United States

A weak backdoor, or simply a backdoor, for a Boolean SAT formula F into a class of SAT formulae C is a partial truth assignment T such that F[T] is in C and satisfiability is preserved. The problem of finding a backdoor from class C1 into class C2, or WB(C1,C2), can be stated as follows: Given a formula F in C1, and a natural number k, determine whether there exists a backdoor for F into C2 assigning at most k variables. 
 
 The class 0-Val contains all Boolean formulae with at least one negative literal in each clause. We design a new algorithm for WB(3CNF, 0-Val) by reducing it to a local search variant of 3-SAT. We show that our algorithm runs in time O*(2.562^k), improving on the previous state-of-the-art of O*(2.85^k). Here, the O* notation is a variant of the big-O notation that allows to omit polynomial factors in the input size. 
 
 Next, we look at WB(3CNF, Null), where Null is the class consisting of the empty formula. This problem was known to have a trivial running time upper bound of O*(6^k) and can easily be solved in O*(3^k) time. We use a reduction to Conflict-Free-d-Hitting-Set to prove an upper bound of O*(2.2738^k), and also prove a lower bound of 2^o(k) assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis. 
 
 Finally, Horn is the class of formulae with at most one positive literal per clause. We improve the previous O*(4.54^k) running time for WB(3CNF, Horn) problem to O*(4.17^k), by exploiting the structure of the SAT instance to give a novel proof of the non-existence of the slowest cases after a slight restructuring of the branching priorities.

AAAI 2022

Faster Algorithms for Weak Backdoors

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. 

technical paper

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among strategic agents. We focus on settings wherein monetary transfers are not available and each agent's private valuation is a submodular function with binary marginals, i.e., the agents' valuations are matroid-rank functions. In this setup, we establish a notable dichotomy between two of the most well-studied fairness notions in discrete fair division; specifically, between envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and maximin shares (MMS).   

First, we show that a known Pareto-efficient mechanism is group strategy-proof for finding EF1 allocations, under matroid-rank valuations. The group strategy-proofness guarantee strengthens an existing result that establishes truthfulness (individually for each agent) in the same context. Our result also generalizes prior work from binary additive valuations to the matroid-rank case.  

Next, we establish that an analogous positive result cannot be achieved for MMS, even when considering truthfulness on an individual level. Specifically, we prove that, for matroid-rank valuations, there does not exist a truthful mechanism that is index oblivious, Pareto efficient, and maximin fair.   

For establishing our results, we develop a characterization of truthful mechanisms for matroid-rank functions. This characterization in fact holds for a broader class of valuations (specifically, holds for binary XOS functions) and might be of independent interest.

Truthful and Fair Mechanisms for Matroid-Rank Valuations

In multiwinner approval voting, the goal is to select k-member committees based on voters' approval ballots. A well-studied concept of proportionality in this context is the justified representation (JR) axiom, which demands that no large cohesive group of voters remains unrepresented. However, the JR axiom may conflict with other desiderata, such as coverage (maximizing the number of voters who approve at least one committee member) or social welfare (maximizing the number of approvals obtained by committee members). In this work, we investigate the impact of imposing the JR axiom (as well as the more demanding EJR axiom) on social welfare and coverage. Our approach is threefold: we derive worst-case bounds on the loss of welfare/coverage that is caused by imposing JR, study the computational complexity of finding 'good' committees that provide JR (obtaining a hardness result, an approximation algorithm, and an exact algorithm for one-dimensional preferences), and examine this setting empirically on several synthetic datasets.

The Price of Justified Representation

Relation prediction in knowledge graphs is dominated by embedding based methods which mainly focus on the transductive setting. Unfortunately, they are not able to handle inductive learning where unseen entities and relations are present and cannot take advantage of prior knowledge. Furthermore, their inference process is not easily explainable. In this work, we propose an all-in-one solution, called BERTRL (BERT-based Relational Learning), which leverages pre-trained language model and fine-tunes it by taking relation instances and their possible reasoning paths as training samples. BERTRL outperforms the SOTAs in 15 out of 18 cases in both inductive and transductive settings. Meanwhile, it demonstrates strong generalization capability in few-shot learning and is explainable. The data and code can be found at https://github.com/zhw12/BERTRL.

Inductive Relation Prediction by BERT

We study the problem of online learning with human feedback in the human-in-the-loop machine translation, in which the human translators revise the machine-generated translations and then the corrected translations are used to improve the neural machine translation (NMT) system. However, previous methods require online model updating or additional translation memory networks to achieve high-quality performance, making them inflexible and inefficient in practice.
 In this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric online learning method without changing the model structure.
 This approach introduces two k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) modules: one module memorizes the human feedback, which is the correct sentences provided by human translators, 
 while the other balances the usage of the history human feedback and original NMT models adaptively. 
 Experiments conducted on EMEA and JRC-Acquis benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method obtains substantial improvements on translation accuracy and achieves better adaptation performance with less repeating human correction operations.

Non-Parametric Online Learning from Human Feedback for Neural Machine Translation

Motion completion, as a challenging and fundamental problem, is of great significance in film and game applications. For different motion completion application scenarios (in-betweening, in-filling, and blending), most previous methods deal with the completion problems with case-by-case methodology designs. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method to solve multiple motion completion problems under a unified framework and achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on LaFAN1 (+17% better than previous sota) under multiple evaluation settings. Inspired by the recent great success of self-attention-based transformer models, we consider the completion as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem. Our method consists of three modules - a standard transformer encoder with self-attention that learns long-range dependencies of input motions, a trainable mixture embedding module that models temporal information and encodes different key-frame combinations in a unified form, and a new motion perceptual loss for better capturing high-frequency movements. Our method can predict multiple missing frames within a single forward propagation in real-time and get rid of the post-processing requirement. We also introduce a novel large-scale dance movement dataset for exploring the scaling capability of our method and its effectiveness in complex motion applications.

A Unified Framework for Real Time Motion Completion

Various neural network models have been proposed to tackle combinatorial optimization problems such as the travelling salesman problem (TSP). Existing learning-based TSP methods adopt a simple setting that the training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, the existing literature fails to solve TSP instances when training and testing data have different distributions.
Concretely, we find that different training and testing distribution will result in more difficult TSP instances, i.e., the solution obtained by the model has a large gap from the optimal solution.
To tackle this problem, in this work, we study learning-based TSP methods when training and testing data have different distributions using adaptive-hardness, i.e., how difficult a TSP instance can be for a solver. 
This problem is challenging because it is non-trivial to (1) define hardness measurement quantitatively; (2) efficiently and continuously generate sufficiently hard TSP instances upon model training; (3) fully utilize instances with different levels of hardness to learn a more powerful TSP solver.
To solve these challenges, we first propose a principled hardness measurement to quantify the hardness of TSP instances. Then, we propose a hardness-adaptive generator to generate instances with different hardness. We further propose a curriculum learner fully utilizing these instances to train the TSP solver. Experiments show that our hardness-adaptive generator can generate instances ten times harder than the existing methods, and our proposed method achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art models in terms of the optimality gap. The codes are publicly available.

Learning to Solve Travelling Salesman Problem with Hardness-Adaptive Curriculum

Group re-identification (G-ReID) focuses on associating the group images containing the same persons under different cameras. The key challenge of G-ReID is that all the cases of the intra-group member and layout variations are hard to exhaust. To this end, we propose a novel uncertainty modeling, which treats each image as a distribution depending on the current member and layout, then digs out potential group features by random samplings. Based on potential and original group features, uncertainty modeling can learn better decision boundaries, which is implemented by two modules, member variation module (MVM) and layout variation module (LVM). Furthermore, we propose a novel second-order transformer framework (SOT), which is inspired by the fact that the position modeling in the transformer is coped with the G-ReID task. SOT is composed of the intra-member module and inter-member module. Specifically, the intra-member module extracts the first-order token for each member, and then the inter-member module learns a second-order token as a group feature by the above first-order tokens, which can be regarded as the token of tokens. A large number of experiments have been conducted on three available datasets, including CSG, DukeGroup and RoadGroup. The experimental results show that the proposed SOT outperforms all previous state-of-the-art methods.

Uncertainty Modeling with Second-Order Transformer for Group Re-Identification

Expert-layman text style transfer technologies have the potential to improve communication between members of scientific communities and the general public. High-quality information produced by experts is often filled with difficult jargon laypeople struggle to understand. This is a particularly notable issue in the medical domain, where layman are often confused by medical text online. At present, two bottlenecks interfere with the goal of building high-quality medical expert-layman style transfer systems: a dearth of pretrained  medical-domain language models spanning both expert and layman terminologies and a lack of parallel corpora for training the transfer task itself. To mitigate the first issue, we propose a novel language model (LM) pretraining task, Knowledge Base Assimilation, to synthesize pretraining data from the edges of a graph of expert- and layman-style medical terminology terms into an LM during self-supervised learning. To mitigate the second issue, we build a large-scale parallel corpus in the medical expert-layman domain using a margin-based criterion. Our experiments show that transformer-based models pretrained on knowledge base assimilation and other well-established pretraining tasks fine-tuning on our new parallel corpus leads to considerable improvement against expert-layman transfer benchmarks, gaining an average relative improvement of our human evaluation, the Overall Success Rate (OSR), by 106%.

Self-Supervised Knowledge Assimilation for Expert-Layman Text Style Transfer

Pedestrian trajectory prediction has become an essential underpinning in various human-centric applications including but not limited to autonomous vehicles, intelligent surveillance system and social robotics. Previous research endeavors mainly focus on single camera trajectory prediction (SCTP), while the problem of multi-camera trajectory prediction (MCTP) is often overly simplified into predicting presence in the next camera. This paper addresses MCTP from a more realistic yet challenging perspective, by redefining the task as a joint estimation of both future destination and possible trajectory. As such, two major efforts are devoted to facilitating related research and advancing modeling techniques. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive multi-camera Scenes Pedestrian Trajectory Dataset (mcScenes), which is collected from a real-world multi-camera space combined with thorough human interaction annotations and carefully designed evaluation metrics. Secondly, we propose a novel joint prediction framework, namely HM3GAT, for the MCTP task by building a tailored network architecture. The core idea behind HM3GAT is a fusion of topological and trajectory information that are mutually beneficial to the prediction of each task, achieved by deeply customized networks. The proposed framework is comprehensively evaluated on the mcScenes dataset with multiple ablation experiments. Status-of-the-art SCTP models are adopted as baselines to further validate the advantages of our method in terms of both information fusion and technical improvement. The mcScenes dataset, the HM3GAT, and alternative models are made publicly available for interested readers.

Hierarchical Multi-Supervision Multi-Interaction Graph Attention Network for Multi-Camera Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Despite of achieving great success in real life, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is still suffering from three critical issues, which are data efficiency, lack of the interpretability and transferability. Recent research shows that embedding symbolic knowledge into DRL is promising in addressing those challenges. Inspired by this, we introduce a novel deep reinforcement learning framework with symbolic options. This framework features a loop training procedure, which enables guiding the improvement of policy by planning with action models and symbolic options learned from interactive trajectories automatically. The learned symbolic options help doing the dense requirement of expert domain knowledge and provide inherent interpretabiliy of policies. Moreover, the transferability and data efficiency can be further improved by planning with the action models. To validate the effectiveness of this framework, we conduct experiments on two domains, Montezuma's Revenge and Office World respectively, and the results demonstrate the comparable performance, improved data efficiency, interpretability and transferability.

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