United States

In this keynote, Andrew will explore how current technologies, particularly agentic workflow, are revolutionizing the development of AI products. He will also delve into the role of AI in prototyping, showcasing how AI lowers the cost of software development and accelerates the prototyping process.

AAAI 2025

AI, Agents and Applications

keynote

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.



Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI could be regarded as an analogy to human dual-process cognition, modeling the intuitive System 1 with neural networks and the algorithmic System 2 with symbolic reasoning. However, for complex learning targets, NeSy systems often generate outputs inconsistent with domain knowledge and it is challenging to rectify them. Inspired by the human Cognitive Reflection, which promptly detects errors in our intuitive response and revises them by invoking the System 2 reasoning, we propose to improve NeSy systems by introducing Abductive Reflection (ABL-Refl) based on the Abductive Learning (ABL) framework. ABL-Refl leverages domain knowledge to abduce a reflection vector during training, which can then flag potential errors in the neural network outputs and invoke abduction to rectify them and generate consistent outputs during inference. ABL-Refl is highly efficient in contrast to previous ABL implementations. Experiments show that ABL-Refl outperforms state-of-the-art NeSy methods, achieving excellent accuracy with fewer training resources and enhanced efficiency.

Efficient Rectification of Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Inconsistencies by Abductive Reflection

An important - but very demanding - property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules are strategyproof, even when allowing for randomization. However, Gibbard's theorem is based on a rather strong interpretation of strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for at least one utility function consistent with his ordinal preferences. In this paper, we study weak strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for all utility functions consistent with his ordinal preferences. We show how to systematically design attractive, weakly strategyproof social decision schemes (SDSs) and explore their limitations for both strict and weak preferences. In particular, for strict preferences, we show that there are weakly strategyproof SDSs that are either ex post efficient or Condorcet-consistent, while neither even-chance SDSs nor pairwise SDSs satisfy both properties and weak strategyproofness at the same time. By contrast, for the case of weak preferences, we discuss two sweeping impossibility results that preclude the existence of appealing weakly strategyproof SDSs.

Weak Strategyproofness in Randomized Social Choice

Infectious diseases have historically had profound effects on global health, economies, and social structures. Effective tracing of infectious diseases is essential not only for immediate public health responses but also for shaping future prevention strategies. Traditional tracing methods often emphasize homogeneous networks, overlooking the diverse transmission characteristics of heterogeneous populations. This research addresses two critical challenges: the heterogeneity of transmission across various media and modes, and the significant yet underexplored influence of community structures on epidemic spread and tracing.We propose a Heterogeneous Hypergraph Attention Network (HHAN) modelthat accounts for multiple transmission pathways and patterns within heterogeneous networks.  HHAN integrates a heterogeneous graph neural network module to handle the complexity of communication among different populations, and an Agent-Based Modeling Module that combines agent-based ideas to model individual behaviors. This approach effectively captures complex interactions within community structures and addresses individual variability. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the HHAN model significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in tackling the complex challenge of tracing infectious diseases in heterogeneous populations.

HHAN: Comprehensive Infectious Disease Source Tracing via Heterogeneous Hypergraph Neural Network

Motion planning is a crucial component in autonomous vehicles. State-of-the-art motion planners are trained on meticulously curated datasets, which are not only expensive to annotate but also insufficiently containing rarely-seen critical scenarios. Failing to capture such scenarios inevitably risks motion planners and potentially causes incidents during testing. One intuitive solution is to compose such scenarios by programming and executing a simulator (e.g., CARLA). However, this requires huge human cost. I'm motivated to develop a cheap method to generate diverse critical traffic scenarios for training better motion planners. First, I represent traffic scenarios by scripts, using which the simulator produces traffic scenarios. Then, I develop a method which accepts user-specified text description, which a Large Language Model (LLM) translates into scripts using in-context learning.
The output scripts are sent to the simulator which produces the corresponding traffic scenarios. As my method can generate abundant safety-critical traffic scenarios, I use them as synthetic training data for motion planners. To demonstrate the value of the generated scenarios, I train existing motion planners on my synthetic data, existing real-world datasets, and the mix of my data with the existing datasets.
My experiments show that motion planners trained with my data significantly outperforms the counterparts trained only on real-world data, showing the usefulness of my synthetic data and the effectiveness of my data generation method.

Generating Traffic Scenarios via In-Context Learning to Learn Better Motion Planner

Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning (WSDVC) aims to localize and describe all events of interest in a video without requiring annotations of event boundaries. This setting poses a great challenge in accurately locating the temporal location of event, as the relevant supervision is unavailable. Existing methods rely on explicit alignment constraints between event locations and captions, which involve complex event proposal procedures during both training and inference. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel implicit location-caption alignment paradigm by complementary masking, which simplifies the complex event proposal and localization process while maintaining effectiveness. Specifically, our model comprises two components: a dual-mode video captioning module and a mask generation module. The dual-mode video captioning module captures global event information and generates descriptive captions,
while the mask generation module generates differentiable positive and negative masks for localizing the events. These masks enable the implicit alignment of event locations and captions by ensuring that captions generated from positively and negatively masked videos are complementary, thereby forming a complete video description. In this way, even under weak supervision, the event location and event caption can be aligned implicitly. Extensive experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing weakly-supervised methods and achieves competitive results compared to fully-supervised methods. Code will be released.

Implicit Location-Caption Alignment via Complementary Masking for Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning

Tensor decomposition (TD) models are promising solutions for knowledge graph completion due to their simple structures but powerful representation capacities. The TD models typically adopt Tucker decomposition with a structured core tensor. Some models with a sparse core tensor, such as DistMult and ComplEx, are too simple and thus limit the interaction between embedding components, while other models with a dense core tensor are too complex and may lead to significant overfitting. To address these issues, we propose a new TD model called SPAC (Sparse Partitioning and Adaptive Core tensor pruning) model for knowledge graph completion. Specifically, SPAC captures coarse and fine-grained semantic information using a hybrid core tensor, where auxiliary cores are used to model sparse interactions and main cores for dense interactions. Moreover, SPAC introduces a gating mechanism to control the output of intermediate variables, enhancing the interaction between different partition groups. Furthermore, SPAC employs an adaptive pruning approach to dynamically adjust the shape of the core tensor. Due to the elaborate model design, the proposed TD model enhances expressive capacity and reduces the number of parameters in the core tensor. Experiments are conducted on datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and YAGO3-10. The results demonstrate that SPAC outperforms state-of-the-art tensor decomposition models, including MEIM and Tucker models. A series of ablation studies show that the gating mechanism and adaptive pruning strategy in SPAC are crucial for the performance improvement.

SPAC: Sparse Partitioning and Adaptive Core Tensor Pruning Model for Knowledge Graph Completion

The field of music generation has seen a surge of interest from both academia and industry, with innovative platforms such as Suno, Udio, and SkyMusic earning widespread recognition. However, the challenge of music infilling—modifying specific music segments without reconstructing the entire piece—remains a significant hurdle for both audio-based and symbolic-based models, limiting their adaptability and practicality. In this paper, we address symbolic music infilling by introducing the Collaborative Music Inpainter (CMI), an advanced human-in-the-loop (HITL) model for music infilling. The CMI features the Joint Embedding Predictive Autoregressive Generative Architecture (JEP-AGA), which learns the high-level predictive representations of the masked part that needs to be infilled during the autoregressive generative process, akin to how humans perceive and interpret music. The newly developed Dynamic Interaction Learner (DIL) achieves HITL by iteratively refining the infilled output based on user interactions alone, significantly reducing the interaction cost without requiring further input. Experimental results confirm CMI’s superior performance in music infilling, demonstrating its efficiency in producing high-quality music.

Compose with Me: Collaborative Music Inpainter for Symbolic Music Infilling

Knowledge compilation is a method of transforming knowledge into a compressed and tractable form, permitting more efficient operations. For Boolean functions, numerous representations have been proposed to enhance succinctness and tractability. In this paper, we introduce a new representation named structured Decomposable And-Sum Circuit (st-DASC), which employs $\wedge$ and $+$ nodes with signed edges, in place of the standard $\wedge$ and $\vee$ nodes with unsigned edges. Notably, incorporating negative signs permits polytime logical negation. By following the knowledge compilation map, we show that st-DASC is more succinct than the Sentential Decision Diagram (SDD) while still maintaining support for all of the operations on the knowledge compilation map that SDD supports. Furthermore, st-DASC is even more succinct than structured d-DNNF (st-d-DNNF), which itself is more succinct but supports fewer operations than SDD. Accordingly, st-DASC breaks the traditional trade-off between succinctness and tractability.

An and-Sum Circuit with Signed Edges That Is More Succinct than SDD

This paper presents VDAct, a dataset for a Video-grounded Dialogue on Event-driven Activities, alongside VDEval, a session-based context evaluation metric specially designed for the task. Unlike existing datasets, VDAct includes longer and more complex video sequences that depict a variety of event-driven activities that require advanced contextual understanding for accurate response generation. The dataset comprises 3,000 dialogues with over 30,000 question-and-answer pairs, derived from 1,000 videos with diverse activity scenarios. VDAct displays a notably challenging characteristic due to its broad spectrum of activity scenarios and wide range of question types. Empirical studies on state-of-the-art vision foundation models highlight their limitations in addressing certain question types on our dataset. Furthermore, VDEval, which integrates dialogue session history and video content summaries extracted from our supplementary KGs to evaluate individual responses, demonstrates a significantly higher correlation with human assessments on the VDAct dataset than existing evaluation metrics that rely solely on the context of single dialogue turns.

A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset and Metric for Event-driven Activities

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has gained significant attention in autonomous systems, yet its black-box nature and lack of explainability hinder user trust in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving. Existing experience replay approaches enhance sample efficiency but often fail to capture the internal causality of training data, leading to a convoluted training process that is difficult for humans to explain. In this work, we introduce Experience Replay with Causal Inference (ERCI), an explainable approach that integrates time series representation and causal inference to offer human-aligned explanations for DRL. Specifically, ERCI 1) introduces a novel multivariate time series representation to extract explainable Time Series Causal Factors (TSCF) from experimental data and 2) leverages internal causality in TSCFs with causal inference as a crucial standard for experience replay in DRL training. We evaluate ERCI using multiple baseline algorithms across diverse environments. Results show that ERCI provides human-aligned explanations and further improves sample efficiency through enhanced explainability. Notably, ERCI outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches by 15% in average performance, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability.

AI, Agents and Applications

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2025

Efficient Rectification of Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Inconsistencies by Abductive Reflection

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

AI, Agents and Applications

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2025

Efficient Rectification of Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Inconsistencies by Abductive Reflection

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads