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Deep neural networks are the default choice of learning models for computer vision tasks. Extensive work has been carried out in recent years on explaining deep models for vision tasks such as classification. However, recent work has shown that it is possible for these models to produce substantially different attribution maps even when two very similar images are given to the network, raising serious questions about trustworthiness. To address this issue, we propose a robust attribution training strategy to improve attributional robustness of deep neural networks. Our method carefully analyzes the requirements for attributional robustness and introduces two new regularizers that preserve a model&#39;s attribution map during attacks. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art attributional robustness methods by a margin of approximately 3% to 9% in terms of attribution robustness measures on several datasets including MNIST, FMNIST, Flower and GTSRB.

AAAI 2021

Enhanced Regularizers for Attributional Robustness

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

Deep neural networks are the default choice of learning models for computer vision tasks. Extensive work has been carried out in recent years on explaining deep models for vision tasks such as classification. However, recent work has shown that it is possible for these models to produce substantially different attribution maps even when two very similar images are given to the network, raising serious questions about trustworthiness. To address this issue, we propose a robust attribution training strategy to improve attributional robustness of deep neural networks. Our method carefully analyzes the requirements for attributional robustness and introduces two new regularizers that preserve a model's attribution map during attacks. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art attributional robustness methods by a margin of approximately 3% to 9% in terms of attribution robustness measures on several datasets including MNIST, FMNIST, Flower and GTSRB.

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. 

Deep reinforcement learning approaches have shown impressive results in a variety of different domains, however, more complex heterogeneous architectures such as world models require the different neural components to be trained separately instead of end-to-end. While a simple genetic algorithm recently showed end-to-end training is possible, it failed to solve a more complex 3D task. This paper presents a method called Deep Innovation Protection (DIP) that addresses the credit assignment problem in training complex heterogenous neural network models end-to-end for such  environments. The main idea behind the approach is to employ multiobjective optimization to temporally reduce the selection pressure on specific components in multi-component network, allowing other components to adapt. We investigate the emergent representations of these evolved networks, which learn to predict properties important for the survival of the agent, without the need for a specific forward-prediction loss.

Deep Innovation Protection: Confronting the Credit Assignment Problem in Training Heterogeneous Neural Architectures

Explainable AI provides insights to users into the why for
model predictions, offering potential for users to better understand
and trust a model, and to recognize and correct AI
predictions that are incorrect. Prior research on human and
explainable AI interactions has focused on measures such as
interpretability, trust, and usability of the explanation. There
are mixed findings whether explainable AI can improve actual
human decision-making and the ability to identify the
problems with the underlying model. Using real datasets, we
compare objective human decision accuracy without AI (control),
with an AI prediction (no explanation), and AI prediction
with explanation. We find providing any kind of AI prediction
tends to improve user decision accuracy, but no conclusive
evidence that explainable AI has a meaningful impact.
Moreover, we observed the strongest predictor for human decision
accuracy was AI accuracy and that users were somewhat
able to detect when the AI was correct vs. incorrect, but
this was not significantly affected by including an explanation.
Our results indicate that, at least in some situations, the
why information provided in explainable AI may not enhance
user decision-making, and further research may be needed to
understand how to integrate explainable AI into real systems.

Does Explainable Artificial Intelligence Improve Human Decision-Making?

We study the classical problem of matching n agents to n objects, where the agents have ranked preferences over the objects. We focus on two popular desiderata from the matching literature: Pareto optimality and rank-maximality. Instead of asking the agents to report their complete preferences, our goal is to learn a desirable matching from partial preferences, specifically a matching that is necessarily Pareto optimal (NPO) or necessarily rank-maximal (NRM) under any completion of the partial preferences. We focus on the top-k model in which agents reveal a prefix of their preference rankings. We design efficient algorithms to check if a given matching is NPO or NRM, and to check whether such a matching exists given top-k partial preferences. We also study online algorithms for eliciting partial preferences adaptively, and prove bounds on their competitive ratio.

Necessarily Optimal One-Sided Matchings

The predominant paradigm in evolutionary game theory and more generally online learning in games is based on a clear distinction between a population of dynamic agents that interact given a fixed, static game. In this paper, we move away from the artificial divide between dynamic agents and static games, to introduce and analyze a large class of competitive settings where both the agents and the games they play evolve strategically over time. We focus on arguably the most archetypal game-theoretic setting---zero-sum games (as well as network generalizations)---and the most studied evolutionary learning dynamic---replicator, the continuous-time analogue of multiplicative weights. Populations of agents compete against each other in a zero-sum competition that itself evolves adversarially to the current population mixture. Remarkably, despite the chaotic coevolution of agents and games, we prove that the system exhibits a number of regularities. First, the system has conservation laws of an information-theoretic flavor that couple the behavior of all agents and games. Secondly, the system is Poincare recurrent, with effectively all possible initializations of agents and games lying on recurrent orbits that come arbitrarily close to their initial conditions infinitely often. Thirdly, the time-average agent behavior and utility converge to the Nash equilibrium values of the time-average game. Finally, we provide a polynomial time algorithm to efficiently predict this time-average behavior for any such coevolving network game.

Evolutionary Game Theory Squared: Evolving Agents in Endogenously Evolving Zero-Sum Games

Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) provide a compact representation of knowledge that can be queried in a flexible way: after learning the parameters of a graphical model once, new probabilistic queries can be answered at test time without retraining. However, when using undirected PGMS with hidden variables, two sources of error typically compound in all but the simplest models (a) learning error (both computing the partition function and integrating out the hidden variables is intractable); and (b) prediction error (exact inference is also intractable). Here we introduce query training (QT), a mechanism to learn a PGM that is optimized for the approximate inference algorithm that will be paired with it. The resulting PGM is a worse model of the data (as measured by the likelihood), but it is tuned to produce better marginals for a given inference algorithm. Unlike prior works, our approach preserves the querying flexibility of the original PGM: at test time, we can estimate the marginal of any variable given any partial evidence. We demonstrate experimentally that QT can be used to learn a challenging 8-connected grid Markov random field with hidden variables and that it consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art AdVIL when tested on three undirected models across multiple datasets.

Query Training: Learning a Worse Model to Infer Better Marginals in Undirected Graphical Models with Hidden Variables

Prior work on multilingual question answering has mostly focused on using large multilingual pre-trained language models (LM) to perform zero-shot language-wise learning: train a QA model on English and test on other languages. In this work, we explore strategies that improve cross-lingual transfer by bringing the multilingual embeddings closer in the semantic space. 
Our first strategy augments the original English training data with machine translation-generated data. This results in a corpus of multilingual silver-labeled QA pairs that is 14 times larger than the original training set. In addition, we propose two novel strategies, language adversarial training and language arbitration framework, which significantly improve the (zero-resource) cross-lingual transfer performance and result in LM embeddings that are less language-variant. Empirically, we show that the proposed models outperform the previous zero-shot baseline on the recently introduced multilingual MLQA and TyDiQA datasets.

Multilingual Transfer Learning for QA Using Translation as Data Augmentation

This paper presents a novel approach to top-k ranking Bayesian optimization (top-k ranking BO) which is a practical and significant generalization of  preferential BO to handle top-k ranking and tie/indifference observations. We first design a surrogate model that is not only capable of catering to the above observations, but is also supported by a classic random utility model. Another equally important contribution is the introduction of the first information-theoretic acquisition function in BO with preferential observation called multinomial predictive entropy search (MPES) which is flexible in handling these observations and optimized for all inputs of a query jointly. MPES possesses superior performance compared with existing acquisition functions that select the inputs of a query one at a time greedily. We empirically evaluate the performance of MPES using several synthetic benchmark functions,  CIFAR-10 dataset, and  SUSHI preference dataset.

Top-k Ranking Bayesian Optimization

We propose to estimate the KL divergence using a relaxed likelihood ratio  estimation  in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert space. We show that the dual of our ratio estimator for KL in the particular case of Mutual Information estimation corresponds to a lower bound on the MI  that is related to the so called Donsker Varadhan lower bound.  In this dual form, MI is estimated via learning a witness function discriminating between the joint density and the product of marginal, as well as an auxiliary scalar variable that enforces a normalization constraint on the likelihood ratio. By extending the function space to neural networks, we propose an efficient neural MI estimator, and validate its performance on synthetic examples, showing advantage over the existing baselines. We demonstrate its strength in large-scale self-supervised representation learning through MI maximization.

Improved Mutual Information Estimation

Leveraging weak or noisy supervision for building effective machine learning models has long been an important research problem. Its importance has further increased recently due to the growing need for large-scale datasets to train deep learning models. Weak or noisy supervision could originate from multiple sources including non-expert annotators or automatic labeling based on heuristics or user interaction signals. There is an extensive amount of previous work focusing on leveraging noisy labels. Most notably, recent work has shown impressive gains by using a meta-learned instance re-weighting approach where a meta-learning framework is used to assign instance weights to noisy labels. In this paper, we extend this approach via posing the problem as a label correction problem within a meta-learning framework. We view the label correction procedure as a meta-process and propose a new meta-learning based framework termed MLC (Meta Label Correction) for learning with noisy labels. Specifically, a label correction network is adopted as a meta-model to produce corrected labels for noisy labels while the main model is trained to leverage the corrected labels. Both models are jointly trained by solving a bi-level optimization problem. We run extensive experiments with different label noise levels and types on both image recognition and text classification tasks. We compare the re-weighing and correction approaches showing that the correction framing addresses some of the limitations of re-weighting. We also show that the proposed MLC approach outperforms previous methods in both image and language tasks.

Meta Label Correction for Noisy Label Learning

To facilitate a wide-spread acceptance of AI systems guiding decision making in real-world applications, trustworthiness of deployed models is key. That is, it is crucial for predictive models to be uncertainty-aware and yield well-calibrated (and thus trustworthy) predictions for both in-domain samples as well as under domain shift. Recent efforts to account for predictive uncertainty include post-processing steps for trained neural networks, Bayesian neural networks as well as alternative non-Bayesian approaches such as ensemble approaches and evidential deep learning. Here, we propose an efficient yet general modelling approach for obtaining well-calibrated, trustworthy probabilities for samples obtained after a domain shift. We introduce a new training strategy combining an entropy-encouraging loss term with an adversarial calibration loss term and demonstrate that this results in well-calibrated and technically trustworthy predictions for a wide range of domain drifts. We comprehensively evaluate previously proposed approaches on different data modalities, a large range of data sets including sequence data, network architectures and perturbation strategies. We observe that our modelling approach substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, yielding well-calibrated predictions under domain drift.

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