United States

Social norms are standards of behaviour common in a society. However, when agents make decisions without considering how others are impacted, norms can emerge that lead to the subjugation of certain agents. We present RAWL-E, a method to create ethical norm-learning agents. RAWL-E agents operationalise maximin, a fairness principle from Rawlsian ethics, in their decision-making processes to promote ethical norms by balancing societal well-being with individual goals. We evaluate RAWL-E agents in simulated harvesting scenarios. We find that norms emerging in RAWL-E agent societies enhance social welfare, fairness, and robustness, and yield higher minimum experience compared to those that emerge in agent societies who do not implement Rawlsian ethics..

AAAI 2025

Operationalising Rawlsian Ethics for Fairness in Norm Learning Agents

peai

equity

fairness

bias

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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.



Offsite-tuning is a privacy-preserving method for tuning large language models (LLMs) by sharing a lossy compressed emulator from the LLM owners with data owners for downstream task tuning. This approach protects the privacy of both the model and data owners. However, current offsite tuning methods often suffer from adaptation degradation, high computational costs, and limited protection strength due to uniformly dropping LLM layers or relying on expensive knowledge distillation. To address these issues, we propose ScaleOT, a novel privacy-utility-scalable offsite-tuning framework that effectively balances privacy and utility. ScaleOT introduces a novel layerwise lossy compression algorithm that uses reinforcement learning to obtain the importance of each layer. It employs lightweight networks, termed harmonizers, to replace the raw LLM layers. By combining important original LLM layers and harmonizers in different ratios, ScaleOT generates emulators tailored for optimal performance with various model scales for enhanced privacy protection. Additionally, we present a rank reduction method to further compress the original LLM layers, significantly enhancing privacy with negligible impact on utility. Comprehensive experiments show that ScaleOT can achieve nearly lossless offsite tuning performance compared with full fine-tuning while obtaining better model privacy.

ScaleOT: Privacy-utility-scalable Offsite-tuning with Dynamic LayerReplace and Selective Rank Compression

This study investigates scheduling strategies for the stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problem with maximal time lags (SRCPSP/max). Recent advances in Constraint Programming (CP) and Temporal Networks have re-invoked interest in evaluating the advantages and drawbacks of various proactive and reactive scheduling methods. First, we present a new, CP-based fully proactive method. Second, we show how a reactive approach can be constructed using an online rescheduling procedure. A third contribution is based on partial order schedules and uses Simple Temporal Networks with Uncertainty (STNUs). Our statistical analysis shows that the STNU-based algorithm performs best in terms of solution quality, while also showing good relative offline and online computation time

Proactive and Reactive Constraint Programming for Stochastic Project Scheduling with Maximal Time-Lags

Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to attain but is generally viewed as less fair.  This paper presents a general reduction scheme that, given a utilitarian solver, produces a distribution over outcomes that is leximin in expectation. 
Importantly, the scheme is robust in the sense that, given an approximate utilitarian solver, it produces an outcome that is approximately-leximin (in expectation) - with the same approximation factor.  We apply our scheme to several social choice problems: stochastic allocations of indivisible goods, giveaway lotteries, and fair lotteries for participatory budgeting.

Reducing Leximin Fairness to Utilitarian Optimization

Dataset condensation has significantly improved model training efficiency, but its application on devices with different computing power brings new requirements for different data sizes. For sparse graph data with non-Euclidean structures, repeated condensation of each scale may lead to significant computational costs. Thus, condensing multiple scale graphs simultaneously is the core of achieving efficient training in different on-device scenarios. Existing efficient works for multi-scale graph dataset condensation mainly perform efficient approximate computation in scale order (large-to-small or small-to-large scales). However, these two commonly used paradigms for multi-scale graph dataset condensation have serious *scaling down degradation* and *scaling up collapse*  problems of a graph. The main bottleneck of the above paradigms is whether the effective information of the original graph is fully preserved when consenting to the primary sub-scale (the first of multiple scales), which determines the condensation effect and consistency of all scales. In this paper, we proposed a novel GNN-centric **Bi**-directional **M**ulti-**S**cale **G**raph Dataset **C**ondensation (**BiMSGC**) framework, to explore unifying paradigms by operating on both large-to-small and small-to-large for multi-scale graph condensation. Based on the mutual information theory, we estimate an optimal ''*meso-scale*'' to obtain the minimum necessary dense graph preserving the maximum utility information of the original graph, and then we achieve stable and consistent ''*bi-directional*'' condensation learning by optimizing graph eigenbasis matching with information bottleneck on other scales. Encouraging empirical results on several datasets demonstrates the significant superiority of the proposed framework in graph condensation at different scales.

Bi-Directional Multi-Scale Graph Dataset Condensation via Information Bottleneck

We present an option discovery algorithm that accelerates planning by minimizing the shortest distance between any two states in the MDP. The proposed algorithm produces options that approximately minimize planning time in the multi-goal setting: it is shown to be a worst case $(4\alpha,2)$-approximation of the optimal option set, where $\alpha$ is the approximation ratio of the $k$-medians with penalties subroutine. We then present a variation, \textit{Fast Average Options}, with improved run-time and describe a general means of producing similar algorithms based on selection of a $k$-medians subroutine. We empirically evaluate our method on four discrete and two continuous control planning domains and show that it outperforms other leading option discovery algorithms.

Discovering Options That Minimize Average Planning Time

Early exiting is an effective paradigm for improving the inference efficiency of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by dynamically adjusting the number of executed layers for each sample. However, in most existing works, easy and hard samples are treated equally by each classifier during training, which neglects the test-time early exiting behavior, leading to inconsistency between training and testing. Although some methods have tackled this issue under a fixed speed-up ratio, the challenge of flexibly adjusting the speed-up ratio while maintaining consistency between training and testing is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Consistency-Oriented Signal-based Early Exiting (COSEE) framework, which leverages a calibrated sample weighting mechanism to enable each classifier to emphasize the samples that are more likely to exit at that classifier under various acceleration scenarios. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our COSEE across multiple exiting signals and backbones, yielding a better trade-off between performance and efficiency.

COSEE: Consistency-Oriented Signal-Based Early Exiting via Calibrated Sample Weighting Mechanism

Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to infer missing facts between newly emerged entities within knowledge graphs (KGs), posing a significant challenge. While recent studies have shown promising results in inferring such entities through knowledge subgraph reasoning, they suffer from (i) the semantic inconsistencies of similar relations, and (ii) noisy interactions inherent in KGs due to the presence of unconvincing knowledge for emerging entities. To address these challenges, we propose a Semantic Structure-aware Denoising Network (S$^2$DN) for inductive KGC. Our goal is to learn adaptable general semantics and reliable structures to distill consistent semantic knowledge while preserving reliable interactions within KGs. Specifically, we introduce a semantic smoothing module over the enclosing subgraphs to retain the universal semantic knowledge of relations. We incorporate a structure refining module to filter out unreliable interactions and offer additional knowledge, retaining robust structure surrounding target links. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark KGs demonstrate that S$^2$DN surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of S$^2$DN in preserving semantic consistency and enhancing the robustness of filtering out unreliable interactions in contaminated KGs. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDN.

S$^2$DN: Learning to Denoise Unconvincing Knowledge for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation. Nevertheless, achieving precise control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. While existing models excel in directly generating multi-track mix, their limitations become evident when it comes to composing individual tracks and integrating them in a controllable manner. This departure from the typical workflows of professional composers hinders the ability to refine details in specific tracks. To address this gap, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework designed to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music using a single model. Building upon an audio latent diffusion model, JEN-1 Composer extends the versatility of multi-track music generation. We introduce a progressive curriculum training strategy, which gradually escalates the difficulty of training tasks while ensuring the model's generalization ability and facilitating smooth transitions between different scenarios. During inference, users can iteratively generate and select music tracks, thus incrementally composing entire musical pieces in accordance with the Human-AI co-composition workflow. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis, marking a significant advancement in interactive AI-assisted music creation. Demos are available in the supplementary materials for exploration.

JEN-1 Composer: A Unified Framework for High-Fidelity Multi-Track Music Generation

Automated Program Repair (APR) is a task to automatically generate patches for the buggy code. However, most research focuses on generating correct patches while ignoring the consistency between the fixed code and the original buggy code. How to conduct adaptive bug fixing and generate patches with minimal modifications have seldom been investigated. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a novel task, namely AdaPR (Adaptive Program Repair). We then propose a two-stage approach AdaPatcher (Adaptive Patch Generator) to enhance program repair while maintaining the consistency. In the first stage, we utilize a Bug Locator with self-debug learning to accurately pinpoint bug locations. In the second stage, we train a Program Modifier to ensure consistency between the post-modified fixed code and the pre-modified buggy code. The Program Modifier is enhanced with a location-aware repair learning strategy to generate patches based on identified buggy lines, a hybrid training strategy for selective reference and an adaptive preference learning to prioritize fewer changes. 
The experimental results show that our approach outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, validating the effectiveness of our two-stage framework for the newly proposed AdaPR task.

Less Is More: Adaptive Program Repair with Bug Localization and Preference Learning

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) aims to learn temporal dynamics among variables to forecast future time series. Existing statistical and deep learning-based methods suffer from a limited number of learnable parameters and small-scale training data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) combining time series with textual prompts have achieved promising performance in MTSF. However, we discovered that the current LLM-based solutions fall short in learning disentangled embeddings. We introduce TimeCMA an intuitive yet effective framework for MTSF via cross-modality alignment. Specifically, we present a dual-modality encoding with two branches: the time series encoding branch extracts disentangled yet weak time series embeddings, and the LLM-empowered encoding branch wraps the same time series with text as prompts to obtain entangled yet robust prompt embeddings. As a result, such a cross-modality alignment retrieves both disentangled and robust time series embeddings, ``the best of two worlds'', from the prompt embeddings based on time series and prompt modality similarities. As another key design, to reduce the computational costs from multi-time series with their length textual prompts, we design an effective prompt to encourage the most essential temporal information to be encapsulated in the last token: only the last token is passed to downstream prediction. We further store the last token embeddings to accelerate inference speed. Extensive experiments on eight real datasets demonstrate that TimeCMA outperforms state-of-the-arts.

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ScaleOT: Privacy-utility-scalable Offsite-tuning with Dynamic LayerReplace and Selective Rank Compression

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