United States

The existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods (MARL) for determining the coordination between agents focus on either global-level or neighborhood-level coordination between agents. However the problem of coordination between individual agents is remain to be solved. It is crucial for learning an optimal coordinated policy in unknown multi-agent environments to analyze the agent&#39;s roles and the correlation between individual agents. To this end, in this paper we propose an agent-level coordination based MARL method. Specifically, it includes two parts in our method. The first is correlation analysis between individual agents based on the Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall correlation coefficients; And the second is an agent-level coordinated training framework where the communication message between weakly correlated agents is dropped out, and a correlation based reward function is built. The proposed method is verified in four mixed cooperative-competitive environments. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art MARL methods and can measure the correlation between individual agents accurately.

AAAI 2021

Coordination between Individual Agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).
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AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods (MARL) for determining the coordination between agents focus on either global-level or neighborhood-level coordination between agents. However the problem of coordination between individual agents is remain to be solved. It is crucial for learning an optimal coordinated policy in unknown multi-agent environments to analyze the agent's roles and the correlation between individual agents. To this end, in this paper we propose an agent-level coordination based MARL method. Specifically, it includes two parts in our method. The first is correlation analysis between individual agents based on the Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall correlation coefficients; And the second is an agent-level coordinated training framework where the communication message between weakly correlated agents is dropped out, and a correlation based reward function is built. The proposed method is verified in four mixed cooperative-competitive environments. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art MARL methods and can measure the correlation between individual agents accurately.

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. 

Despite the abundance of multi-modal data, such as image-text pairs, there has been little effort in understanding the individual entities and their different roles in the construction of these data instances. In this work, we endeavour to discover the entities and their corresponding importance in cooking recipes automatically as a visual-linguistic association problem. More specifically, we introduce a novel cross-modal learning framework to jointly model the latent representations of images and text in the food image-recipe association and retrieval tasks. This model allows one to discover complex functional and hierarchical relationships between images and text, and among textual parts of a recipe including title, ingredients and cooking instructions. Our experiments show that by making use of efficient tree-structured Long Short-Term Memory as the text encoder in our computational cross-modal retrieval framework,  we are not only able to identify the main ingredients and cooking actions in the recipe descriptions without explicit supervision, but we can also learn more meaningful feature representations of food recipes, appropriate for challenging cross-modal retrieval and recipe adaption tasks.

CHEF: Cross-Modal Hierarchical Embeddings for Food Domain Retrieval

Visual Information Extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust Visual Information Extraction System (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is an unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (https://github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.

Towards Robust Visual information Extraction in Real World: New Dataset and Novel Solution

We study test-based binary classification, where a principal either accepts or rejects agents based on the outcomes they get in a set of tests.  The principal commits to a policy, which consists of all sets of outcomes that lead to acceptance.  Each agent is modeled by a distribution over the space of possible outcomes.  When an agent takes a test, he pays a cost and receives an independent sample from his distribution as the outcome.  Agents can always choose between taking another test and stopping.  They maximize their expected utility, which is the value of acceptance if the principal's policy accepts the set of outcomes they have and 0 otherwise, minus the total cost of tests taken.

We focus on the case where agents can be either "good" or "bad" (corresponding to their distribution over test outcomes), and the principal's goal is to accept good agents and reject bad ones.  We show, roughly speaking, that as long as the good and bad agents have different distributions (which can be arbitrarily close to each other), the principal can always achieve perfect accuracy, meaning good agents are accepted with probability 1, and bad ones are rejected with probability 1.  Moreover, there is a policy achieving perfect accuracy under which the maximum number of tests any agent needs to take is constant â€” in sharp contrast to the case where the principal directly observes samples from agents' distributions.  The key technique is to choose the policy so that agents self-select into taking tests.

Classification with Few Tests through Self-Selection

We study the task of semantic mapping â€“ specifically, an embodied agent (a robot or an egocentric AI assistant) is given a tour of a new environment and asked to build an allocentric top-down semantic map (â€˜what is where?â€™) from egocentric observations of an RGB-D camera with known pose (via localization sensors). Importantly, our goal is to build neural episodic memories and spatio-semantic representations of 3D spaces that enable the agent to easily learn subsequent tasks in the same space â€“ navigating to objects seen during the tour (â€˜Find chairâ€™) or answering questions about the space (â€˜How many chairs did you see in the house?â€™). Towards this goal, we present Semantic MapNet (SMNet), which consists of: (1) an Egocentric Visual Encoder that encodes each egocentric RGB-D frame, (2) a Feature Projector that projects egocentric features to appropriate locations on a floor-plan, (3) a Spatial Memory Tensor of size floor-plan lengthÃ—widthÃ—feature-dims that learns to accumulate projected egocentric features, and (4) a Map Decoder that uses the memory tensor to produce semantic top-down maps. SMNet combines the strengths of (known) projective camera geometry and neural representation learning. On the task of semantic mapping in the  Matterport3D dataset, SMNet significantly outperforms competitive baselines by 4.01âˆ’16.81% (absolute) on mean-IoU and 3.81âˆ’19.69% (absolute) on Boundary-F1 metrics. Moreover, we show how to use the spatio-semantic allocentric representations build by SMNet for the task of ObjectNav and Embodied Question Answering. Project page: https://vincentcartillier.github.io/smnet.html.

Semantic MapNet: Building Allocentric Semanticmaps and Representations from Egocentric Views

Metric clustering is a fundamental primitive in machine learning with several applications for mining massive datasets. An important example of metric clustering is the k-center problem. While this problem has been extensively studied in distributed settings, all previous algorithms use Î©(k) space per machine and Î©(n k) total work. In this paper, we develop the first highly scalable approximation algorithm for k-center clustering, with O~(n^Îµ) space per machine and O~(n^(1+Îµ)) total work, for arbitrary small constant Îµ. It produces an O(log log log n)-approximate solution with k(1+o(1)) centers in O(log log n) rounds of computation.

Extreme k-Center Clustering

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with subadditive valuations in a fair and efficient manner. Envy-Freeness up to any good (EFX) is the most compelling notion of fairness in the context of indivisible goods. Although the existence of EFX is not known beyond the simple case of two agents with subadditive valuations, some good approximations of EFX are known to exist, namely 1/2-EFX allocation and EFX allocations with bounded charity.

Nash welfare (the geometric mean of agents' valuations) is one of the most commonly used measures of efficiency. In case of additive valuations, an allocation that maximizes Nash welfare also satisfies fairness properties like Envy-Free up to one good (EF1). Although there is substantial work on approximating Nash welfare when agents have additive valuations, very little is known when agents have subadditive valuations. In this paper, we design a polynomial-time algorithm that outputs an allocation that satisfies either of the two approximations of EFX as well as achieves an O(n) approximation to the Nash welfare. Our result also improves the current best-known approximation of O(n log n) and O(m) to Nash welfare when agents have submodular and subadditive valuations, respectively.

Furthermore, our technique also gives an O(n) approximation to a family of welfare measures, p-mean of valuations for p in (-\infty, 1], thereby also matching asymptotically the current best approximation ratio for special cases like p = -\infty while also retaining the remarkable fairness properties.

Fair and Efficient Allocations under Subadditive Valuations

Envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) provides a strong and intuitive guarantee of fairness in the allocation of indivisible goods. But whether such allocations always exist or whether they can be efficiently computed remains an important open question. We study the existence and computation of EFX in conjunction with various other economic properties under lexicographic preferences--a well-studied preference restriction model in artificial intelligence and economics. In sharp contrast to the known results for additive valuations, we not only prove the existence of EFX and Pareto optimal allocations, but in fact provide an algorithmic characterization of these two properties. We also characterize the mechanisms that are, in addition, strategyproof, non-bossy, and neutral. When the efficiency notion is strengthened to rank-maximality, we obtain non-existence and computational hardness results, and show that tractability can be restored when EFX is relaxed to another well-studied fairness notion called maximin share guarantee (MMS).

Fair and Efficient Allocations under Lexicographic Preferences

Without prohibitive and laborious 3D annotations, weakly-supervised 3D human pose methods mainly employ the model regularization with geometric projection consistency or geometry estimation from multi-view images. Nevertheless, those approaches explicitly need known parameters of calibrated cameras, exhibiting a limited model generalization in various realistic scenarios. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we propose a Deductive Weakly-Supervised Learning (DWSL) for 3D human pose machine. Our DWSL firstly learns latent representations on depth and camera pose for 3D pose reconstruction. Since weak supervision usually causes ill-conditioned learning or inferior estimation, our DWSL introduces deductive reasoning to make an inference for the human pose from a view to another and develops a reconstruction loss to demonstrate what the model learns and infers is reliable. 
This learning by deduction strategy employs the view-transform demonstration and structural rules derived from depth, geometry and angle constraints, which improves the reliability of the model training with weak supervision. On three 3D human pose benchmarks, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposed method, which achieves superior performance in comparison with state-of-the-art weak-supervised methods. Particularly, our model shows an appealing potential for learning from 2D data captured in dynamic outdoor scenes, which demonstrates promising robustness and generalization in realistic scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Xipeng-Chen/DWSL-3D-pose.

Deductive Learning for Weakly-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation via Uncalibrated Cameras

The COVID-19 pandemic provides new motivation for a classic problem in epidemiology: estimating the empirical rate of transmission during an outbreak (formally, the time-varying reproduction number) from case counts. While standard methods exist, they work best at coarse-grained national or state scales with abundant data, and struggle to accommodate the partial observability and sparse data common at finer scales (e.g., individual schools or towns). For example, case counts may be sparse when only a small fraction of infections are caught by a testing program. Or, whether an infected individual tests positive may depend on the kind of test and the point in time when they are tested. We propose a Bayesian framework which accommodates partial observability in a principled manner. Our model places a Gaussian process prior over the unknown reproduction number at each time step and models observations sampled from the distribution of a specific testing program. For example, our framework can accommodate a variety of kinds of tests (viral RNA, antibody, antigen, etc.) and sampling schemes (e.g., longitudinal or cross-sectional screening). Inference in this framework is complicated by the presence of tens or hundreds of thousands of discrete latent variables. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient stochastic variational inference method which relies on a novel gradient estimator for the variational objective. Experimental results for an example motivated by COVID-19 show that our method produces an accurate and well-calibrated posterior, while standard methods for estimating the reproduction number can fail badly.

Tracking Disease Outbreaks from Sparse Data with Bayesian Inference

Safety validation is important during the development of safety-critical autonomous systems but can require significant computational effort. Existing algorithms often start from scratch each time the system under test changes. We apply transfer learning to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning based safety validation algorithms when applied to related systems. Knowledge from previous safety validation tasks is encoded through the action value function and transferred to future tasks with a learned set of attention weights. Including a learned state and action value transformation for each source task can improve performance even when systems have substantially different failure modes. We conduct experiments on safety validation tasks in gridworld and autonomous driving scenarios. We show that transfer learning can improve the initial and final performance of validation algorithms and reduce the number of training steps.

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Next from AAAI 2021

CHEF: Cross-Modal Hierarchical Embeddings for Food Domain Retrieval

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Disentangling Successor Features for Coordination in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

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