Canada

Differentially private (DP) synthetic datasets have been receiving significant attention from academia, industry, and government. However, little is known about how to perform statistical inference using DP synthetic datasets. Naive approaches that do not take into account the induced uncertainty due to the DP mechanism will result in biased estimators and invalid inferences. In this paper, we present a class of maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)-based easy-to-implement bias-corrected DP estimators with valid asymptotic confidence intervals (CI) for parameters in regression settings, by establishing the connection between additive DP mechanisms and measurement error models. Our simulation shows that our estimator has comparable performance to the widely used sufficient statistic perturbation (SSP) algorithm in some scenarios but with the advantage of releasing a synthetic dataset and obtaining statistically valid asymptotic CIs, which can achieve better coverage when compared to the naive CIs obtained by ignoring the DP mechanism.

AAAI 2024

Analysis of Differentially Private Synthetic Data: A Measurement Error Approach

statistical inference

synthetic dataset

differential privacy

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.

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. 

Quantization replaces floating point arithmetic with integer arithmetic in deep neural network models, providing more efficient on-device inference with less power and memory. In this work, we propose a framework for formally verifying the properties of quantized neural networks. Our baseline technique is based on integer linear programming which guarantees both soundness and completeness. We then show how efficiency can be improved by utilizing gradient-based heuristic search methods and also bound-propagation techniques. We evaluate our approach on perception networks quantized with PyTorch. Our results show that we can verify quantized networks with better scalability and efficiency than the previous state of the art.

Towards Efficient Verification of Quantized Neural Networks | VIDEO

Continuous machine learning pipelines are common in industrial settings where models are periodically trained on data streams. Unfortunately, concept drifts may occur in data streams where the joint distribution of the data X and label y, P(X, y), changes over time and possibly degrade model accuracy. Existing concept drift adaptation approaches mostly focus on updating the model to the new data possibly using ensemble techniques of previous models and tend to discard the drifted historical data. However, we contend that explicitly utilizing the drifted data together leads to much better model accuracy and propose Quilt, a data-centric framework for identifying and selecting data segments that maximize model accuracy. To address the potential downside of efficiency, Quilt extends existing data subset selection techniques, which can be used to reduce the training data without compromising model accuracy. These techniques cannot be used as is because they only assume virtual drifts where the posterior probabilities P(y|X) are assumed not to change. In contrast, a key challenge in our setup is to also discard undesirable data segments with concept drifts. Quilt thus discards drifted data segments and selects data segment subsets holistically for accurate and efficient model training. The two operations use gradient-based scores, which have little computation overhead. In our experiments, we show that Quilt outperforms state-of-the-art drift adaptation and data selection baselines on synthetic and real datasets.

Quilt: Robust Data Segment Selection against Concept Drifts

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial to safety-critical machine learning applications and has been extensively studied.
While recent studies have predominantly focused on classifier-based methods, research on deep generative model (DGM)-based methods have lagged relatively.
This disparity may be attributed to a perplexing phenomenon: DGMs often assign higher likelihoods to unknown OOD inputs than to their known training data.
This paper focuses on explaining the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon.
We propose a hypothesis that less complex images concentrate in high-density regions in the latent space, resulting in a higher likelihood assignment in the Normalizing Flow (NF).
We experimentally demonstrate its validity for five NF architectures, concluding that their likelihood is untrustworthy.
Additionally, we show that this problem can be alleviated by treating image complexity as an independent variable.
Finally, we provide evidence of the potential applicability of our hypothesis in another DGM, PixelCNN++.

Understanding Likelihood of Normalizing Flow and Image Complexity through the Lens of Out-of-Distribution Detection

With the growth of 3D sensing technology, the deep learning system for 3D point clouds has become increasingly important, especially in applications such as autonomous vehicles where safety is a primary concern. However, there are growing concerns about the reliability of these systems when they encounter noisy point clouds, either occurring naturally or introduced with malicious intent. This paper highlights the challenges of point cloud classification posed by various forms of noise, from simple background noise to malicious adversarial/backdoor attacks that can intentionally skew model predictions. While there's an urgent need for optimized point cloud denoising, current point outlier removal approaches, an essential step for denoising, rely heavily on handcrafted strategies and are not adapted for higher-level tasks, such as classification. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative point outlier cleansing method that harnesses the power of downstream classification models. Using gradient-based attribution analysis, we define a novel concept: point risk. Drawing inspiration from tail risk minimization in finance, we recast the outlier removal process as an optimization problem, named PointCVaR. Extensive experiments show that our proposed technique not only robustly filters diverse point cloud outliers but also consistently and significantly enhances existing robust methods for point cloud classification. A notable feature of our approach is its effectiveness in defending against the latest threat of backdoor attacks in point clouds.

PointCVaR: Risk-optimized Outlier Removal for Robust 3D Point Cloud Classification

A plethora of fair graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proposed to promote fairness in models for high-stake real-life contexts. Meanwhile, explainability is generally proposed to help machine learning practitioners debug models by providing human-understandable explanations. However, seldom work on explainability is made to generate explanations for fairness diagnosis in GNNs. From the explainability perspective, this paper explores the problem of what subgraph patterns of the graph cause the biased behavior of GNNs, and what actions could practitioners take to rectify the bias? By answering the two questions, this paper aims to produce compact, diagnostic, and actionable explanations that are responsible for discriminatory behavior. Specifically, we formulate the problem of generating diagnostic and actionable explanations for fair GNNs as a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem. To solve the problem, a dedicated multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is presented to ensure GNNs' explainability and fairness in one go. In particular, an influenced nodes-based gradient approximation is developed to boost the computation efficiency of the evolutionary computation, as it does not need to retrain the GNN from scratch. We provide a theoretical analysis to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Moreover, extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art fair GNNs in terms of classification performance, fairness, and interpretability.

Generating Diagnostic and Actionable Explanations for Fair Graph Neural Networks

Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real environments. Most learning solutions often neglect the risk of failing to meet these constraints, hindering their implementation in real-world contexts. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware decision-making framework for contextual bandit problems, accommodating constraints and continuous action spaces. Our approach employs an actor multi-critic architecture, with each critic characterizing the distribution of performance and constraint metrics. Our framework is designed to cater to various risk levels, effectively balancing constraint satisfaction against performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we first compare it against state-of-the-art baseline methods in a synthetic environment, highlighting the impact of intrinsic environmental noise across different risk configurations. Finally, we evaluate our framework in a real-world use case involving a 5G mobile network where only our approach satisfies consistently the system constraint (a signal processing reliability target) with a small performance toll (8.5% increase in power consumption).

Risk-Aware Continuous Control with Neural Contextual Bandits | VIDEO

We present a modular approach to \emph{reinforcement learning} (RL) in environments consisting of simpler components evolving in parallel. A monolithic view of such modular environments may be prohibitively large to learn, or may require unrealizable communication between the components in the form of a centralized controller. Our proposed approach is based on the assume-guarantee paradigm where the optimal control for the individual components is synthesized in isolation by making \emph{assumptions} about the behaviors of neighboring components, and providing \emph{guarantees} about their own behavior. We express these \emph{assume-guarantee contracts} as regular languages and provide automatic translations to scalar rewards to be used in RL. By combining local probabilities of satisfaction for each component, we provide a lower bound on the probability of satisfaction of the complete system. By solving a Markov game for each component, RL can produce a controller for each component that maximizes this lower bound. The controller utilizes the information it receives through communication, observations, and any knowledge of a coarse model of other agents. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach on a variety of case studies.

Assume-Guarantee Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, there has been growing interest in developing robust machine learning (ML) models that can withstand adversarial attacks, including one of the most widely adopted, efficient, and interpretable ML algorithms—decision trees (DTs). This paper proposes a novel coevolutionary algorithm (CoEvoRDT) designed to create robust DTs capable of handling noisy high-dimensional data in adversarial contexts. Motivated by the limitations of traditional DT algorithms, we leverage adaptive coevolution to allow DTs to evolve and learn from interactions with perturbed input data. CoEvoRDT alternately evolves competing populations of DTs and perturbed features, enabling construction of DTs with desired properties. CoEvoRDT is easily adaptable to various target metrics, allowing the use of tailored robustness criteria such as minimax regret. Furthermore, CoEvoRDT has potential to improve the results of other state-of-the-art methods by incorporating their outcomes (DTs they produce) into the initial population and optimize them in the process of coevolution. Inspired by the game theory, CoEvoRDT utilizes mixed Nash equilibrium to enhance convergence. The method is tested on 20 popular datasets and shows superior performance compared to 4 state-of-the-art algorithms. It outperformed all competing methods on 13 datasets with adversarial accuracy metrics, and on all 20 considered datasets with minimax regret. Strong experimental results and flexibility in choosing the error measure make CoEvoRDT a promising approach for constructing robust DTs in real-world applications.

Coevolutionary Algorithm for Building Robust Decision Trees under Minimax Regret

Deploying deep learning models in safety-critical applications remains a very challenging task, mandating the provision of assurances for the dependable operation of these models. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods estimate the model’s confidence per prediction, informing decision-making by considering the effect of randomness and model misspecification. Despite the advances of state-of-the-art UQ methods, they are computationally expensive or produce conservative prediction sets/intervals. We introduce MC-CP, a novel hybrid UQ method that combines a new adaptive Monte Carlo (MC) dropout method with conformal prediction (CP). MC-CP adaptively modulates the traditional MC dropout at runtime to save memory and computation resources, enabling predictions to be consumed by CP, yielding robust prediction sets/intervals. Throughout comprehensive experiments, we show that MC-CP delivers significant improvements over comparable UQ methods, like MC dropout, RAPS and CQR, both in classification and regression benchmarks. MC-CP can be easily added to existing models, making its deployment simple. The MC-CP code and replication package is available at https://github.com/team-daniel/MC-CP.

Robust Uncertainty Quantification Using Conformalised Monte Carlo Prediction

Although promising, existing defenses against query-based attacks share a common limitation: they offer increased robustness against attacks at the price of a considerable accuracy drop on clean samples. In this work, we show how to efficiently establish, at test-time, a solid tradeoff between robustness and accuracy when mitigating query-based attacks. Given that these attacks necessarily explore low-confidence regions, our insight is that activating dedicated defenses, such as RND (Qin et al., NeuRIPS 2021) and Random Image Transformations (Xie et al., ICLR 2018), only for low-confidence inputs is sufficient to prevent them. Our approach is independent of training and supported by theory. We verify the effectiveness of our approach for various existing defenses by conducting extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Our results confirm that our proposal can indeed enhance these defenses by providing better tradeoffs between robustness and accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art approaches while being completely training-free.

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