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How much credit (or blame) should an action taken in a state get for a future reward? This is the fundamental temporal credit assignment problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). One of the earliest and still most widely used heuristics is to assign this credit based on a scalar coefficient, lambda (treated as a hyperparameter), raised to the power of the time interval between the state-action and the reward. In this empirical paper, we explore heuristics based on more general pairwise weightings that are functions of the state in which the action was taken, the state at the time of the reward, as well as the time interval between the two. Of course it isn&#39;t clear what these pairwise weight functions should be, and because they are too complex to be treated as hyperparameters we develop a metagradient procedure for learning these weight functions during the usual RL training of a policy. Our empirical work shows that it is often possible to learn these pairwise weight functions during learning of the policy to achieve better performance than competing approaches.

AAAI 2022

Adaptive Pairwise Weights for Temporal Credit Assignment

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.

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-26 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.<br><br>

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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.

How much credit (or blame) should an action taken in a state get for a future reward? This is the fundamental temporal credit assignment problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). One of the earliest and still most widely used heuristics is to assign this credit based on a scalar coefficient, lambda (treated as a hyperparameter), raised to the power of the time interval between the state-action and the reward. In this empirical paper, we explore heuristics based on more general pairwise weightings that are functions of the state in which the action was taken, the state at the time of the reward, as well as the time interval between the two. Of course it isn't clear what these pairwise weight functions should be, and because they are too complex to be treated as hyperparameters we develop a metagradient procedure for learning these weight functions during the usual RL training of a policy. Our empirical work shows that it is often possible to learn these pairwise weight functions during learning of the policy to achieve better performance than competing approaches.

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. 

Vision-based autonomous urban driving in dense traffic is quite challenging due to the complicated urban environment and the dynamics of the driving behaviors. Widely-applied methods either heavily rely on hand-crafted rules or learn from limited human experience, which makes them hard to generalize to rare but critical scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel CAscade Deep REinforcement learning framework, CADRE, to achieve model-free vision-based autonomous urban driving. In CADRE, to derive representative latent features from raw observations, we first offline train a Co-attention Perception Module (CoPM) that leverages the co-attention mechanism to learn the inter-relationships between the visual and control information from a pre-collected driving dataset. Cascaded by the frozen CoPM, we then present an efficient distributed proximal policy optimization framework to online learn the driving policy under the guidance of particularly designed reward functions. We perform a comprehensive empirical study with the CARLA NoCrash benchmark as well as specific obstacle avoidance scenarios in autonomous urban driving tasks. The experimental results well justify the effectiveness of CADRE and its superiority over the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

CADRE: A Cascade Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Vision-Based Autonomous Urban Driving

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure shared among tasks. Without heavy reward engineering, the sparse rewards in long-horizon tasks exacerbate the problem of sample efficiency in meta-RL. Another challenge in meta-RL is the discrepancy of difficulty level among tasks, which might cause one easy task dominating learning of the shared policy and thus preclude policy adaptation to new tasks. This work introduces a novel objective function to learn an action translator among training tasks. We theoretically verify that the value of the transferred policy with the action translator can be close to the value of the source policy and our objective function (approximately) upper bounds the value difference. We propose to combine the action translator with context-based meta-RL algorithms for better data collection and moreefficient exploration during meta-training. Our approach em-pirically improves the sample efficiency and performance ofmeta-RL algorithms on sparse-reward tasks.

Learning Action Translator for Meta Reinforcement Learning on Sparse-Reward Tasks

In addition to reproducing discriminatory relationships in the training data, machine learning (ML) systems can also introduce or amplify discriminatory effects. We refer to this as introduced unfairness, and investigate the conditions under which it may arise. To this end, we propose introduced total variation as a measure of introduced unfairness, and establish graphical conditions under which it may be incentivised to occur. These criteria imply that adding the sensitive attribute as a feature removes the incentive for introduced variation under well-behaved loss functions. Additionally, taking a causal perspective, introduced path-specific effects shed light on the issue of when specific paths should be considered fair.

Why Fair Labels Can Yield Unfair Predictions: Graphical Conditions for Introduced Unfairness

Optimistic initialization underpins many theoretically sound exploration schemes in tabular domains; however, in the deep function approximation setting, optimism can quickly disappear if initialized naively. We propose a framework for more effectively incorporating optimistic initialization into reinforcement learning for continuous control. Our approach uses metric information about the state-action space to estimate which transitions are still unexplored, and explicitly maintains the initial Q-value optimism for the corresponding state-action pairs. We also develop methods for efficiently approximating these training objectives, and for incorporating domain knowledge into the optimistic envelope to improve sample efficiency. We empirically evaluate these approaches on a variety of hard exploration problems in continuous control, where our method outperforms existing exploration techniques.

Optimistic Initialization for Exploration in Continuous Control

Activation maximization (AM) refers to the task of generating input examples that maximize the activation of a target class of a classifier, which can be used for class-conditional image generation and model interpretation. A popular class of AM method, GAN-based AM, introduces a GAN pre-trained on a large image set, and performs AM over its input random seed or style embeddings, so that the generated images are natural and adversarial attacks are prevented. Most of these methods would require the image set to contain some images of the target class to be visualized. Otherwise they tend to generate other seen class images that most maximizes the target class activation. In this paper, we aim to tackle the case where information about the target class is completely removed from the image set. This would ensure that the generated images truly reflect the target class information residing in the classifier, not the target class information in the image set, which contributes to a more faithful interpretation technique. To this end, we propose PROBEGAN, a GAN-based AM algorithm capable of generating image classes unseen in the image set. Rather than using a pre-trained GAN, PROBEGAN trains a new GAN with AM explicitly included in its training objective. PROBEGAN consists of a class-conditional generator, a seen-class discriminator, and an all-class unconditional discriminator. It can be shown that such a framework can generate images with the features of the unseen target class, while retaining the naturalness as depicted in the image set. Experiments have shown that PROBEGAN can generate unseen-class images with much higher quality than the baselines. We also explore using PROBEGAN as a model interpretation tool. Our code is at https://github.com/csmiler/ProbeGAN/.

An Adversarial Framework for Generating Unseen Images by Activation Maximization

Influence diagrams have recently been used to analyse the safety and fairness properties of AI systems. A key building block for this analysis is a graphical criterion for value of information (VoI). This paper establishes the first complete graphical criterion for VoI in influence diagrams with multiple decisions. Along the way, we establish two techniques for proving properties of multi-decision influence diagrams: ID homomorphisms are structure-preserving transformations of influence diagrams, while a Tree of Systems is a collection of paths that captures how information and control can flow in an influence diagram.

A Complete Criterion for Value of Information in Soluble Influence Diagrams

Large capacity deep learning models are often prone to a high generalization gap when trained with a limited amount of labeled training data. A recent class of methods to address this problem uses various ways to construct a new training sample by mixing a pair (or more) of training samples. We propose PatchUp, a hidden state block-level regularization technique for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), that is applied on selected contiguous blocks of feature maps from a random pair of samples. Our approach improves the robustness of CNN models against the manifold intrusion problem that may occur in other state-of-the-art mixing approaches. Moreover, since we are mixing the contiguous block of features in the hidden space, which has more dimensions than the input space, we obtain more diverse samples for training towards different dimensions. Our experiments on CIFAR10/100, SVHN, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet using ResNet architectures including PreActResnet18/34, WRN-28-10, ResNet101/152 models show that PatchUp improves upon, or equals, the performance of current state-of-the-art regularizers for CNNs. We also show that PatchUp can provide a better generalization to deformed samples and is more robust against adversarial attacks.

PatchUp: A Feature-Space Block-Level Regularization Technique for Convolutional Neural Networks

We address the poor scalability of learning algorithms for orthogonal recurrent neural networks via the use of stochastic coordinate descent on the orthogonal group, leading to a cost per iteration that increases linearly with the number of recurrent states. This contrasts with the cubic dependency of typical feasible algorithms such as stochastic Riemannian gradient descent, which prohibits the use of big network architectures. Coordinate descent rotates successively two columns of the recurrent matrix. When the coordinate (i.e., indices of rotated columns) is selected uniformly at random at each iteration, we prove convergence of the algorithm under standard assumptions on the loss function, stepsize and minibatch noise. In addition, we numerically show that the Riemannian gradient has an approximately sparse structure. Leveraging this observation, we propose a variant of our proposed algorithm that relies on the Gauss-Southwell coordinate selection rule. Experiments on a benchmark recurrent neural network training problem show that the proposed approach is a very promising step towards the training of orthogonal recurrent neural networks with big architectures.

Coordinate Descent on the Orthogonal Group for Recurrent Neural Network Training

In this paper, we introduce VACA, a novel class of variational graph autoencoders for causal inference in the absence of hidden confounders, when only observational data and the causal graph are available. Without making any parametric assumptions, VACA mimics the necessary properties of a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to provide a flexible and practical framework for approximating interventions (do-operator) and abduction-action-prediction steps. As a result, and as shown by our empirical results, VACA accurately approximates the interventional and counterfactual distributions on diverse SCMs. Finally, we apply VACA to evaluate counterfactual fairness in fair classification problems, as well as to learn fair classifiers without compromising performance.

VACA: Designing Variational Graph Autoencoders for Causal Queries

Submodular functions are at the core of many machine learning and data mining tasks. The underlying submodular functions for many of these tasks are decomposable, i.e., they are sum of several simple submodular functions. In many data intensive applications, however, the number of underlying submodular functions in the original function is so large that we need prohibitively large amount of time to process it and/or it does not even fit in the main memory. To overcome this issue, we introduce the notion of sparsification for decomposable submodular functions whose objective is to obtain an accurate approximation of the original function that is a (weighted) sum of only a few submodular functions. Our main result is a polynomial-time randomized sparsification algorithm such that the expected number of functions used in the output is independent of the number of underlying submodular functions in the original function. We also study the effectiveness of our algorithm under various constraints such as matroid and cardinality constraints. We complement our theoretical analysis with an empirical study of the performance of our algorithm.

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CADRE: A Cascade Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Vision-Based Autonomous Urban Driving

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Next from AAAI 2022

CADRE: A Cascade Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Vision-Based Autonomous Urban Driving

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SHADOW: Dynamic-Aware Credit Assignment Against Long-Horizon Tasks

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