Canada

Next Point-of-Interests (POIs) recommendation task aims to provide a dynamic ranking of POIs based on users&#39; current check-in trajectories. The recommendation performance of this task is contingent upon a comprehensive understanding of users&#39; personalized behavioral patterns through Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) data. While prior studies have adeptly captured sequential patterns and transitional relationships within users&#39; check-in trajectories, a noticeable gap persists in devising a mechanism for discerning specialized behavioral patterns during distinct time slots, such as noon, afternoon, or evening. In this paper, we introduce an innovative data structure termed the ``Mobility Tree&#39;&#39;, tailored for hierarchically describing users&#39; check-in records. The Mobility Tree encompasses multi-granularity time slot nodes to learn user preferences across varying temporal periods. Meanwhile, we propose the Mobility Tree Network (MTNet), a multitask framework for personalized preference learning based on Mobility Trees. We develop a four-step node interaction operation to propagate feature information from the leaf nodes to the root node. Additionally, we adopt a multitask training strategy to push the model towards learning a robust representation. The comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MTNet over eleven state-of-the-art next POI recommendation models across three real-world LBSN datasets, substantiating the efficacy of time slot preference learning facilitated by Mobility Tree.

AAAI 2024

Learning Time Slot Preferences via Mobility Tree for Next POI Recommendation | VIDEO

learning preferences or rankings

mining of spatial

temporal or spatio-temporal data

recommender systems

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


AAAI 2023

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.

Next Point-of-Interests (POIs) recommendation task aims to provide a dynamic ranking of POIs based on users' current check-in trajectories. The recommendation performance of this task is contingent upon a comprehensive understanding of users' personalized behavioral patterns through Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) data. While prior studies have adeptly captured sequential patterns and transitional relationships within users' check-in trajectories, a noticeable gap persists in devising a mechanism for discerning specialized behavioral patterns during distinct time slots, such as noon, afternoon, or evening. In this paper, we introduce an innovative data structure termed the ``Mobility Tree'', tailored for hierarchically describing users' check-in records. The Mobility Tree encompasses multi-granularity time slot nodes to learn user preferences across varying temporal periods. Meanwhile, we propose the Mobility Tree Network (MTNet), a multitask framework for personalized preference learning based on Mobility Trees. We develop a four-step node interaction operation to propagate feature information from the leaf nodes to the root node. Additionally, we adopt a multitask training strategy to push the model towards learning a robust representation. The comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MTNet over eleven state-of-the-art next POI recommendation models across three real-world LBSN datasets, substantiating the efficacy of time slot preference learning facilitated by Mobility Tree.

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.

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. 

Equipping a deep model the ability of few-shot learning (FSL) is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. Gradient-based meta-learning effectively addresses the challenge by learning how to learn novel tasks. Its key idea is learning a deep model in a bi-level optimization manner, where the outer-loop process learns a shared gradient descent algorithm (called meta-optimizer), while the inner-loop process leverages it to optimize a task-specific base learner with few examples. Although these methods have shown superior performance on FSL, the outer-loop process requires calculating second-order derivatives along the inner-loop path, which imposes considerable memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients. This degrades meta-learning performance. Inspired by recent diffusion models, we find that the inner-loop gradient descent process can be viewed as a reverse process (i.e., denoising) of diffusion where the target of denoising is the weight of base learner but origin data. Based on this fact, we propose to model the gradient descent algorithm as a diffusion model and then present a novel conditional diffusion-based meta-learning, called MetaDiff, that effectively models the optimization process of base learner weights from Gaussian initialization to target weights in a denoising manner. Thanks to the training efficiency of diffusion models, our MetaDiff does not need to differentiate through the inner-loop path such that the memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients can be effectively alleviated for improving FSL. Experimental results show that our MetaDiff outperforms state-of-the-art gradient-based meta-learning family on FSL tasks.

MetaDiff: Meta-Learning with Conditional Diffusion for Few-Shot Learning

The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has gained significant attention across a broad spectrum of machine learning applications. Incorporating the over-relaxation technique shows potential for enhancing the convergence rate of ADMM. However, determining optimal algorithmic parameters, including both the associated penalty and over-relaxation parameters, often relies on empirical approaches tailored to specific problem domains and contextual scenarios. Incorrect parameter selection can significantly hinder ADMM's convergence rate. To address this challenge, we first propose a general approach to optimize the value of penalty parameter, followed by a novel analytical formula to compute the optimal over-relaxation parameter in the context of linear quadratic problems (LQPs). Experimental validation of our proposed paramete selection methods is then conducted on a range of imaging applications, including image deblurring, magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction, and diffeomorphic image registration.

Optimizing ADMM and Over-Relaxed ADMM Parameters for Linear Quadratic Problems

Black-box domain adaptation (BDA) targets to learn a classifier on an unsupervised target domain while assuming only access to black-box predictors trained from unseen source data. Although a few BDA approaches have demonstrated promise by manipulating the transferred labels, they largely overlook the rich underlying structure in the target domain. To address this problem, we introduce a novel separation and alignment framework for BDA. Firstly, we locate those well-adapted samples via loss ranking and a flexible confidence-thresholding procedure. Then, we introduce a novel graph contrastive learning objective that aligns under-adapted samples to their local neighbors and well-adapted samples. Lastly, the adaptation is finally achieved by a nearest-centroid-augmented objective that exploits the clustering effect in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms best baselines on benchmark datasets, e.g. improving the averaged per-class accuracy by 4.1% on the VisDA dataset. The source code is available at: https://github.com/MingxuanXia/SEAL.

A Separation and Alignment Framework for Black-Box Domain Adaptation | VIDEO

The look-up table (LUT) has recently shown its practicability and effectiveness in super-resolution (SR) tasks due to its low computational cost and hardware independence. However, most existing methods focus on improving the performance of SR, neglecting the demand for high-speed SR on low-computational edge devices. In this paper, we propose an efficient expanded convolution (EC) layer, which expands the output size of regular convolution to enlarge the receptive field (RF) indirectly. It can increase the size of the LUT corresponding to the network linearly with the increase of RF. Additionally, after introducing the EC, multiple LUTs are merged into one LUT, achieving faster running speed while maintaining SR performance. More specifically, we expand the coverage of the convolutional output so that the output at the current position covers the target position and its surroundings, forming an overlapping sliding window at the output end. We sum up the overlapping parts of the sliding window as the output, thereby achieving the effect of enlarging the RF size. Moreover, by expanding the numerical range of the accumulated results and rescaling them to [0,255], the method can mitigate the error caused by quantization output. Experiments indicate that the proposed method performs better than the baseline method and is faster than other LUT-based SR methods.

Efficient Look-Up Table from Expanded Convolutional Network for Accelerating Image Super-resolution

Causal discovery under Granger causality framework has yielded widespread concerns in time series analysis task. Nevertheless, most previous methods are unaware of the underlying causality disappearing problem, that is, cer-tain weak causalities are less focusable and may be lost during the modeling process, thus leading to biased causal conclusions. Therefore, we propose to introduce joint causal influences (i.e., causal influences from the union of multiple variables) as additional causal indication in-formation to help identify weak causalities. Further, to break the limitation of existing methods that implicitly and coarsely model joint causal influences, we propose a novel hidden variable-driven causal hypergraph neural network to meticulously explore the locality and diversity of joint causal influences, and realize its explicit and fine-grained modeling. Specifically, we introduce hidden vari-ables to construct a causal hypergraph for explicitly char-acterizing various fine-grained joint causal influences. Then, we customize a dual causal information transfer mechanism (encompassing a multi-level causal path and an information aggregation path) to realize the free diffu-sion and meticulous aggregation of joint causal influences and facilitate its adaptive learning. Finally, we design a multi-view collaborative optimization constraint to guar-antee the characterization diversity of causal hypergraph and capture remarkable forecasting relationships (i.e., causalities). Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.

Towards the Disappearing Truth: Fine-Grained Joint Causal Influences Learning with Hidden Variable-Driven Causal Hypergraphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great performance in learning representations for graph-structured data. However, recent studies have found that the interference between topology and attribute can lead to distorted node representations. Most GNNs are designed based on homophily assumptions, thus they cannot be applied to graphs with heterophily. This research critically analyzes the propagation principles of various GNNs and the corresponding challenges from an optimization perspective. A novel GNN called Graph Neural Networks with Soft Association between Topology and Attribute (GNN-SATA) is proposed. Different embeddings are utilized to gain insights into attributes and structures while establishing their interconnections through soft association. Further as integral components of the soft association, a Graph Pruning Module (GPM) and Graph Augmentation Module (GAM) are developed. These modules dynamically remove or add edges to the adjacency relationships to make the model better fit with graphs with homophily or heterophily. Experimental results on homophilic and heterophilic graph datasets convincingly demonstrate that the proposed GNN-SATA effectively captures more accurate adjacency relationships and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Especially on the heterophilic graph dataset Squirrel, GNN-SATA achieves a 2.81% improvement in accuracy, utilizing merely 27.19% of the original number of adjacency relationships. Our code is released at https://github.com/wwwfadecom/GNN-SATA.

Graph Neural Networks with Soft Association between Topology and Attribute

Image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from a degraded low-quality observation. Recently, Transformer models have achieved promising performance on image restoration tasks due to their powerful ability to model long-range dependencies. However, the quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input size makes them inapplicable to practical applications. In this paper, we develop an efficient convolutional network for image restoration by enhancing multi-scale representation learning. To this end, we propose an omni-kernel module that consists of three branches, i.e., global, large, and local branches, to learn global-to-local feature representations efficiently. Specifically, the global branch achieves a global perceptive field via the dual-domain channel attention and frequency-gated mechanism. Furthermore, to provide multi-grained receptive fields, the large branch is formulated via different shapes of depth-wise convolutions with unusually large kernel sizes. Moreover, we complement local information using a point-wise depth-wise convolution. Finally, the proposed network, dubbed OKNet, is established by inserting the omni-kernel module into the bottleneck position for efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 benchmark datasets for three representative image restoration tasks, including image dehazing, image desnowing, and image defocus deblurring. The code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/OKNet.

Omni-Kernel Network for Image Restoration | VIDEO

Submodular maximization algorithms have found wide applications in various fields such as data summarization, recommendation systems, and active learning. In recent years, deletion-robust submodular maximization algorithms have garnered attention due to their significant implications in scenarios where some data points may be removed due to user preferences or privacy concerns, such as in recommendation systems and influence maximization. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of submodular maximization with knapsack constraints and propose a robust streaming algorithm for it. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to solve this problem for non-monotone submodular functions and can achieve an approximation ratio of $1/(6.82+2.63d)-\epsilon$ under a near-optimal summary size of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(k+r)$, where $k$ denotes the maximum cardinality of any feasible solution, $d$ denotes the number of the knapsack constraints and $r$ is the robustness parameter. For monotone submodular functions, our algorithm can achieve an approximation ratio of $1/(2+2d)-\epsilon$ under a near-optimal summary size of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(k+r)$, significantly improving upon the best-known ratio of $\Omega\big((1/d-\epsilon)^2\big)$. The empirical performance of our algorithm is extensively evaluated in several applications including influence maximization and recommendation systems, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Deletion-Robust Submodular Maximization with Knapsack Constraints

To enhance the efficacy of multi-scenario services in industrial recommendation systems, the emergence of multi-domain recommendation has become prominent, which entails simultaneous modeling of all domains through a unified model, effectively capturing commonalities and differences among them. However, current methods rely on manual domain partitioning, which overlook the intricate domain relationships and the heterogeneity of different domains during joint optimization, hindering the integration of domain commonalities and differences. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a universal and flexible framework D3 aimed at optimizing the multi-domain recommendation pipeline from three key aspects. Firstly, an attention-based domain adaptation module is introduced to automatically identify and incorporate domain-sensitive features during training. Secondly, we propose a fusion gate module that enables the seamless integration of commonalities and diversities among domains, allowing for implicit characterization of intricate domain relationships. Lastly, we tackle the issue of joint optimization by deriving loss weights from two complementary viewpoints: domain complexity and domain specificity, alleviating inconsistencies among different domains during the training phase. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework. In addition, D3 has been implemented on a real-life, high-traffic internet platform catering to millions of users daily.

D3: A Methodological Exploration of Domain Division, Modeling, and Balance in Multi-Domain Recommendations

One of the challenges in generating human-like music is articulating musical expressions such as dynamics, phrasing, and timbre, which are difficult for computational models to mimic. Previous efforts to tackle this problem have been insufficient due to a fundamental lack of data containing information about musical expressions. In this paper, we introduce MID-FiLD, a MIDI dataset for learning fine-level dynamics control. Notable properties of MID-FiLD are as follows: (1) All 4,422 MIDI samples are constructed by professional music writers with a strong understanding of composition and musical expression. (2) Each MIDI sample contains four different musical metadata including control change #1 (CC#1) value. We verify that our metadata is a key factor in MID-FiLD, exerting a substantial influence over CC#1 values. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of MID-FiLD to deep learning models by suggesting a token-based encoding methodology and reveal the potential for generating controllable, human-like musical expressions.

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MetaDiff: Meta-Learning with Conditional Diffusion for Few-Shot Learning

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Next POI Recommendation with Dynamic Graph and Explicit Dependency