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Instrumental variables (IVs), widely applied in economics and healthcare, enable consistent counterfactual prediction in the presence of hidden confounding factors, effectively addressing endogeneity issues. The prevailing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods typically rely on the availability of valid IVs (satisfying \textbf{Relevance}, \textbf{Exclusivity}, and \textbf{Exogeneity}), a requirement which often proves elusive in real-world scenarios. Various data-driven techniques are being developed to create valid IVs (or representations of IVs) from a pool of IV candidates. However, most of these techniques still necessitate the inclusion of valid IVs within the set of candidates. This paper proposes a distribution-conditioned adversarial variational autoencoder to tackle this challenge. Specifically: 1) for \textbf{Relevance} and \textbf{Exclusivity}, we deduce the corresponding evidence lower bound following the Bayesian network structure and build the variational autoencoder accordingly; 2) for \textbf{Exogeneity}, we design an adversarial game to encourage latent factors originating from the marginal distribution, compelling the independence between IVs and other outcome-related factors. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness, stability and generality of our proposed model in generating valid IV factors in the absence of valid IV candidates.

AAAI 2024

Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation

deep generative models & autoencoders

causal learning

adversarial learning

technical paper

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/)

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. 

Coalitions naturally exist in many real-world systems involving multiple decision makers such as ridesharing, security, and online ad auctions, but the coalition structure among the agents is often unknown. We propose and study an important yet previously overseen problem -- Coalition Structure Learning (CSL), where we aim to carefully design a series of games for the agents and infer the underlying coalition structure by observing their interactions in those games. We establish a lower bound on the sample complexity  -- defined as the number of games needed to learn the structure -- of any algorithms for CSL and propose the Iterative Grouping (IG) algorithm for designing normal-form games to achieve the lower bound. We show that IG can be extended to other succinct games such as congestion games and graphical games. Moreover, we solve CSL in a more restrictive and practical setting: auctions. We show a variant of IG to solve CSL in the auction setting even if we cannot design the bidder valuations. Finally, we conduct experiments to evaluate IG in the auction setting and the results align with our theoretical analysis.

Learning Coalition Structures with Games

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a generic problem modeling
and solving framework with a strong focus on knowledge
representation and a rapid growth of industrial applications.
So far, the study of complexity resulted in characterizing hardness
and determining their sources, fine-grained insights in
the form of dichotomy-style results, as well as detailed parameterized
complexity landscapes. Unfortunately, for the
well-known parameter treewidth disjunctive programs require
double-exponential runtime under reasonable complexity assumptions.
This quickly becomes out of reach. We deal with
the classification of structural parameters for disjunctive ASP
on the program’s rule structure (incidence graph). First, we
show how vertex cover size enables a single-exponential runtime,
despite subset-minimization being not represented in
the program’s structure. We provide a polynomial kernel and
then turn our attention to strictly better structural parameters
between vertex cover size and treewidth, while still avoiding
double-exponential runtime. Unfortunately, there is not much
hope in finding such significantly better parameters, which we
underline by double-exponential lower bounds for the most
prominent parameters in that range: treedepth, feedback vertex
size, and cliquewidth. Our results provide an in-depth
hardness study, relying on a novel reduction from normal to
disjunctive programs, trading the increase of complexity for
an exponential parameter compression.

On the Structural Hardness of Answer Set Programming: Can Structure Efficiently Confine the Power of Disjunctions?

This paper introduces a novel approach for topic modeling utilizing latent codebooks from Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder~(VQ-VAE), discretely encapsulating the rich information of the pre-trained embeddings such as the pre-trained language model.
From the novel interpretation of the latent codebooks and embeddings as conceptual bag-of-words, we propose a new generative topic model called Topic-VQ-VAE~(TVQ-VAE) which inversely generates the original documents related to the respective latent codebook.
The TVQ-VAE can visualize the topics with various generative distributions including the traditional BoW distribution and the autoregressive image generation.
Our experimental results on document analysis and image generation demonstrate that TVQ-VAE effectively captures the topic context which reveals the underlying structures of the dataset and supports flexible forms of document generation.
Official implementation of the proposed TVQ-VAE is available at https://github.com/clovaai/TVQ-VAE.

Topic-VQ-VAE: Leveraging Latent Codebooks for Flexible Topic-Guided Document Generation

Asynchronous federated learning (AFL) is a distributed machine learning technique that allows multiple devices to collaboratively train deep learning models without sharing local data. However, AFL suffer from low efficiency due to poor client model training quality and slow server model convergence speed, which are a result of the heterogeneous nature of both data and devices. To address these issues, we propose Efficient Asynchronous \textbf{Fed}erated Learning with Prospective Momentum \textbf{A}ggregation and Fine-Grained \textbf{C}orrection (\textbf{FedAC}). Our framework consists of three key components. The first component is client weight evaluation based on temporal gradient, which evaluates the client weight based on the similarity between the client and server update directions. The second component is adaptive server update with prospective weighted momentum, which uses a asynchronous buffered update strategy and a prospective weighted momentum with adaptive learning rate to update the global model in server. The last component is client update with fine-grained gradient correction, which introduces a fine-grained gradient correction term to mitigate the client drift and correct the client stochastic gradient. We conduct experiments on real and synthetic datasets, and compare with existing AFL and SFL methods. Experimental results show that our framework can effectively improve the model training efficiency and performance of AFL.

Efficient Asynchronous Federated Learning with Prospective Momentum Aggregation and Fine-Grained Correction

Currently, image generation and synthesis have remarkably progressed with generative models. Despite photo-realistic results, intrinsic discrepancies are still observed in the frequency domain. The spectral discrepancy appeared not only in generative adversarial networks but in diffusion models. In this study, we propose a framework to effectively mitigate the disparity in frequency domain of the generated images to improve generative performance of both GAN and diffusion models. This is realized by spectrum translation for the refinement of image generation (STIG) based on contrastive learning. We adopt theoretical logic of frequency components in various generative networks. The key idea, here, is to refine the spectrum of the generated image via the concept of image-to-image translation and contrastive learning in terms of digital signal processing. We evaluate our framework across eight fake image datasets and various cutting-edge models to demonstrate the effectiveness of STIG. Our framework outperforms other cutting-edges showing significant decreases in FID and log frequency distance of spectrum. We further emphasize that STIG improves image quality by decreasing the spectral anomaly. Additionally, validation results present that the frequency-based deepfake detector confuses more in the case where fake spectrums are manipulated by STIG.

Spectrum Translation for Refinement of Image Generation (STIG) Based on Contrastive Learning and Spectral Filter Profile | VIDEO

This paper tackles the problem of efficient and stable video semantic segmentation. While stability has been under-explored, prevalent work in efficient video semantic segmentation uses the keyframe paradigm. They efficiently process videos by only recomputing the low-level features and reusing high-level features computed at selected keyframes. In addition, the reused features stabilize the predictions across frames, thereby improving video consistency. However, dynamic scenes in the video can easily lead to misalignments between reused and recomputed features, which hampers performance. Moreover, relying on feature reuse to improve prediction consistency is brittle; an erroneous alignment of the features can easily lead to unstable predictions. Therefore, the keyframe paradigm exhibits a dilemma between stability and performance. We address this efficiency and stability challenge using a novel yet simple Temporal Feature Correlation (TFC) module. It uses the cosine similarity between two frames’ low-level features to inform the semantic label’s consistency across frames. Specifically, we selectively reuse label-consistent features across frames through linear interpolation and update others through sparse multi-scale deformable attention. As a result, we no longer directly reuse features to improve stability and thus effectively solve feature misalignment. This work provides a significant step towards efficient and stable video semantic segmentation. On the VSPW dataset, our method significantly improves the prediction consistency of image-based methods while being as fast and accurate.

Exploring Temporal Feature Correlation for Efficient and Stable Video Semantic Segmentation

Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems over graphs appear routinely in many applications such as in optimizing traffic, viral marketing in social networks, and matching for job allocation. Due to their combinatorial nature, these problems are often NP-hard. Existing approximation algorithms and heuristics rely on the search space to find the solutions and become time-consuming when this space is large. In this paper, we design a neural method called COMBHelper to reduce this space and thus improve the efficiency of the traditional CO algorithms based on node selection. Specifically, it employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to identify promising nodes for the solution set. This pruned search space is then fed to the traditional CO algorithms. COMBHelper also uses a Knowledge Distillation (KD) module and a problem-specific boosting module to bring further efficiency and efficacy. Our extensive experiments show that the traditional CO algorithms with COMBHelper are at least 2 times faster than their original versions. Our code is available at Github.

COMBHelper: A Neural Approach to Reduce Search Space for Graph Combinatorial Problems

A key challenge in continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) is to efficiently capture long-range spatial interactions over time from the video input. To address this challenge, we propose TCNet, a hybrid network that effectively models spatio-temporal information from Trajectories and Correlated regions. TCNet's trajectory module transforms frames into aligned trajectories composed of continuous visual tokens. This facilitates extracting region trajectory patterns. In addition, for a query token, self-attention is learned along the trajectory. As such, our network can also focus on fine-grained spatio-temporal patterns, such as finger movement, of a region in motion. TCNet's correlation module utilizes a novel dynamic attention mechanism that filters out irrelevant frame regions. Additionally, it assigns dynamic key-value tokens from correlated regions to each query. Both innovations significantly reduce the computation cost and memory. We perform experiments on four large-scale datasets: PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14-T, CSL, and CSL-Daily. Our results demonstrate that TCNet consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, we improve over the previous state-of-the-art by 1.5\% and 1.0\% word error rate on PHOENIX14 and PHOENIX14-T, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/hotfinda/TCNet

TCNet: Continuous Sign Language Recognition from Trajectories and Correlated Regions

Pixel-aligned implicit models, such as PIFu, PIFuHD, and ICON, are used for single-view clothed human reconstruction. These models need to be trained using a sampling training scheme. Existing sampling training schemes either fail to capture thin surfaces (e.g. ears, fingers) or cause noisy artefacts in reconstructed meshes. To address these problems, we introduce Fine Structured-Aware Sampling (FSS), a new sampling training scheme to train pixel-aligned implicit models for single-view human reconstruction. FSS resolves the aforementioned problems by proactively adapting to the thickness and complexity of surfaces. In addition, unlike existing sampling training schemes, FSS shows how normals of sample points can be capitalized in the training process to improve results.
Lastly, to further improve the training process, FSS proposes a mesh thickness loss signal for pixel-aligned implicit models. It becomes computationally feasible to introduce this loss once a slight reworking of the pixel-aligned implicit function framework is carried out. Our results show that our methods significantly outperform SOTA methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/kcyt/FSS.

Fine Structure-Aware Sampling: A New Sampling Training Scheme for Pixel-Aligned Implicit Models in Single-View Human Reconstruction | VIDEO

Missing data are an unavoidable complication frequently encountered in many causal discovery tasks. 
When a missing process depends on the missing values themselves (known as self-masking missingness), the recovery of the joint distribution becomes unattainable, and detecting the presence of such self-masking missingness remains a perplexing challenge. Consequently, due to the inability to reconstruct the original distribution and to discern the underlying missingness mechanism, simply applying existing causal discovery methods would lead to wrong conclusions. In this work, we found that the recent advances additive noise model has the potential for learning causal structure under the existence of the self-masking missingness. With this observation, we aim to investigate the identification problem of learning causal structure from missing data under an additive noise model with different missingness mechanisms, where the `no self-masking missingness' assumption can be eliminated appropriately. 
Specifically, we first elegantly extend the scope of identifiability of causal skeleton to the case with weak self-masking missingness (i.e., no other variable could be the cause of self-masking indicators except itself). We further provide the sufficient and necessary identification conditions of the causal direction under additive noise model and show that the causal structure can be identified up to an IN-equivalent pattern. We finally propose a practical algorithm based on the above theoretical results on learning the causal skeleton and causal direction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation

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Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation

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Learning Coalition Structures with Games

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