Canada

The Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem involves finding a set of conflict-free paths for a group of agents confined to a graph. In typical MAPF scenarios, the graph and the agents&#39; starting and ending vertices are known beforehand, allowing the use of centralized planning algorithms. However, in this study, we focus on the decentralized MAPF setting, where the agents may observe the other agents only locally and are restricted in communications with each other. Specifically, we investigate the lifelong variant of MAPF, where new goals are continually assigned to the agents upon completion of previous ones. Drawing inspiration from the successful AlphaZero approach, we propose a decentralized multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for MAPF tasks. Our approach utilizes the agent&#39;s observations to recreate the intrinsic Markov decision process, which is then used for planning with a tailored for multi-agent tasks version of neural MCTS. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learnable MAPF solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/mats-lp.

AAAI 2024

Decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search for Partially Observable Multi-Agent Pathfinding

alphazero

mapf

mcts

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.

The Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem involves finding a set of conflict-free paths for a group of agents confined to a graph. In typical MAPF scenarios, the graph and the agents' starting and ending vertices are known beforehand, allowing the use of centralized planning algorithms. However, in this study, we focus on the decentralized MAPF setting, where the agents may observe the other agents only locally and are restricted in communications with each other. Specifically, we investigate the lifelong variant of MAPF, where new goals are continually assigned to the agents upon completion of previous ones. Drawing inspiration from the successful AlphaZero approach, we propose a decentralized multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for MAPF tasks. Our approach utilizes the agent's observations to recreate the intrinsic Markov decision process, which is then used for planning with a tailored for multi-agent tasks version of neural MCTS. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learnable MAPF solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/mats-lp.

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. 

Generalization and sample efficiency have been long-standing issues concerning reinforcement learning, and thus the field of Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) has gained increasing attention due to its potential of solving a wide range of problems with static and limited offline data. Existing OMRL methods often assume sufficient training tasks and data coverage to apply contrastive learning to extract task representations. However, such assumptions are not applicable in several real-world applications and thus undermine the generalization ability of the representations. In this paper, we consider OMRL with two types of data limitations: limited training tasks and limited behavior diversity and propose a novel algorithm called GENTLE for learning generalizable task representations in the face of data limitations. GENTLE employs Task Auto-Encoder (TAE), which is an encoder-decoder architecture to extract the characteristics of the tasks. Unlike existing methods, TAE is optimized solely by reconstruction of the state transition and reward, which captures the generative structure of the task models and produces generalizable representations when training tasks are limited. To alleviate the effect of limited behavior diversity, we consistently construct pseudo-transitions to align the data distribution used to train TAE with the data distribution encountered during testing. Empirically, GENTLE significantly outperforms existing OMRL methods on both in-distribution tasks and out-of-distribution tasks across both the given-context protocol and the one-shot protocol.

Generalizable Task Representation Learning for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Data Limitations | VIDEO

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used as repositories of biological and chemical information to generate pharmacological lead compounds. However, for LLMs to focus on specific drug targets typically requires experimentation with progressively more refined prompts. Results thus become dependent not just on what is known about the target, but also on what is known about the prompt- engineering. In this paper, we separate the prompt into domain-constraints that can be written in a standard logical form and a simple text-based query. We investigate whether LLMs can be guided, not by refining prompts manually, but by refining the logical component automatically, keeping the query unchanged. We describe an iterative procedure LMLF (“Language Model with Logical Feedback”) in which the constraints are progressively refined using a logical notion of generalisation. On any iteration, newly generated instances are verified against the constraint, providing "logical-feedback" for the next iteration's refinement of the constraints. We evaluate LMLF using two well-known  targets (inhibition of the Janus Kinase 2; and Dopamine Receptor D2); and two different LLMs (GPT-3 and PaLM). We show that LMLF, starting with the same logical constraints and query text, can be used to guide both LLMs to generate potential leads. We find: (a)  Binding affinities of LMLF-generated molecules are skewed towards higher binding affinities than those from existing baselines; (b) LMLF results in generating molecules that are skewed towards higher binding affinities than without logical feedback; (c) Assessment by a computational chemist suggests that LMLF generated compounds may be novel inhibitors. These findings suggest that LLMs with logical feedback may provide a mechanism for generating new leads without requiring the domain-specialist to acquire sophisticated skills in prompt-engineering.

Generating Novel Leads for Drug Discovery Using LLMs with Logical Feedback

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims at recognizing samples in novel classes from unseen domains that are vastly different from training classes, with few labeled samples. However, the large domain gap between training and novel classes makes previous FSL methods perform poorly. To address this issue, we propose MetaPrompt, a Task-adaptive Prompted Transformer model for CD-FSL, by jointly exploiting prompt learning and the parameter generation framework. The proposed MetaPrompt enjoys several merits. First, a task-conditioned prompt generator is established upon attention mechanisms. It can flexibly produce a task-adaptive prompt with arbitrary length for unseen tasks, by selectively gathering task characteristics from the contextualized support embeddings. Second, the task-adaptive prompt is attached to Vision Transformer to facilitate fast task adaptation, steering the task-agnostic representation to incorporate task knowledge. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to exploit a prompt-based parameter generation mechanism for CD-FSL. Extensive experimental results on the Meta-Dataset benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves superior results against state-of-the-art methods.

Task-Adaptive Prompted Transformer for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Event extraction is an important task in natural language processing that focuses on mining event-related information from unstructured text. Despite considerable advancements, it is still challenging to achieve satisfactory performance in this task, and issues like data scarcity and imbalance obstruct progress. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach where we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as expert annotators for event extraction. We strategically include sample data from the training dataset in the prompt as a reference, ensuring alignment between the data distribution of LLM-generated samples and that of the benchmark dataset. This enables us to craft an augmented dataset that complements existing benchmarks, alleviating the challenges of data imbalance and scarcity and thereby enhancing the performance of fine-tuned models. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our proposed method, and we believe that this approach holds great potential for propelling the development and application of more advanced and reliable event extraction systems in real-world scenarios.

Is a Large Language Model a Good Annotator for Event Extraction? | VIDEO

Motivated by high resource costs of centralized machine learning schemes as well as data privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) emerged as an efficient alternative that relies on aggregating locally trained models rather than collecting clients' potentially private data. In practice, available resources and data distributions vary from one client to another, creating an inherent system heterogeneity that leads to deterioration of the performance of conventional FL algorithms. In this work, we present a federated quantization-based self-supervised learning scheme (Fed-QSSL) designed to address heterogeneity in FL systems. At clients' side, to tackle data heterogeneity we leverage distributed self-supervised learning while utilizing low-bit quantization to satisfy constraints imposed by local infrastructure and limited communication resources. At server's side, Fed-QSSL deploys de-quantization, weighted aggregation and re-quantization, ultimately creating models personalized to both data distribution as well as specific infrastructure of each client's device. We validated the proposed algorithm on real world datasets, demonstrating its efficacy, and theoretically analyzed impact of low-bit training on the convergence and robustness of the learned models.

Fed-QSSL: A Framework for Personalized Federated Learning under Bitwidth and Data Heterogeneity | VIDEO

Recent advances in sequential recommendation models have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating pre-trained text embeddings with item ID embeddings to achieve superior performance. However, our study takes a unique perspective by exclusively focusing on the untapped potential of text embeddings, obviating the need for ID embeddings. We begin by implementing a pre-processing strategy known as whitening, which effectively transforms the anisotropic semantic space of pre-trained text embeddings into an isotropic Gaussian distribution. Comprehensive experiments reveal that applying whitening to pre-trained text embeddings in sequential recommendation models significantly enhances performance. Yet, a full whitening operation might break the potential manifold of items with similar text semantics. To retain the original semantics while benefiting from the isotropy of the whitened text features, we propose a Dual-view Whitening method for Sequential Recommendation (DWSRec), which leverages both fully whitened and relaxed whitened item representations as dual views for effective recommendations. We further examine the advantages of our approach through both empirical and theoretical analyses. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets show that DWSRec outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sequential recommendation.

Dual-View Whitening on Pre-trained Text Embeddings for Sequential Recommendation

Dung’s Argumentation Framework (AF) has been extended in several directions. Among the numerous proposed extensions, three of them seem to be of particular interest and have correlations between them. These extensions are: constrained AF (CAF), where AF is augmented with (strong) constraints; epistemic AF (EAF), where AF is augmented with epistemic constraints; and incomplete AF (iAF), where arguments and attacks can be uncertain. While the complexity and expressiveness of CAF and iAF have been studied, that of EAF has not been explored so far. In this paper we investigate the complexity and expressivity of EAF. To this end, we first introduce the Labeled CAF (LCAF), a variation of CAF where constraints are defined over the alphabet of labeled arguments. Then, we investigate the complexity of credulous and skeptical reasoning and show that: i) EAF is more expressive than iAF (under preferred semantics), ii) although LCAF is a restriction of EAF where modal operators are not allowed, these frameworks have the same complexity, iii) the results for LCAF close a gap in the characterization of the complexity of CAF. Interestingly, even though EAF has the same complexity as LCAF, it allows modeling domain knowledge in a more natural and easy-to-understand way.

Complexity of Credulous and Skeptical Acceptance in Epistemic Argumentation Framework

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable advances in sequential decision tasks. However, recent works have revealed that DRL agents are susceptible to slight perturbations in observations. This vulnerability raises concerns regarding the effectiveness and robustness of deploying such agents in real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel robust reinforcement learning method called SortRL, which improves the robustness of DRL policies against observation perturbations from the perspective of the network architecture. We employ a novel architecture for the policy network that incorporates global $l_\infty$ Lipschitz continuity and provide a convenient method to enhance policy robustness based on the output margin. Besides, a training framework is designed for SortRL, which solves given tasks while maintaining robustness against $l_\infty$ bounded perturbations on the observations. Several experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our method, including classic control tasks and video games. The results demonstrate that SortRL achieves state-of-the-art robustness performance against different perturbation strength.

Improve Robustness of Reinforcement Learning against Observation Perturbations via l_∞ Lipschitz Policy Networks

Curvilinear structures, which include line-like continuous objects, are fundamental geometrical elements in image-based applications. Reconstructing these structures from images constitutes a pivotal research area in computer vision. However, the complex topology and ambiguous image evidence render this process a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce DeepBranchTracer, a novel method that learns both external image features and internal geometric characteristics to reconstruct curvilinear structures. Firstly, we formulate the curvilinear structures extraction as a geometric attribute estimation problem. Then, a curvilinear structure feature learning network is designed to extract essential branch attributes, including the image features of centerline and boundary, and the geometric features of direction and radius. Finally, utilizing a multi-feature fusion tracing strategy, our model iteratively traces the entire branch by integrating the extracted image and geometric features. We extensively evaluated our model on both 2D and 3D datasets, demonstrating its superior performance over existing segmentation and reconstruction methods in terms of accuracy and continuity.

DeepBranchTracer: A Generally-Applicable Approach to Curvilinear Structure Reconstruction Using Multi-Feature Learning

Recently, diffusion-based image generation methods are credited for their remarkable text-to-image generation capabilities, while still facing challenges in accurately generating multilingual scene text images. To tackle this problem, we propose Diff-Text, which is a training-free scene text generation framework for any language. Our model outputs a photo-realistic image given a text of any language along with a textual description of a scene. The model leverages rendered sketch images as priors, thus arousing the potential multilingual-generation ability of the pre-trained Stable Diffusion. Based on the observation from the influence of the cross-attention map on object placement in generated images, we propose a localized attention constraint into the cross-attention layer to address the unreasonable positioning problem of scene text. Additionally, we introduce contrastive image-level prompts to further refine the position of the textual region and achieve more accurate scene text generation. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing method in both the accuracy of text recognition and the naturalness of foreground-background blending.

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Generalizable Task Representation Learning for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Data Limitations | VIDEO

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Learning to Communicate Locally for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Pathfinding