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Argumentation frameworks (AFs) are a core formalism in the field of formal argumentation. As most standard computational tasks regarding AFs are hard for the first or second level of the Polynomial Hierarchy, a variety of algorithmic approaches to achieve manageable runtimes have been considered in the past. Among them, the backdoor-approach and the treewidth-approach turned out to yield fixed-parameter tractable fragments. However, many applications yield high parameter values for these methods, often rendering them infeasible in practice. We introduce the backdoor-treewidth approach for abstract argumentation, combining the best of both worlds with a guaranteed parameter value that does not exceed the minimum of the backdoor- and treewidth-parameter. In particular, we formally define backdoor-treewidth and establish fixed-parameter tractability for standard reasoning tasks of abstract argumentation. Moreover, we provide systems to find and exploit backdoors of small width, and conduct systematic experiments evaluating the new parameter.

AAAI 2022

Tractable Abstract Argumentation via Backdoor-Treewidth

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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 introduce novel methods for encoding acyclicity and s-t-reachability constraints for propositional formulas with underlying directed graphs, based on vertex elimination graphs, which makes them suitable for cases where the underlying graph has a low directed elimination width. In contrast to solvers with ad hoc constraint propagators for graph constraints such as GraphSAT, our methods encode these constraints as standard propositional clauses, making them directly applicable with any SAT solver. An empirical study demonstrates that our methods do often outperform both earlier encodings of these constraints as well as GraphSAT especially when underlying graphs have a low directed elimination width.

Propositional Encodings of Acyclicity and Reachability by Using Vertex Elimination

Reactive synthesis from high-level specifications that combine hard constraints expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) with soft constraints expressed by discounted sum (DS) rewards has applications in planning and reinforcement learning. An existing approach combines techniques from LTL synthesis with optimization for the DS rewards but has failed to yield a sound algorithm. An alternative approach combining LTL synthesis with satisficing DS rewards (rewards that achieve a threshold) is sound and complete for integer discount factors, but, in practice, a fractional discount factor is desired. This work extends the existing satisficing approach, presenting the first sound algorithm for synthesis from LTL and DS rewards with fractional discount factors. The utility of our algorithm is demonstrated on robotic planning domains.

Synthesis from Satisficing and Temporal Goals

We introduce a new statistical verification algorithm that formally quantifies the behavioral robustness of any time-continuous process formulated as a continuous-depth model. Our algorithm solves a set of global optimization (Go) problems over a given time horizon to construct a tight enclosure (Tube) of the set of all process executions starting from a ball of initial states. We call our algorithm GoTube. Through its construction, GoTube ensures that the bounding tube is conservative up to a desired probability and up to a desired tightness.
 GoTube is implemented in JAX and optimized to scale to complex continuous-depth neural network models. Compared to advanced reachability analysis tools for time-continuous neural networks, GoTube does not accumulate overapproximation errors between time steps and avoids the infamous wrapping effect inherent in symbolic techniques. We show that GoTube substantially outperforms state-of-the-art verification tools in terms of the size of the initial ball, speed, time-horizon, task completion, and scalability on a large set of experiments.
 GoTube is stable and sets the state-of-the-art in terms of its ability to scale to time horizons well beyond what has been previously possible.

GoTube: Scalable Statistical Verification of Continuous-Depth Models

Decision trees are a popular choice of explainable model, but just like neural networks, they suffer from adversarial examples. Existing algorithms for fitting decision trees robust against adversarial examples are greedy heuristics and lack approximation guarantees. In this paper we propose ROCT, a collection of methods to train decision trees that are optimally robust against user-specified attack models. We show that the min-max optimization problem that arises in adversarial learning can be solved using a single minimization formulation for decision trees with 0-1 loss. We propose such formulations in Mixed-Integer Linear Programming and Maximum Satisfiability, which widely available solvers can optimize. We also present a method that determines the upper bound on adversarial accuracy for any model using bipartite matching. Our experimental results demonstrate that the existing heuristics achieve close to optimal scores while ROCT achieves state-of-the-art scores.

Robust Optimal Classification Trees Against Adversarial Examples

Correlated Equilibrium is a solution concept that is more general than Nash Equilibrium (NE) and can lead to outcomes with better social welfare. However, its natural extension to the sequential setting, the Extensive Form Correlated Equilibrium (EFCE), requires a quadratic amount of space to solve, even in restricted settings without randomness in nature. To alleviate these concerns, we apply subgame resolving, a technique extremely successful in finding NE in zero-sum games to solving general-sum EFCEs. Subgame resolving refines a correlation plan in an online manner: instead of solving for the full game upfront, it only solves for strategies in subgames that are reached in actual play, resulting in significant computational gains. In this paper, we (i) lay out the foundations to quantify the quality of a refined strategy, in terms of the social welfare and exploitability of correlation plans, (ii) show that EFCEs possess a sufficient amount of independence between subgames to perform resolving efficiently, and (iii) provide two algorithms for resolving, one using linear programming and the other based on regret minimization. Both methods guarantee safety, i.e., they will never be counterproductive. Our methods are the first time an online method has been applied to the correlated, general-sum setting.

Safe Subgame Resolving for Extensive Form Correlated Equilibrium

Diverse planning is an important problem in automated planning with many real world applications. Recently, diverse planning has seen renewed interest, with work that defines a taxonomy of computational problems with respect to both plan quality and solution diversity. However, despite the recent advances in diverse planning, the variety of approaches and the number of available planners are still quite limited, even nonexistent for several computational problems. In this work, we aim to extend the portfolio of planners for various computational problems in diverse planning. To that end, we introduce a novel approach to finding solutions for three computational problems within diverse planning and present planners for these three problems. For one of these problems, our approach is the first one that is able to provide solutions to the problem. For another, we show that top-k and top quality planners can provide, albeit naive, solutions to the problem and we extend these planners to improve the diversity of the solution. Finally, for the third problem, we show that some existing diverse planners already provide solutions to that problem. We suggest another approach and empirically show it to compare favorably with these existing planners.

Bounding Quality in Diverse Planning

In recent years, tree decoders become more popular than LaTeX string decoders in the field of handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) as they can capture the hierarchical tree structure of mathematical expressions. However previous tree decoders converted the tree structure labels into a fixed and ordered sequence, which could not make full use of the diversified expression of tree labels. In this study, we propose a novel tree decoder (TDv2) to fully utilize the tree structure labels. Compared with previous tree decoders, this new model does not require a fixed priority for different branches of a node during training and inference, which can effectively improve the model generalization capability. The input and output of the model make full use of the tree structure label, so that there is no need to find the parent node in the decoding process, which simplifies the decoding process and adds a prior information to help predict the node. We verified the effectiveness of each part of the model through comprehensive ablation experiments and attention visualization analysis. On the authoritative CROHME 14/16/19 datasets, our method achieves the state-of-the-art results.

TDv2: A Novel Tree-Structured Decoder for Offline Mathematical Expression Recognition

In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce and the model is expected to perform in the zero or few shot setting. Recently, several works have shown that continual pretraining or performing a second phase of pretraining (inter-training) which is better aligned with the downstream task, can lead to improved results, especially in the scarce data setting. Here, we propose to leverage sentiment-carrying discourse markers to generate large-scale weakly-labeled data, which in turn can be used to adapt language models for sentiment analysis. Extensive experimental results show the value of our approach on various benchmark datasets, including the finance domain. Code, models and data are available at https://github.com/ibm/tslm-discourse-markers.

Fortunately, Discourse Markers Can Enhance Language Models for Sentiment Analysis

Recent work on neuro-symbolic inductive logic programming has led to promising approaches that can learn explanatory rules from noisy, real-world data. While some proposals approximate logical operators with differentiable operators from fuzzy or real-valued logic that are parameter-free thus diminishing their capacity to fit the data, other approaches are only loosely based on logic making it difficult to interpret the learned ``rules". In this paper, we propose learning rules with the recently proposed logical neural networks (LNN). Compared to others, LNNs offer a strong connection to classical Boolean logic thus allowing for precise interpretation of learned rules while harboring parameters that can be trained with gradient-based optimization to effectively fit the data. We extend LNNs to induce rules in first-order logic. Our experiments on standard benchmarking tasks confirm that LNN rules are highly interpretable and can achieve comparable or higher accuracy due to their flexible parameterization.

Neuro-Symbolic Inductive Logic Programming with Logical Neural Networks

The Cumulative constraint greatly contributes to the success of constraint programming at solving scheduling problems. The SoftCumulative, a version of the Cumulative where overloading the resource incurs a penalty is, however, less studied. We introduce a checker and a filtering algorithm for the SoftCumulative, which are inspired by the powerful energetic reasoning rule for the Cumulative. Both algorithms can be used with classic linear penalty function, but also with a quadratic penalty function, where the penalty of overloading the resource increases quadratically with the amount of the overload. We show that these algorithms are more general than existing algorithms and vastly outperform a decomposition of the SoftCumulative in practice.

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