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Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design, i.e. using programs to specify the reward functions in RL environments. Programs allow human engineers to express sub-goals and complex task scenarios in a structured and interpretable way. The challenge of programmatic reward design, however, is that while humans can provide the high-level structures, properly setting the low-level details, such as the right amount of reward for a specific sub-task, remains difficult. A major contribution of this paper is a probabilistic framework that can infer the best candidate programmatic reward function from expert demonstrations. Inspired by recent generative-adversarial approaches, our framework searches for themost likely programmatic reward function under whichthe optimally generated trajectories cannot be differen-tiated from the demonstrated trajectories. Experimental results show that programmatic reward functions learned using this framework can significantly outperform those learned using existing reward learning algorithms, and enable RL agents to achieve state-of-the-art performance on highly complex tasks.

AAAI 2022

Programmatic Reward Design by Example

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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AAAI 2023

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.

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. 

We investigate the fairness concerns of training a machine learning model using data with missing values. Even though there are a number of fairness intervention methods in the literature, most of them require a complete training set as input. In practice, data can have missing values, and data missing patterns can depend on group attributes (e.g. gender or race). Simply applying off-the-shelf fair learning algorithms to an imputed dataset may lead to an unfair model. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze different sources of discrimination risks when training with an imputed dataset. Then, we propose an integrated approach based on decision trees that does not require a separate process of imputation and learning. Instead, we train a tree with missing incorporated as attribute (MIA), which does not require explicit imputation, and we optimize a fairness-regularized objective function. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing fairness intervention methods applied to an imputed dataset, through several experiments on real-world datasets.

Fairness without Imputation: A Decision Tree Approach for Fair Prediction with Missing Values

Recent research has demonstrated that Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial patches which introduce perceptible but localized changes to the input. Nevertheless, existing approaches have focused on generating adversarial patches on images, their counterparts in videos have been less explored. Compared with images, attacking videos is much more challenging as it needs to consider not only spatial cues but also temporal cues. To close this gap, we introduce a novel adversarial attack in this paper, the bullet-screen comment (BSC) attack, which attacks video recognition models with BSCs. Specifically, adversarial BSCs are generated with a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, where the environment is set as the target model and the agent plays the role of selecting the position and transparency of each BSC. By continuously querying the target models and receiving feedback, the agent gradually adjusts its selection strategies in order to achieve a high fooling rate with non-overlapping BSCs. As BSCs can be regarded as a kind of meaningful patch, adding it to a clean video will not affect people's understanding of the video content, nor will arouse people's suspicion. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. On both UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets, our BSC attack method can achieve about 90% fooling rate when attacking three mainstream video recognition models, while only occluding < 8% areas in the video. Our code is available at https://github.com/kay-ck/BSC-attack.

Attacking Video Recognition Models with Bullet-Screen Comments

Modern recommendation systems are mostly based on implicit feedback data which can be quite noisy due to false positives (FPs) caused by many reasons, such as misclicks or quick curiosity. Numerous recommendation algorithms based on collaborative filtering have leveraged post-click user behavior (e.g., skip) to identify false positives. They effectively involved these false positives in the model supervision as negative-like signals. Yet, false positives had not been considered in existing session-based recommendation systems (SBRs) although they provide just as deleterious effects. 
 To resolve false positives in SBRs, we first introduce FP-Metric model which reformulates the objective of the session-based recommendation with FP constraints into metric learning regularization. In addition, we propose FP-AdaMetric that enhances the metric-learning regularization terms with an adaptive module that elaborately calculates the impact of FPs inside sequential patterns. We verify that FP-AdaMetric improves several session-based recommendation models' performances in terms of Hit Rate (HR), MRR, and NDCG on datasets from different domains including music, movie, and game. Furthermore, we show that the adaptive module plays a much more crucial role in FP-AdaMetric model than in other baselines.

FPAdaMetric: False-Positive-Aware Adaptive Metric Learning for Session-Based Recommendation

Blackbox transfer attacks for image classifiers have been extensively studied in recent years. In contrast, little progress has been made on transfer attacks for object detectors. Object detectors take a holistic view of the image and the detection of one object (or lack thereof) often depends on other objects in the scene. This makes such detectors inherently context-aware and adversarial attacks in this space are more challenging than those targeting image classifiers. In this paper, we present a new approach to generate context-aware attacks for object detectors. We show that by using co-occurrence of objects and their relative locations and sizes as context information, we can successfully generate targeted mis-categorization attacks that achieve higher transfer success rates on blackbox object detectors than the state-of-the-art. We test our approach on a variety of object detectors with images from PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets and demonstrate up to 20 percentage points improvement in performance compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.

Context-Aware Transfer Attacks for Object Detection

On-device directional hearing requires audio source separation from a given direction while achieving stringent human-imperceptible latency requirements. While neural nets can achieve significantly better performance than traditional beamformers, all existing models fall short of supporting low-latency causal inference on computationally-constrained wearables. We present DeepBeam, a hybrid model that combines traditional beamformers with a custom lightweight neural net. The former reduces the computational burden of the latter and also improves its generalizability, while the latter is designed to further reduce the memory and computational overhead to enable real-time and low-latency operations. Our evaluation shows comparable performance to state-of-the-art causal inference models on synthetic data while achieving a 5x reduction of model size, 4x reduction of computation per second, 5x reduction in processing time and generalizing better to real hardware data. Further, our real-time hybrid model runs in 8 ms on mobile CPUs designed for low-power wearable devices and achieves an end-to-end latency of 17.5 ms.

Hybrid Neural Networks for On-Device Directional Hearing

Volitionality and subject animacy are fundamental and closely related properties of an event. Their classification is challenging because it requires contextual text understanding and a huge amount of labeled data. This paper proposes a novel method that jointly learns volitionality and subject animacy at a low cost, heuristically labeling events in a raw corpus. Volitionality labels are assigned using a small lexicon of volitional and non-volitional adverbs such as deliberately and accidentally; subject animacy labels are assigned using a list of animate and inanimate nouns obtained from ontological knowledge. We then consider the problem of learning a classifier from the labeled events so that it can perform well on unlabeled events without the words used for labeling. We view the problem as a bias reduction or unsupervised domain adaptation problem and apply the techniques. We conduct experiments with crowdsourced gold data in Japanese and English and show that our method effectively learns volitionality and subject animacy without manually labeled data.

Minimally-Supervised Joint Learning of Event Volitionality and Subject Animacy Classification

Financial assets exhibit dependence structures, i.e., movements of their prices or returns show various correlations. Knowledge of assets' price dependencies can help investors to create a diversified portfolio, aiming to reduce portfolio risk due to the high volatility of the financial market. Since asset dependency changes with time in complex patterns, asset dependency forecast is an essential problem in finance. In this paper, we organize pairwise assets dependencies in an Asset Dependency Matrix (ADM) and formulate the problem of assets dependencies forecast to predict the future ADM given a sequence of past ADMs. We propose a novel idea viewing a sequence of ADMs as a sequence of images to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies among the assets. Inspired by video prediction tasks, we develop a novel Asset Dependency Neural Network (ADNN) to tackle the ADM prediction problem. Experiments show that our proposed framework consistently outperforms baselines on both future ADM prediction and portfolio risk reduction tasks.

Forecasting Asset Dependencies to Reduce Portfolio Risk

MAX k-SAT is one of the archetypal NP-hard problems. Its variation called random MAX k-SAT problem was introduced in order to understand how hard it is to solve instances of the problem on average. The most common model to sample random instances is the uniform model, which has received a large amount of attention. However, the uniform model often fails to capture important structural properties we observe in the real-world instances.  
	
To address these limitations, a more general (in a certain sense) model has been proposed, the configuration model, which is able to produce instances with an arbitrary distribution of  variables' degrees, and so can simulate biases in instances appearing in various applications. 

Our overall goal is to expand the theory built around the uniform model to the more general configuration model for a wide range of degree distributions. This includes locating satisfiability thresholds and analysing the performance of the standard heuristics applied to instances sampled from the configuration model.
	
In this paper we analyse the performance of the pure literal elimination rule. We provide an equation that given an underlying degree distribution gives the number of clauses the pure literal elimination rule satisfies w.h.p. We also show how the distribution of variable degrees changes over time as the algorithm is being executed.

Analysis of Pure Literal Elimination Rule for Non-Uniform Random (MAX) k-SAT Problem with an Arbitrary Degree Distribution

Learning information-rich and generalizable representations effectively from unlabeled multivariate cardiac signals to identify abnormal heart rhythms (cardiac arrhythmias) is valuable in real-world clinical settings but often challenging due to its complex temporal dynamics. Cardiac arrhythmias can vary significantly in temporal patterns even for the same patient (i.e., intra subject difference). Meanwhile, the same type of cardiac arrhythmia can show different temporal patterns among different patients due to different cardiac structures (i.e., inter subject difference). In this paper, we address the challenges by proposing an Intra-Inter Subject Self-Supervised Learning (ISL) model that is customized for multivariate cardiac signals. Our proposed ISL model integrates medical knowledge into self-supervision to effectively learn from intra-inter subject differences. In intra subject self-supervision, ISL model first extracts heartbeat-level features from each subject using a channel-wise attentional CNN-RNN encoder. Then a stationarity test module is employed to capture the temporal dependencies between heartbeats. In inter subject self-supervision, we design a set of data augmentations according to the clinical characteristics of cardiac signals and perform contrastive learning among subjects to learn distinctive representations for various types of patients. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets were conducted. In a semi-supervised transfer learning scenario, our pre-trained ISL model leads about 10% improvement over supervised training when only 1% labeled data is available, suggesting strong generalizability and robustness of the model.

Intra-Inter Subject Self-Supervised Learning for Multivariate Cardiac Signals

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the online and offline setting, which we summarize and term as runtime uncertainty. Such uncertainty cannot be learned from the logged data due to its abnormality and rareness nature. To assert a certain level of robustness, we perturb the off-policy estimators along an adversarial direction in view of the runtime uncertainty. It allows the resulting estimators to be robust not only to observed but also unexpected runtime uncertainties. Leveraging this idea, we bring runtime-uncertainty robustness to three major off-policy learning methods: the inverse propensity score method, reward-model method, and doubly robust method. We theoretically justify the robustness of our methods to runtime uncertainty, and demonstrate their effectiveness using both the simulation and the real-world online experiments.

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