United States

We provide improved upper and lower bounds for the Min-Sum-Radii (MSR) and Min-Sum-Diameters (MSD) clustering problems with a bounded number of clusters $k$. In particular, we propose an exact MSD algorithm with a running-time of $n^{O(k)}$. We also provide $(1+\epsilon)$ approximation algorithms for MSR with a running-time of $O(kn) +(1/\epsilon)^{O(dk)}$ in metrics spaces of doubling dimension $d$. For MSD we get a similar approximation bound (with an extra $2^{O(k/\epsilon)}$ factor in the second term).

Our algorithms extend to $\alpha$-MSR, where radii are raised to an $\alpha$ power, for $\alpha&gt;1$, whereas for $\alpha$-MSD we prove an exponential time ETH-based lower bound for $\alpha&gt;\log 3$. All algorithms can also be modified to handle outliers. 

Moreover, we can extend the results to variants  that observe \emph{fairness} constraints, as well as to the general framework of \emph{mergeable} clustering, which includes many other popular clustering variants. We complement these upper bounds with ETH-based lower bounds for these problems, in particular proving that $n^{O(k)}$ time is tight for MSR and $\alpha$-MSR even in doubling spaces, and that $2^{o(k)}$ bounds are impossible for MSD.

AAAI 2025

Improved Fixed-Parameter Bounds for Min-Sum-Radii and Diameters k-Clustering and Their Fair Variants

clustering

We provide improved upper and lower bounds for the Min-Sum-Radii (MSR) and Min-Sum-Diameters (MSD) clustering problems with a bounded number of clusters $k$. In particular, we propose an exact MSD algorithm with a running-time of $n^{O(k)}$. We also provide $(1+\epsilon)$ approximation algorithms for MSR with a running-time of $O(kn) +(1/\epsilon)^{O(dk)}$ in metrics spaces of doubling dimension $d$. For MSD we get a similar approximation bound (with an extra $2^{O(k/\epsilon)}$ factor in the second term).

Our algorithms extend to $\alpha$-MSR, where radii are raised to an $\alpha$ power, for $\alpha>1$, whereas for $\alpha$-MSD we prove an exponential time ETH-based lower bound for $\alpha>\log 3$. All algorithms can also be modified to handle outliers. 

Moreover, we can extend the results to variants  that observe \emph{fairness} constraints, as well as to the general framework of \emph{mergeable} clustering, which includes many other popular clustering variants. We complement these upper bounds with ETH-based lower bounds for these problems, in particular proving that $n^{O(k)}$ time is tight for MSR and $\alpha$-MSR even in doubling spaces, and that $2^{o(k)}$ bounds are impossible for MSD.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/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. AAAI-25 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.



Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating code. However, the misuse of LLM-generated (synthetic) code has raised concerns in both educational and industrial contexts, underscoring the urgent need for synthetic code detectors. Existing methods for detecting synthetic content are primarily designed for general text and struggle with code due to the unique grammatical structure of programming languages and the presence of numerous ``low-entropy'' tokens. Building on this, our work proposes a novel zero-shot synthetic code detector based on the similarity between the original code and its LLM-rewritten variants. Our method is based on the observation that differences between LLM-rewritten and original code tend to be smaller when the original code is synthetic. We utilize self-supervised contrastive learning to train a code similarity model and evaluate our approach on two synthetic code detection benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement over existing SOTA synthetic content detectors, with AUROC scores increasing by 20.5\% on the APPS benchmark and 29.1\% on the MBPP benchmark.

Uncovering LLM-Generated Code: A Zero-Shot Synthetic Code Detector via Code Rewriting

Deep learning models have demonstrated exceptional performance in a variety of real-world applications. These successes are often attributed to strong base models that can generalize to novel tasks with limited supporting data while keeping prior knowledge intact. However, these impressive results are based on the availability of a large amount of high-quality data, which is often lacking in specialized biomedical applications. In such fields, models are often developed with limited data that arrive incrementally with novel categories. This requires the model to adapt to new information while preserving existing knowledge. Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) methods offer a promising approach to addressing these challenges, but they also depend on strong base models that face the same aforementioned limitations. To overcome these constraints, we propose AnchorInv following the straightforward and efficient buffer-replay strategy. Instead of selecting and storing raw data, AnchorInv generates synthetic samples guided by anchor points in the feature space. This approach protects privacy and regularizes the model for adaptation. When evaluated on three public physiological time series datasets, AnchorInv exhibits efficient knowledge forgetting prevention and improved adaptation to novel classes, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines.

AnchorInv: Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning of Physiological Signals via Feature Space-Guided Inversion

Building a universal multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that performs equitably across languages has long been a challenge due to its inherent difficulties.
To address this task we introduce a Language-Agnostic Multilingual ASR pipeline through orthography Unification and language-specific Transliteration (LAMA-UT).
LAMA-UT operates without any language-specific modules while matching the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on a minimal amount of data.
Our pipeline consists of two key steps.
First, we utilize a universal transcription generator to unify orthographic features into Romanized form and capture common phonetic characteristics across diverse languages. 
Second, we utilize a universal converter to transform these universal transcriptions into language-specific ones.
In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method leveraging universal transcriptions for massively multilingual ASR.
Our pipeline achieves a relative error reduction rate of 45\% when compared to Whisper and performs comparably to MMS, despite being trained on only 0.1\% of Whisper's training data.
Furthermore, our pipeline does not rely on any language-specific modules.
However, it performs on par with zero-shot ASR approaches which utilize additional language-specific lexicons and language models.
We expect this framework to serve as a cornerstone for flexible multilingual ASR systems that are generalizable even to unseen languages.

LAMA-UT: Language Agnostic Multilingual ASR Through Orthography Unification and Language-Specific Transliteration

Surface-from-gradients (SfG) aims to recover a three-dimensional (3D) surface from its gradients. Traditional methods encounter significant challenges in achieving high accuracy and handling high-resolution inputs, particularly facing the complex nature of discontinuities and the inefficiencies associated with large-scale linear solvers. Although recent advances in deep learning, such as photometric stereo, have enhanced normal estimation accuracy, they do not fully address the intricacies of gradient-based surface reconstruction. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Fourier neural operator-based Numerical Integration Network (FNIN) within a two-stage optimization framework. In the first stage, our approach employs an iterative architecture for numerical integration, harnessing an advanced Fourier neural operator to approximate the solution operator in Fourier space. Additionally, a self-learning attention mechanism is incorporated to effectively detect and handle discontinuities. In the second stage, we refine the surface reconstruction by formulating a weighted least squares problem, addressing the identified discontinuities rationally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency compared to current state-of-the-art solvers. This is particularly evident in handling high-resolution images with complex data, achieving error fewer than 0.1 mm on tested objects.

FNIN: A Fourier Neural Operator-based Numerical Integration Network for Surface-from-gradients

Dependency-aware spatial crowdsourcing (DASC) addresses the unique challenges posed by subtask dependencies in spatial task assignment. This paper investigates the task assignment problem in DASC and proposes a two-stage Recommend and Match Optimization (RMO) framework, leveraging multi-agent reinforcement learning for subtask recommendation and a multi-dimensional utility function for subtask matching. The RMO framework primarily addresses two key challenges: credit assignment for subtasks with interdependencies and maintaining overall coherence between subtask recommendation and matching. Specifically, we employ meta-gradients to construct auxiliary policies and establish a gradient connection between two stages, which can effectively address credit assignment and joint optimization of subtask recommendation and matching, while concurrently accelerating network training. We further establish a unified gradient descent process through gradient synchronization across recommendation networks, auxiliary policies, and the matching utility evaluation function. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed approach.

Gradient-Guided Credit Assignment and Joint Optimization for Dependency-Aware Spatial Crowdsourcing

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints at each time step (derived from global cost constraints) and this can result in either overly conservative policies or violation of safety constraints. In this paper, we propose
to learn a policy that generates desirable trajectories and avoids undesirable trajectories. To be specific, we first partition the pre-collected dataset of state-action trajectories into desirable and undesirable subsets. Intuitively, the desirable set contains high reward and safe trajectories, and undesirable set contains unsafe trajectories and low-reward safe trajectories. Second, we learn a policy that generates desirable trajectories and avoids undesirable trajectories, where (un)desirability scores are provided by a classifier learnt from the dataset of desirable and undesirable trajectories. This approach bypasses the computational complexity and stability issues of a min-max objective that is employed in existing methods. Theoretically, we also show our approach’s strong connections to existing learning paradigms involving human feedback. Finally, we extensively evaluate our method using the DSRL benchmark for offline safe RL. Empirically, our method outperforms competitive baselines, achieving higher rewards and better constraint satisfaction across a wide variety of benchmark tasks.

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Trajectory Classification

Multi-objective decision-making problems have emerged in numerous real-world scenarios, such as video games, navigation and robotics. Considering the clear advantages of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in optimizing decision-making processes, researchers have delved into the development of Multi-Objective RL (MORL) methods for solving multi-objective decision problems. However, previous methods either cannot obtain the entire Pareto front, or employ only a single policy network for all the preferences over multiple objectives, which may not produce personalized solutions for each preference. To address these limitations, we propose a novel decomposition-based framework for MORL, Pareto Set Learning for MORL (PSL-MORL), that harnesses the generation capability of hypernetwork to produce the parameters of the policy network for each decomposition weight, generating relatively distinct policies for various scalarized subproblems with high efficiency. PSL-MORL is a general framework, which is compatible for any RL algorithm. The theoretical result guarantees the superiority of the model capacity of PSL-MORL and the optimality of the obtained policy network. Through extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PSL-MORL in achieving dense coverage of the Pareto front, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art MORL methods in both the hypervolume and sparsity indicators.

Pareto Set Learning for Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal capabilities but have been found to be more susceptible to generating harmful content compared to their backbone large language models (LLMs). Our investigation reveals that the integration of images significantly shifts the model's internal activations during the forward pass, diverging from those triggered by textual input. Moreover, the safety alignments of LLMs embedded within VLMs are not sufficiently robust to handle the activations discrepancies, making the models vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. To address this issue, we propose the \textbf{internal activation revision} approach that efficiently revises activations during generation, steering the model toward safer outputs. Our framework incorporates revisions at both the layer level and head level, offering control over the model's generation at varying levels of granularity. Notably, revisions at the head level achieve an optimal balance between safety and helpfulness. Our method significantly improves the safety of LLaVA-V1.5-7B, reducing attack success rates by 47.52\%, 34.93\%, and 45.24\% on SafeBench, Safe-Unsafe, and Unsafe benchmarks, respectively, while minimally impacting model helpfulness. Additionally, we extensively investigate how various factors of the method, including sample construction methods, revision vector extraction, different layers, revision strengths, and the number of revised heads, affect the model's effectiveness. Our objective is to provide a data-efficient and flexible alternative to resource-intensive fine-tuning defense methods, thereby assisting VLMs in becoming more reliable when processing sensitive information. 

Warning: This paper contains prompts, generated examples, and model outputs that are offensive or harmful to some readers.

Internal Activation Revision: Safeguarding Vision Language Models Without Parameter Update

Recent years have witnessed rapid advancements in the safety alignments of large language models (LLMs). Methods such as supervised instruction fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) have thus emerged as vital components in constructing LLMs. While these methods achieve robust and fine-grained alignment to human values, their practical application is still hindered by high annotation costs and incomplete human alignments. Besides, the intrinsic human values within training corpora have not been fully exploited. To address these issues, we propose ISAAC (Intrinsically Supervised Alignments by Assessing Corpus), a primary and coarse-grained safety alignment strategy for LLMs. ISAAC only relies on a prior assumption about the text corpus, and does not require preferences in RLHF or human responses selection in SFT.  Specifically, it assumes a long-tail distribution of text corpus and employs a specialized sampling strategy to automatically sample high-quality responses. Theoretically, we prove that this strategy can improve the safety of LLMs
under our assumptions. Empirically, our evaluations on mainstream LLMs show that ISAAC achieves a safety score comparable to current SFT solutions. Moreover, we conduct experiments on ISAAC for some RLHF-based LLMs, where we find that ISAAC can even improve the safety of these models under specific safety domains. These findings demonstrate that ISAAC can provide preliminary alignment to LLMs, thereby reducing the construction costs of existing human-feedback-based methods.

Exploring Intrinsic Alignments Within Text Corpus

Common methods for aligning already-capable models with desired behavior rely on the ability of humans to provide supervision.
However, future superhuman models will surpass the capability of humans.
Therefore, humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models.
This expected deficiency of human evaluation would weaken the safety of future AI systems.
Scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization are two complementary approaches to tackle this issue.
In this paper, we attempt to combine the strengths of these two approaches to further improve alignment.
Specifically, we investigate ways of improving human supervision with a strong pretrained model and then supervise the strong model with enhanced weak human supervision.
To make iterative empirical progress, we consider an analogy: can we use a strong model to improve weak model supervision and then use it to supervise the strong model?
We empirically test it by finetuning a small weak model on ground truth labels with the additional help from a large strong model, and then finetuning the strong model on labels generated by the weak model.
We find that debate can assist a weak model in extracting trustworthy information from an untrustworthy strong model, which provides leverage as context on samples when training a weak model.
We also show that an ensemble of weak models helps exploit long arguments generated by strong model debaters and obtain a more robust supervision estimate.
Extensive experiments on the OpenAI weak-to-strong NLP benchmarks show that the combination approach leads to better alignment, which indicates that debate has the potential to help weak-to-strong generalization.

Improved Fixed-Parameter Bounds for Min-Sum-Radii and Diameters k-Clustering and Their Fair Variants

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Improved Fixed-Parameter Bounds for Min-Sum-Radii and Diameters k-Clustering and Their Fair Variants

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Uncovering LLM-Generated Code: A Zero-Shot Synthetic Code Detector via Code Rewriting

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