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Much of the research on learning symbolic models of AI agents focuses on agents with stationary models. This assumption fails to hold in settings where the agent&#39;s capabilities may change as a result of learning, adaptation, or other post-deployment modifications. Efficient assessment of agents in such settings is critical for learning the true capabilities of an AI system and for ensuring its safe usage. In this work, we propose a novel approach to differentially assess black-box AI agents that have drifted from their previously known models. As a starting point, we consider the fully observable and deterministic setting. We leverage sparse observations of the drifted agent&#39;s current behavior and knowledge of its initial model to generate an active querying policy that selectively queries the agent and computes an updated model of its functionality. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach is much more efficient than re-learning the agent model from scratch. We also show that the cost of differential assessment using our method is proportional to the amount of drift in the agent&#39;s functionality.

AAAI 2022

Differential Assessment of Black-Box AI Agents

The AAAI 2025 presidential panel on the future of AI research aims to help all AI stakeholders navigate the recent significant transformations in AI capabilities, as well as AI research methodologies, environments, and communities. It includes 17 chapters, each covering one topic related to AI research, and sketching its history, current trends and open challenges. The study has been conducted by 25 AI researchers and supported by 15 additional contributors and 475 respondents to a community survey.

The Future of AI Research - Webinar Series

Much of the research on learning symbolic models of AI agents focuses on agents with stationary models. This assumption fails to hold in settings where the agent's capabilities may change as a result of learning, adaptation, or other post-deployment modifications. Efficient assessment of agents in such settings is critical for learning the true capabilities of an AI system and for ensuring its safe usage. In this work, we propose a novel approach to differentially assess black-box AI agents that have drifted from their previously known models. As a starting point, we consider the fully observable and deterministic setting. We leverage sparse observations of the drifted agent's current behavior and knowledge of its initial model to generate an active querying policy that selectively queries the agent and computes an updated model of its functionality. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach is much more efficient than re-learning the agent model from scratch. We also show that the cost of differential assessment using our method is proportional to the amount of drift in the agent's functionality.

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 study the online influence maximization (OIM) problem in social networks, where in multiple rounds the learner repeatedly chooses seed nodes to generate cascades, observes the cascade feedback, and gradually learns the best seeds that generate the largest cascade. We focus on two major challenges in this paper. First, we work with node-level feedback instead of edge-level feedback. The edge-level feedback reveals all edges that pass through information in a cascade, whereas the node-level feedback only reveals the activated nodes with timestamps. The node-level feedback is arguably more realistic since in practice it is relatively easy to observe who is influenced but very difficult to observe from which relationship (edge) the influence comes. Second, we use standard offline oracles instead of offline pair-oracles. To compute a good seed set for the next round, an offline pair-oracle finds the best seed set and the best parameters within the confidence region simultaneously, and such an oracle is difficult to compute due to the combinatorial core of the OIM problem. So we focus on how to use the standard offline influence maximization oracle which finds the best seed set given the edge parameters as input. In this paper, we resolve these challenges for the famous independent cascade (IC) diffusion model. The past research only achieves edge-level feedback, while we present the first optimal regret algorithm for the node-level feedback. For the first challenge above, we apply a novel adaptation of the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) approach to learn the graph parameters and its confidence region (a confidence ellipsoid). For the second challenge, we adjust the update procedure to dissect the confidence ellipsoid into confidence intervals on each parameter, so that the standard offline influence maximization oracle is enough.

Online Influence Maximization with Node-Level Feedback Using Standard Offline Oracles

In many real-world scenarios, we often deal with streaming data that is sequentially collected over time. Due to the non-stationary nature of the environment, the streaming data distribution may change in unpredictable ways, which is known as the concept drift in the literature. To handle concept drift, previous methods first detect when/where the concept drift happens and then adapt models to fit the distribution of the latest data. However, there are still many cases that some underlying factors of environment evolution are predictable, making it possible to model the future concept drift trend of the streaming data, while such cases are not fully explored in previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel method DDG-DA, that can effectively forecast the evolution of data distribution and improve the performance of models. Specifically, we first train a predictor to estimate the future data distribution, then leverage it to generate training samples, and finally train models on the generated data. We conduct experiments on three real-world tasks (forecasting on stock price trend, electricity load and solar irradiance) and obtained significant improvement on multiple widely-used models.

DDG-DA: Data Distribution Generation for Predictable Concept Drift Adaptation

As a decisive part in the success of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), spatio-temporal predictive modeling for crowd movements is a challenging task particularly considering scenarios where societal events drive mobility behavior deviated from the normality. While tremendous progress has been made to model high-level spatio-temporal regularities with deep learning, most, if not all of the existing methods are neither aware of the dynamic interactions among multiple transport modes nor adaptive to unprecedented volatility brought by potential societal events. In this paper, we are therefore motivated to improve the canonical spatio-temporal network (ST-Net) from two perspectives: (1) design a heterogeneous mobility information network (HMIN) to explicitly represent intermodality in multimodal mobility; (2) propose a memory-augmented dynamic filter generator (MDFG) to generate sequence-specific parameters in an on-the-fly fashion for various scenarios. The enhanced event-aware spatio-temporal network, namely EAST-Net, is evaluated on several real-world datasets with a wide variety and coverage of societal events. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results verify the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Code and data are published on https://github.com/underdoc-wang/EAST-Net.

Event-Aware Multimodal Mobility Nowcasting

Decentralized stochastic gradient descent methods have attracted increasing interest in recent years. Numerous methods have been proposed for the nonconvex finite-sum optimization problem.  However, existing methods have a large sample complexity,  slowing down the empirical convergence speed. To address this issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel decentralized stochastic gradient descent method for the nonconvex finite-sum optimization problem, which enjoys a better sample and communication complexity than existing methods. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one achieving such favorable sample and communication complexities. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments and the experimental results have confirmed the superior performance of our proposed method.

Efficient Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent Method for Nonconvex Finite-Sum Optimization Problems

Learning effective embeddings for potentially irregularly sampled time-series, evolving at different time scales, is fundamental for machine learning tasks such as classification and clustering. Task-dependent embeddings rely on similarities between data samples to learn effective geometries. However, many popular time-series similarity measures are not valid distance metrics, and as a result they do not reliably capture the intricate relationships between the multi-variate time-series data samples for learning effective embeddings. One of the primary ways to formulate an accurate distance metric is by forming distance estimates via Monte-Carlo-based expectation evaluations. However, the high-dimensionality of the underlying distribution, and the inability to sample from it, pose significant challenges. To this end, we develop an Importance Sampling based distance metric -- I-SEA -- which enjoys the properties of a metric while consistently achieving superior performance for machine learning tasks such as classification and representation learning. I-SEA leverages Importance Sampling and Non-parametric Density Estimation to adaptively estimate distances, enabling implicit estimation from the underlying high-dimensional distribution, resulting in improved accuracy and reduced variance. We theoretically establish the properties of I-SEA and demonstrate its capabilities via experimental evaluations on real-world healthcare datasets.

I-SEA: Importance Sampling and Expected Alignment-Based Deep Distance Metric Learning for Time Series Analysis and Embedding

Due to the surge of cloud-assisted AI services, the problem of designing resilient prediction serving systems that can effectively cope with stragglers and minimize response delays has attracted much interest. The common approach for tackling this problem is replication which assigns the same prediction task to multiple workers. This approach, however, is  inefficient and incurs significant resource overheads. Hence, a learning-based approach known as parity model (ParM) has been recently proposed which learns models that can generate ``parities'' for a group of predictions  to reconstruct the predictions of the slow/failed workers. While this learning-based approach is more resource-efficient than replication, it is tailored to the specific model hosted by the cloud and is particularly suitable for a small number of queries (typically less than four) and tolerating very few stragglers (mostly one). Moreover, ParM does not handle Byzantine adversarial workers. We propose a different approach, named Approximate Coded Inference (ApproxIFER), that does not require training any parity models, hence it is agnostic to the model hosted by the cloud and can be readily applied to different data domains and model architectures. Compared with earlier works, ApproxIFER can handle a general number of stragglers and scales significantly better with the  number of queries. Furthermore, ApproxIFER is robust against Byzantine workers. Our extensive experiments on a large number of datasets and model architectures show significant degraded mode accuracy improvement by up to 58% over ParM.

ApproxIFER: A Model-Agnostic Approach to Resilient and Robust Prediction Serving Systems

The shortcomings of maximum likelihood estimation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning have been highlighted by an increasing number of papers. When the model class is misspecified or has a limited representational capacity, model parameters with high likelihood might not necessarily result in high performance of the agent on a downstream control task. To alleviate this problem, we propose an end-to-end approach for model learning which directly optimizes the expected returns using implicit differentiation. We treat a value function that satisfies the Bellman optimality operator induced by the model as an implicit function of model parameters and show how to differentiate the function. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence highlighting the benefits of our approach in the model misspecification regime compared to likelihood-based methods.

Control-Oriented Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Differentiation

The efficient detection of outbreaks and other cascading phenomena is a fundamental problem in a number of domains, including disease spread, social networks, and infrastructure networks. In such settings, monitoring and testing a small group of pre-selected nodes from the susceptible population (i.e., a sensor set) is often the preferred testing regime. We study the problem of selecting a sensor set that minimizes the delay in detection---we refer to this as the MinDelSS problem. Prior methods for minimizing the detection time rely on greedy algorithms using submodularity. We show that this approach can sometimes lead to a worse approximation for minimizing the detection time than desired. We also show that MinDelSS is hard to approximate within an O(n^(1-1/g))-factor for any constant g greater than or equal to 2 for a graph with n nodes. This instead motivates seeking a bicriteria approximations. We present the algorithm RoundSensor, which gives a rigorous worst case O(log(n))-factor for the detection time, while violating the budget by a factor of O(log^2(n)). Our algorithm is based on the sample average approximation technique from stochastic optimization, combined with linear programming and rounding. We evaluate our algorithm on several networks, including hospital contact networks, which validates its effectiveness in real settings.

Provable Sensor Sets for Epidemic Detection over Networks with Minimum Delay

Co-training, extended from self-training, is one of the frameworks for semi-supervised learning. Without natural split of features, single-view co-training works at the cost of training extra classifiers, where the algorithm should be delicately designed to prevent individual classifiers from collapsing into each other. To remove these obstacles which deter the adoption of single-view co-training, we present a simple and efficient algorithm Multi-Head Co-Training. By integrating base learners into a multi-head structure, the model is in a minimal amount of extra parameters. Every classification head in the unified model interacts with its peers through a â€œWeak and Strong Augmentationâ€ strategy, in which the diversity is naturally brought by the strong data augmentation. Therefore, the proposed method facilitates single-view co-training by 1). promoting diversity implicitly and 2). only requiring a small extra computational overhead. The effectiveness of Multi-Head Co-Training is demonstrated in an empirical study on standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks.

Semi-Supervised Learning with Multi-Head Co-Training

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether the model can well approximate the environment. However, learning an accurate model is challenging, especially in complex and noisy environments. To tackle this problem, we propose the conservative model-based actor-critic (CMBAC), a novel approach that achieves high sample efficiency without the strong reliance on accurate learned models. Specifically, CMBAC learns multiple estimates of the Q-value function from a set of inaccurate models and uses the average of the bottom-k estimates---a conservative estimate---to optimize the policy. An appealing feature of CMBAC is that the conservative estimates effectively encourage the agent to avoid unreliable â€œpromising actionsâ€---whose values are high in only a small fraction of the models. Experiments demonstrate that CMBAC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of sample efficiency on several challenging control tasks, and the proposed method is more robust than previous methods in noisy environments.

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