Canada

Since artificial intelligence has seen tremendous recent successes in many areas, it has sparked great interest in its potential for trustworthy and interpretable risk prediction. However, most models lack causal reasoning and struggle with class imbalance, leading to poor precision and recall. To address this, we propose a Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation model (TDCFD) to transform original feature values into causal feature attributions for the specific risk prediction task. The causal feature attribution helps describe how much contribution the value of this feature can make to the risk prediction result. After the causal feature distillation, a deep neural network is applied to produce trustworthy prediction results with causal interpretability and high precision/recall. We evaluate the performance of our TDCFD method on several synthetic and real datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods regarding precision, recall, interpretability, and causality.

AAAI 2024

Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation: Towards Trustworthy Risk Prediction

risk prediction

trustworthy

causal inference

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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. 

Much effort has been devoted to building multi-modal knowledge graphs by visualizing entities on images, but ignoring the multi-modal information of the relation between entities. Hence, in this paper, we aim to construct a new large-scale multi-modal knowledge graph with triplet facts grounded on images that reflect not only entities but also their relations. To achieve this purpose, we propose a novel pipeline method, including triplet fact filtering, image retrieving, entity-based image filtering, relation-based image filtering, and image clustering. In this way, a multi-modal knowledge graph named ImgFact is constructed, which contains 247,732 triplet facts and 3,730,805 images. In experiments, the manual and automatic evaluations prove the reliable quality of our ImgFact. We further use the obtained images to enhance model performance on two tasks. In particular, the model optimized by our ImgFact achieves an impressive 8.38% and 9.87% improvement over the solutions enhanced by an existing multi-modal knowledge graph and VisualChatGPT on F1 of relation classification. We release ImgFact and its instructions at https://github.com/kleinercubs/ImgFact.

Beyond Entities: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph with Triplet Fact Grounding

Incorporating factual knowledge in knowledge graph is regarded as a promising approach for mitigating the hallucination of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods usually only use the user's input to query the knowledge graph, thus failing to address the factual hallucination generated by LLMs during its reasoning process. To address this problem, this paper proposes Knowledge Graph-based Retrofitting (KGR), a new framework that incorporates LLMs with KGs to mitigate factual hallucination during the reasoning process by retrofitting the initial draft responses of LLMs based on the factual knowledge stored in KGs. Specifically, KGR leverages LLMs to extract, select, validate, and retrofit factual statements within the model-generated responses, which enables an autonomous knowledge verifying and refining procedure without any additional manual efforts. Experiments show that KGR can significantly improve the performance of LLMs on factual QA benchmarks especially when involving complex reasoning processes, which demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of KGR in mitigating hallucination and enhancing the reliability of LLMs.

Mitigating Large Language Model Hallucinations via Autonomous Knowledge Graph-Based Retrofitting

Mobile gaming is a rapidly growing and incredibly profitable sector; having grown seven-fold over the past 10 years, it now grosses over $100 billion annually. This growth was due in large part to a shift in monetization strategies: rather than charging players an upfront cost ("pay-to-play"), games often request optional microtransactions throughout gameplay ("free-to-play"). We focus on a common scenario in which games include wait times---gating either items or game progression---that players can pay to skip. Game designers typically say that they optimize for player happiness rather than revenue; however, prices for skips are typically set at levels that few players are willing to pay, leading to low purchase rates. Under a traditional analysis, it would seem that game designers fail at their stated goal if few players buy what they are selling. We argue that an alternate model can better explain this dynamic: players value tasks more highly as they are perceived to be more difficult. While skips can increase players' utilities by providing instant gratification, pricing skips too cheaply can lower players' utilities by decreasing the perceived amount of work needed to complete a task. We show that high revenue, high player utility, and low purchase rates can all coexist under this model, particularly under a realistic distribution of players having few buyers but a few big-spending "whales." We also investigate how a game designer should optimize prices under our model.

Pay to (Not) Play: Monetizing Impatience in Mobile Games

Time series forecasts of different temporal granularity are widely used in real-world applications, e.g., sales prediction in days and weeks for making different inventory plans. However, these tasks are usually solved separately without ensuring coherence, which is crucial for aligning downstream decisions. Previous works mainly focus on ensuring coherence with some straightforward methods, e.g., aggregation from the forecasts of fine granularity to the coarse ones, and allocation from the coarse granularity to the fine ones. These methods merely take the temporal hierarchical structure to maintain coherence without improving the forecasting accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel granularity message-passing mechanism (GMP) that leverages temporal hierarchy information to improve forecasting performance and also utilizes an adaptive reconciliation (AR) strategy to maintain coherence without performance loss. Furthermore, we introduce an optimization module to achieve task-based targets while adhering to more real-world constraints. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework (GMP-AR) achieves superior performances on temporal hierarchical forecasting tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our framework has been successfully applied to a real-world task of payment traffic management in Alipay by integrating with the task-based optimization module.

GMP-AR: Granularity Message Passing and Adaptive Reconciliation for Temporal Hierarchy Forecasting

Constraint Programming (CP) has been successfully used to model and solve complex combinatorial problems. However, modeling is often not trivial and requires expertise, which is a bottleneck to wider adoption. In Constraint Acquisition (CA), the goal is to assist the user by automatically learning the model.
In (inter)active CA, this is done by interactively posting queries to the user, e.g. does this partial solution satisfy your (unspecified) constraints or not.
While interactive CA methods learn the constraints, the learning is related to symbolic concept learning, as the goal is to learn an exact representation. 
However, a large number of queries is required to learn the model, which is a major limitation. In this paper, we aim to alleviate this limitation by tightening the connection of CA and Machine Learning (ML), by, for the first time in interactive CA, exploiting statistical ML methods. We propose to use probabilistic classification models to guide interactive CA queries to the most promising parts. We discuss how to train classifiers to predict whether a candidate expression from the bias is a constraint of the problem or not, using both relation-based and scope-based features. We then show how the predictions can be used in all layers of interactive CA: the query generation, the scope finding, and the lowest-level constraint finding. We experimentally evaluate our proposed methods using different classifiers and show that our methods greatly outperform the state of the art, decreasing the number of queries needed to converge by up to 72%.

Learning to Learn in Interactive Constraint Acquisition

To understand event structures of documents, event causality identification (ECI) emerges as a crucial task, aiming to discern causal relationships among event mentions. The latest approach for ECI has introduced advanced deep learning models where transformer-based encoding models, complemented by enriching components, are typically leveraged to learn effective event context representations for causality prediction. As such, an important step for ECI models is to transform the event context representations into causal label representations to perform logits score computation for training and inference purposes. Within this framework, event context representations might encapsulate numerous complicated and noisy structures due to the potential long context between the input events while causal label representations are intended to capture pure information about the causal relations to facilitate score estimation. Nonetheless, a notable drawback of existing ECI models stems from their reliance on simple feed-forward networks to handle the complex context-to-label representation transformation process, which might require drastic changes in the representations to hinder the learning process. To overcome this issue, our work introduces a novel method for ECI where, instead abrupt transformations, event context representations are gradually updated to achieve effective label representations. This process will be done incrementally to allow filtering of irrelevant structures at varying levels of granularity for causal relations. To realize this, we present a diffusion model to learn gradual representation transition processes between context and causal labels. It operates through a forward pass for causal label representation noising and a reverse pass for reconstructing label representations from random noise.  Our experiments on different datasets across multiple languages demonstrate the advantages of the diffusion model with state-of-the-art performance for ECI.

Mastering Context-to-Label Representation Transformation for Event Causality Identification with Diffusion Models

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these constraints are enforced while maximizing expected reward. Most recent approaches for solving Constrained RL convert the trajectory based cost constraint into a surrogate problem that can be solved using minor modifications to RL methods. A key drawback with such approaches is an over or underestimation of the cost constraint at each state.  Therefore, we provide an approach that does not modify the trajectory based cost constraint and instead imitates "good" trajectories and avoids "bad" trajectories generated from incrementally improving policies. We employ an oracle that utilizes a reward threshold (which is varied with learning) and the overall cost constraint to label trajectories as "good" or "bad". A key advantage of our approach is that we are able to work from any starting policy or set of trajectories and improve on it. In an exhaustive set of experiments, we demonstrate that our approach is able to outperform top benchmark approaches for solving Constrained RL problems, with respect to expected cost, CVaR cost, or even unknown cost constraints.

Imitate the Good and Avoid the Bad: An Incremental Approach to Safe Reinforcement Learning

In many real-world applications, from robotics to pedestrian trajectory prediction, there is a need to predict multiple real-valued outputs to represent several potential scenarios. Current deep learning techniques to address multiple-output problems are based on two main methodologies: (1) mixture density networks, which suffer from poor stability at high dimensions, or (2) multiple choice learning (MCL), an approach that uses $M$ single-output functions, each only producing a point estimate hypothesis. This paper presents a Mixture of Multiple-Output functions (MoM) approach using a novel variant of dropout, Multiple Hypothesis Dropout. Unlike traditional MCL-based approaches, each multiple-output function not only estimates the mean but also the variance for its hypothesis. This is achieved through a novel stochastic winner-take-all loss which allows each multiple-output function to estimate variance through the spread of its subnetwork predictions.
Experiments on supervised learning problems illustrate that our approach outperforms existing solutions for reconstructing multimodal output distributions.
Additional studies on unsupervised learning problems show that estimating the parameters of latent posterior distributions within a discrete autoencoder significantly improves codebook efficiency, sample quality, precision and recall.

Multiple Hypothesis Dropout: Estimating the Parameters of Multi-Modal Output Distributions | VIDEO

Multi-agent interactions, such as communication, teaching, and bluffing, often rely on higher-order social inference, i.e., understanding how others infer oneself. Such intricate reasoning can be effectively modeled through nested multi-agent reasoning. Nonetheless, the computational complexity escalates exponentially with each level of reasoning, posing a significant challenge. However, humans effortlessly perform complex social inferences as part of their daily lives. To bridge the gap between human-like inference capabilities and computational limitations, we propose a novel approach: leveraging neural networks to amortize high-order social inference, thereby expediting nested multi-agent reasoning. We evaluate our method in two challenging multi-agent interaction domains. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is computationally efficient while exhibiting minimal degradation in accuracy.

Neural Amortized Inference for Nested Multi-Agent Reasoning | VIDEO

This paper proposes SEER, a novel backdoor detection algorithm for vision-language models, addressing the gap in the literature on multi-modal backdoor detection. While backdoor detection in single-modal models has been well studied, the investigation of such defenses in multi-modal models remains limited. Existing backdoor defense mechanisms cannot be directly applied to multi-modal settings due to their increased complexity and search space explosion. In this paper, we propose to detect backdoors in vision-language models by jointly searching image triggers and malicious target texts in feature space shared by vision and language modalities. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SEER can achieve over 92% detection rate on backdoor detection in vision-language models in various settings without accessing training data or knowledge of downstream tasks.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2024

Beyond Entities: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph with Triplet Fact Grounding

Similar lecture

Learning Faithful Representations of Causal Graphs

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2024

Beyond Entities: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph with Triplet Fact Grounding

Similar lecture

Learning Faithful Representations of Causal Graphs

Downloads