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We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes actions in each time step based on the current state, the principal&#39;s advice/signal, and beliefs about the external parameter. The action of the agent updates the state according to a stochastic process. The model arises naturally in many applications, e.g., an app (the principal) can advice the user (the agent) on possible choices between actions based on additional real-time information the app has. We study the problem of designing a signaling strategy from the principal&#39;s point of view. We show that the principal has an optimal strategy against a myopic agent, who only optimizes their rewards locally, and the optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time. In contrast, it is NP-hard to approximate an optimal policy against a far-sighted agent. Further, we show that if the principal has the power to threaten the agent by not providing future signals, then we can efficiently design a threat-based strategy. This strategy guarantees the principal&#39;s payoff as if playing against an agent who is far-sighted but myopic to future signals.

AAAI 2022

Bayesian Persuasion in Sequential Decision-Making

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes actions in each time step based on the current state, the principal's advice/signal, and beliefs about the external parameter. The action of the agent updates the state according to a stochastic process. The model arises naturally in many applications, e.g., an app (the principal) can advice the user (the agent) on possible choices between actions based on additional real-time information the app has. We study the problem of designing a signaling strategy from the principal's point of view. We show that the principal has an optimal strategy against a myopic agent, who only optimizes their rewards locally, and the optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time. In contrast, it is NP-hard to approximate an optimal policy against a far-sighted agent. Further, we show that if the principal has the power to threaten the agent by not providing future signals, then we can efficiently design a threat-based strategy. This strategy guarantees the principal's payoff as if playing against an agent who is far-sighted but myopic to future signals.

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. 

We study the problem of learning influence adoption in networks. In this problem, a communicable entity (such as an infectious disease, a computer virus, or a social media meme) propagates through a network, and the goal is to learn the state of each individual node by sampling only a small number of nodes and observing/testing their states. We study this problem in heterogeneous networks, in which each individual node has a set of distinct features that determine how it is affected by the propagating entity. We give an efficient algorithm with nearly optimal sample complexity for two variants of this learning problem, corresponding to symptomatic and asymptomatic spread. In each case, the optimal sample complexity naturally generalizes the complexity of learning how nodes are affected in isolation, and the complexity of learning influence adoption in a homogeneous network.

Learning Influence Adoption in Heterogeneous Networks

Deep learning has redefined AI thanks to the rise of artificial neural networks, which are inspired by neurological networks in the brain. Through the years, this dualism between AI and neuroscience has brought immense benefits to both fields, allowing neural networks to be used in a plethora of applications. Neural networks use an efficient implementation of reverse differentiation, called backpropagation (BP). This algorithm, however, is often criticized for its biological implausibility (e.g., lack of local update rules for the parameters). Therefore, biologically plausible learning methods that rely on predictive coding (PC), a framework for describing information processing in the brain, are increasingly studied. Recent works prove that these methods can approximate BP up to a certain margin on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), and asymptotically on any other complex model, and that zero-divergence inference learning (Z-IL), a variant of PC, is able to exactly implement BP on MLPs. However, the recent literature shows also that there is no biologically plausible method yet that can exactly replicate the weight update of BP on complex models. To fill this gap, in this paper, we generalize (PC and) Z-IL by directly defining it on computational graphs, and show that it can perform exact reverse differentiation. What results is the first PC (and so biologically plausible) algorithm that is equivalent to BP in the way of updating parameters on any neural network, providing a bridge between the interdisciplinary research of neuroscience and deep learning. Furthermore, the above results in particular also immediately provide a novel local and parallel implementation of BP.

Reverse Differentiation via Predictive Coding

Online learning to rank (OLTR) interactively learns to choose lists of items from a large collection based on certain click models that describe users' click behaviors. Most recent works for this problem focus on the stochastic environment where the item attractiveness is assumed to be invariant during the learning process. In many real-world scenarios, however, the environment could be dynamic or even arbitrarily changing. This work studies the OLTR problem in both stochastic and adversarial environments under the position-based model (PBM). We propose a method based on the follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) framework with Tsallis entropy and develop a new self-bounding constraint especially designed for PBM. We prove the proposed algorithm simultaneously achieves O(log T) regret in the stochastic environment and O(mâˆšnT) regret in the adversarial environment, where T is the number of rounds, n is the number of items and m is the number of positions. We also provide a lower bound of order â„¦(mâˆšnT) for adversarial PBM, which matches our upper bound and improves over the state-of-the-art lower bound. The experiments show that our algorithm could simultaneously learn in both stochastic and adversarial environments and is competitive compared to existing methods that are designed for a single environment.

Simultaneously Learning Stochastic and Adversarial Bandits under the Position-Based Model

The fairness in machine learning is getting increasing attention, as its applications in different fields continue to expand and diversify. To mitigate the discriminated model behaviors between different demographic groups, we introduce a novel post-processing method to optimize over multiple fairness constraints through group-aware threshold adaptation. We propose to learn adaptive classification thresholds for each demographic group by optimizing the confusion matrix estimated from the probability distribution of a classification model output. As we only need an estimated probability distribution of model output instead of the classification model structure, our post-processing model can be applied to a wide range of classification models and improve fairness in a model-agnostic manner and ensure privacy. This even allows us to post-process existing fairness methods to further improve the trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Moreover, our model has low computational cost. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis on the convergence of our optimization algorithm and the trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Our method theoretically enables a better upper bound in near optimality than previous method under the same condition. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains the result that is closest to the theoretical accuracy-fairness trade-off boundary.

Group-Aware Threshold Adaptation for Fair Classification

In this work we consider the problem of regret minimization for logistic bandits. The main challenge of logistic bandits is reducing the dependence on a potentially large problem dependent constant that can at worst scale exponentially with the norm of the unknown parameter vector. Previous works have applied self-concordance of the logistic function to remove this worst-case dependence providing regret guarantees that move the reduce the dependence on this worst case parameter to lower order terms with only polylogarithmic dependence on the main term and as well as linear dependence on the dimension of the unknown parameter. This work improves upon the prior art by 1) removing all scaling of the worst case term on the main term and 2) reducing the dependence on the dependence to scale with the square root of dimension in the fixed arm setting by employing an experimental design procedure. Our regret bound in fact takes a tighter instance (i.e., gap) dependent regret bound for the first time in logistic bandits. We also propose a new warmup sampling algorithm that can dramatically reduce the lower order term in the regret in general and prove that it can exponentially reduce the lower order term's dependency on the worst case parameter in some instances. Finally, we discuss the impact of the bias of the MLE on the logistic bandit problem in d dimensions, providing an example where d^2 lower order regret (cf., it is d for linear bandits) may not be improved as long as the MLE is used and how bias-corrected estimators may be used to make it closer to d.

An Experimental Design Approach for Regret Minimization in Logistic Bandits

We provide guarantees for approximate Gaussian Process (GP) regression resulting from two common low-rank kernel approximations: based on random Fourier features, and based on truncating the kernel's Mercer expansion. In particular, we bound the Kullbackâ€“Leibler divergence between an exact GP and one resulting from one of the afore-described low-rank approximations to its 
 kernel, as well as between their corresponding predictive densities, and we also bound the error between predictive mean vectors and between predictive covariance matrices computed using the exact versus using the approximate GP. We provide experiments on both simulated data and standard benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of our theoretical bounds.

How Good Are Low-Rank Approximations in Gaussian Process Regression?

Few-shot classification requires adapting knowledge learned from a large annotated base dataset to recognize novel unseen classes, each represented by few labeled examples. In such a scenario, pretraining a network with high capacity on the large dataset and then finetuning it on the few examples causes severe overfitting. At the same time, training a simple linear classifier on top of ``frozen'' features learned from the large labeled dataset fails to adapt the model to the properties of the novel classes, effectively inducing underfitting. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to both of these two popular strategies. First, our method pseudo-labels the entire large dataset using the linear classifier trained on the novel classes. This effectively ``hallucinates'' the novel classes in the large dataset, despite the novel categories not being present in the base database (novel and base classes are disjoint). Then, it finetunes the entire model with a distillation loss on the pseudo-labeled base examples, in addition to the standard cross-entropy loss on the novel dataset. This step effectively trains the network to recognize contextual and appearance cues that are useful for the novel-category recognition but using the entire large-scale base dataset and thus overcoming the inherent data-scarcity problem of few-shot learning. Despite the simplicity of the approach, we show that that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on four well-established few-shot classification benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/LabelHalluc.

Label Hallucination for Few-Shot Classification

In this paper, we tackle the problem of one-shot unsupervised domain adaptation (OSUDA) for semantic segmentation where the segmentors only see one unlabeled target image during training. In this case, traditional unsupervised domain adaptation models usually fail since they cannot adapt to the target domain with over-fitting to one (or few) target samples. To address this problem, existing OSUDA methods usually integrate a style-transfer module to perform domain randomization based on the unlabeled target sample, with which multiple domains around the target sample can be explored during training. However, such a style-transfer module relies on an additional set of images as style reference for pre-training and also increases the memory demand for domain adaptation. Here we propose a new OSUDA method that can effectively relieve such computational burden. Specifically, we integrate several style-mixing layers into the segmentor which play the role of style-transfer module to stylize the source images without introducing any learned parameters. Moreover, we propose a patchwise prototypical matching (PPM) method to weighted consider the importance of source pixels during the supervised training to relieve the negative adaptation. Experimental results show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two commonly used benchmarks for domain adaptive semantic segmentation under the one-shot setting and is more efficient than all comparison approaches.

Style Mixing and Patchwise Prototypical Matching for One-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

In Apprenticeship Learning (AL), we are given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) without access to the cost function. Instead, we observe trajectories sampled by an expert that acts according to some policy. The goal is to find a policy that matches the expert's performance on some predefined set of cost functions. 
We introduce an online variant of AL (Online Apprenticeship Learning; OAL), where the agent is expected to perform comparably to the expert while interacting with the environment. We show that the OAL problem can be effectively solved by combining two mirror descent based no-regret algorithms: one for policy optimization and another for learning the worst case cost. By employing optimistic exploration, we derive a convergent algorithm with O(sqrt(K)) regret, where K is the number of interactions with the MDP, and an additional linear error term that depends on the amount of expert trajectories available. Importantly, our algorithm avoids the need to solve an MDP at each iteration, making it more practical compared to prior AL methods. Finally, we implement a deep variant of our algorithm which shares some similarities to GAIL, but where the discriminator is replaced with the costs learned by OAL. Our simulations suggest that OAL performs well in high dimensional control problems.

Online Apprenticeship Learning

This paper starts by revealing a surprising finding: without any learning, a randomly initialized CNN can localize objects surprisingly well. That is, a CNN has an inductive bias to naturally focus on objects, named as Tobias ("The object is at sight") in this paper. This empirical inductive bias is further analyzed and successfully applied to self-supervised learning (SSL). A CNN is encouraged to learn representations that focus on the foreground object, by transforming every image into various versions with different backgrounds, where the foreground and background separation is guided by Tobias. Experimental results show that the proposed Tobias significantly improves downstream tasks, especially for object detection. This paper also shows that Tobias has consistent improvements on training sets of different sizes, and is more resilient to changes in image augmentations.

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Learning Influence Adoption in Heterogeneous Networks

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Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

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