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Multi-agent consensus problems can often be seen as a sequence of autonomous and independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared  goal of  achieving  a global consensus state. Being able to estimate probabilities for the different outcomes and to predict how long it takes for a consensus to be formed, if ever, are core issues for such protocols.

Little attention has been given to protocols in which agents can remember past or outdated states.  In this paper, we propose a framework to study what we call `memory consensus protocol&#39;. We show that the employment of memory allows such processes to always converge, as well as, in some scenarios, such as cycles, converge faster. We provide a theoretical analysis of the probability of each option eventually winning such processes based on the initial opinions expressed by agents. Further, we perform experiments to investigate network topologies in which agents benefit from memory on the expected time needed for consensus.

AAAI 2021

The Influence of Memory in Multi-Agent Consensus

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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Multi-agent consensus problems can often be seen as a sequence of autonomous and independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared  goal of  achieving  a global consensus state. Being able to estimate probabilities for the different outcomes and to predict how long it takes for a consensus to be formed, if ever, are core issues for such protocols.

Little attention has been given to protocols in which agents can remember past or outdated states.  In this paper, we propose a framework to study what we call `memory consensus protocol'. We show that the employment of memory allows such processes to always converge, as well as, in some scenarios, such as cycles, converge faster. We provide a theoretical analysis of the probability of each option eventually winning such processes based on the initial opinions expressed by agents. Further, we perform experiments to investigate network topologies in which agents benefit from memory on the expected time needed for consensus.

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. 

Autoregressive models using Transformers have emerged as the  dominant  approach  for  music  generation  with  the  goal of synthesizing minute-long compositions that exhibit large-scale musical structure. These models are commonly trained by minimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) of the observed sequence in an autoregressive manner. Unfortunately, the  quality  of  samples  from  these  models  tends  to  degrade significantly for long sequences, a phenomenon attributed to exposure bias. Fortunately, we are able to detect these failures with classifiers trained to distinguish between real and sampled sequences, an observation that motivates our exploration of adversarial losses to complement the NLL objective. We use a pre-trained Span-BERT model for the discriminator of the GAN, which in our experiments helped with training stability. We use the Gumbel-Softmax trick to obtain a differentiable approximation of the sampling process. This makes discrete sequences amenable to optimization in GANs. In addition, we break the sequences into smaller chunks to ensure that we stay within a given memory budget. We demonstrate via human evaluations and a new discriminative metric that the music generated by our approach outperforms a baseline trained with likelihood maximization, the state-of-the-art Music Transformer, and other GANs used for sequence generation. 57% of people prefer music generated via our approach while 43% prefer Music Transformer.

Symbolic Music Generation with Transformer-GANs

Reinforcement learning and planning have been revolutionized in recent years, due in part to the mass adoption of deep convolutional neural networks and the resurgence of powerful methods to refine decision-making policies. However, the problem of sparse reward signals and their representation
remains pervasive in many domains. While various rewardshaping mechanisms and imitation learning approaches have been proposed to mitigate this problem, the use of humanaided artificial rewards introduces human error, sub-optimal behavior, and a greater propensity for reward hacking. In this
paper, we mitigate this by representing objectives as automata in order to define novel reward shaping functions over this structured representation. In doing so, we address the sparse rewards problem within a novel implementation of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) by proposing a reward shaping function which is updated dynamically to capture statistics on the utility of each automaton transition as it pertains to satisfying the goal of the agent. We further demonstrate that such automaton-guided reward shaping can be utilized to facilitate transfer learning between different environments when the objective is the same.

Dynamic Automaton-Guided Reward Shaping for Monte Carlo Tree Search

Generalized planning is concerned with the computation of general policies that solve multiple instances of a planning domain all at once. It has been recently shown that these policies can be computed in two steps: first, a suitable abstraction in the form of a qualitative numerical planning problem (QNP) is learned from sample plans, then the general policies are obtained from the learned QNP using a planner. In this work, we introduce an alternative approach for computing more expressive general policies which does not require sample plans or a QNP planner. The new formulation is very simple and can be cast in terms that are more standard in machine learning: a large but finite pool of features is defined from the predicates in the planning examples using a general grammar, and a small subset of features is sought for separating â€œgoodâ€ from â€œbadâ€ state transitions, and goals from non-goals. The problems of finding such a â€œseparating surfaceâ€ while labeling the transitions as â€œgoodâ€ or â€œbadâ€ are jointly addressed as a single combinatorial optimization problem expressed as a Weighted Max-SAT problem. The advantage of looking for the simplest policy in the given feature space that solves the given examples, possibly non-optimally, is that many domains have no general, compact policies that are optimal. The approach yields general policies for a number of benchmark domains.

Learning General Planning Policies from Small Examples without Supervision

Many practical applications require the solution of numerically challenging linear programs (LPs) and mixed integer programs (MIPs).
Scaling is a widely used preconditioning technique that aims at reducing the error propagation of the involved linear systems,
thereby improving the numerical behavior of the dual simplex algorithm and, consequently, LP-based branch-and-bound.
A reliable scaling method often makes the difference whether these problems can be solved correctly or not.
In this paper, we investigate the use of machine learning to choose at the beginning of the solution process
between two common scaling methods: Standard scaling and Curtis-Reid scaling.
The latter often, but not always, leads to a more robust solution process, but may suffer from longer solution times.

Rather than training for overall solution time, we propose to use the attention level of a MIP solution process as a learning label.
We evaluate the predictive power of a random forest approach and a linear regressor that learns the (square-root of the) difference in attention level.
It turns out that the resulting classification not only reduces various types of numerical errors by large margins, but it also improves the performance of the dual simplex algorithm.

The learned model has been implemented within the FICO Xpress MIP solver and it is used by default since release 8.9, May 2020, to determine the scaling algorithm Xpress applies before solving an LP or a MIP.

Learning to Scale Mixed-Integer Programs

Although static networks have been extensively studied in machine learning, data mining, and AI communities for many decades, the study of dynamic networks has recently taken center stage due to the prominence of social media and its effects on the dynamics of social networks. In this paper, we propose a statistical model for dynamically evolving networks, together with a variational inference approach. Our model, Neural Latent Space Model with Variational Inference, encodes edge dependencies across different time snapshots. It represents nodes via latent vectors and uses interaction matrices to model the presence of edges. These matrices can be used to incorporate multiple relations in heterogeneous networks by having a separate matrix for each of the relations. To capture the temporal dynamics, both node vectors and interaction matrices are allowed to evolve with time. Existing network analysis methods use representation learning techniques for modelling networks. These techniques are different for homogeneous and heterogeneous networks because heterogeneous networks can have multiple types of edges and nodes as opposed to a homogeneous network. Unlike these, we propose a unified model for homogeneous and heterogeneous networks in a variational inference framework. Moreover, the learned node latent vectors and interaction matrices may be interpretable and therefore provide insights on the mechanisms behind network evolution. We experimented with a single step and multi-step link forecasting on real-world networks of homogeneous, bipartite, and heterogeneous nature, and demonstrated that our model significantly outperforms existing models.

Neural Latent Space Model for Dynamic Networks and Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works have either required exact gradients or state-action visitation measure based mini-batch stochastic gradients with a diverging batch size, which limit their applicability in practical scenarios. In this paper, we consider classical policy gradient methods that compute an approximate gradient with a single trajectory or a fixed size mini-batch of trajectories under soft-max parametrization and log-barrier regularization, along with the widely-used REINFORCE gradient estimation procedure. By controlling the number of "bad" episodes and resorting to the classical doubling trick, we establish an anytime sub-linear high probability regret bound as well as almost sure global convergence of the average regret with an asymptotically sub-linear rate. These provide the first set of global convergence and sample efficiency results for the well-known REINFORCE algorithm and contribute to a better understanding of its performance in practice.

Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with REINFORCE

In machine learning, training data often capture the behaviour of multiple subgroups of some underlying human population.
When the amounts of training data for the subgroups are not controlled carefully, under-representation bias arises.
We introduce two natural notions of subgroup fairness and instantaneous fairness to address such under-representation bias in time-series forecasting problems.
In particular, we consider the subgroup-fair and instant-fair learning of a linear dynamical system (LDS) from multiple trajectories of varying lengths and the associated forecasting problems.
We provide globally convergent methods for the learning problems using hierarchies of convexifications of non-commutative polynomial optimisation problems. 
Our empirical results on a biased data set motivated by insurance applications and the well-known COMPAS data set demonstrate both the beneficial impact of fairness considerations on statistical performance and the encouraging effects of exploiting sparsity on run time.

Fairness in Forecasting and Learning Linear Dynamical Systems

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and Targeted ASBA (TABSA) allow finer-grained inferences about sentiment to be drawn from the same text, depending on context. For example, a given text can have different targets (e.g., neighborhoods) and different aspects (e.g., price or safety), with different sentiment associated with each target-aspect pair. In this paper, we investigate whether adding context to self-attention models improves performance on (T)ABSA. We propose two variants of Context-Guided BERT (CG-BERT) that learn to distribute attention under different contexts. We first adapt a context-aware Transformer to produce a CG-BERT that uses context-guided softmax-attention. Next, we propose an improved Quasi-Attention CG-BERT model that learns a compositional attention that supports subtractive attention. We train both models with pretrained BERT on two (T)ABSA datasets: SentiHood and SemEval-2014 (Task 4). Both models achieve new state-of-the-art results with our QACG-BERT model having the best performance. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the impact of context in the our proposed models. Our work provides more evidence for the utility of adding context-dependencies to pretrained self-attention-based language models for context-based natural language tasks.

Context-Guided BERT for Targeted Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Given an unsatisfiable set of constraints F, a maximal satisfiable subset (MSS) is a maximal subset of constraints C âŠ† F such that C is satisfiable. Over the past two decades, the steady improvement in runtime performance of algorithms for finding MSS has led to an increased adoption of MSS-based techniques in wide variety of domains. Motivated by the progress in finding an MSS, the past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in design of algorithmic techniques to enumerate all the MSSes, which has subsequently led to discovery of new applications utilizing enumeration of MSSes.
The development of techniques for finding and enumeration of MSSes mirrors a similar phenomenon of finding and enumeration of SAT solutions in the early 2000s, which subsequently motivated design of algorithmic techniques for model counting. In a similar spirit, we undertake study to investigate the feasibility of MSS counting techniques. In particular, the focus point of our investigation is to answer whether one can design efficient MSS counting techniques that do not rely on explicit MSS enumeration. The primary contribution of this work is an affirmative answer to the above question. Our tool, CountMSS, uses a novel architecture of a wrapper W and a remainder R such that the desired MSS count can be expressed as |W| âˆ’ |R|. CountMSS relies on the advances in projected model counting to efficiently compute |W| and |R|. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CountMSS is able to scale to instances clearly beyond the reach of enumeration-based techniques.

Counting Maximal Satisfiable Subsets

We investigate the problem of bounding causal effects from experimental studies in which treatment assignment is randomized but the subject compliance is imperfect. It is well known that under such conditions, the actual causal effects are not point-identifiable due to uncontrollable unobserved confounding. In their seminal work, Balke and Pearl (1994) derived the tightest bounds over the causal effects in this settings by employing an algebra program to derive analytic expressions. However, Pearl's approach assumes the primary outcome to be discrete and finite. Solving such a program could be intractable when high-dimensional context variables are present. In this paper, we present novel non-parametric methods to bound causal effects on the continuous outcome from studies with imperfect compliance. These bounds could be generalized to settings with a high-dimensional context.

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Symbolic Music Generation with Transformer-GANs

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Symbolic Music Generation with Transformer-GANs

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Limits of repetition in the illusion of consensus

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