Canada

Large language models (LLMs) show their powerful automatic reasoning and planning capability with a wealth of semantic knowledge about the human world. However, the grounding problem still hinders the applications of LLMs in the real-world environment. Existing studies try to fine-tune the LLM or utilize pre-defined behavior APIs to bridge the LLMs and the environment, which not only costs huge human efforts to customize for every single task but also weakens the generality strengths of LLMs. To autonomously ground the LLM onto the environment, we proposed the Hypothesis, Verification, and Induction (HYVIN) framework to automatically and progressively ground the LLM with self-driven skill learning. HYVIN first employs the LLM to propose the hypothesis of sub-goals to achieve tasks and then verify the feasibility of the hypothesis via interacting with the underlying environment. Once verified, HYVIN can then learn generalized skills with the guidance of these successfully grounded subgoals. These skills can be further utilized to accomplish more complex tasks that fail to pass the verification phase. Verified in the famous instruction following task set, BabyAI, HYVIN achieves comparable performance in the most challenging tasks compared with imitation learning methods that cost millions of demonstrations, proving the effectiveness of learned skills and showing the feasibility and efficiency of our framework.

AAAI 2024

Hypothesis, Verification, and Induction: Grounding Large Language Models with Self-Driven Skill Learning

self-driven grounding llms agents

instruction following

reinforcement learning

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

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. 

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify the emotions conveyed by each utterance in a conversational video. Current efforts encounter challenges in balancing intra- and inter-speaker context dependencies when tackling intra-modal interactions. This balance is vital as it encompasses modeling self-dependency (emotional inertia) where speakers' own emotions affect them and modeling inter-personal dependencies (empathy) where counterparts' emotions influence a speaker. Furthermore, challenges arise in addressing cross-modal interactions that involve content with conflicting emotions across different modalities. To address this issue, we introduce an adaptive interactive graph network (IGN) called AdaIGN that employs the Gumbel Softmax trick to adaptively select nodes and edges, enhancing intra- and cross-modal interactions. Unlike undirected graphs, we use a directed IGN to prevent future utterances from impacting the current one. Next, we propose Node- and Edge-level Selection Policies (NESP) to guide node and edge selection, along with a Graph-Level Selection Policy (GSP) to integrate the utterance representation from original IGN and NESP-enhanced IGN. Moreover, we design a task-specific loss function that prioritizes text modality and intra-speaker context selection. To reduce computational complexity, we use pre-defined pseudo labels through self-supervised methods to mask unnecessary utterance nodes for selection. Experimental results show that AdaIGN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets.

Adaptive Graph Learning for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Detection

Semi-supervised learning algorithms that use pseudo-labeling have become increasingly popular for improving model performance by utilizing both labeled and unlabeled data. 
In this paper, we offer a fresh perspective on the selection of pseudo-labels, inspired by theoretical insights. We suggest that pseudo-labels with a high degree of local variance are more prone to inaccuracies. Based on this premise, we introduce the Local Variance Match (LVM) method, which aims to optimize the selection of pseudo-labels in semi-supervised learning (SSL) tasks. Our methodology is validated through a series of experiments on widely-used image classification datasets, such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN, spanning various labeled data quantity scenarios. The empirical findings show that the LVM method substantially outpaces current SSL techniques, achieving state-of-the-art results in many of these scenarios. For instance, we observed an error rate of 5.41% on CIFAR-10 with a single label for each class, 35.87% on CIFAR-100 when using four labels per class, and 1.94% on SVHN with four labels for each class. Notably, the standout error rate of 5.41% is less than 1% shy of the performance in a fully-supervised learning environment. In experiments on ImageNet with 100k labeled data, the LVM also reached state-of-the-art outcomes. Additionally, the efficacy of the LVM method is further validated by its stellar performance in speech recognition experiments.

Leveraging Local Variance for Pseudo-Label Selection in Semi-supervised Learning

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, decentralized agents hold the promise of overcoming the combinatorial explosion of joint action space and enabling greater scalability. However, they are susceptible to a game-theoretic pathology called \emph{relative overgeneralization} that shadows the optimal joint action. Although recent value-decomposition algorithms guide decentralized agents by learning a factored global action value function, the representational limitation and the inaccurate sampling of optimal joint actions during the learning process make this problem still. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel algorithm called \emph{Optimistic Value Instructors (OVI)}. The main idea behind OVI is to introduce multiple optimistic instructors into the value-decomposition paradigm, which are capable of suggesting potentially optimal joint actions and rectifying the factored global action value function to recover these optimal actions. Specifically, the instructors maintain optimistic value estimations of per-agent local actions and thus eliminate the negative effects caused by other agents' exploratory or sub-optimal non-cooperation, enabling accurate identification and suggestion of optimal joint actions. Based on the instructors' suggestions, the paper further presents two instructive constraints to rectify the factored global action value function to recover these optimal joint actions, thus overcoming the RO problem. Experimental evaluation of OVI on various cooperative multi-agent tasks demonstrates its superior performance against multiple baselines, highlighting its effectiveness.

Optimistic Value Instructors for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-objective Stochastic Linear bandit (MOSLB) plays a critical role in the sequential decision-making paradigm, however, most existing methods focus on the Pareto dominance among different objectives without considering any priority. In this paper, we study bandit algorithms under mixed Pareto-lexicographic orders, which can reflect decision makers' preferences. We adopt the Grossone approach to deal with these orders and develop the notion of Pareto-lexicographic optimality to evaluate the learners' performance. Our work represents a first attempt to address these important and realistic orders in bandit algorithms. To design algorithms under these orders, the upper confidence bound (UCB) policy and the prior free lexicographical filter are adapted to approximate the optimal arms at each round. Moreover, the framework of the algorithms involves two stages in pursuit of the balance between exploration and exploitation. Theoretical analysis as well as numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

Hierarchize Pareto Dominance in Multi-Objective Stochastic Linear Bandits

The popularity of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has led to increased concerns about Model Stealing Attacks (MSA), which aim to craft a clone model by querying MLaaS. Currently, most research on MSA assumes that MLaaS can provide soft labels and that the attacker has a proxy dataset with a similar distribution. However, this fails to encapsulate the more practical scenario where only hard labels are returned by MLaaS and the data distribution remains elusive. Furthermore, most existing work focuses solely on stealing the model accuracy, neglecting the model robustness, while robustness is essential in security-sensitive scenarios, e.g, face-scan payment. Notably, improving model robustness often necessitates the use of expensive techniques such as adversarial training, thereby further making stealing robustness a more lucrative prospect. In response to these identified gaps, we introduce a novel Data-Free Hard-Label Robustness Stealing (DFHL-RS) attack in this paper, which enables the stealing of both model accuracy and robustness by simply querying hard labels of the target model without the help of any natural data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The clone model achieves a clean accuracy of 77.86% and a robust accuracy of 39.51% against AutoAttack, which are only 4.71% and 8.40% lower than the target model on the CIFAR-10 dataset, significantly exceeding the baselines. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LetheSec/DFHL-RS-Attack.

Data-Free Hard-Label Robustness Stealing Attack

Recently, the evaluation of Large Language Models has emerged as a popular area of research. 
The three crucial questions for LLM evaluation are ``what, where, and how to evaluate''.
However, the existing research mainly focuses on the first two questions, which are basically what tasks to give the LLM during testing and what kind of knowledge it should deal with.
As for the third question, which is about what standards to use, the types of evaluators, how to score, and how to rank, there hasn't been much discussion.
In this paper, we analyze evaluation methods by comparing various criteria with both manual and automatic evaluation, utilizing onsite, crowd-sourcing, public annotators and GPT-4, with different scoring methods and ranking systems. 
We propose a new dataset, LLMEval and conduct evaluations on 20 LLMs. 
A total of 2,186 individuals participated, leading to the generation of 243,337 manual annotations and 57,511 automatic evaluation results.
We perform comparisons and analyses of different settings and conduct 10 conclusions that can provide some insights for evaluating LLM in the future. The dataset and the results are publicly available at 
https://github.com/llmeval.
The version with the appendix are publicly available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07398.

LLMEval: A Preliminary Study on How to Evaluate Large Language Models

CLIP has demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse downstream tasks. By aligning images and texts in a shared feature space, they enable zero-shot classification via hand-crafted prompts. However, recent studies have shown that hand-crafted prompts may be unsuitable in practical applications. Specifically, choosing an appropriate prompt for a given task requires accurate data and knowledge, which may not be obtainable in practical situations. An inappropriate prompt can result in poor performance. Moreover, if there is no training data, tuning prompts arbitrarily through unlabeled test data may lead to serious performance degradation when giving hand-crafted prompts. Our study reveals that the aforementioned problems are mainly due to the biases in testing data (Data Bias) and pre-trained CLIP model (Model Bias). The Data Bias makes it challenging to choose an appropriate prompt, while Model Bias renders some predictions inaccurate and biased, which leads to error accumulation. To address these biases, we propose robust test-time Adaptation for zeroshot Prompt tuning (ADAPROMPT). Specifically, we ensemble multiple prompts to avoid the worst-case results and dynamically tune prompts to adapt to Data Bias during testing. Furthermore, we adopt a confidence-aware buffer to store balanced and confident unlabeled test data to tune prompts in order to overcome Model Bias. Our extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that ADAPROMPT alleviates model bias, adapts to data bias and mostly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods at a small time cost. Moreover, our experimental results reveal that ADAPROMPT hardly encounters any performance degradation on these datasets.

Robust Test-Time Adaptation for Zero-Shot Prompt Tuning | VIDEO

Existing cold-start recommendation methods often adopt item-level alignment strategies to align the content feature and the collaborative feature of warm items for model training, however, cold items in the test stage have no historical interactions with users to obtain the collaborative feature. Since these models ignore the above condition of cold items in the training stage, the performance is limited. In this paper, we propose a preference aware dual contrastive learning based recommendation model (PAD-CLRec), where the user preference is explored to take into account the condition of cold items for feature alignment. Here, the user preference is obtained by aggregating a group of collaborative feature of the warm items in the user's purchase records. Then, a group-level alignment between the user preference and the item's content feature can be realized via a proposed preference aware contrastive function for enhancing cold-item recommendation. In addition, a joint objective function is introduced to achieve a better trade-off between the recommendation performance of warm items and cold items from both item-level and group-level perspectives, yielding better overall recommendation performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the results show the superiority of our method, as compared with the state-of-the-arts.

Preference Aware Dual Contrastive Learning for Item Cold-Start Recommendation

In recent years, with the popularity of social media applications, massive digital images are available online, which brings great convenience to image recreation. However, the use of unauthorized image materials in multi-source composite images is still inadequately regulated, which may cause significant loss and discouragement to the copyright owners of the source image materials. Ideally, deep watermarking techniques could provide a solution for protecting these copyrights based on their encoder-noise-decoder training strategy. Yet existing image watermarking schemes, which are mostly designed for single images, cannot well address the copyright protection requirements in this scenario, since the multi-source image composing process commonly includes distortions that are not well investigated in previous methods, e.g., the extreme downsizing.
To meet such demands, we propose MuST, a multi-source tracing robust watermarking scheme, whose architecture includes a multi-source image detector and minimum external rectangle operation for multiple watermark resynchronization and extraction. Furthermore, we constructed an image material dataset covering common image categories and designed the simulation model of the multi-source image composing process as the noise layer. Experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of MuST in tracing sources of image materials from the composite images compared with SOTA watermarking methods, which could maintain the extraction accuracy above 98% to trace the sources of at least 3 different image materials while keeping the average PSNR of watermarked image materials higher than 42.51 dB. We released our code on https://github.com/MrCrims/MuST

MuST: Robust Image Watermarking for Multi-Source Tracing

Image super-resolution is a fundamentally ill-posed problem because multiple valid high-resolution images exist for one low-resolution image. Super-resolution methods based on diffusion probabilistic models can deal with the ill-posed nature by learning the distribution of high-resolution images conditioned on low-resolution images, avoiding the problem of blurry images in PSNR-oriented methods. However, existing diffusion-based super-resolution methods have high time consumption with the use of iterative sampling, while the quality and consistency of generated images are less than ideal due to problems like color shifting. In this paper, we propose Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model with Probability Flow Sampling (ECDP) for image super-resolution. To reduce the time consumption, we design a continuous-time conditional diffusion model for image super-resolution, which enables the use of probability flow sampling for efficient generation. Additionally, to improve the consistency of generated images, we propose a hybrid parametrization for the denoiser network, which interpolates between the data-predicting parametrization and the noise-predicting parametrization for different noise scales. Moreover, we design an image quality loss as a complement to the score matching loss of diffusion models, further improving the consistency and quality of super-resolution. Extensive experiments on DIV2K, ImageNet, and CelebA demonstrate that our method achieves higher super-resolution quality than existing diffusion-based image super-resolution methods while having lower time consumption. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yuan-Yutao/ECDP.

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Adaptive Graph Learning for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Detection

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Semantic Skill Grounding for Embodied Instruction-Following in Cross-Domain Environments

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