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Current neural network architectures have no mechanism for explicitly reasoning about item trade-offs. Such trade-offs are important for popular tasks such as recommendation. The main idea of this work is to give neural networks inductive biases that are inspired by economic theories. To this end, we propose Neural Utility Functions, which directly optimize the gradients of a neural network so that they are more consistent with utility theory, a mathematical framework for modeling choice among items. We demonstrate that Neural Utility Functions can recover theoretical item relationships better than vanilla neural networks, analytically show existing neural networks are not quasi-concave and do not inherently reason about trade-offs, and that augmenting existing models with a utility loss function improves recommendation results. The Neural Utility Functions we propose are theoretically motivated, and yield strong empirical results.

AAAI 2021

Neural Utility Functions

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

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. 

As an emerging field in Machine Learning, Explainable AI (XAI) has been offering remarkable performance in interpreting the decisions made by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To achieve visual explanations for CNNs, methods based on class activation mapping and randomized input sampling have gained great popularity. However, the attribution methods based on these techniques provide lower-resolution and blurry explanation maps that limit their explanation power. To circumvent this issue, visualization based on various layers is sought. In this work, we collect visualization maps from multiple layers of the model based on an attribution-based input sampling technique and aggregate them to reach a fine-grained and complete explanation. We also propose a layer selection strategy that applies to the whole family of CNN-based models, based on which our extraction framework is applied to visualize the last layers of each convolutional block of the model. Moreover, we perform an empirical analysis of the efficacy of derived lower-level information to enhance the represented attributions. Comprehensive experiments conducted on shallow and deep models trained on natural and industrial datasets, using both ground-truth and model-truth based evaluation metrics validate our proposed algorithm by meeting or outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in terms of explanation ability and visual quality, demonstrating that our method shows stability regardless of the size of objects or instances to be explained.

Explaining Convolutional Neural Networks through Attribution-Based Input Sampling and Block-Wise Feature Aggregation

We tackle the problem of machine translation of manga, Japanese comics. Manga translation involves two important problems in machine translation: context-aware and multimodal translation. Since text and images are mixed up in an unstructured fashion in Manga, obtaining context from the image is essential for manga translation. However, it is still an open problem how to extract context from image and integrate into MT models. In addition, corpus and benchmarks to train and evaluate such model is currently unavailable. In this paper, we make the following four contributions that establishes the foundation of manga translation research. First, we propose multimodal context-aware translation framework. We are the first to incorporate context information obtained from manga image. It enables us to translate texts in speech bubbles that cannot be translated without using context information (e.g., texts in other speech bubbles, gender of speakers, etc.). Second, for training the model, we propose the approach to automatic corpus construction from pairs of original manga and their translations, by which large parallel corpus can be constructed without any manual labeling. Third, we created a new benchmark to evaluate manga translation. Finally, on top of our proposed methods, we devised a first compleheisive system for fully automated manga translation.

Towards Fully Automated Manga Translation

This paper studies learning from positive and unlabeled examples, known as PU learning. It proposes a novel PU learning method called Predictive Adversarial Networks (PAN) based on GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks). GAN learns a generator to generate data (e.g., images) to fool a discriminator which tries to determine whether the generated data belong to a (positive) training class. PU learning can be casted as trying to identify (not generate) likely positive instances from the unlabeled set to fool a discriminator that determines whether the identified likely positive instances from the unlabeled set are indeed positive. However, directly applying GAN is problematic because GAN focuses on only the positive data. The resulting PU learning method will have high precision but low recall. We propose a new objective function based on KL-divergence. Evaluation using both image and text data shows that PAN outperforms state-of-the-art PU learning methods and also a direct adaptation of GAN for PU learning.

Predictive Adversarial Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data

Cascade models are central to understanding, predicting, and controlling epidemic spreading and information propagation. Related optimization, including influence maximization, model parameter inference, or the development of vaccination strategies, relies heavily on sampling from a model. This is either inefficient or inaccurate. As alternative, we present an efficient message passing algorithm that computes the probability distribution of the cascade size for the Independent Cascade Model on weighted directed networks and generalizations. Our approach is exact on trees but can be applied to any network topology. It approximates locally tree-like networks well, scales to large networks, and can lead to surprisingly good performance on more dense networks, as we also exemplify on real world data.

Cascade Size Distributions: Why They Matter and How To Compute Them Efficiently

Image-to-image translation is to map images from a given style to another given style. While exceptionally successful, current methods assume the availability of training images in both source and target domains, which does not always hold in practice. Inspired by humans' reasoning capability of analogy, we propose analogical image translation (AIT)  that exploit the concept of gist, for the first time. Given images of two styles in the source domain: A and A', along with images B of the first style in the target domain, learn a model to translate B to B' in the target domain, such that A:A' :: B:B'.  AIT is especially useful for translation scenarios in which training data of one style is hard to obtain but training data of the same two styles in another domain is available. For instance, in the case from normal conditions to extreme, rare conditions, obtaining real training images for the latter case is challenging. However, obtaining synthetic data for both cases is relatively easy. In this work, we aim at adding adverse weather effects, more specifically fog, to images taken in clear weather. To circumvent the challenge of collecting real foggy images, AIT learns the gist of translating synthetic clear-weather to foggy images, followed by adding fog effects onto real clear-weather images, without ever seeing any real foggy image. AIT achieves zero-shot image translation capability, whose  effectiveness and benefit are demonstrated  by  the downstream task of semantic foggy scene understanding.

Analogical Image Translation for Fog Generation

Representing graphs as sets of node embeddings in certain curved Riemannian manifolds has recently gained momentum in machine learning due to their desirable geometric inductive biases (e.g., hierarchical structures benefit from hyperbolic geometry). However, going beyond embedding spaces of constant sectional curvature, while potentially more representationally powerful, proves to be challenging as one can easily lose the appeal of computationally tractable tools such as geodesic distances or Riemannian gradients. Here, we explore two computationally efficient matrix manifolds, showcasing how to learn and optimize graph embeddings in these Riemannian spaces. Empirically, we demonstrate consistent improvements over Euclidean geometry while often outperforming hyperbolic and elliptical embeddings based on various metrics that capture different graph properties. Our results serve as new evidence for the benefits of non-Euclidean embeddings in machine learning pipelines.

Computationally Tractable Riemannian Manifolds for Graph Embeddings

Evasion attack in multi-label learning systems is an interesting, widely witnessed, yet rarely explored research topic. Characterizing the crucial factors determining the attackability of the multi-label adversarial threat is the key to interpret the origin of the adversarial vulnerability and to understand how to mitigate it. Our study is inspired by the theory of adversarial risk bound. We associate the attackability of a targeted multi-label classifier with the regularity of the classifier and the training data distribution. Beyond the theoretical attackability analysis, we further propose an efficient empirical attackability estimator via greedy label space exploration. It provides provably computational efficiency and approximation accuracy. Substantial experimental results on real-world datasets validate the unveiled attackability factors and the effectiveness of the proposed empirical attackability indicator.

Characterizing the Evasion Attackability of Multi-Label Classifiers

Unsupervised aspect detection (UAD) aims at automatically extracting interpretable aspects and identifying aspect-specific segments (such as sentences) from online reviews. However, recent deep learning based topic models, specifically aspect-based autoencoder, suffer from several problems such as extracting noisy aspects and poorly mapping aspects discovered by models to the aspects of interest. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we first propose a self-supervised contrastive learning framework and an attention-based model equipped with a novel smooth self-attention (SSA) module for the UAD task in order to learn better representations for aspects and review segments. Secondly, we introduce a high-resolution selective mapping (HRSMap) method to efficiently assign aspects discovered by the model to the aspects of interest. We also propose using a knowledge distillation technique to further improve the aspect detection performance. Our methods outperform several recent unsupervised and weakly supervised approaches on publicly available benchmark user review datasets. Aspect interpretation results show that extracted aspects are meaningful, have a good coverage, and can be easily mapped to aspects of interest. Ablation studies and attention weight visualization also demonstrate effectiveness of SSA and the knowledge distillation method.

A Simple and Effective Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Aspect Detection

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the problem changes, shifting both the distribution of states and their values. In this paper we take a novel perspective, arguing that the value prediction problems faced by an RL agent should not be addressed in isolation, but rather as a single, holistic, prediction problem. An RL algorithm generates a sequence of policies that, at least approximately, improve towards the optimal policy. We explicitly characterize the associated sequence of value functions and call it the value-improvement path. Our main idea is to approximate the value-improvement path holistically, rather than to solely track the value function of the current policy. Specifically, we discuss the impact that this holistic view of RL has on representation learning. We demonstrate that a representation that spans the past value-improvement path will also provide an accurate value approximation for future policy improvements. We use this insight to better understand existing approaches to auxiliary tasks and to propose new ones. To test our hypothesis empirically, we augmented a standard deep RL agent with an auxiliary task of learning the value-improvement path. In a study of Atari 2600 games, the augmented agent achieved approximately double the mean and median performance of the baseline agent.

The Value-Improvement Path: Towards Better Representations for Reinforcement Learning

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved great success in analyzing tropical cyclones (TC) with satellite images in several tasks, such as TC intensity estimation. In contrast, TC structure, which is conventionally described by a few parameters estimated subjectively by meteorology specialists, is still hard to be profiled objectively and routinely. This study applies CNN on satellite images to create the entire TC structure profiles, covering all the structural parameters. By utilizing the meteorological domain knowledge to construct TC wind profiles based on historical structure parameters, we provide valuable labels for training in our newly released benchmark dataset. With such a dataset, we hope to attract more attention to this crucial issue among data scientists. Meanwhile, a baseline is established based on a specialized convolutional model operating on polar-coordinates. We discovered that it is more feasible and physically reasonable to extract structural information on polar-coordinates, instead of Cartesian coordinates, according to a TCâ€™s rotational and spiral natures. Experimental results on the released benchmark dataset verified the robustness of the proposed model and demonstrated the potential for applying deep learning techniques for this barely developed yet important topic.
For codes and implementation details, please visit https://github.com/BoyoChen/TCSA-CNN-profiler.

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Explaining Convolutional Neural Networks through Attribution-Based Input Sampling and Block-Wise Feature Aggregation

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Basic Utility Theory for Belief Functions

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