United States

We propose a general variational framework of fair clustering, which integrates an original Kullback-Leibler (KL) fairness term with a large class of clustering objectives, including prototype or graph based. Fundamentally different from the existing combinatorial and spectral solutions, our variational multi-term approach enables to control the trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. We derive a general tight upper bound based on a concave-convex decomposition of our fairness term, its Lipschitz-gradient property and the Pinskerâ€™s inequality. Our tight upper bound can be jointly optimized with various clustering objectives, while yielding a scalable solution, with convergence guarantee. Interestingly, at each iteration, it performs an independent update for each assignment variable. Therefore, it can be easily distributed for large-scale datasets. This scalability is important as it enables to explore different trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. Unlike spectral relaxation, our formulation does not require computing its eigenvalue decomposition. We report comprehensive evaluations and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods over various fair clustering benchmarks, which show that our variational formulation can yield highly competitive solutions in terms of fairness and clustering objectives.

AAAI 2021

Variational Fair Clustering

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.

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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

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Building an intelligent dialogue system with the ability to select a proper response according to a multi-turn context is a great challenging task.
Existing studies focus on building a context-response matching model with various neural architectures or pretrained language models (PLMs)
and typically learning with a single response prediction task.
These approaches overlook many potential training signals contained in dialogue data, which might be beneficial for context understanding and produce better features for response prediction. 
Besides, the response retrieved from existing dialogue systems supervised by the conventional way
still faces some critical challenges, including incoherence and inconsistency.
To address these issues, in this paper, we propose learning a context-response matching model with auxiliary self-supervised tasks designed for the dialogue data based on pre-trained language models.
Specifically, we introduce four self-supervised tasks including next session prediction, utterance restoration, incoherence detection and consistency discrimination, and jointly train the PLM-based response selection model with these auxiliary tasks in a multi-task manner.  
By this means, the auxiliary tasks can guide the learning of the matching model to achieve a better local optimum and select a more proper response.
Experiment results on two benchmarks indicate that the proposed auxiliary self-supervised tasks bring significant improvement for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based dialogues, and our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on both datasets.

Learning an Effective Context-Response Matching Model with Self-Supervised Tasks for Retrieval-Based Dialogues

Facial landmark localization aims to detect the predefined points of human faces, and the topic has been rapidly improved with the recent development of neural network based methods. However, it remains a challenging task when dealing with faces in unconstrained scenarios, especially with large pose variations. In this paper, we target the problem of facial landmark localization across large poses and address this task based on a split-and-aggregate strategy. To split the search space, we propose a set of anchor templates as references for regression, which well addresses the large variations of face poses. Based on the prediction of each anchor template, we propose to aggregate the results, which can reduce the landmark uncertainty due to the large poses. Overall, our proposed approach, named AnchorFace, obtains state-of-the-art results with extremely efficient inference speed on four challenging benchmarks, i.e. AFLW, 300W, Menpo, and WFLW dataset. Code will be available soon.

AnchorFace: An Anchor-Based Facial Landmark Detector across Large Poses

Explaining black-box models such as deep neural networks is becoming increasingly important as it helps to boost trust and debugging. Popular forms of explanations map the features to a vector indicating their individual importance to a decision on the instance-level. They can then be used to prevent the model from learning the wrong bias in data possibly due to ambiguity. For instance, Ross et al.'s ``right for the right reasons'' propagates user explanations backwards to the network by formulating differentiable constraints based on input gradients. 

Unfortunately, input gradients as well as many other widely used explanation methods form an approximation of the decision boundary and assume the underlying model to be fixed. Here, we demonstrate how to make use of influence functions---a well known robust statistic---in the constraints to correct the modelâ€™s behaviour more effectively. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that this ``right for better reasons''(RBR) considerably reduces the time to correct the classifier at training time and boosts the quality of explanations at inference time compared to input gradients. Besides, we also showcase the effectiveness of RBR in correcting "Clever Hans"-like behaviour in real, high-dimensional domain.

Right for Better Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Influence Function

We introduce Nutri-bullets, a multi-document summarization task for health and nutrition. First, we present two datasets of food and health summaries from multiple scientific studies. Furthermore, we propose a novel extract-compose model to solve the problem in the regime of limited parallel data. We explicitly select key spans from several abstracts using a policy network, followed by composing the selected spans to present a summary via a task specific language model. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach leads to more faithful, relevant and diverse summarization -- properties imperative to this application. For instance, on the BreastCancer dataset our approach gets a more than 50% improvement on relevance and faithfulness.

Nutri-Bullets: Summarizing Health Studies by Composing Segments

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) models are able to cope with the scarcity issue of NER samples in target domains. However, most of the existing NER benchmarks lack domain-specialized entity types or do not focus on a certain domain, leading to a less effective cross-domain evaluation. To address these obstacles, we introduce a cross-domain NER dataset (CrossNER), a fully-labeled collection of NER data spanning over five diverse domains with specialized entity categories for different domains. Additionally, we also provide a domain-related corpus since using it to continue pre-training language models (domain-adaptive pre-training) is effective for the domain adaptation. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the effectiveness of leveraging different levels of the domain corpus and pre-training strategies to do domain-adaptive pre-training for the cross-domain task. Results show that focusing on the fractional corpus containing domain-specialized entities and utilizing a more challenging pre-training strategy in domain-adaptive pre-training are beneficial for the NER domain adaptation, and our proposed method can consistently outperform existing cross-domain NER baselines. Nevertheless, experiments also illustrate the challenge of this cross-domain NER task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will catalyze research in the NER domain adaptation area. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zliucr/CrossNER.

CrossNER: Evaluating Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

Search-based systems have shown to be effective for planning in zero-sum games. However, search-based approaches have important disadvantages. First, the decisions of search algorithms are mostly non-interpretable, which is problematic in domains where predictability and trust are desired such as commercial games. Second, the computational complexity of search-based algorithms might limit their applicability, especially in contexts where resources are shared among other tasks such as graphic rendering. In this work we introduce a system for synthesizing programmatic strategies for a real-time strategy (RTS) game. In contrast with search algorithms, programmatic strategies are more amenable to explanations and tend to be efficient, once the program is synthesized. Our system uses a novel algorithm for simplifying domain-specific languages (DSLs) and a local search algorithm that synthesizes programs with self play. We performed a user study where we enlisted four professional programmers to develop programmatic strategies for mRTS, a minimalist RTS game. Our results show that the programs synthesized by our approach can outperform search algorithms and be competitive with programs written by the programmers.

Programmatic Strategies for Real-Time Strategy Games

Network games provide a natural machinery to compactly represent strategic interactions among agents whose payoffs exhibit sparsity in their dependence on the actions of others. Besides encoding interaction sparsity, however, real networks often exhibit a multi-scale structure, in which agents can be grouped into communities, those communities further grouped, and so on, and where interactions among such groups may also exhibit sparsity. We present a general model of multi-scale network games that encodes such multi-level structure. We then develop several algorithmic approaches that leverage this multi-scale structure, and derive sufficient conditions for convergence of these to a Nash equilibrium. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches enable orders of magnitude improvements in scalability when computing Nash equilibria in such games. For example, we can solve previously intractable instances involving up to 1 million agents in under 15 minutes.

Multi-Scale Games: Representing and Solving Games on Networks with Group Structure

Collaborative Multi-Agent Planning (MAP) problems with uncertainty and partial observability are often modeled as Dec-POMDPs. Yet, in deterministic domains, Qualitative Dec-POMDPs can scale up to much larger problem sizes. The best current QDec solver (QDec-FP) reduces MAP problems to multiple single-agent problems. In this paper, we describe a planner that uses richer information about agentsâ€™ knowledge to improve upon QDec-FP. With this change, the planner not only scales up to larger problems with more objects, but it can also support signaling, where agents signal information to each other by changing the state of the world.

Improved Knowledge Modeling and Its Use for Signaling in Multi-Agent Planning with Partial Observability

We present *-CFQ ("star-CFQ"): a suite of large-scale datasets of varying scope based on the CFQ semantic parsing benchmark, designed for principled investigation of the scalability of machine learning systems in a realistic compositional task setting. Using this suite, we conduct a series of experiments investigating the ability of Transformers to benefit from increased training data size under conditions of fixed computational cost. We show that compositional generalization remains a challenge at all training sizes, and we show that increasing the scope of natural language leads to consistently higher error rates, which are only partially offset by increased training data. We further show that while additional training data from a related domain improves the accuracy in data-starved situations, this improvement is limited and diminishes as the distance from the related domain to the target domain increases.

*-CFQ: Analyzing the Scalability of Machine Learning on a Compositional Task

We consider the problem of responsibility attribution in the setting of parametric Markov chains. Given a family of Markov chains over a set of parameters, and a property, responsibility attribution asks how the difference in the value of the property should be attributed to the parameters when they change from one point in the parameter space to another. 

We formalize responsibility as path-based attribution schemes studied in cooperative game theory. An attribution scheme in a game determines how a value (a surplus or a cost) is distributed among a set of participants. Path-based attribution schemes include the well-studied Aumann-Shapley and the Shapley-Shubik schemes. In our context, an attribution scheme measures the responsibility of each parameter on the value function of the parametric Markov chain. 

We study the decision problem for path-based attribution schemes. Our main technical result is an algorithm for deciding if a path-based attribution scheme for a rational (ratios of polynomials) cost function is over a rational threshold. In particular, it is decidable if the Aumann-Shapley value for a player is at least a given rational number. As a consequence, we show that responsibility attribution is decidable for parametric Markov chains and for a general class of properties that include expectation and variance of discounted sum and long-run average rewards, as well as specifications in temporal logic.

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Learning an Effective Context-Response Matching Model with Self-Supervised Tasks for Retrieval-Based Dialogues

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Learning an Effective Context-Response Matching Model with Self-Supervised Tasks for Retrieval-Based Dialogues

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A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

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