Canada

Domain model acquisition has been identified as a bottleneck in the application of planning technology, especially within narrative planning. Learning action models from narrative texts in an automated way is essential to overcome this barrier, but challenging because of the inherent complexities of such texts. We present an evaluation of planning domain models derived from narrative texts using our fully automated, unsupervised system, NaRuto. Our system combines structured event extraction, predictions of commonsense event relations, and textual contradictions and similarities. Evaluation results show that NaRuto generates domain models of significantly better quality than existing fully automated methods, and even sometimes on par with those created by semi-automated methods, with human assistance.

AAAI 2024

NaRuto: Automatically Acquiring Planning Models from Narrative Texts

planning model generation

model learning

commonsense reasoning

event extraction

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. 

AAAI 2021

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

Recently, dense retrieval (DR) models, which represent queries and documents with fixed-width vectors and retrieve relevant ones via nearest neighbor search, have drawn increasing attention from the IR community. 
However, previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of DR critically relies on sufficient training signals, which leads to severe performance degradation when applied in out-of-domain scenarios, where large-scale training data are usually unavailable.
To solve this problem, existing studies adopt a data-augmentation-plus-joint-training paradigm to construct weak/pseudo supervisions on the target domain and combine them with the large-scale human annotated data on the source domain to train the DR models. However, they don't explicitly distinguish the data and the supervision signals in the training process and simply assume that the DR models are mighty enough to capture and memorize different domain knowledge and relevance matching patterns without guidance, which, as shown in this paper, is not true.
Based on this observation, we propose a Robust Multi-Supervision Combining strategy (RMSC) that
decouples the domain and supervision signals by explicitly telling the DR models how the domain data and supervision signals are combined in the training data with specially designed soft tokens. 
With the extra soft tokens to store the domain-specific and supervision-specific knowledge, RMSC allows the DR models 
to conduct retrieval based on human-like relevance matching patterns and target-specific language distribution on the target domain without human annotations.
Extensive experiments on zero-shot DR benchmarks show that RMSC significantly improves the ranking performance on the target domain compared to strong DR baselines and domain adaptation methods, while being stable during training and can be combined with query generation or second-stage pre-training.

Combining Multiple Supervision for Robust Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval

We here address the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods or chores to $n$ agents with \emph{weights} that define their entitlement to the set of indivisible resources. Stemming from well-studied fairness concepts such as envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) for agents with \textit{equal} entitlements, we present, in this study, the first set of impossibility results alongside algorithmic guarantees for fairness among agents with \textit{unequal} entitlements.

Within this paper, we expand the concept of envy-freeness up to any good or chore to the weighted context (WEFX and XWEF respectively), demonstrating that these allocations are not guaranteed to exist for two or three agents. Despite these negative results, we develop a WEFX procedure for two agents with \emph{integer} weights, and furthermore, we devise an approximate WEFX procedure for two agents with \emph{normalized} weights. We further present a polynomial-time algorithm that guarantees a weighted envy-free allocation up to one chore (1WEF) for any number of agents with additive cost functions. Our work underscores the heightened complexity of the weighted fair division problem when compared to its unweighted counterpart.

Almost Envy-Free Allocations of Indivisible Goods or Chores with Entitlements

Negative sampling stands as a pivotal technique in dense retrieval, essential for training effective retrieval models and significantly impacting retrieval performance. While existing negative sampling methods have made commendable progress by leveraging hard negatives, a comprehensive guiding principle for constructing negative candidates and designing negative sampling distributions is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we embark on a theoretical analysis of negative sampling in dense retrieval. This exploration culminates in the unveiling of the quasi-triangular principle, a novel framework that elucidates the triangular-like interplay between query, positive document, and negative document. Fueled by this guiding principle, we introduce TriSampler, a straightforward yet highly effective negative sampling method. The keypoint of TriSampler lies in its ability to selectively sample more informative negatives within a prescribed constrained region. Experimental evaluation show that TriSampler consistently attains superior retrieval performance across a diverse of representative retrieval models.

TriSampler: A Better Negative Sampling Principle for Dense Retrieval

The training problem of neural networks (NNs) is known to be ER-complete with respect to ReLU and linear activation functions. We show that the training problem for NNs equipped with arbitrary activation functions is polynomial-time bireducible to the existential theory of the reals extended with the corresponding activation functions. For effectively continuous activation functions (e.g., the sigmoid function), we obtain an inclusion to low levels of the arithmetical hierarchy. Consequently, the sigmoid activation function leads to the existential theory of the reals with the exponential function, and hence the decidability of training NNs using the sigmoid activation function is equivalent to the decidability of the existential theory of the reals with the exponential function, a long-standing open problem. In contrast, we obtain that the training problem is undecidable if sinusoidal activation functions are considered.

Complexity of Neural Network Training and ETR: Extensions with Effectively Continuous Functions

This paper studies the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for aggregating preferences over combinatorial domains, represented using Conditional Preference Networks (CP-nets). Its focus is on aggregating preferences over so-called \emph{swaps}, for which optimal solutions in general are already known to be of exponential size. We first analyze a trivial 2-approximation algorithm that simply outputs the best of the given input preferences, and establish a structural condition under which the approximation ratio of this algorithm is improved to $4/3$. We then propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm whose outputs are provably no worse than those of the trivial algorithm, but often substantially better. A family of problem instances is presented for which our improved algorithm produces optimal solutions, while, for any $\varepsilon$, the trivial algorithm can\emph{not}\/ attain a $(2-\varepsilon)$-approximation. These results may lead to the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm that solves the CP-net aggregation problem for swaps with an approximation ratio substantially better than $2$.

Approximation Algorithms for Preference Aggregation Using CP-Nets

Current parametric models have made notable progress in 3D hand pose and shape estimation. However, due to the fixed hand topology and complex hand poses, current models are hard to generate meshes that are aligned with the image well. To tackle this issue, we introduce a dual noise estimation method in this paper. Given a single-view image as input, we first adopt a baseline parametric regressor to obtain the coarse hand meshes. We assume the mesh vertices and their image-plane projections are noisy, and can be associated in a unified probabilistic model. We then learn the distributions of noise to refine mesh vertices and their projections. The refined vertices are further utilized to refine camera parameters in a closed-form manner. Consequently, our method obtains well-aligned and high-quality 3D hand meshes. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Interhand2.6M dataset demonstrate that the proposed method not only improves the performance of its baseline by more than 10% but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://github.com/hanhuili/DNE4Hand.

Monocular 3D Hand Mesh Recovery via Dual Noise Estimation

Leveraging wearable devices for motion reconstruction has emerged as an economical and viable technique. Certain methodologies employ sparse Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) on the human body and harness data-driven strategies to model human poses. However, the reconstruction of motion based solely on sparse IMUs data is inherently fraught with ambiguity, a consequence of numerous identical IMU readings corresponding to different poses. In this paper, we explore the spatial importance of multiple sensors, supervised by text that describes specific actions. Specifically, uncertainty is introduced to derive weighted features for each IMU. We also design a Hierarchical Temporal Transformer (HTT) and apply contrastive learning to achieve precise temporal and feature alignment of sensor data with textual semantics. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed approach achieves significant improvements in multiple metrics compared to existing methods. Notably, with textual supervision, our method not only differentiates between ambiguous actions such as sitting and standing but also produces more precise and natural motion.

Spatial-Related Sensors Matters: 3D Human Motion Reconstruction Assisted with Textual Semantics

In this paper, we focus on a realistic yet challenging task, Single Domain Generalization Object Detection (S-DGOD), where only one source domain's data can be used for training object detectors, but have to generalize multiple distinct target domains. In S-DGOD, both high-capacity fitting and generalization abilities are needed due to the task's complexity. Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is known for its high capacity for complex data fitting and we propose to leverage Differentiable NAS to solve S-DGOD. However, it may confront severe over-fitting issues due to the feature imbalance phenomenon, where parameters optimized by gradient descent are biased to learn from the easy-to-learn features, which are usually non-causal and spuriously correlated to ground truth labels, such as the features of background in object detection data. Consequently, this leads to serious performance degradation, especially in generalizing to unseen target domains with huge domain gaps between the source domain and target domains. To address this issue, we propose the Generalizable loss (G-loss), which is an OoD-aware objective, preventing NAS from over-fitting by using gradient descent to optimize parameters not only on a subset of easy-to-learn features but also the remaining predictive features for generalization, and the overall framework is named G-NAS. Experimental results on the S-DGOD urban-scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed G-NAS achieves SOTA performance compared to baseline methods.

G-NAS: Generalizable Neural Architecture Search for Single Domain Generalization Object Detection

Remote physiology, which involves monitoring vital signs without the need for physical contact, has great potential for various applications. Current remote physiology methods rely only on a single camera or radio frequency (RF) sensor to capture the microscopic signatures from vital movements. However, our study shows that fusing deep RGB and RF features from both sensor streams can further improve performance. Because these multimodal features are defined in distinct dimensions and have varying contextual importance, the main challenge in the fusion process lies in the effective alignment of them and adaptive integration of features under dynamic scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel vital sensing model, named Fusion-Vital, that combines the RGB and RF modalities through the new introduction of pairwise input formats and transformer-based fusion strategies. We also perform comprehensive experiments based on a newly collected and released remote vital dataset comprising synchronized video-RF sensors, showing the superiority of the fusion approach over the previous single-sensor baselines in various aspects.

Fusion-Vital: Video-RF Fusion Transformer for Advanced Remote Physiological Measurement

Online dense mapping of urban scenes is of paramount importance for scene understanding of autonomous navigation. Traditional online dense mapping methods fuse sensor measurements (vision, lidar, etc.) across time and space via explicit geometric correspondence. Recently, NeRF-based methods have proved the superiority of neural implicit representations by high-fidelity reconstruction of large-scale city scenes. However, it remains an open problem how to integrate powerful neural implicit representations into online dense mapping. Existing methods are restricted to constrained indoor environments and are too computationally expensive to meet online requirements. To this end, we propose Swift-Mapping, an online neural implicit dense mapping framework in urban scenes. We introduce a novel neural implicit octomap (NIO) structure that provides efficient neural representation for large and dynamic urban scenes while retaining online update capability. Based on that, we propose an online neural dense mapping framework that effectively manages and updates neural octree voxel features. Our approach achieves SOTA reconstruction accuracy while being more than 10x faster in reconstruction speed, demonstrating the superior performance of our method in both accuracy and efficiency.

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