Canada

Inferring the private information of humans from their strategic behavioral data is crucial and challenging. The main approach is first obtaining human behavior functions (which map public information and human private information to behavior), enabling subsequent inference of private information from observed behavior. Most existing studies rely on strong equilibrium assumptions to obtain behavior functions. Our work focuses on continuous double auctions, where multiple traders with heterogeneous rationalities and beliefs dynamically trade commodities and deriving equilibria is generally intractable. We develop a knowledge-aware machine learning-based framework to infer each trader&#39;s private cost vectors for producing different units of its commodity. Our key idea is to learn behavior functions by incorporating the statistical knowledge about private costs given the observed trader asking behavior across the population. Specifically, we first use a neural network to characterize each trader&#39;s behavior function. Second, we leverage the statistical knowledge to derive the posterior distribution of each trader&#39;s private costs given its observed asks. Third, through designing a novel loss function, we utilize the knowledge-based posterior distributions to guide the learning of the neural network. We conduct extensive experiments on a large experimental dataset, and demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over baselines in inferring the private information of humans.

AAAI 2024

Data-Driven Knowledge-Aware Inference of Private Information in Continuous Double Auctions

continuous double auctions

private information inference

machine learning

Inferring the private information of humans from their strategic behavioral data is crucial and challenging. The main approach is first obtaining human behavior functions (which map public information and human private information to behavior), enabling subsequent inference of private information from observed behavior. Most existing studies rely on strong equilibrium assumptions to obtain behavior functions. Our work focuses on continuous double auctions, where multiple traders with heterogeneous rationalities and beliefs dynamically trade commodities and deriving equilibria is generally intractable. We develop a knowledge-aware machine learning-based framework to infer each trader's private cost vectors for producing different units of its commodity. Our key idea is to learn behavior functions by incorporating the statistical knowledge about private costs given the observed trader asking behavior across the population. Specifically, we first use a neural network to characterize each trader's behavior function. Second, we leverage the statistical knowledge to derive the posterior distribution of each trader's private costs given its observed asks. Third, through designing a novel loss function, we utilize the knowledge-based posterior distributions to guide the learning of the neural network. We conduct extensive experiments on a large experimental dataset, and demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over baselines in inferring the private information of humans.

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. 

The multimodal recommendation has gradually become the infrastructure of online media platforms, enabling them to provide personalized service to users through a joint modeling of user historical behaviors (e.g., purchases, clicks) and item various modalities (e.g., visual and textual). The majority of existing studies typically focus on utilizing modal features or modal-related graph structure to learn user local interests. Nevertheless, these approaches encounter two limitations: (1) Shared updates of user ID embeddings result in the consequential coupling between collaboration and multimodal signals; (2) Lack of exploration into robust global user interests to alleviate the sparse interaction problems faced by local interest modeling. To address these issues, we propose a novel Local and Global Graph Learning-guided Multimodal Recommender (LGMRec), which jointly models local and global user interests. Specifically, we present a local graph embedding module to independently learn collaborative-related and modality-related embeddings of users and items with local topological relations. Moreover, a global hypergraph embedding module is designed to capture global user and item embeddings by modeling insightful global dependency relations. The global embeddings acquired within the hypergraph embedding space can then be combined with two decoupled local embeddings to improve the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LGMRec over various state-of-the-art recommendation baselines, showcasing its effectiveness in modeling both local and global user interests.

LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation

Data augmentation methods are commonly integrated into the training of anomaly detection models. Previous approaches have primarily focused on replicating real-world anomalies or enhancing diversity, without considering that the standard of anomaly varies across different classes, potentially leading to a biased training distribution. This paper analyzes crucial traits of simulated anomalies that contribute to the training of reconstructive networks and condenses them into several methods, thus creating a comprehensive framework by selectively utilizing appropriate combinations. Furthermore, we integrate this framework with a reconstruction-based approach and concurrently propose a split training strategy that alleviates the issue of overfitting while avoiding introducing interference to the reconstruction process. The evaluations conducted on the MVTec anomaly detection dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art approach, particularly in terms of object classes. To evaluate generalizability, we generate a simulated dataset comprising anomalies with diverse characteristics since the original test samples only include specific types of anomalies and may lead to biased evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach exhibits promising potential for generalizing effectively to various unforeseen anomalies encountered in real-world scenarios.

A Comprehensive Augmentation Framework for Anomaly Detection | VIDEO

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to recognize novel named entities in low-resource domains utilizing existing knowledge. However, the present few-shot NER models assume that the labeled data are all clean without noise or outliers, and there are few works focusing on the robustness of the cross-domain transfer learning ability to textual adversarial attacks in Few-shot NER. In this work, we comprehensively explore and assess the robustness of few-shot NER models under textual adversarial attack scenario, and found the vulnerability of existing few-shot NER models. Furthermore, we propose a robust two-stage few-shot NER method with Boundary Discrimination and Correlation Purification (BDCP). Specifically, in the span detection stage, the entity boundary discriminative module is introduced to provide a highly distinguishing boundary representation space to detect entity spans. In the entity typing stage, the correlations between entities and contexts are purified by minimizing the interference information and facilitating correlation generalization to alleviate the perturbations caused by textual adversarial attacks. In addition, we construct adversarial examples for few-shot NER based on public datasets Few-NERD and Cross-Dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on those two groups of few-shot NER datasets containing adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness and superiority of the proposed method.

Robust Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Boundary Discrimination and Correlation Purification

Automatically generating scripts (i.e. sequences of key steps described in text) from video demonstrations and reasoning about the subsequent steps are crucial to the modern AI virtual assistants to guide humans to complete everyday tasks, especially unfamiliar ones. However, current methods for generative script learning rely heavily on well-structured preceding steps described in text and/or images or are limited to a certain domain, resulting in a disparity with real-world user scenarios. To address these limitations, we present a new benchmark challenge – MULTISCRIPT, with two new tasks on task-oriented multimodal script learning: (1) multimodal script generation, and (2) subsequent step prediction. For both tasks, the input consists of a target task name and a video illustrating what has been done to complete the target task, and the expected output is (1) a sequence of structured step descriptions in text based on the demonstration video, and (2) a single text description for the subsequent step, respectively. Built from WikiHow, MULTISCRIPT covers multimodal scripts in videos and text descriptions for over 6,655 human everyday tasks across 19 diverse domains. To establish baseline performance on MULTISCRIPT, we propose two knowledge-guided multimodal generative frameworks that incorporate the task-related knowledge prompted from large language models such as Vicuna. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches significantly improve over the competitive baselines.

MULTISCRIPT: Multimodal Script Learning for Supporting Open Domain Everyday Tasks

Link prediction is a fundamental task of graph machine learning, and Graph Neural Network (GNN) based methods have become the mainstream approach due to their good performance. However, the typical practice learns node representations through neighborhood aggregation, lacking awareness of the structural relationships between target nodes. Recently, some methods have attempted to address this issue by node labeling tricks. However, they still rely on the node-centric neighborhood message passing of GNNs, which we believe involves two limitations in terms of information perception and transmission for link prediction. First, it cannot perceive long-range structural information due to the restricted receptive fields. Second, there may be information loss of node-centric model on link-centric task. In addition, we empirically find that the neighbor node features could introduce noise for link prediction. To address these issues, we propose a structural information enhanced link prediction framework, which involves removing the neighbor node features while fitting neighborhood graph structures more focused through GNN. Furthermore, we introduce Binary Structural Transformer (BST) to encode the structural relationships between target nodes, complementing the deficiency of GNN. Our approach achieves remarkable results on multiple popular benchmarks, including ranking first on ogbl-ppa, ogbl-citation2 and Pubmed.

Structural Information Enhanced Graph Representation for Link Prediction

We propose a novel single-loop decentralized algorithm, DGDA-VR, for solving the stochastic nonconvex strongly-concave minimax problems over a connected network of agents, which are equipped with stochastic first-order oracles to estimate their local gradients. DGDA-VR, incorporating variance reduction, achieves $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ oracle complexity and $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ communication complexity without resorting to multi-communication rounds -- both are optimal, i.e., matching the lower bounds for this class of problems. Since DGDA-VR does not require multiple communication rounds, it is applicable to a broader range of decentralized computational environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed method using a single communication round in each iteration to jointly optimize the oracle and communication complexities for the problem considered here.

Jointly Improving the Sample and Communication Complexities in Decentralized Stochastic Minimax Optimization

Existing semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) models have exhibited impressive performance on the target domain by effectively utilizing few labeled target samples per class (e.g., 3 samples per class). To guarantee an equal number of labeled target samples for each class, however, they require domain experts to manually recognize a considerable amount of the unlabeled target data. Moreover, as the target samples are not equally informative for shaping the decision boundaries of the learning models, it is crucial to select the most informative target samples for labeling, which is, however, impossible for human selectors. As a remedy, we propose an EFfective Target Labeling (EFTL) framework that harnesses active learning and pseudo-labeling strategies to automatically select some informative target samples to annotate. Concretely, we introduce a novel sample query strategy, called non-maximal degree node suppression (NDNS), that iteratively performs maximal degree node query and non-maximal degree node removal to select representative and diverse target samples for labeling. To learn target-specific characteristics, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling strategy that attempts to label low-confidence target samples accurately via clustering consistency (CC), and then inject information of the model uncertainty into our query process. CC enhances the utilization of the annotation budget and increases the number of “labeled” target samples while requiring no additional manual effort. Our proposed EFTL framework can be easily coupled with existing SSDA models, showing significant improvements on three benchmarks

Enhancing Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Effective Target Labeling

Deep superpixel algorithms have made remarkable strides by substituting hand-crafted features with learnable ones. Nevertheless, we observe that existing deep superpixel methods, serving as mid-level representation operations, remain sensitive to the statistical properties (e.g., color distribution, high-level semantics) embedded within the training dataset. Consequently, learnable features exhibit constrained discriminative capability, resulting in unsatisfactory pixel grouping performance, particularly in untrainable application scenarios. To address this issue, we propose the Content Disentangle Superpixel (CDS) algorithm to selectively separate the invariant inter-pixel correlations and statistical properties, i.e., style noise. Specifically, We first construct auxiliary modalities that are homologous to the original RGB image but have substantial stylistic variations. Then, driven by mutual information, we propose the local-grid correlation alignment across modalities to reduce the distribution discrepancy of adaptively selected features and learn invariant inter-pixel correlations. Afterwards, we perform global-style mutual information minimization to enforce the separation of invariant content and train data styles. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach to existing state-of-the-art methods, regarding boundary adherence, generalization, and efficiency. Code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/rookiie/CDSpixel.

Learning Invariant Inter-pixel Correlations for Superpixel Generation

Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling have obtained promising results through modeling the unidirectional or bidirectional guidance between intent and slot. However, existing works design joint models heuristically and lack some theoretical exploration, including (1) theoretical measurement of the joint-interaction quality; (2) explainability of design and optimization methods of joint models, which may limit the performance and efficiency of designs. In this paper, we mathematically define the cross-task information gain (CIG) to measure the quality of joint processes from an information-theoretic perspective and discover an implicit optimization of CIG in previous models. Based on this, we propose a novel multi-stage iterative framework with theoretical effectiveness, explainability, and convergence, which can explicitly optimize information for cross-task interactions. Further, we devise an information-based joint model (InfoJoint) that conforms to this theoretical framework to gradually reduce the cross-task propagation of erroneous semantics through CIG iterative maximization. Extensive experiment results on two public datasets show that InfoJoint outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

Towards Explainable Joint Models via Information Theory for Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Recent advancements in offline reinforcement learning (RL) have underscored the capabilities of Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL), a paradigm that learns the action distribution based on target returns for each state in a supervised manner. However, prevailing RCSL methods largely focus on deterministic trajectory modeling, disregarding stochastic state transitions and the diversity of future trajectory distributions. A fundamental challenge arises from the inconsistency between the sampled returns within individual trajectories and the expected returns across multiple trajectories. Fortunately, value-based methods offer a solution by leveraging a value function to approximate the expected returns, thereby addressing the inconsistency effectively. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, termed the Critic-Guided Decision Transformer (CGDT), which combines the predictability of long-term returns from value-based methods with the trajectory modeling capability of the Decision Transformer. By incorporating a learned value function, known as the critic, CGDT ensures a direct alignment between the specified target returns and the expected returns of actions. This integration bridges the gap between the deterministic nature of RCSL and the probabilistic characteristics of value-based methods. Empirical evaluations on stochastic environments and D4RL benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of CGDT over traditional RCSL methods. These results highlight the potential of CGDT to advance the state of the art in offline RL and extend the applicability of RCSL to a wide range of RL tasks.

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Data-Driven Knowledge-Aware Inference of Private Information in Continuous Double Auctions

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Data-Driven Knowledge-Aware Inference of Private Information in Continuous Double Auctions

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LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation

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