has real queries but simulated summaries. To cover both these real summary and query aspects, we build abstractive end-to-end neural network models on the combined datasets that yield new state-of-the-art transfer results on DUC datasets. We also introduce new hierarchical encoders that enable a more efficient encoding of the query together with multiple documents. Empirical results demonstrate that our data augmentation and encoding methods outperform baseline models on automatic metrics, as well as on human evaluations along multiple attributes.

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