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It is well-known from probability theory that network-based methods like Bayesian networks constitute remarkable frameworks for efficient probabilistic reasoning. In this paper, we focus on qualitative default reasoning based on Spohn’s ranking functions for which network-based methods have not yet been studied satisfactorily. With constraint networks, we develop a framework for iterative calculations of c-representations, a family of ranking models of conditional belief bases which show outstanding properties from a commonsense and formal point of view, that are characterized by assigning possible worlds a degree of implausibility via penalizing the falsification of conditionals. Constraint networks unveil the dependencies among these penalty points (and hence among the conditionals) and make it possible to compute the penalty points locally on so-called safe sub-bases. As an application of our framework, we show that skeptical c-inferences can be drawn locally from safe sub-bases without losing validity.

AAAI 2024

Decomposing Constraint Networks for Calculating c-Representations | VIDEO

nonmonotonic reasoning

knowledge representation and reasoning

preferences

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. 

Adversarial examples are commonly created by solving a constrained optimization problem, typically using sign-based methods like Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). These attacks can benefit from momentum with a constant parameter, such as Momentum Iterative FGSM (MI-FGSM), to enhance black-box transferability. However, the monotonic time-varying momentum parameter is required to guarantee convergence in theory, creating a theory-practice gap. Additionally, recent work shows that sign-based methods fail to converge to the optimum in several convex settings, exacerbating the issue. To address these concerns, we propose a novel method which incorporates both an innovative adaptive momentum parameter without monotonicity assumptions  and an adaptive step-size scheme that replaces the sign operation. Furthermore, we derive a regret upper bound for general convex functions. Experiments on multiple models demonstrate the efficacy of our method in generating adversarial examples with human-imperceptible noise while achieving high attack success rates, indicating its superiority over previous adversarial example generation methods.

On the Convergence of an Adaptive Momentum Method for Adversarial Attacks

Image hiding aims to conceal one or more secret images within a cover image of the same resolution. Due to strict capacity requirements, image hiding is commonly called large-capacity steganography. In this paper, we propose StegFormer, a novel autoencoder-based image-hiding model. StegFormer can conceal one or multiple secret images within a cover image of the same resolution while preserving the high visual quality of the stego image. In addition, to mitigate the limitations of current steganographic models in real-world scenarios, we propose a normalizing training strategy and a restrict loss to improve the reliability of the steganographic models under realistic conditions. Furthermore, we propose an efficient steganographic capacity expansion method to increase the capacity of steganography and enhance the efficiency of secret communication. Through this approach, we can increase the relative payload of StegFormer to 96 bits per pixel without any training strategy modifications. Experiments demonstrate that our StegFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. In the case of single-image steganography, there is an improvement of more than 3 dB and 5 dB in PSNR for secret/recovery image pairs and cover/stego image pairs.

StegFormer: Rebuilding the Glory of Autoencoder-Based Steganography

This paper studies the problem of continual learning in an open-world scenario, referred to as Open-world Continual Learning (OwCL). OwCL is increasingly rising while it is highly challenging in two-fold: i) learning a sequence of tasks without forgetting knowns in the past, and ii) identifying unknowns (novel objects/classes) in the future. Existing OwCL methods suffer from the adaptability of task-aware boundaries between knowns and unknowns, and do not consider the mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose Pro-KT, a novel prompt-enhanced knowledge transfer model for OwCL. Pro-KT includes two key components: (1) a prompt bank to encode and transfer both task-generic and task-specific knowledge, and (2) a task-aware open-set boundary to identify unknowns in the new tasks. Experimental results using two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed Pro-KT outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts in both the detection of unknowns and the classification of knowns markedly.

Learning to Prompt Knowledge Transfer for Open-World Continual Learning

Despite significant advancements in multi-label text classification, the ability of existing models to generalize to novel and seldom-encountered complex concepts, which are compositions of elementary ones, remains underexplored. This research addresses this gap. By creating unique data splits across three benchmarks, we assess the compositional generalization ability of existing multi-label text classification models. Our results show that these models often fail to generalize to compositional concepts encountered infrequently during training, leading to inferior performance on tests with these new combinations. To address this, we introduce a data augmentation method that leverages two innovative text generation models designed to enhance the classification models' capacity for compositional generalization. Our experiments show that this data augmentation approach significantly improves the compositional generalization capabilities of classification models on our benchmarks, with both generation models surpassing other text generation baselines.

Compositional Generalization for Multi-Label Text Classification: A Data-Augmentation Approach

Low dimensional models like PCA are often used to simplify complex datasets by learning a single approximating subspace. This paradigm has expanded to union of subspaces models, like those learned by subspace clustering. In this paper, we present Principle Component Trees (PCTs), a graph structure that generalizes these ideas to identify mixtures of components that together describe the subspace structure of high-dimensional datasets. Each node in a PCT corresponds to a principle component of the data, and the edges between nodes indicate the components that must be mixed to produce a subspace that approximates a portion of the data. In order to construct PCTs, we propose two angle-distribution hypothesis tests to detect subspace clusters in the data. To analyze, compare, and select the best PCT model, we define two persistent homology measures that describe their shape. We show our construction yields two key properties of PCTs, namely ancestral orthogonality and non-decreasing singular values. Our main theoretical results show that learning PCTs reduces to PCA under multivariate normality, and that PCTs are efficient parameterizations of intersecting union of subspaces. Finally, we use PCTs to analyze neural network latent space, word embeddings, and reference image datasets.

Principle Component Trees and Their Persistent Homology

To better understand the output of deep neural networks (DNN), attribution based methods have been an important approach for model interpretability, which assign a score for each input dimension to indicate its importance towards the model outcome. Notably, the attribution methods use the ax- ioms of sensitivity and implementation invariance to ensure the validity and reliability of attribution results. Yet, the ex- isting attribution methods present challenges for effective in- terpretation and efficient computation. In this work, we in- troduce MFABA, an attribution algorithm that adheres to ax- ioms, as a novel method for interpreting DNN. Addition- ally, we provide the theoretical proof and in-depth analy- sis for MFABA algorithm, and conduct a large scale exper- iment. The results demonstrate its superiority by achieving over 101.5142 times faster speed than the state-of-the-art at- tribution algorithms. The effectiveness of MFABA is thor- oughly evaluated through the statistical analysis in compar- ison to other methods, and the full implementation package is open-source at: https://github.com/LMBTough/MFABA.

MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-Based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks

We characterize offline data poisoning attacks on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where an attacker may change a data set in an attempt to install a (potentially fictitious) unique Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium for a two-player zero-sum Markov game. We propose the unique Nash set, namely the set of games, specified by their Q functions, with a specific joint policy being the unique Nash equilibrium. The unique Nash set is central to poisoning attacks because the attack is successful if and only if data poisoning pushes all plausible games inside it. The unique Nash set generalizes the reward polytope commonly used in inverse reinforcement learning to MARL. For zero-sum Markov games, both the inverse Nash set and the set of plausible games induced by data are polytopes in the Q function space. We exhibit a linear program to efficiently compute the optimal poisoning attack. Our work sheds light on the structure of data poisoning attacks on offline MARL, a necessary step before one can design more robust MARL algorithms.

Data Poisoning to Fake a Nash Equilibria for Markov Games

Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) learns to generate an informative response based on a given dialogue context and external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs; KGs). Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and pre-training techniques has brought great success to knowledge-grounded dialogue. However, when building KGD systems in real applications, there are various real-world noises that are inevitable to face. For example, the dialogue context might involve perturbations such as misspellings and abbreviations. In addition, KGs typically suffer from incompletion and also might contain erroneous and outdated facts. Such real-world noises pose a challenge to the robustness of KGD systems and hinder their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose an entity-based contrastive learning framework for improving the robustness of KGD. Specifically, we make use of the entity information in a KGD sample to create both its positive and negative samples which involve semantic-irrelevant and semantic-relevant perturbations, respectively. The contrastive learning framework ensures the KGD model is aware of these two types of perturbations, thus could generate informative responses with the potentially noisy inputs in real applications. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance in terms of automatic evaluation scores, verifying its effectiveness and potentiality. Furthermore, we show that our method is able to generate better responses than comparison models in both the noisy and the few-shot settings.

Improving the Robustness of Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue via Contrastive Learning

We formulate the problem of eliciting agents' preferences with the goal of finding a Kemeny ranking as a Dueling Bandits problem.
Here the bandits' arms correspond to alternatives that need to be ranked and the feedback corresponds to a pairwise comparison between alternatives by a randomly sampled agent.
We consider both sampling with and without replacement, i.e., the possibility to ask the same agent about some comparison multiple times or not.

We find approximation bounds for Kemeny rankings dependant on confidence intervals over estimated winning probabilities of arms. 
Based on these we state algorithms to find Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) solutions and elaborate on their sample complexity for sampling with or without replacement.
Furthermore, if all agents' preferences are strict rankings over the alternatives, we provide means to prune confidence intervals and thereby guide a more efficient elicitation. We formulate several adaptive sampling methods that use look-aheads to estimate how much confidence intervals (and thus approximation guarantees) might be tightened. 
All described methods are compared on synthetic data.

Eliciting Kemeny Rankings

In the standard use case of Algorithmic Fairness, the goal is to eliminate the relationship between a sensitive variable and a corresponding score. Throughout recent years, the scientific community has developed a host of definitions and tools to solve this task, which work well in many practical applications. However, the applicability and effectivity of these tools and definitions becomes less straightfoward in the case of multiple sensitive attributes. To tackle this issue, we propose a sequential framework, which allows to progressively achieve fairness across a set of sensitive features. We accomplish this by leveraging multi-marginal Wasserstein barycenters, which extends the standard notion of Strong Demographic Parity to the case with multiple sensitive characteristics. This method also provides a closed-form solution for the optimal, sequentially fair predictor, permitting a clear interpretation of inter-sensitive feature correlations. Our approach seamlessly extends to approximate fairness, enveloping a framework accommodating the trade-off between risk and unfairness. This extension permits a targeted prioritization of fairness improvements for a specific attribute within a set of sensitive attributes, allowing for a case specific adaptation. A data-driven estimation procedure for the derived solution is developed, and comprehensive numerical experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real datasets. Our empirical findings decisively underscore the practical efficacy of our post-processing approach in fostering fair decision-making.

Decomposing Constraint Networks for Calculating c-Representations | VIDEO

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On the Convergence of an Adaptive Momentum Method for Adversarial Attacks

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Decomposing Constraint Networks for Calculating c-Representations | VIDEO

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On the Convergence of an Adaptive Momentum Method for Adversarial Attacks

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