Canada

Recent advances on deep learning models come at the price of formidable training cost. The increasing model size is one of the root causes, but another less-emphasized fact is that data scale is actually increasing at a similar speed as model scale, and the training cost is proportional to both of them. Compared to the rapidly evolving model architecture, how to efficiently use the training data (especially for the expensive foundation model pretraining) is both less explored and difficult to realize due to the lack of a convenient framework that focus on data efficiency capabilities. To this end, we present DeepSpeed Data Efficiency, a framework that makes better use of data, increases training efficiency, and improves model quality. Specifically, we propose and combine two data efficiency techniques: efficient data sampling via a general curriculum learning library, and efficient data routing via a novel random layerwise token dropping technique. For GPT-3 1.3B language model pretraining, our work achieves 12.5x less data/time/cost ($3.7K if rent on Azure), while still maintaining 95% of model quality compared to baseline with full data and cost ($46.3K). For GPT-3 1.3B and BERT-large pretraining, our work can also achieve the same model quality with up to 2x less data/time/cost, or achieve better model quality under same data/time/cost. DeepSpeed Data Efficiency is easy to use and tune, enabling us to easily apply it and verify its benefit on additional tasks including GPT-3 MoE model pretraining and small-scale GPT-2/ViT finetuning.

AAAI 2024

DeepSpeed Data Efficiency: Improving Deep Learning Model Quality and Training Efficiency via Efficient Data Sampling and Routing

ml: deep generative models & autoencoders

snlp: language models

ml: distributed machine learning & federated learning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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. 

Prior approximations of AIXI, a Bayesian optimality notion for general reinforcement learning, can only approximate AIXI's Bayesian environment model using an a-priori defined set of models. This is a fundamental source of epistemic uncertainty for the agent in settings where the existence of systematic bias in the predefined model class cannot be resolved by simply collecting more data from the environment. We address this issue in the context of Human-AI teaming by considering a setup where additional knowledge for the agent in the form of new candidate models arrives from a human operator in an online fashion. We introduce a new agent called DynamicHedgeAIXI that maintains an exact Bayesian mixture over dynamically changing sets of models via a time-adaptive prior constructed from a variant of the Hedge algorithm. The DynamicHedgeAIXI agent is the richest direct approximation of AIXI known to date and comes with good performance guarantees. Experimental results on epidemic control on contact networks validates the agent's practical utility.

Dynamic Knowledge Injection for AIXI Agents

We consider the problem of multi-objective optimization (MOO) of expensive black-box functions with the goal of discovering high-quality and diverse Pareto fronts where we are allowed to evaluate a batch of inputs. This problem arises in many real-world applications including penicillin production where diversity of solutions is critical. We solve this problem in the framework of Bayesian optimization (BO) and propose a novel approach referred to as Pareto front-Diverse Batch Multi-Objective BO (PDBO). PDBO tackles two important challenges: 1) How to automatically select the best acquisition function in each BO iteration, and 2) How to select a diverse batch of inputs by considering multiple objectives. We propose principled solutions to address these two challenges. First, PDBO employs a multi-armed bandit approach to select one acquisition function from a given library. We solve a cheap MOO problem by assigning the selected acquisition function for each expensive objective function to obtain a candidate set of inputs for evaluation. Second, it utilizes Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to choose a Pareto-front-diverse batch of inputs for evaluation from the candidate set obtained from the first step. The key parameters for the methods behind these two steps are updated after each round of function evaluations. Experiments on multiple MOO benchmarks demonstrate that PDBO outperforms prior methods in terms of both the quality and diversity of Pareto solutions.

Pareto Front-Diverse Batch Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization | VIDEO

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we further explore this line of research by investigating how reward shaping under budget constraints can improve the principal's utility. We study a two-player Stackelberg game where the principal and the agent have different reward functions, and the agent chooses an MDP policy for both players. The principal offers an additional reward to the agent, and the agent picks their policy selfishly to maximize their reward, which is the sum of the original and the offered reward. Our results establish the NP-hardness of the problem and offer polynomial approximation algorithms for two classes of instances: Stochastic trees and deterministic decision processes with a finite horizon.

Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

Feature visualization is one of the most popular techniques used to interpret the internal behavior of individual units of trained deep neural networks. Based on activation maximization, they consist of finding \textit{synthetic} or \textit{natural} inputs that maximize neuron activations. This paper introduces an optimization framework that aims to deceive feature visualization through adversarial model manipulation. It consists of finetuning a pre-trained model with a specifically introduced loss that aims to maintain model performance, while also significantly changing feature visualization. We provide evidence of the success of this manipulation on several pre-trained models for the classification task with ImageNet.

Adversarial Attacks on the Interpretation of Neuron Activation Maximization

We address the Individualized continuous treatment effect
(ICTE) estimation problem where we predict the effect of
any continuous valued treatment on an individual using ob-
servational data. The main challenge in this estimation task
is the potential confounding of treatment assignment with in-
dividual’s covariates in the training data, whereas during in-
ference ICTE requires prediction on independently sampled
treatments. In contrast to prior work that relied on regularizers
or unstable GAN training, we advocate the direct approach
of augmenting training individuals with independently sam-
pled treatments and inferred counterfactual outcomes. We in-
fer counterfactual outcomes using a two-pronged strategy: a
Gradient Interpolation for close-to-observed treatments, and
a Gaussian Process based Kernel Smoothing which allows
us to down weigh high variance inferences. We evaluate our
method on five benchmarks and show that our method out-
performs six state-of-the-art methods on the counterfactual
estimation error. We analyze the superior performance of our
method by showing that (1) our inferred counterfactual re-
sponses are more accurate, and (2) adding them to the train-
ing data reduces the distributional distance between the con-
founded training distribution and test distribution where treat-
ment is independent of covariates. Our proposed method is
model-agnostic and we show that it improves ICTE accuracy
of several existing models.

Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation Using Gradient Interpolation and Kernel Smoothing

The generation of logically coherent dialogues by humans relies on underlying cognitive abilities. Based on this, we redefine the dialogue coherence evaluation process, combining cognitive judgment with the basic text to achieve a more human-like evaluation. We propose a novel dialogue evaluation framework based on Dialogue Cognition Graph (DCGEval) to implement the fusion by in-depth interaction between cognition modeling and text modeling. The proposed Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) based graph structure called DCG aims to uniformly model four dialogue cognitive abilities. Specifically, core-semantic cognition is modeled by converting the utterance into an AMR graph, which can extract essential semantic information without redundancy. The temporal and role cognition are modeled by establishing logical relationships among the different AMR graphs. Finally, the commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet is fused to express commonsense cognition. Experiments demonstrate the necessity of modeling human cognition for
dialogue evaluation, and our DCGEval presents stronger correlations with human judgments compared to other state-of-the-art evaluation metrics.

Dialogues Are Not Just Text: Modeling Cognition for Dialogue Coherence Evaluation | VIDEO

Optimal transport is a fundamental topic that has attracted a great amount of attention from the optimization community in the past decades. In this paper, we consider an interesting discrete dynamic optimal transport problem: can we efficiently update the optimal transport plan when the weights or the locations of the data points change? This problem is naturally motivated by several applications in machine learning. For example, we often need to compute the optimal transport cost between two different data sets; if some changes happen to a few data points, should we re-compute the high complexity cost function or update the cost by some efficient dynamic data structure? We are aware that several dynamic maximum flow algorithms have been proposed before, however, the research on dynamic minimum cost flow problem is still quite limited, to the best of our knowledge. We propose a novel 2D Skip Orthogonal List together with some dynamic tree techniques. Although our algorithm is based on the conventional simplex method, it can efficiently find the variable to pivot within expected O(1) time, and complete each pivoting operation within expected O(|V|) time where V is the set of all supply and demand nodes. Since dynamic modifications typically do not introduce significant changes, our algorithm requires only a few simplex iterations in practice. So our algorithm is more efficient than re-computing the optimal transport cost that needs at least one traversal over all |E|=O(|V|^2) variables, where |E| denotes the number of edges in the network. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing algorithms in the dynamic scenarios.

A Novel Skip Orthogonal List for Dynamic Optimal Transport Problem

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have become a leading paradigm for establishing near-term quantum applications in recent years. The trainability issue of QNNs has garnered extensive attention, spurring demand for a comprehensive analysis of QNNs in order to identify viable solutions. In this work, we propose a perspective that characterizes the trainability of QNNs based on their locality. We prove that the entire variation range of the loss function via adjusting any local quantum gate vanishes exponentially in the number of qubits with a high probability for a broad class of QNNs. This result reveals extra harsh constraints independent of gradients and unifies the restrictions on gradient-based and gradient-free optimizations naturally. We showcase the validity of our results with numerical simulations of representative models and examples. Our findings, as a fundamental property of random quantum circuits, deepen the understanding of the role of locality in QNNs and serve as a guideline for assessing the effectiveness of diverse training strategies for quantum neural networks.

Exponential Hardness of Optimization from the Locality in Quantum Neural Networks

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to align the positive features while differentiating the negative features in the latent space by minimizing a pair-wise contrastive loss. As the embodiment of an outstanding discriminative unsupervised graph representation learning approach, GCL achieves impressive successes in various graph benchmarks. However, such an approach falls short of recognizing the topology isomorphism of graphs, resulting in that graphs with relatively homogeneous node features cannot be sufficiently discriminated. By revisiting classic graph topology recognition works, we disclose that the corresponding expertise intuitively complements GCL methods. To this end, we propose a novel hierarchical topology isomorphism expertise embedded graph contrastive learning, which introduces knowledge distillations to empower GCL models to learn the hierarchical topology isomorphism expertise, including the graph-tier and subgraph-tier. On top of this, the proposed method holds the feature of plug-and-play, and we empirically demonstrate that the proposed method is universal to multiple state-of-the-art GCL models. The solid theoretical analyses are further provided to prove that compared with conventional GCL methods, our method acquires the tighter upper bound of Bayes classification error. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks to exhibit the performance superiority of our method over candidate GCL methods, e.g., for the real-world graph representation learning experiments, the proposed method beats the state-of-the-art method by 0.23% on unsupervised representation learning setting, 0.43% on transfer learning setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/jyf123/HTML.

Hierarchical Topology Isomorphism Expertise Embedded Graph Contrastive Learning | VIDEO

We use the maximum a posteriori estimation principle for learning representations distributed on the unit sphere. We propose to use the angular Gaussian distribution, which corresponds to a Gaussian projected on the unit-sphere and derive the associated loss function. We also consider the von Mises-Fisher distribution, which is the conditional of a Gaussian in the unit-sphere. The learned representations are pushed toward fixed directions, which are the prior means of the Gaussians; allowing for a learning strategy that is resilient to data drift. This makes it suitable for online continual learning, which is the problem of training neural networks on a continuous data stream, where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially so that data from past tasks are no longer accessible, and data from the current task can be seen only once. 
To address this challenging scenario, we propose a memory-based representation learning technique equipped with our new loss functions. Our approach does not require negative data or knowledge of task boundaries and performs well with smaller batch sizes while being computationally efficient. 
We demonstrate with extensive experiments that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on both standard evaluation scenarios and realistic scenarios with blurry task boundaries. For reproducibility, we use the same training pipeline for every compared method and share the code at https://t.ly/SQTj.

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