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Under data distributions which may be heavy-tailed, many stochastic gradient-based learning algorithms are driven by feedback queried at points with almost no performance guarantees on their own. Here we explore a modified &quot;anytime online-to-batch&quot; mechanism which for smooth objectives admits high-probability error bounds while requiring only lower-order moment bounds on the stochastic gradients. Using this conversion, we can derive a wide variety of &quot;anytime robust&quot; procedures, for which the task of performance analysis can be effectively reduced to regret control, meaning that existing regret bounds (for the bounded gradient case) can be robustified and leveraged in a straightforward manner. As a direct takeaway, we obtain an easily implemented stochastic gradient-based algorithm for which all queried points formally enjoy sub-Gaussian error bounds, and in practice show noteworthy gains on real-world data applications.

AAAI 2022

Anytime Guarantees Under Heavy-Tailed Data

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



Under data distributions which may be heavy-tailed, many stochastic gradient-based learning algorithms are driven by feedback queried at points with almost no performance guarantees on their own. Here we explore a modified "anytime online-to-batch" mechanism which for smooth objectives admits high-probability error bounds while requiring only lower-order moment bounds on the stochastic gradients. Using this conversion, we can derive a wide variety of "anytime robust" procedures, for which the task of performance analysis can be effectively reduced to regret control, meaning that existing regret bounds (for the bounded gradient case) can be robustified and leveraged in a straightforward manner. As a direct takeaway, we obtain an easily implemented stochastic gradient-based algorithm for which all queried points formally enjoy sub-Gaussian error bounds, and in practice show noteworthy gains on real-world data applications.

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. 

Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions
 made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of ProtGNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space.
 Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in ProtGNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the non-interpretable counterparts.

ProtGNN: Towards Self-Explaining Graph Neural Networks

Due to the scarcity of annotated samples, the diversity between support set and query set becomes the main obstacle for few shot semantic segmentation. Most existing prototype-based approaches only exploit the prototype from the support feature and ignore the information from the query sample, failing to remove this obstacle.In this paper, we proposes a dual prototype network (DPNet) to dispose of few shot semantic segmentation from a new perspective. Along with the prototype extracted from the support set, we propose to build the pseudo-prototype based on foreground features in the query image. To achieve this goal, the cycle comparison module is developed to select reliable foreground features and generate the pseudo-prototype with them. Then, a prototype interaction module is utilized to integrate the information of the prototype and the pseudo-prototype based on their underlying correlation. Finally, a multi-scale fusion module is introduced to capture contextual information during the dense comparison between prototype (pseudo-prototype) and query feature. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method exceeds previous state-of-the-arts with a sizable margin, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Learning from the Target: Dual Prototype Network for Few Shot Semantic Segmentation

Spatiotemporal graph represents a crucial data structure where the nodes and edges are embedded in a geometric space and their attribute values can evolve dynamically over time. Nowadays, spatiotemporal graph data is becoming increasingly popular and important, ranging from microscale (e.g. protein folding), to middle-scale (e.g. dynamic functional connectivity), to macro-scale (e.g. human mobility network). Although disentangling and understanding the correlations among spatial, temporal, and graph aspects have been a long-standing key topic in network science, they typically rely on network processes hypothesized by human knowledge. They usually fit well towards the properties that the predefined principles are tailored for, but usually cannot do well for the others, especially for many key domains where the human has yet very limited knowledge such as protein folding and biological neuronal networks. In this paper, we aim at pushing forward the modeling and understanding of spatiotemporal graphs via new disentangled deep generative models. Specifically, a new Bayesian model is proposed that factorizes spatiotemporal graphs into spatial, temporal, and graph factors as well as the factors that explain the interplay among them. A variational objective function and new mutual information thresholding algorithms driven by information bottleneck theory have been proposed to maximize the disentanglement among the factors with theoretical guarantees. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-arts by up to 69.2% for graph generation and 41.5% for interpretability.

Disentangled Spatiotemporal Graph Generative Model

Image operators have been extensively applied to create visually attractive photos for users to share processed images on social media. However, most image operators often smooth out details or generate textures after the processing, which removes the original content and raises challenges for restoring the original image. To resolve this issue, we propose a quasi-invertible model that learns common image processing operators in a restorable fashion: the learned image operators can generate visually pleasing results with the original content embedded. Our model is trained on input-output pairs that represent an image processing operator's behavior and uses a network that consists of an invertible branch and a non-invertible branch to increase our model's approximation capability. We evaluate the proposed model on ten image operators, including detail enhancement, abstraction, blur,  photographic style, and non-photorealistic style. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms relevant baselines in the restoration quality, and the learned restorable operator is fast in inference and robust to compression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the invertible operator can be easily applied to practical applications such as restorable human face retouching and highlight preserved exposure adjustment.

Restorable Image Operators with Quasi-Invertible Networks

The capability of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent heavily depends on the diversity of the learning scenarios generated by the environment. Generation of diverse realistic scenarios is challenging for real-time strategy (RTS) environments. The RTS environments are characterized by intelligent entities/non-RL agents cooperating and competing with the RL agents with large state and action spaces over a long period of time, resulting in an infinite space of feasible, but not necessarily realistic, scenarios involving complex interaction among different RL and non-RL agents. Yet, most of the existing simulators rely on randomly generating the environments based on predefined settings/layouts and offer limited flexibility and control over the environment dynamics for researchers to generate diverse, realistic scenarios as per their demand. To address this issue, for the first time, we formally introduce the benefits of adopting an existing formal scenario specification language, SCENIC, to assist researchers to model and generate diverse scenarios in an RTS environment in a flexible, systematic, and programmatic manner. To showcase the benefits, we interfaced SCENIC to an existing RTS environment Google Research Football (GRF) simulator and introduced a benchmark consisting of 32 realistic scenarios, encoded in SCENIC, to train RL agents and testing their generalization capabilities. We also show how researchers/RL practitioners can incorporate their domain knowledge to expedite the training process by intuitively modeling stochastic programmatic policies with SCENIC.

Programmatic Modeling and Generation of Real-Time Strategic Soccer Environments for Reinforcement Learning

The Evidential regression network (ENet) estimates a continuous target and its predictive uncertainty without costly Bayesian model averaging. However, it is possible that the target is inaccurately predicted due to the gradient shrinkage problem of the original loss function of the ENet, the negative log marginal likelihood (NLL) loss. In this paper, the objective is to improve the prediction accuracy of the ENet while maintaining its efficient uncertainty estimation by resolving the gradient shrinkage problem. A multi-task learning (MTL) framework, referred to as MT-ENet, is proposed to accomplish this aim. In the MTL, we define the Lipschitz modified mean squared error (MSE) loss function as another loss and add it to the existing NLL loss. The Lipschitz modified MSE loss is designed to mitigate the gradient conflict with the NLL loss by dynamically adjusting its Lipschitz constant. By doing so, the Lipschitz MSE loss does not disturb the uncertainty estimation of the NLL loss. The MT-ENet enhances the predictive accuracy of the ENet without losing uncertainty estimation capability on the synthetic dataset and real-world benchmarks, including drug-target affinity (DTA) regression. Furthermore, the MT-ENet shows remarkable calibration and out-of-distribution detection capability on the DTA benchmarks.

Improving Evidential Deep Learning via Multi-Task Learning

3D meshes are widely employed to represent geometry structure of 3D shapes. Due to limitation of scanning sensor precision and other issues, meshes are inevitably affected by noise, which hampers the subsequent applications. Convolultional neural networks (CNNs) achieve great success in image processing tasks, including 2D image denoising, and have been proven to own the capacity of modeling complex features at different scales, which is also particularly useful for mesh denoising. However, due to the nature of irregular structure, CNNs-based denosing strategies cannot be trivially applied for meshes. To circumvent this limitation, in the paper, we propose the local surface descriptor (LSD), which is able to transform the local deformable surface around a face into 2D grid representation and thus facilitates the deployment of CNNs to generate denoised face normals. To verify the superiority of LSD, we directly feed LSD into the classical Resnet without any complicated network design. The extensive experimental results show that, compared to the state-of-the-arts, our method achieves encouraging performance with respect to both objective and subjective evaluations.

Local Surface Descriptor for Geometry and Feature Preserved Mesh Denoising

Learning from Crowds (LFC) seeks to induce a high-quality classifier from training instances, which are linked to a range of possible noisy annotations from crowdsourcing workers under their various levels of skills and their own preconditions. Recent studies on LFC focus on designing new methods to improve the performance of the classifier trained from crowdsourced labeled data.
 To this day, however, there remain under-explored security aspects of LFC systems. In this work, we seek to bridge this gap. We first show that LFC models are vulnerable to adversarial examples---small changes to input data can cause classifiers to make prediction mistakes. Second, we propose an approach, A-LFC for training a robust classifier from crowdsourced labeled data. Our empirical results on three real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can substantially improve the performance of the trained classifier even with the existence of adversarial examples. On average, A-LFC has 10.05% and 11.34% higher test robustness than the state-of-the-art in the white-box and black-box attack settings, respectively.

Adversarial Learning from Crowds

Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Stance Detection with Sentiment-Based Pre-Training

Obtaining a well-trained model involves expensive data collection and training procedures, therefore the model is a valuable intellectual property. Recent studies revealed that adversaries can `steal' deployed models even when they have no training samples and can not get access to the model parameters or structures. Currently, there were some defense methods to alleviate this threat, mostly by increasing the cost of model stealing. In this paper, we explore the defense from another angle by verifying whether a suspicious model contains the knowledge of defender-specified external features. Specifically, we embed the external features by tempering a few training samples with style transfer. We then train a meta-classifier to determine whether a model is stolen from the victim. This approach is inspired by the understanding that the stolen models should contain the knowledge of features learned by the victim model. We examine our method on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective in detecting different types of model stealing simultaneously, even if the stolen model is obtained via a multi-stage stealing process. The codes for reproducing main results are available at Github (https://github.com/zlh-thu/StealingVerification).

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