Canada

We study the design of iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs). The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, several papers have recently proposed machine learning (ML)-based preference elicitation algorithms that aim to elicit only the most important information from bidders. However, from a practical point of view, the main shortcoming of this prior work is that those designs elicit bidders&#39; preferences via value queries (i.e., “What is your value for the bundle {A, B}?&#39;&#39;). In most real-world ICA domains, value queries are considered impractical, since they impose an unrealistically high cognitive burden on bidders, which is why they are not used in practice. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by designing an ML-powered combinatorial clock auction that elicits information from the bidders only via demand queries (i.e., “At prices p, what is your most preferred bundle of items?&#39;&#39;). We make two key technical contributions: First, we present a novel method for training an ML model on demand queries. Second, based on those trained ML models, we introduce an efficient method for determining the demand query with the highest clearing potential, for which we also provide a theoretical foundation. We experimentally evaluate our ML-based demand query mechanism in several spectrum auction domains and compare it against the most established real-world ICA: the combinatorial clock auction (CCA). Our mechanism significantly outperforms the CCA in terms of efficiency in all domains, it achieves higher efficiency in a significantly reduced number of rounds, and, using linear prices, it exhibits vastly higher clearing potential. Thus, with this paper we bridge the gap between research and practice and propose the first practical ML-powered ICA.

AAAI 2024

Machine Learning-Powered Combinatorial Clock Auction

auctions

mechanism design

applications

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. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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.

We study the design of iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs). The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, several papers have recently proposed machine learning (ML)-based preference elicitation algorithms that aim to elicit only the most important information from bidders. However, from a practical point of view, the main shortcoming of this prior work is that those designs elicit bidders' preferences via value queries (i.e., “What is your value for the bundle {A, B}?''). In most real-world ICA domains, value queries are considered impractical, since they impose an unrealistically high cognitive burden on bidders, which is why they are not used in practice. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by designing an ML-powered combinatorial clock auction that elicits information from the bidders only via demand queries (i.e., “At prices p, what is your most preferred bundle of items?''). We make two key technical contributions: First, we present a novel method for training an ML model on demand queries. Second, based on those trained ML models, we introduce an efficient method for determining the demand query with the highest clearing potential, for which we also provide a theoretical foundation. We experimentally evaluate our ML-based demand query mechanism in several spectrum auction domains and compare it against the most established real-world ICA: the combinatorial clock auction (CCA). Our mechanism significantly outperforms the CCA in terms of efficiency in all domains, it achieves higher efficiency in a significantly reduced number of rounds, and, using linear prices, it exhibits vastly higher clearing potential. Thus, with this paper we bridge the gap between research and practice and propose the first practical ML-powered ICA.

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. 

Existing class-agnostic counting models typically rely on a single type of prompt, e.g., box annotations. This paper aims to establish a comprehensive prompt-based counting framework capable of generating density maps for concerned objects indicated by various prompt types, such as box, point, and text. To achieve this goal, we begin by converting prompts from different modalities into prompt masks without requiring training. These masks are then integrated into a class-agnostic counting methodology for predicting density maps. Furthermore, we introduce a fixed-point inference along with an associated loss function to improve counting accuracy, all without introducing new parameters. The effectiveness of this method is substantiated both theoretically and experimentally. Additionally, a contrastive training scheme is implemented to mitigate dataset bias inherent in current class-agnostic counting datasets, a strategy whose effectiveness is confirmed by our ablation study. Our model excels in prominent class-agnostic datasets and exhibits superior performance in cross-dataset adaptation tasks.

A Fixed-Point Approach to Unified Prompt-Based Counting | VIDEO

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.

InstructDoc: A Dataset for Zero-Shot Generalization of Visual Document Understanding with Instructions

DEtection TRansformer (DETR)-based models have achieved remarkable performance. However, they are accompanied by a large computation overhead cost, which significantly prevents their applications on resource-limited devices. Prior arts attempt to reduce the computational burden of DETR using low-bit quantization, while these methods sacrifice a severe significant performance on weight-activation-attention low-bit quantization. We observe that the number of matching queries and positive samples affect much on the representation capacity of queries in DETR, while quantifying queries of DETR further reduces its representational capacity, thus leading to a severe performance drop. We introduce a new quantization strategy based on Auxiliary Queries for DETR (AQ-DETR), aiming to enhance the capacity of quantized queries. In addition, a layer-by-layer distillation is proposed to reduce the quantization error between quantized attention and full-precision counterpart. Through our extensive experiments on large-scale open datasets, the performance of the 4-bit quantization of DETR and Deformable DETR models is comparable to  full-precision counterparts.

AQ-DETR: Low-Bit Quantized Detection Transformer with Auxiliary Queries

Humor is a crucial part of human communication. Understanding humor and generating humorous responses in dialogue can provide natural and empathic human-computer interactions.
However, most existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform  unsatisfactorily in humor generation.
On one hand, the serious shortage of humor corpus and datasets pose challenges for constructing models that can understand and generate humorous expressions. On the other hand, humor generation relies on rich knowledge and commonsense, which is often tacit and unspoken.
In this paper, we construct the largest Chinese Explainable Humor Response Dataset to date with chain-of-humor and humor mind map annotations, which can be used to comprehensively evaluate as well as improve the humorous response ability of PLMs.
We further design humor-related auxiliary tasks to further enhance PLMs' humorous response performance.
Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed dataset and auxiliary tasks effectively help PLMs to generate humorous responses, laying the groundwork for future humor research.

Talk Funny! A Large-Scale Humor Response Dataset with Chain-of-Humor Interpretation

Transferable black-box adversarial attacks against classifiers by disturbing the intermediate-layer features have been extensively studied in recent years. However, these methods have not yet achieved satisfactory performances when directly applied to object detectors. This is largely because the features of detectors are fundamentally different from that of the classifiers. In this study, we propose a simple but effective method to improve the transferability of adversarial examples for object detectors by leveraging the properties of spatial consistency and limited equivariance of object detectors’ features. Specifically, we combine a novel loss function and deliberately designed data augmentation to distort the backbone features of object detectors by suppressing significant features corresponding to objects and amplifying the surrounding vicinal features corresponding to object boundaries. As such the target object and background area on the generated adversarial samples are more likely to be confused by other detectors. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art black-box transferability for untargeted attacks on various models, including one/two-stage, CNN/Transformer-based, and anchor-free/anchor-based detectors.

Transferable Adversarial Attacks for Object Detection Using Object-Aware Significant Feature Distortion | VIDEO

The Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) has recently gained popularity in the field of computer vision, thanks to its image generation applications, such as Imagen, Latent Diffusion Models, and Stable Diffusion, which have demonstrated impressive capabilities and sparked much discussion within the community. Recent investigations have further unveiled the utility of DPM in the domain of medical image analysis, as underscored by the commendable performance exhibited by the medical image segmentation model across various tasks. Although these models were originally underpinned by a UNet architecture, there exists a potential avenue for enhancing their performance through the integration of vision transformer mechanisms. However, we discovered that simply combining these two models resulted in subpar performance. To effectively integrate these two cutting-edge techniques for the Medical image segmentation, we propose a novel Transformer-based Diffusion framework, called MedSegDiff-V2. We verify its effectiveness on 20 medical image segmentation tasks with different image modalities. Through comprehensive evaluation, our approach demonstrates superiority over prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies. Code is released at https://github.com/WuJunde/MedSegDiff.

MedSegDiff-V2: Diffusion-based Medical Image Segmentation with Transformer

Real-world decision-making problems are usually accompanied by delayed rewards, which affects the sample efficiency of Reinforcement Learning, especially in the extremely delayed case where the only feedback is the episodic reward obtained at the end of an episode. Episodic return decomposition is a promising way to deal with the episodic-reward setting. Several corresponding algorithms have shown remarkable effectiveness of the learned step-wise proxy rewards from return decomposition. However, these existing methods lack either attribution or representation capacity, leading to inefficient decomposition in the case of long-term episodes. In this paper, we propose a novel episodic return decomposition method called Diaster (Difference of implicitly assigned sub-trajectory reward). Diaster decomposes any episodic reward into credits of two divided sub-trajectories at any cut point, and the step-wise proxy rewards come from differences in expectation. We theoretically and empirically verify that the decomposed proxy reward function can guide the policy to be nearly optimal. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of both sample efficiency and performance.

Episodic Return Decomposition by Difference of Implicitly Assigned Sub-trajectory Reward | VIDEO

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are widely used for multi-objective optimization due to their population-based nature. Traditional multi-objective EAs (MOEAs) generate a large set of solutions to approximate the Pareto front, leaving a decision maker (DM) with the task of selecting a preferred solution. However, this process can be inefficient and time-consuming, especially when there are many objectives or the DM has subjective preferences. To address this issue, interactive MOEAs (iMOEAs) combine decision making into the optimization process, i.e., update the population with the help of the DM. In contrast to their wide applications, there has existed only two pieces of theoretical works on iMOEAs, which only considered interactive variants of the two simple single-objective algorithms, RLS and (1+1)-EA. This paper provides the first running time analysis (the essential theoretical aspect of EAs) for practical iMOEAs. Specifically, we prove that the expected running time of the well-developed interactive NSGA-II (called R-NSGA-II) for solving the OneMinMax, OneJumpZeroJump problems are $O(n \log n)$ and $O(n^k)$, respectively, which are all asymptotically faster than the traditional NSGA-II. Meanwhile, we present a variant of OneMinMax, and prove that R-NSGA-II can be exponentially slower than NSGA-II. These results provide theoretical justification for the effectiveness of iMOEAs while identifying situations where they may fail. Experiments are also conducted to validate the theoretical results.

Towards Running Time Analysis of Interactive Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms

Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for image-to-image translation (I2I), allowing flexible image translation via user-provided text prompts. This paper proposes frequency-controlled diffusion model (FCDiffusion), an end-to-end diffusion-based framework contributing a novel solution to text-guided I2I from a frequency-domain perspective. At the heart of our framework is a feature-space frequency-domain filtering module based on Discrete Cosine Transform, which extracts image features carrying different DCT spectral bands to control the text-to-image generation process of the Latent Diffusion Model, realizing versatile I2I applications including style-guided content creation, image semantic manipulation, image scene translation, and image style translation. Different from related methods, FCDiffusion establishes a unified text-driven I2I framework suiting diverse I2I application scenarios simply by switching among different frequency control branches. The effectiveness and superiority of our method for text-guided I2I are demonstrated with extensive experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our project is publicly available at: https://xianggao1102.github.io/FCDiffusion/.

Frequency-Controlled Diffusion Model for Versatile Text-Guided Image-to-Image Translation

BEV perception is of great importance in the field of autonomous driving, serving as the cornerstone of planning, controlling, and motion prediction. The quality of the BEV feature highly affects the performance of BEV perception. However, taking the noises in camera parameters and LiDAR scans into consideration, we usually obtain BEV representation with harmful noises. Diffusion models naturally have the ability to denoise noisy samples to the ideal data, which motivates us to utilize the diffusion model to get a better BEV representation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework, named DiffBEV, to exploit the potential of diffusion model to generate a more comprehensive BEV representation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply diffusion model to BEV perception. In practice, we design three types of conditions to guide the training of the diffusion model which denoises the coarse samples and refines the semantic feature in a progressive way. What's more, a cross-attention module is leveraged to fuse the context of BEV feature and the semantic content of conditional diffusion model. DiffBEV achieves a 25.9% mIoU on the nuScenes dataset, which is 6.2% higher than the best-performing existing approach. Quantitative and qualitative results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffBEV in BEV semantic segmentation and 3D object detection tasks. The code will be available soon.

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