United States

We present a novel deep reinforcement learning method to learn construction heuristics for vehicle routing problems. In specific, we propose a Multi-Decoder Attention Model (MDAM) to train multiple diverse policies, which effectively increases the chance of finding good solutions compared with existing methods that train only one policy. A customized beam search strategy is designed to fully exploit the diversity of MDAM. In addition, we propose an Embedding Glimpse layer in MDAM based on the recursive nature of construction, which can improve the quality of each policy by providing more informative embeddings. Extensive experiments on six different routing problems show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning based models.

AAAI 2021

Multi-Decoder Attention Model with Embedding Glimpse for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems

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. 

Recent video captioning work improves greatly due to the invention of various elaborate model architectures. If multiple captioning models are combined into a unified framework not only by simple more ensemble, and each model can benefit from each other, the final captioning might be boosted further. Jointly training of multiple model have not been explored in previous works. In this paper, we propose a novel Augmented Partial Mutual Learning (APML) training method where multiple decoders are trained jointly with mimicry losses between different decoders and different input variations. Another problem of training captioning model is the "one-to-many" mapping problem which means that one identical video input is mapped to multiple caption annotations.  To address this problem, we propose an annotation-wise frame masking approach to convert the "one-to-many" mapping to "one-to-one" mapping. The experiments performed on MSR-VTT and MSVD datasets demonstrate our proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Augmented Partial Mutual Learning with Frame Masking for Video Captioning

Coreference resolution and semantic role labeling are NLP tasks that capture different aspects of semantics, indicating respectively, which expressions refer to the same entity, and what semantic roles expressions serve in the sentence. However, they are often closely interdependent, and both generally necessitate natural language understanding. Do they form a coherent abstract representation of documents? We present a neural network architecture for joint coreference resolution and semantic role labeling for English, and train graph neural networks to model the 'coherence' of the combined shallow semantic graph. Using the resulting coherence score as a reward for our joint semantic analyzer, we use reinforcement learning to encourage global coherence over the document and between semantic annotations. This leads to improvements on both tasks in multiple datasets from different domains, and across a range of encoders of different expressivity, calling, we believe, for a more holistic approach for semantics in NLP.

Joint Semantic Analysis with Document-Level Cross-Task Coherence Rewards

Although recent multi-task learning methods have shown to be effective in improving the generalization of deep neural networks, they should be used with caution for safety-critical applications, such as clinical risk prediction. This is because even if they achieve improved task-average performance, they may still yield degraded performance on individual tasks, which may be critical (e.g., prediction of mortality risk). Existing asymmetric multi-task learning methods tackle this negative transfer problem by performing knowledge transfer from tasks with low loss to tasks with high loss. However, using loss as a measure of reliability is risky since low loss could result from overfitting. In the case of time-series prediction tasks, knowledge learned for one task (e.g., predicting the sepsis onset) at a specific timestep may be useful for learning another task (e.g., prediction of mortality) at a later timestep, but lack of loss at each timestep makes it difficult to measure the reliability at each timestep. To capture such dynamically changing asymmetric relationships between tasks in time-series data, we propose a novel temporal asymmetric multi-task learning model that performs knowledge transfer from certain tasks/timesteps to relevant uncertain tasks, based on the feature-level uncertainty. We validate our model on multiple clinical risk prediction tasks against various deep learning models for time-series prediction, which our model significantly outperforms without any sign of negative transfer. Further qualitative analysis of learned knowledge graphs by clinicians shows that they are helpful in analyzing the predictions of the model.

Clinical Risk Prediction with Temporal Probabilistic Asymmetric Multi-Task Learning

With recent advances in distantly supervised (DS) relation extraction (RE), considerable attention is attracted to leverage multi-instance learning (MIL) to distill high-quality supervision from the noisy DS. Here, we go beyond label noise and identify the key bottleneck of DS-MIL to be its low data utilization: as high-quality supervision being refined by MIL, MIL abandons a large amount of training instances, which leads to a low data utilization and hinders model training from having abundant supervision. In this paper, we propose collaborative adversarial training to improve the data utilization, which coordinates virtual adversarial training (VAT) and adversarial training (AT) at different levels. Specifically, since VAT is label-free, we employ the instance-level VAT to recycle instances abandoned by MIL. Besides, we deploy AT at the bag-level to unleash the full potential of the high-quality supervision got by MIL. Our proposed method brings consistent improvements (âˆ¼ 5 absolute AUC score) to the previous state of the art, which verifies the importance of the data utilization issue and the effectiveness of our method.

Empower Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Collaborative Adversarial Training

This work studies the use of visual semantic representations to align entities in heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs). Images are natural components of many existing KGs. By combining visual knowledge with other auxiliary information, we show that the proposed new approach,  EVA, creates a holistic entity representation that provides strong signals for cross-graph entity alignment. Besides, previous entity alignment methods require human labelled seed alignment, restricting availability. EVA provides a completely unsupervised solution by leveraging the visual similarity of entities to create an initial seed dictionary (visual pivots). Experiments on benchmark data sets DBP15k and DWY15k show that EVA offers state-of-the-art performance on both monolingual and cross-lingual entity alignment tasks. Furthermore, we discover that images are particularly useful to align long-tail KG entities, which inherently lack the structural contexts necessary for capturing the correspondences. Code release: https://github.com/cambridgeltl/eva; project page: http://cogcomp.org/page/publication view/927.

Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment

Open intent classification is a challenging task in dialogue systems. On the one hand, it should ensure the quality of known intent identification. On the other hand, it needs to detect the open (unknown) intent without prior knowledge. Current models are limited in finding the appropriate decision boundary to balance the performances of both known intents and the open intent. In this paper, we propose a post-processing method to learn the adaptive decision boundary (ADB) for open intent classification. We first utilize the labeled known intent samples to pre-train the model. Then, we automatically learn the adaptive spherical decision boundary for each known class with the aid of well-trained features. Specifically, we propose a new loss function to balance both the empirical risk and the open space risk. Our method does not need open intent samples and is free from modifying the model architecture. Moreover, our approach is surprisingly insensitive with less labeled data and fewer known intents. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method yields significant improvements compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Open Intent Classification with Adaptive Decision Boundary

We summarize full-length movies by creating shorter videos containing their most informative scenes. We explore the hypothesis that a summary can be created by assembling scenes which are turning points (TPs), i.e., key events in a movie that describe its storyline. We propose a model that identifies TP scenes by building a sparse movie graph that represents relations between scenes and is constructed using multimodal information. According to human judges, the summaries created by our approach are more informative and complete, and receive higher ratings, than the outputs of sequence-based models and general-purpose summarization algorithms. The induced graphs are interpretable, displaying different topology for different movie genres.

Movie Summarization via Sparse Graph Construction

Self-supervised pre-training techniques, albeit relying on large amounts of text, have enabled rapid growth in learning language representations for natural language understanding. However, as radically empirical models on sentences, they are subject to the input data distribution, inevitably incorporating data bias and reporting bias, which may lead to inaccurate understanding of sentences. To address this problem, we propose to adopt a human learner's approach: when we cannot make sense of a word in a sentence, we often consult the dictionary for specific meanings; but can the same work for empirical models? In this work, we try to inform the pre-trained masked language models of word meanings for semantics-enhanced pre-training. To achieve a contrastive and holistic view of word meanings, a definition pair of two related words is presented to the masked language model such that the model can better associate a word with its crucial semantic features. Both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations validate the proposed approach on semantics-orientated tasks, with an almost negligible increase of training data.

Towards Semantics-Enhanced Pre-Training: Can Lexicon Definitions Help Learning Sentence Meanings?

Diagnostic datasets that can detect biased models are an important prerequisite for bias reduction within natural language processing.
However, undesired patterns in the collected data can make such tests incorrect.
For example, if the feminine subset of a gender-bias-measuring coreference resolution dataset contains sentences with a longer average distance between the pronoun and the correct candidate, an RNN-based model may perform worse on this subset due to long-term dependencies.
In this work, we introduce a theoretically grounded method for weighting test samples to cope with such patterns in the test data.
We demonstrate the method on the GAP dataset for coreference resolution.
We annotate GAP with spans of all personal names and show that examples in the female subset contain more personal names and a longer distance between pronouns and their referents, potentially affecting the bias score in an undesired way.
Using our weighting method, we find the set of weights on the test instances that should be used for coping with these correlations,  
and we re-evaluate 16 recently released coreference models.

The Gap on Gap: Tackling the Problem of Differing Data Distributions in Bias-Measuring Datasets

The advanced text generation methods have witnessed great success in text summarization, language translation, and synthetic news generation. However, these techniques can be abused to generate disinformation and fake news. To better understand the potential threats of synthetic news, we develop a novel generation method FACTGEN to generate high-quality news content.  The majority of existing text generation methods either afford limited supplementary information or lose consistency between the input and output which makes the synthetic news less trustworthy. To address these issues, FACTGEN retrieves external facts to enrich the output and reconstructs the input claim from the generated content to improve the consistency among the input and the output. Experiment results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the generated news contents of FACTGEN are consistent and contain rich facts. We also discuss an effective defending technique to identify these synthetic news pieces if FACTGEN was used to generate fake news.

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Augmented Partial Mutual Learning with Frame Masking for Video Captioning

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Vehicle Routing with Finite Time Horizon using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Improved Network Embedding

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Augmented Partial Mutual Learning with Frame Masking for Video Captioning

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Vehicle Routing with Finite Time Horizon using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Improved Network Embedding

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