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Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations.

In this paper, we introduce BARcode (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARcode identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARcode can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARcode as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.

AAAI 2024

Imitation of Life: A Search Engine for Biologically Inspired Design | VIDEO

cognitive modeling & cognitive systems (cms) -> cms: analogy application domains (app) -> app: other applications

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. 

Learning in games considers how multiple agents maximize their own rewards through repeated games. Memory, an ability that an agent changes his/her action depending on the history of actions in previous games, is often introduced into learning to explore more clever strategies and discuss the decision-making of real agents like humans. However, such games with memory are hard to analyze because they exhibit complex phenomena like chaotic dynamics or divergence from Nash equilibrium. In particular, how asymmetry in memory capacities between agents affects learning in games is still unclear. In response, this study formulates a gradient ascent algorithm in games with asymmetry memory capacities. To obtain theoretical insights into learning dynamics, we first consider a simple case of zero-sum games. We observe complex behavior, where learning dynamics draw a heteroclinic connection from unstable fixed points to stable ones. Despite this complexity, we analyze learning dynamics and prove local convergence to these stable fixed points, i.e., the Nash equilibria. We identify the mechanism driving this convergence: an agent with a longer memory learns to exploit the other, which in turn endows the other's utility function with strict concavity. We further numerically observe such convergence in various initial strategies, action numbers, and memory lengths. This study reveals a novel phenomenon due to memory asymmetry, providing fundamental strides in learning in games and new insights into computing equilibria.

Memory Asymmetry Creates Heteroclinic Orbits to Nash Equilibrium in Learning in Zero-Sum Games

Slow concept drift is a ubiquitous, yet under-studied problem in practical machine learning systems. Although recent data is more indicative of future data in these settings, naively prioritizing these instances runs the risk of losing valuable information from the past. We propose an optimization-driven approach towards balancing instance importance over large training windows. First, we model instance relevance using a mixture of multiple timescales of decay, allowing us to capture rich temporal trends. Second, we learn an auxiliary scorer model that recovers the appropriate mixture of timescales as a function of the instance itself. Finally, we propose a nested optimization objective for learning the scorer, by which it maximizes forward transfer for the learned model. Experiments on a large real-world dataset of 39M photos over a 9 year period show upto 15% relative gains in accuracy compared to other robust learning baselines. We replicate our gains on two collections of real-world datasets for non-stationary learning, and extend our work to continual learning settings where, too, we beat SOTA methods by large margins.

Instance-Conditional Timescales of Decay for Nonstationary Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have exhibited great performance in discriminative feature learning for complex visual tasks. Besides discrimination power, interpretability is another important yet under-explored property for CNNs. One difficulty in the CNN interpretability is that filters and image classes are entangled. In this paper, we introduce a novel pathway to alleviate the entanglement between filters and image classes. The proposed pathway groups the filters in a late conv-layer of CNN into class-specific clusters. Clusters and classes are in a one-to-one relationship. Specifically, we use the Bernoulli sampling to generate the filter-cluster assignment matrix from a learnable filter-class correspondence matrix. To enable end-to-end optimization, we develop a novel reparameterization trick for handling the non-differentiable Bernoulli sampling. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on ten widely used network architectures (including nine CNNs and a ViT) and five benchmark datasets. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method PICNN (the combination of standard CNNs with our proposed pathway) exhibits greater interpretability than standard CNNs while achieving higher or comparable discrimination power.

PICNN: A Pathway towards Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks

Few-shot segmentation aims to accurately segment novel target objects within query images using only a limited number of annotated support images. The recent works exploit support background as well as its foreground to precisely compute the dense correlations between query and support. However, they overlook the characteristics of the background that generally contains various types of objects. In this paper, we highlight this characteristic of background which can bring problematic cases as follows: (1) when the query and support backgrounds are dissimilar and (2) when objects in the support background are similar to the target object in the query. Without any consideration of the above cases, adopting the entire support background leads to a misprediction of the query foreground as background. To address this issue, we propose Task-disruptive Background Suppression(TBS), a module to suppress those disruptive support background features based on two spatial-wise scores: query-relevant and target-relevant scores. The former aims to mitigate the impact of unshared features solely existing in the support background, while the latter aims to reduce the influence of target-similar support background features. Based on these two scores, we define a query background relevant score that captures the similarity between the backgrounds of the query and the support, and utilize it to scale support background features to adaptively restrict the impact of disruptive support backgrounds. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL and COCO datasets on 1-shot segmentation. Our codes are available at github.com/SuhoPark0706/TBSNet

Task-Disruptive Background Suppression for Few-Shot Segmentation | VIDEO

We consider binary group decision-making under a rich model of liquid democracy recently proposed by Colley, Grandi, and Novaro (2022): agents submit ranked delegation options, where each option may be a function of multiple agents' votes; e.g., "I vote yes if a majority of my friends vote yes." Such ballots are unravelled into a profile of direct votes by selecting one entry from each ballot so as not to introduce cyclic dependencies. We study delegation via monotonic Boolean functions, and two unravelling procedures: MinSum, which minimises the sum of the ranks of the chosen entries, and its egalitarian counterpart, MinMax. We provide complete computational dichotomies: MinSum is hard to compute (and approximate) as soon as any non-trivial functions are permitted, and polynomial otherwise; for MinMax the easiness results extend to arbitrary-arity logical ORs and ANDs taken in isolation, but not beyond. For the classic model of delegating to individual agents, we give asymptotically near-tight algorithms for carrying out the two procedures and efficient algorithms for finding optimal unravellings with the highest vote count for a given alternative. These algorithms inspire novel tie-breaking rules for the setup of voting to change a status quo. We then introduce a new axiom, which can be viewed as a variant of the participation axiom, and use algorithmic techniques developed earlier in the paper to show that it is satisfied by MinSum and a lexicographic refinement of MinMax (but not MinMax itself).

Unravelling Expressive Delegations: Complexity and Normative Analysis

De novo peptide sequencing from mass spectrometry (MS) data is a critical task in proteomics research. Traditional de novo algorithms have encountered a bottleneck in accuracy due to the inherent complexity of proteomics data. While deep learning-based methods have shown progress, they reduce the problem to a translation task, potentially overlooking critical nuances between spectra and peptides. In our research, we present ContraNovo, a pioneering algorithm that leverages contrastive learning to extract the relationship between spectra and peptides and incorporates the mass information into peptide decoding, aiming to address these intricacies more efficiently. Through rigorous evaluations on two benchmark datasets, ContraNovo consistently outshines contemporary state-of-the-art solutions, underscoring its promising potential in enhancing de novo peptide sequencing.

ContraNovo: A Contrastive Learning Approach to Enhance De Novo Peptide Sequencing

Video compression relies heavily on exploiting the temporal redundancy between video frames, which is usually achieved by estimating and using the motion information. The motion information is represented as optical flows in most of the existing deep video compression networks. Indeed, these networks often adopt pre-trained optical flow estimation networks for motion estimation. The optical flows, however, may be less suitable for video compression due to the following two factors. First, the optical flow estimation networks were trained to perform inter-frame prediction as accurately as possible, but the optical flows themselves may cost too many bits to encode. Second, the optical flow estimation networks were trained on synthetic data, and may not generalize well enough to real-world videos. We address the twofold limitations by enhancing the optical flows in two stages: offline and online. In the offline stage, we fine-tune a trained optical flow estimation network with the motion information provided by a traditional (non-deep) video compression scheme, e.g. H.266/VVC, as we believe the motion information of H.266/VVC achieves a better rate-distortion trade-off. In the online stage, we further optimize the latent features of the optical flows with a gradient descent-based algorithm for the video to be compressed, so as to enhance the adaptivity of the optical flows. We conduct experiments on two state-of-the-art deep video compression schemes, DCVC and DCVC-DC. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed offline and online enhancement together achieves on average 13.4% bitrate saving for DCVC and 4.1% bitrate saving for DCVC-DC on the tested videos, without increasing the model or computational complexity of the decoder side.

Offline and Online Optical Flow Enhancement for Deep Video Compression

This paper investigates a new, practical, but challenging problem named Non-exemplar Online Class-incremental continual Learning (NO-CL), which aims to preserve the discernibility of base classes \emph{without} buffering data examples and efficiently learn novel classes continuously in a \emph{single-pass} (i.e., online) data stream.
The challenges of this task are mainly two-fold: (1) Both base and novel classes suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting as no previous samples are available for replay. (2) As the online data can only be observed once, there is no way to fully re-train the whole model, e.g., re-calibrate the decision boundaries via prototype alignment or feature distillation. In this paper, we propose a novel \underline{\textbf{D}}ual-prototype \underline{\textbf{S}}elf-augment and \underline{\textbf{R}}efinement method (DSR) for NO-CL problem, which consists of two strategies: 1) Dual class prototypes: vanilla and high-dimensional prototypes are exploited to utilize the pre-trained information and obtain robust quasi-orthogonal representations rather than example buffers for both privacy preservation and memory reduction. 
2) Self-augment and refinement: Instead of updating the whole network, we optimize high-dimensional prototypes alternatively with the extra projection module based on self-augment vanilla prototypes, through a bi-level optimization problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed DSR in NO-CL$\footnote{https://github.com/huofushuo/nocl}$.

Non-exemplar Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning via Dual-Prototype Self-Augment and Refinement

In application domains requiring mission-critical decision making, such as finance and robotics, the optimal policy derived by reinforcement learning (RL) often hinges on a preference for risk management. Yet, the dynamic nature of risk measures poses considerable challenges to achieving generalization and adaptation of risk-sensitive policies in the context of RL. In this paper, we propose a risk-conditioned RL model that enables rapid policy adaptation to varying risk measures via a unified risk representation, the Weighted Value-at-Risk (WV@R). To sample risk measures that avoid undue optimism, we construct a risk proposal network employing a conditional adversarial auto-encoder and a normalizing flow. This network establishes coherent representations for risk measures, preserving the continuity in terms of the Wasserstein distance on the risk measures. The normalizing flow is used to support non-crossing quantile regression that obtains valid samples for risk measures, and it is also applied to the agent’s critic to ascertain the preservation of monotonicity in quantile estimations. Through experiments with locomotion, finance, and self-driving scenarios, we show that our model is capable of adapting to a range of risk measures, achieving comparable performance to the baseline models individually trained for each measure. Our model often outperforms the baselines, especially in the cases when exploration is required during training but risk-aversion is favored during evaluation.

Risk-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: A Generalized Approach for Adapting to Varying Risk Measures

Instruction-following is particularly crucial for large language models (LLMs) to support diverse user requests. While existing work has made progress in aligning LLMs with human preferences, evaluating their capabilities on instruction-following remains a challenge due to complexity and diversity of real-world user instructions. While existing evaluation methods focus on general skills, they suffer from two main shortcomings, i.e., lack of fine-grained task-level evaluation and reliance on singular instruction expression. To address these problems, this paper introduces DINGO, a fine-grained and diverse instruction-following evaluation dataset that has two main advantages: (1) DINGO is based on a manual-annotated, fine-grained and multi-level category tree with 140 nodes derived from real-world user requests; (2) DINGO includes diverse instructions, generated by both GPT-4 and human experts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DINGO can not only provide more challenging and comprehensive evaluation for LLMs, but also provide task-level fine-grained directions to further improve LLMs.

Imitation of Life: A Search Engine for Biologically Inspired Design | VIDEO

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Memory Asymmetry Creates Heteroclinic Orbits to Nash Equilibrium in Learning in Zero-Sum Games

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