United States

We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and generalize stability and safety guarantees, with a tolerable probability threshold p \in [0,1] over the infinite time horizon. Our method leverages advances in machine learning literature and it represents formal certificates as neural networks. In particular, we learn a certificate in the form of a reach-avoid supermartingale (RASM), a novel notion that we introduce in this work. Our RASMs provide reachability and avoidance guarantees by imposing constraints on what can be viewed as a stochastic extension of level sets of Lyapunov functions for deterministic systems. Our approach solves several important problems -- it can be used to learn a control policy from scratch, to verify a reach-avoid specification for a fixed control policy, or to fine-tune a pre-trained policy if it does not satisfy the reach-avoid specification. We validate our approach on 3 stochastic non-linear reinforcement learning tasks.

AAAI 2023

Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with Reach-avoid Guarantees

reach-avoid guarantees

martingales

learning-based control

reasoning under uncertainty

formal verification

safety

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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.

poster

We present an executable formally verified SAT encoding of
ground classical AI planning problems. We use the theorem
prover Isabelle/HOL to perform the verification. We experimentally test the verified encoding and show that it can be used for reasonably sized standard planning benchmarks. We also use it as a reference to test a state-of-the-art SAT-based
planner, showing that it sometimes falsely claims that problems have no solutions of certain lengths.

Formally Verified SAT-Based AI Planning

Knowledge tracing (KT) is a crucial technique to predict students' future performance by observing their historical learning processes. Due to the powerful representation ability of deep neural networks, remarkable progress has been made by using deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. The majority of existing approaches rely on the \emph{homogeneous question} assumption that questions have equivalent contributions if they share the same set of knowledge components. Unfortunately, this assumption is inaccurate in real-world educational scenarios. Furthermore, it is very challenging to interpret the prediction results from the existing deep learning based KT models. Therefore, in this paper, we present QIKT, a question-centric interpretable KT model to address the above challenges. The proposed QIKT approach explicitly models students' knowledge state variations at a fine-grained level with question-sensitive cognitive representations that are jointly learned from a question-centric knowledge acquisition module and a question-centric problem solving module. Meanwhile, the QIKT utilizes an item response theory based prediction layer to generate interpretable prediction results. The proposed QIKT model is evaluated on three public real-world educational datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach is superior on the KT prediction task, and it outperforms a wide range of deep learning based KT models in terms of prediction accuracy with better model interpretability. To encourage reproducible results, we have provided all the datasets and code at \url{https://pykt.org/}. 

Improving Interpretability of Deep Sequential Knowledge Tracing Models with Dual Cognitive Representations

AmnioML: Amniotic Fluid Segmentation and Volume Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification

Recent studies on adversarial examples expose vulnerabilities of natural language processing (NLP) models. Existing techniques for generating adversarial examples are typically driven by deterministic heuristic rules that are agnostic to the optimal adversarial examples, a strategy that often results in attack failures. To this end, this research proposes Fraud's Bargain Attack (FBA), which utilizes a novel randomization mechanism to enlarge the searching space and enables high-quality adversarial examples to be generated with high probabilities. FBA applies the Metropolis-Hasting algorithm to enhance the selection of adversarial examples from all candidates proposed by a customized Word Manipulation Process (WMP). WMP perturbs one word at a time via insertion, removal, or substitution in a contextual-aware manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FBA outperforms the baselines in terms of attack success rate and imperceptibility.


Fraud’s Bargain Attacks to Textual Classifiers via Metropolis-Hasting Sampling (Student Abstract)

Keyphrase identification and classification is a Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval task that involves extracting relevant groups of words from a given text related to the main topic. In this work, we focus on extracting keyphrases from scientific documents. We introduce TA-DA, a Topic-Aware Domain Adaptation framework for keyphrase extraction that integrates Multi-Task Learning with Adversarial Training and Domain Adaptation. Our approach improves performance over baseline models by up to 5% in the exact match of the F1-score.

TA-DA: Topic-Aware Domain Adaptation for Scientific Keyphrase Identification and Classification (Student Abstract)

The ability to continually learn over time by grasping new knowledge and remembering previously learned experiences is essential for developing an online task-oriented dialogue system (TDS). In this paper, we work on the class incremental learning scenario where the TDS is evaluated without specifying the dialogue domain. We employ contrastive distillation on the intermediate representations of dialogues to learn transferable representations that suffer less from catastrophic forgetting. Besides, we provide a dynamic update mechanism to explicitly preserve the learned experiences by only updating the parameters related to the new task while keeping other parameters fixed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong baselines.

Class Incremental Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Contrastive Distillation on Internal Representations

With the boom of digital educational materials and scalable e-learning systems, the potential for realising AI-assisted personalised learning has skyrocketed. In this landscape, the automatic generation of educational questions will play a key role, enabling scalable self-assessment when a global population is manoeuvring their personalised learning journeys. We develop EduQG, a novel educational question generation model built by adapting a large language model. Our initial experiments demonstrate that EduQG can produce superior educational questions by pre-training on scientific text.

Pre-training with Scientific Text Improves Educational Question Generation

Learning to recover clear images from images having a combination of degrading factors is a challenging task. That being said, autonomous surveillance in low visibility conditions caused by high pollution/smoke, poor air quality index, low light, atmospheric scattering and haze during a blizzard, etc, becomes even more important to prevent accidents. It is thus crucial to form a solution that can not only result in a high-quality image but also which is efficient enough to be deployed for everyday use. However, the lack of proper datasets available to tackle this task limits the performance of the previous methods proposed. To this end, we generate the LowVis-AFO dataset, containing 3647 paired dark-hazy and clear images. We also introduce a new lightweight deep learning model called Low-Visibility Restoration Network (LVRNet). It outperforms previous image restoration methods with low latency, achieving a PSNR value of 25.744 and an SSIM of 0.905, hence making our approach scalable and ready for practical use.

LVRNet: Lightweight Image Restoration for Aerial Images under Low Visibility(Student Abstract)

The efficacy of topological data analysis (TDA) has been demonstrated in many different machine learning pipelines, particularly those in which structural characteristics of data are highly relevant. However, TDA's usability in large scale machine learning applications is hindered by the significant computational cost of generating persistence diagrams. In this work, a method that allows this computationally expensive process to be approximated by deep neural networks is proposed. Moreover, the method's practicality in estimating 0-dimensional persistence diagrams across a diverse range of images is shown.

Persistent Homology through Image Segmentation (Student Abstract)

In this work, we expand the discussion of bias in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) through a large-scale audit. Using a large and global data set of speech, we perform an audit of some of the most popular English ASR services. We show that, even when controlling for multiple linguistic covariates, ASR service performance has a statistically significant relationship to the political alignment of the speaker's birth country with respect to the United States' geopolitical power.

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