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Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy&#39;s value function. TD(λ), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction error into the historical context. However, this approach often neglects the significance of historical states and the relative importance of propagating the TD error, influenced by challenges such as visitation imbalance or outcome noise. To address this, we propose a novel TD algorithm named discerning TD learning (DTD), which allows flexible emphasis functions—predetermined or adapted during training—to allocate efforts effectively across states. We establish the convergence properties of our method within a specific class of emphasis functions and showcase its promising potential for adaptation to deep RL contexts. Empirical results underscore that employing a judicious emphasis function not only improves value estimation but also expedites learning across diverse scenarios.

AAAI 2024

Discerning Temporal Difference Learning

ml: reinforcement learning theory

ml: reinforcement learning algorithms

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.

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-26 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.

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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.

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD(λ), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction error into the historical context. However, this approach often neglects the significance of historical states and the relative importance of propagating the TD error, influenced by challenges such as visitation imbalance or outcome noise. To address this, we propose a novel TD algorithm named discerning TD learning (DTD), which allows flexible emphasis functions—predetermined or adapted during training—to allocate efforts effectively across states. We establish the convergence properties of our method within a specific class of emphasis functions and showcase its promising potential for adaptation to deep RL contexts. Empirical results underscore that employing a judicious emphasis function not only improves value estimation but also expedites learning across diverse scenarios.

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.

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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. 

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) provides an effective solution for decision-making problems involving conflicting objectives. However, achieving high-quality approximations to the Pareto policy set remains challenging, especially in complex tasks with continuous or high-dimensional state-action space. In this paper, we propose the Pareto Ascent Directional Decomposition based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (PA2D-MORL) method, which constructs an efficient scheme for multi-objective problem decomposition and policy improvement, leading to a superior approximation of Pareto policy set. The proposed method leverages Pareto ascent direction to select the scalarization weights and computes the multi-objective policy gradient, which determines the policy optimization direction and ensures joint improvement on all objectives. Meanwhile, multiple policies are selectively optimized under an evolutionary framework to approximate the Pareto frontier from different directions. Additionally, a Pareto adaptive fine-tuning approach is applied to enhance the density and spread of the Pareto frontier approximation. Experiments on various multi-objective robot control tasks show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of both quality and stability of the outcomes.

PA2D-MORL: Pareto Ascent Directional Decomposition Based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning | VIDEO

In this paper, we study the collaborative learning model, which concerns the tradeoff between parallelism and communication overhead in multi-agent multi-armed bandits.  For regret minimization in multi-armed bandits, we present the first set of tradeoffs between the number of rounds of communication between the agents and the regret of the collaborative learning process.

Communication-Efficient Collaborative Regret Minimization in Multi-Armed Bandits | VIDEO

Recent advances in event-based research prioritize sparsity and temporal precision. Approaches learning sparse point-based representations through graph CNNs (GCN) become more popular. Yet, these graph techniques hold lower performance than their frame-based counterpart due to two issues: (i) Biased graph structures that don't properly incorporate varied attributes (such as semantics, and spatial and temporal signals) for each vertex, resulting in inaccurate graph representations. (ii) A shortage of robust pretrained models. Here we solve the first problem by proposing a new event-based GCN (EDGCN), with a dynamic aggregation module to integrate all attributes of vertices adaptively. To address the second problem, we introduce a novel learning framework called cross-representation distillation (CRD), which leverages the dense representation of events as a cross-representation auxiliary to provide additional supervision and prior knowledge for the event graph. This frame-to-graph distillation allows us to benefit from the large-scale priors provided by CNNs while still retaining the advantages of graph-based models. Extensive experiments show our model and learning framework are effective and generalize well across multiple vision tasks.

A Dynamic GCN with Cross-Representation Distillation for Event-Based Learning | VIDEO

Online advertising has been one of the most important sources for industry's growth, where the demand-side platforms (DSP) play an important role via bidding to the ad exchanges on behalf of their advertiser clients. Since more and more ad exchanges have shifted from second to first price auctions, it is challenging for DSPs to adjust bidding strategy in the volatile environment. Recent studies on bid shading in first-price auctions may have limited performance due to relatively strong hypotheses about winning probability distribution. Moreover, these studies do not consider the incentive of advertiser clients, which can be crucial for a reliable advertising platform. In this work, we consider both the optimization of bid shading technique and the design of internal auction which is ex-post incentive compatible (IC) for the management of a DSP. Firstly, we prove that the joint design of bid shading and ex-post IC auction can be reduced to choosing one monotone bid function for each advertiser without loss of optimality. Then we propose a parameterized neural network to implement the monotone bid functions. With well-designed surrogate loss, the objective can be optimized in an end-to-end manner. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm.

Simultaneous Optimization of Bid Shading and Internal Auction for Demand-Side Platforms

Cross-modal hashing~(CMH) is an efficient technique to retrieve relevant data across different modalities, such as images, texts, and videos, which has attracted more and more attention due to its low storage cost and fast query speed. Although existing CMH methods achieve remarkable processes, almost all of them treat all samples of varying difficulty levels without discrimination, thus leaving them vulnerable to noise or outliers. Based on this observation, we reveal and study dual difficulty levels implied in cross-modal hashing learning, \ie instance-level and feature-level difficulty. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Self-Paced Cross-Modal Hashing (DSCMH) that mimics human cognitive learning to learn hashing from ``easy'' to ``hard'' in both instance and feature levels, thereby embracing robustness against noise/outliers. Specifically, our DSCMH assigns weights to each instance and feature to measure their difficulty or reliability, and then uses these weights to automatically filter out the noisy and irrelevant data points in the original space. By gradually increasing the weights during training, our method can focus on more instances and features from ``easy'' to ``hard'' in training, thus mitigating the adverse effects of noise or outliers. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely-used benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DSCMH over 12 state-of-the-art CMH methods.

Dual Self-Paced Cross-Modal Hashing

Tactile signals collected by wearable electronics are essential in modeling and understanding human behavior. One of the main applications of tactile signals is action classification, especially in healthcare and robotics. However, existing tactile classification methods fail to capture the spatial and temporal features of tactile signals simultaneously, which results in sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we design Spatio-Temporal Aware tactility Transformer (STAT) to utilize continuous tactile signals for action classification. We propose spatial and temporal embeddings along with a new temporal pretraining task in our model, which aims to enhance the transformer in modeling the spatio-temporal features of tactile signals. Specially, the designed temporal pretraining task is to differentiate the time order of tubelet inputs to model the temporal properties explicitly. Experimental results on a public action classification dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all metrics.

Jointly Modeling Spatio-Temporal Features of Tactile Signals for Action Classification

In recent years, object detection in deep learning has experienced rapid development. However, most existing object detection models perform well only on closed-set datasets, ignoring a large number of potential objects whose categories are not defined in the training set. These objects are often identified as background or incorrectly classified as pre-defined categories by the detectors. In this paper, we focus on the challenging problem of Novel Class Discovery and Localization (NCDL), aiming to train detectors that can detect the categories present in the training data, while also actively discover, localize, and cluster new categories. We analyze existing NCDL methods and identify the core issue: object detectors tend to be biased towards seen objects, and this leads to the neglect of unseen targets. To address this issue, we first propose an Debiased Region Mining (DRM) approach that combines class-agnostic Region Proposal Network (RPN) and class-aware RPN in a complementary manner. Additionally, we suggest to improve the representation network through semi-supervised contrastive learning by leveraging unlabeled data. Finally, we adopt a simple and efficient mini-batch K-means clustering method for novel class discovery. We conduct extensive experiments on the NCDL benchmark, and the results demonstrate that the proposed DRM approach significantly outperforms previous methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Debiased Novel Category Discovering and Localization

Differential privacy (DP) has achieved remarkable results in the field of privacy-preserving machine learning. However, existing DP frameworks do not satisfy all the conditions for becoming metrics, which prevents them from deriving better basic private properties and leads to exaggerated values on privacy budgets. We propose Wasserstein differential privacy (WDP), an alternative DP framework to measure the risk of privacy leakage, which satisfies the properties of symmetry and triangle inequality. We show and prove that WDP has 13 excellent properties, which can be theoretical supports for the better performance of WDP than other DP frameworks. 
In addition, we derive a general privacy accounting method called Wasserstein accountant, which enables WDP to be applied in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) scenarios containing subsampling. Experiments on basic mechanisms, compositions and deep learning show that the privacy budgets obtained by Wasserstein accountant are relatively stable and less influenced by order. Moreover, the overestimation on privacy budgets can be effectively alleviated. The code is available at https://github.com/Hifipsysta/WDP.

Wasserstein Differential Privacy | VIDEO

Global localization is a challenging task for intelligent robots, as its accuracy directly contributes to the performance of downstream navigation and planning tasks. However, existing literature focus more on the place retrieval and the success rate of localization, with limited attention given to the metrics of position estimation. In this paper, a single-shot global LiDAR localization method is proposed with the ultimate goal of achieving high position accuracy, inspired by the positioning approach of multi-constellation localization systems. Initially, we perform coarse localization using global descriptors and select observation points along with their corresponding coordinates based on the obtained coarse localization results. Coordinates can be acquired from a pre-built map, GNSS, or other devices. Then, a lightweight LiDAR odometry method is designed to estimate the distance between the retrieved data and the observation points. Ultimately, the localization problem is transformed into an optimization problem of solving a system of multiple sphere equations. The experimental results on the KITTI dataset and the self-collected dataset demonstrate that our method achieves an average localization error (including errors in the z-axis) of 0.89 meters. In addition, it achieves retrieval efficiency of 0.357 s per frame on the former dataset and 0.214 s per frame on the latter one. Code and data are available at https://github.com/jlurobot/multi-constellation-localization.

Multi-Constellation-Inspired Single-Shot Global LiDAR Localization

Deep learning methods on graph data have achieved remarkable efficacy across a variety of real-world applications, such as social network analysis and transaction risk detection. Nevertheless, recent studies have illuminated a concerning fact: even the most expressive Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to graph adversarial attacks. While several methods have been proposed to enhance the robustness of GNN models against adversarial attacks, few have focused on a simple yet realistic approach: valuing the adversarial risks and focused safeguards at the node level. This empowers defenders to allocate heightened security level to vulnerable nodes, while lower to robust nodes. With this new perspective, we propose a novel graph defense strategy RisKeeper, such that the adversarial risk can be directly kept in the input graph. We start at valuing the adversarial risk, by introducing a cost-aware projected gradient descent attack that takes into account both cost avoidance and compliance with costs budgets. Subsequently, we present a learnable approach to ascertain the ideal security level for each individual node by solving a bi-level optimization problem. Through extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Our in-depth case studies provide further insights into vulnerable and robust structural patterns, serving as inspiration for practitioners to exercise heightened vigilance.

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