United States

We study fair and efficient allocation of divisible goods, in an online manner, among n agents. The goods arrive online in a sequence of T time periods. The agents&#39; values for a good are revealed only after its arrival, and the online algorithm needs to fractionally allocate the good, immediately and irrevocably, among the agents. Towards a unifying treatment of fairness and economic efficiency objectives, we develop an algorithmic framework for finding online allocations to maximize the generalized mean of the values received by the agents. In particular, working with the assumption that each agent&#39;s value for the grand bundle of goods is appropriately scaled, we address online maximization of p-mean welfare. Parameterized by an exponent term p in (-infty, 1], these means encapsulate a range of welfare functions, including social welfare (p=1), egalitarian welfare (p to -infty), and Nash social welfare (p to 0).

We present a simple algorithmic template that takes a threshold as input and, with judicious choices for this threshold, leads to both universal and tailored competitive guarantees. First, we show that one can compute online a single allocation that O (sqrt(n) log n)-approximates the optimal p-mean welfare for all p &lt;= 1. The existence of such a universal allocation is interesting in and of itself. Moreover, this universal guarantee achieves essentially tight competitive ratios for specific values of p. 

Next, we obtain improved competitive ratios for different ranges of p by executing our algorithm with p-specific thresholds, e.g., we provide O(log^3 n)-competitive ratio for all p in (-1/(log 2n),1). 

We complement our positive results by establishing lower bounds to show that our guarantees are essentially tight for a wide range of the exponent parameter.

AAAI 2022

Universal and Tight Online Algorithms for Generalized-Mean Welfare

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. 

We study fair and efficient allocation of divisible goods, in an online manner, among n agents. The goods arrive online in a sequence of T time periods. The agents' values for a good are revealed only after its arrival, and the online algorithm needs to fractionally allocate the good, immediately and irrevocably, among the agents. Towards a unifying treatment of fairness and economic efficiency objectives, we develop an algorithmic framework for finding online allocations to maximize the generalized mean of the values received by the agents. In particular, working with the assumption that each agent's value for the grand bundle of goods is appropriately scaled, we address online maximization of p-mean welfare. Parameterized by an exponent term p in (-infty, 1], these means encapsulate a range of welfare functions, including social welfare (p=1), egalitarian welfare (p to -infty), and Nash social welfare (p to 0).

We present a simple algorithmic template that takes a threshold as input and, with judicious choices for this threshold, leads to both universal and tailored competitive guarantees. First, we show that one can compute online a single allocation that O (sqrt(n) log n)-approximates the optimal p-mean welfare for all p <= 1. The existence of such a universal allocation is interesting in and of itself. Moreover, this universal guarantee achieves essentially tight competitive ratios for specific values of p. 

Next, we obtain improved competitive ratios for different ranges of p by executing our algorithm with p-specific thresholds, e.g., we provide O(log^3 n)-competitive ratio for all p in (-1/(log 2n),1). 

We complement our positive results by establishing lower bounds to show that our guarantees are essentially tight for a wide range of the exponent parameter.

technical paper

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used to tackle the few-shot learning (FSL) problem and shown great potentials under the transductive setting. However under the inductive setting, existing GNN based methods are less competitive. This is because they use an instance GNN as a label propagation/classification module, which is jointly meta-learned with a feature embedding network. This design is problematic because the classifier needs to adapt quickly to new tasks while the embedding does not. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid GNN (HGNN) model consisting of two GNNs, an instance GNN and a prototype GNN. Instead of label propagation, they act as feature embedding adaptation modules for quick adaptation of the meta-learned feature embedding to new tasks. Importantly they are designed to deal with a fundamental yet often neglected challenge in FSL, that is, with only a handful of shots per class, any few-shot classifier would be sensitive to badly sampled shots which are either outliers or can cause inter-class distribution overlapping. Extensive experiments show that our HGNN obtains new state-of-the-art on three FSL benchmarks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianyuanYu/HGNN.

Hybrid Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Learning

Current representation learning methods for whole slide image (WSI) with pyramidal resolutions are inherently homogeneous and flat, which cannot fully exploit the multiscale and heterogeneous diagnostic information of different structures for comprehensive analysis. This paper presents a novel graph neural network-based multiple instance learning framework (i.e., H^2-MIL) to learn hierarchical representation from a heterogeneous graph with different resolutions for WSI analysis. A heterogeneous graph with the â€œresolutionâ€ attribute is constructed to explicitly model the feature and spatial-scaling relationship of multi-resolution patches. We then design a novel resolution-aware attention convolution (RAConv) block to learn compact yet discriminative representation from the graph, which tackles the heterogeneity of node neighbors with different resolutions and yields more reliable message passing. More importantly, to explore the task-related structured information of WSI pyramid, we elaborately design a novel iterative hierarchical pooling (IHPool) module to progressively aggregate the heterogeneous graph based on scaling relationships of different nodes. We evaluated our method on two public WSI datasets from the TCGA project, i.e., esophageal cancer and kidney cancer. Experimental results show that our method clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both tumor typing and staging tasks.

H^2-MIL: Exploring Hierarchical Representation with Heterogeneous Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Cross-modal hashing has attracted considerable attention for large-scale multimodal data. Recent supervised cross-modal hashing methods using multi-label networks utilize the semantics of multi-labels to enhance retrieval accuracy, where label hash codes are learned independently. However, all these methods assume that label annotations reliably reflect the relevance between their corresponding instances, which is not true in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Bidirectional Reinforcement Guided Hashing for Effective Cross-Modal Retrieval (Bi-CMR), which exploits a bidirectional learning to relieve the negative impact of this assumption. Specifically, in the forward learning procedure, we highlight the representative labels and learn the reinforced multi-label hash codes by intra-modal semantic information, and further adjust similarity matrix. In the backward learning procedure, the reinforced multi-label hash codes and adjusted similarity matrix are used to guide the matching of instances. We construct two datasets with explicit relevance labels that reflect the semantic relevance of instance pairs based on two benchmark datasets. The Bi-CMR is evaluated by conducting extensive experiments over these two datasets. Experimental results prove the superiority of Bi-CMR over four state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness.

Bi-CMR: Bidirectional Reinforcement Guided Hashing for Effective Cross-Modal Retrieval

Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms have not been widely adopted in large scale environments with many agents as they often scale poorly with the number of agents. Using mean field theory to aggregate agents has been proposed as a solution to this problem. However, almost all previous methods in this area make a strong assumption of a centralized system where all the agents in the environment learn the same policy and are effectively indistinguishable from each other. In this paper, we relax this assumption about indistinguishable agents and propose a new mean field system known as Decentralized Mean Field Games, where each agent can be quite different from others. All agents learn independent policies in a decentralized fashion, based on their local observations. We define a theoretical solution concept for this system and provide a fixed point guarantee for a Q-learning based algorithm in this system. A practical consequence of our approach is that we can address a `chicken-and-egg' problem in empirical mean field reinforcement learning algorithms. Further, we provide Q-learning and actor-critic algorithms that use the decentralized mean field learning approach and give stronger performances compared to common baselines in this area. In our setting, agents do not need to be clones of each other and learn in a fully decentralized fashion. Hence, for the first time, we show the application of mean field learning methods in fully competitive environments, large-scale continuous action space environments, and other environments with heterogeneous agents. Importantly, we also apply the mean field method in a ride-sharing problem using a real-world dataset. We propose a decentralized solution to this problem, which is more practical than existing centralized training methods.

Decentralized Mean Field Games

Effective communication can improve coordination in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). One popular communication scheme is exchanging agents' local observations or latent embeddings and using them to augment individual local policy input. Such a communication paradigm can reduce uncertainty for local decision-making and induce implicit coordination. However, it enlarges agents' local policy spaces and increases learning complexity, leading to poor coordination in complex settings. To handle this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework named Multi-Agent Incentive Communication (MAIC) that allows each agent to learn to generate incentive messages and bias other agents' value functions directly, resulting in effective explicit coordination. Our method firstly learns targeted teammate models, with which each agent can anticipate the teammate's action selection and generate tailored messages to specific agents. We further introduce a novel regularization to leverage interaction sparsity and improve communication efficiency. MAIC is agnostic to specific MARL algorithms and can be flexibly integrated with different value function factorization methods. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves excellent performance on multiple cooperative MARL tasks.

Multi-Agent Incentive Communication via Decentralized Teammate Modeling

In dialogue systems, utterances with similar semantics may have distinctive emotions under different contexts. Therefore, modeling long-range contextual emotional relationships with speaker dependency plays a crucial part in dialogue emotion recognition. Meanwhile, distinguishing the different emotion categories is non-trivial since they usually have semantically similar sentiments. To this end, we adopt supervised contrastive learning to make different emotions mutually exclusive to identify similar emotions better. Meanwhile, we utilize an auxiliary response generation task to enhance the model's ability of handling context information, thereby forcing the model to recognize emotions with similar semantics in diverse contexts. To achieve these objectives, we use the pre-trained encoder-decoder model BART as our backbone model since it is very suitable for both understanding and generation tasks. The experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our proposed model obtains significantly more favorable results than the state-of-the-art model in dialogue emotion recognition. The ablation study further demonstrates the effectiveness of supervised contrastive loss and generative loss.

Contrast and Generation Make BART a Good Dialogue Emotion Recognizer

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (KD) allows knowledge transfer from a trained neural network (teacher) to a more compact one (student) in the absence of original training data. Existing works use a validation set to monitor the accuracy of the student over real data and report the highest performance throughout the entire process. However, validation data may not be available at distillation time either, making it infeasible to record the student snapshot that achieved the peak accuracy. Therefore, a practical data-free KD method should be robust and ideally provide monotonically increasing student accuracy during distillation. This is challenging because the student experiences knowledge degradation due to the distribution shift of the synthetic data. A straightforward approach to overcome this issue is to store and rehearse the generated samples periodically, which increases the memory footprint and creates privacy concerns. We propose to model the distribution of the previously observed synthetic samples with a generative network. In particular, we design a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with a training objective that is customized to learn the synthetic data representations optimally. The student is rehearsed by the generative pseudo replay technique, with samples produced by the VAE. Hence knowledge degradation can be prevented without storing any samples. Experiments on image classification benchmarks show that our method optimizes the expected value of the distilled model accuracy while eliminating the large memory overhead incurred by the sample-storing methods.

Robust and Resource-Efficient Data-Free Knowledge Distillation by Generative Pseudo Replay

Top-k sparsification method is popular and powerful forreducing the communication cost in Federated Learning(FL). However, according to our experimental observation, it spends most of the total communication cost on the index of the selected parameters (i.e., their position informa-tion), which is inefficient for FL training. To solve this problem, we propose a FL compression algorithm for convolution neural networks (CNNs), called SmartIdx, by extending the traditional Top-k largest variation selection strategy intothe convolution-kernel-based selection, to reduce the proportion of the index in the overall communication cost and thusachieve a high compression ratio. The basic idea of SmartIdx is to improve the 1:1 proportion relationship betweenthe value and index of the parameters to n:1, by regarding the convolution kernel as the basic selecting unit in parameter selection, which can potentially deliver more informationto the parameter server under the limited network traffic. Tothis end, a set of rules are designed for judging which kernel should be selected and the corresponding packaging strategies are also proposed for further improving the compressionratio. Experiments on mainstream CNNs and datasets show that our proposed SmartIdx performs 2.5Ã—âˆ’69.2Ã— higher compression ratio than the state-of-the-art FL compression algorithms without degrading model performance.

SmartIdx: Reducing Communication Cost in Federated Learning by Exploiting the CNNs Structures

Multimodal pre-training for audio-and-text has recently been proved to be effective and has significantly improved the performance of many downstream speech understanding tasks. However, these state-of-the-art pre-training audio-text models work well only when provided with large amount of parallel audio-and-text data, which brings challenges on many languages that are rich in unimodal corpora but scarce of parallel cross-modal corpus. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to pre-train an audio-text multimodal model with extremely low-resource parallel data and extra non-parallel unimodal data. Our pre-training framework consists of the following components: (1) Intra-modal Denoising Auto-Encoding (IDAE), which is able to reconstruct input text (audio) representations from a noisy version of itself. (2) Cross-modal Denoising Auto-Encoding (CDAE), which is pre-trained to reconstruct the input text (audio), given both a noisy version of the input text (audio) and the corresponding translated noisy audio features (text embeddings). (3) Iterative Denoising Process (IDP), which iteratively translates raw audio (text) and the corresponding text embeddings (audio features) translated from previous iteration into the new less-noisy text embeddings (audio features). We adapt a dual cross-modal Transformer as our backbone model which consists of two unimodal encoders for IDAE and two cross-modal encoders for CDAE and IDP. Our method achieves comparable performance on multiple downstream speech understanding tasks compared with the model pre-trained on fully parallel data, demonstrating the great potential of the proposed method.

Self-Supervised Audio-and-Text Pre-Training with Extremely Low-Resource Parallel Data

Data-to-text generation systems aim to generate text descriptions based on input data (often represented in the tabular form). A typical system uses huge training samples for learning the correspondence between tables and texts. However, large training sets are expensive to obtain, limiting the applicability of these approaches in real-world scenarios. In this work, we focus on few-shot data-to-text generation. We observe that, while fine-tuned pretrained language models may generate plausible sentences, they suffer from the low semantic coverage problem in the few-shot setting. In other words, important input slots tend to be missing in the generated text. To this end, we propose a search-and-learning approach that leverages pretrained language models but inserts the missing slots to improve the semantic coverage. We further finetune our system based on the search results to smooth out the search noise, yielding better-quality text and improving inference efficiency to a large extent. Experiments show that our model achieves high performance on E2E and WikiBio datasets. Especially, we cover 98.35% of input slots on E2E, largely alleviating the low coverage problem.

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