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Linear structural causal models (SCMs) are used to express and analyze the relationships between random variables. Direct causal effects are represented as directed edges and confounding factors as bidirected edges. Identifying the causal parameters from correlations between the nodes is an open problem in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we study SCMs whose directed component forms a tree. Van der Zander et al. (AISTATS&#39;22, PLMR 151, pp. 6770--6792, 2022) give a PSPACE-algorithm for the identification problem in this case, which is a significant improvement over the general Gröbner basis approach, which has doubly-exponential time complexity in the number of structural parameters. However, they do not show that their algorithm is complete. In this work, we present a randomized polynomial-time algorithm, which solves the identification problem for tree-shaped SCMs. For every structural parameter, our algorithms decides whether it is generically identifiable, generically 2-identifiable, or generically unidentifiable. (No other cases can occur.) In the first two cases, it provides one or two  fractional affine square root terms of polynomials (FASTPs) for the corresponding parameter, respectively. In particular, our algorithm is not only polynomial time, but also complete for for tree-shaped SCMs.

AAAI 2024

Identification for Tree-Shaped Structural Causal Models in Polynomial Time

identification

graphical models

causality

Linear structural causal models (SCMs) are used to express and analyze the relationships between random variables. Direct causal effects are represented as directed edges and confounding factors as bidirected edges. Identifying the causal parameters from correlations between the nodes is an open problem in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we study SCMs whose directed component forms a tree. Van der Zander et al. (AISTATS'22, PLMR 151, pp. 6770--6792, 2022) give a PSPACE-algorithm for the identification problem in this case, which is a significant improvement over the general Gröbner basis approach, which has doubly-exponential time complexity in the number of structural parameters. However, they do not show that their algorithm is complete. In this work, we present a randomized polynomial-time algorithm, which solves the identification problem for tree-shaped SCMs. For every structural parameter, our algorithms decides whether it is generically identifiable, generically 2-identifiable, or generically unidentifiable. (No other cases can occur.) In the first two cases, it provides one or two  fractional affine square root terms of polynomials (FASTPs) for the corresponding parameter, respectively. In particular, our algorithm is not only polynomial time, but also complete for for tree-shaped SCMs.

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. 

Label distribution learning (LDL) is an effective learning paradigm for handling label ambiguity. When applying LDL, it typically requires datasets annotated with label distributions. However, obtaining supervised data for LDL is a challenging task. Due to the randomness of label annotation, the annotator can produce inaccurate annotation results for the instance, affecting the accuracy and generalization ability of the LDL model. To address this problem, we propose a generative approach to calibrate the inaccurate annotation for LDL using variational inference techniques. Specifically, we assume that instances with similar features share latent similar label distributions. The feature vectors and label distributions are generated by Gaussian mixture and Dirichlet mixture, respectively. The relationship between them is established through a shared categorical variable, which effectively utilizes the label distribution of instances with similar features, and achieves a more accurate label distribution through the generative approach. Furthermore, we use a confusion matrix to model the factors that contribute to the inaccuracy during the annotation process, which captures the relationship between label distributions and inaccurate label distributions. Finally, the label distribution is used to calibrate the available information in the noisy dataset to obtain the ground-truth label distribution.

Generative Calibration of Inaccurate Annotation for Label Distribution Learning | VIDEO

Ensemble clustering learns more accurate consensus results from a set of weak base clustering results. This technique is more challenging than other clustering algorithms due to the base clustering result set's randomness and the inaccessibility of data features. Existing ensemble clustering methods rely on the Co-association (CA) matrix quality but lack the capability to handle missing connections in base clustering. Inspired by the neighborhood high-order and topological similarity theories, this paper proposes a topological ensemble model based on high-order information. Specifically, this paper compensates for missing connections by mining neighborhood high-order connection information in the CA matrix and learning optimal connections with adaptive weights. Afterward, the learned excellent connections are embedded into topology learning to capture the topology of the base clustering. Finally, we incorporate adaptive high-order connection representation and topology learning into a unified learning framework. To our knowledge, this is the first ensemble clustering work based on topological similarity and high-order connectivity relations. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/ltyong/awec.

Enhancing Ensemble Clustering with Adaptive High-Order Topological Weights

When training on a long-tailed dataset, conventional learning algorithms tend to exhibit a bias towards classes with a larger sample size. Our investigation has revealed that this biased learning tendency originates from the model parameters, which are trained to disproportionately contribute to the classes characterised by their sample size (e.g., many, medium, and few classes).
To balance the overall parameter contribution across all classes, we investigate the importance of each model parameter to the learning of different class groups, and propose a multistage parameter Decouple and Optimisation (DO) framework that decouples parameters into different groups with each group learning a specific portion of classes. To optimise the parameter learning, we apply different training objectives with a collaborative optimisation step to learn complementary information about each class group. Extensive experiments on long-tailed datasets, including CIFAR100, Places-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturaList 2018, show that our framework achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art.

Decoupled Optimisation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Transfer learning (TL) has shown great potential to improve Reinforcement Learning (RL) efficiency by leveraging prior knowledge in new tasks. However, much of the existing TL research focuses on transferring knowledge between tasks that share the same state-action spaces.  Further, transfer from multiple source tasks that have different state-action spaces is more challenging and needs to be solved urgently to improve the generalization and practicality of the method in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes TURRET (Transfer Using gRaph neuRal nETworks), to utilize the generalization capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to facilitate efficient and effective multi-source policy transfer learning in the state-action mismatch setting.  TURRET learns a semantic representation by accounting for the intrinsic property of the agent through GNNs, which leads to a unified state embedding space for all tasks. As a result, TURRET achieves more efficient transfer with strong generalization ability between different tasks and can be easily combined with existing Deep RL algorithms. Experimental results show that TURRET significantly outperforms other TL methods on multiple continuous action control tasks, successfully transferring across robots with different state-action spaces.

A Transfer Approach Using Graph Neural Networks in Deep Reinforcement Learning | VIDEO

Recent deep learning-based multi-view people detection (MVD) methods have shown promising results on existing datasets. However, current methods are mainly trained and evaluated on small, single scenes with a limited number of multi-view frames and fixed camera views. As a result, these methods may not be practical for detecting people in larger, more complex scenes with severe occlusions and camera calibration errors. This paper focuses on improving multi-view people detection by developing a supervised view-wise contribution weighting approach that better fuses multi-camera information under large scenes. Besides, a large synthetic dataset is adopted to enhance the model's generalization ability and enable more practical evaluation and comparison. The model's performance on new testing scenes is further improved with a simple domain adaptation technique. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving promising cross-scene multi-view people detection performance.

Multi-View People Detection in Large Scenes via Supervised View-Wise Contribution Weighting

Partial label learning (PLL) induces a multi-class classifier from training examples each associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is valid. The formation of real-world data typically arises from heterogeneous entanglement of series latent explanatory factors, which are considered intrinsic properties for discriminating between different patterns. Though learning disentangled representation is expected to facilitate label disambiguation for partial-label (PL) examples, few existing works were dedicated to addressing this issue. In this paper, we make the first attempt towards disentangled PLL and propose a novel approach named TERIAL, which makes predictions according to derived disentangled representation of instances and label embeddings. The TERIAL approach formulates the PL examples as an undirected bipartite graph where instances are only connected with their candidate labels, and employs a tailored neighborhood routing mechanism to yield disentangled representation of nodes in the graph. Specifically, the proposed routing mechanism progressively infers the explanatory factors that contribute to the edge between adjacent nodes and augments the representation of the central node with factor-aware embedding information propagated from specific neighbors simultaneously via iteratively analyzing the promising subspace clusters formed by the node and its neighbors. The estimated labeling confidence matrix is also introduced to accommodate unreliable links owing to the inherent ambiguity of PLL. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the neighborhood routing mechanism will converge to the point estimate that maximizes the marginal likelihood of observed PL training examples. Comprehensive experiments over various datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.

Disentangled Partial Label Learning

With the rise of cameras and smart sensors, humanity generates an exponential amount of data. This valuable information, including underrepresented cases like AI in medical settings, can fuel new deep-learning tools. However, data scientists must prioritize ensuring privacy for individuals in these untapped datasets, especially for images or videos with faces, which are prime targets for identification methods. Proposed solutions to de-identify such images often compromise non-identifying facial attributes relevant to downstream tasks.
In this paper, we introduce Disguise, a novel algorithm that seamlessly de-identifies facial images while ensuring the usability of the modified data. Unlike previous approaches, our solution is firmly grounded in the domains of differential privacy and ensemble-learning research. Our method involves extracting and substituting depicted identities with synthetic ones, generated using variational mechanisms to maximize obfuscation and non-invertibility. Additionally, we leverage supervision from a mixture-of-experts to disentangle and preserve other utility attributes. We extensively evaluate our method using multiple datasets, demonstrating a higher de-identification rate and superior consistency compared to prior approaches in various downstream tasks.

Disguise without Disruption: Utility-Preserving Face De-identification

Despite significant progress in utilizing pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to guide the creation of 3D scenes, these methods often struggle to generate scenes that are sufficiently realistic, leading to "neural scene degeneration". 
In this work, we propose a new 3D scene generation model called Real3D. 
Specifically, Real3D designs a pipeline from a NeRF-like implicit renderer to a tetrahedrons-based explicit renderer, greatly improving the neural network's ability to generate various neural scenes. 
Moreover, Real3D introduces an additional discriminator to prevent neural scenes from falling into undesirable local optima, thus avoiding the degeneration phenomenon.
Our experimental results demonstrate that Real3D outperforms all existing state-of-the-art text-to-3D generation methods, providing valuable insights to facilitate the development of learning-based 3D scene generation approaches.

Real3D the Curious Case of Neural Scene Degeneration

Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to security risks due to the inherent transferable nature of adversarial examples. Despite the success of recent generative model-based attacks demonstrating strong transferability, it still remains a challenge to design an efficient attack strategy in a real-world strict black-box setting, where both the target domain and model architectures are unknown. In this paper, we seek to explore a feature contrastive approach in the frequency domain to generate adversarial examples that are robust in both cross-domain and cross-model settings. With that goal in mind, we propose two modules that are only employed during the training phase: a Frequency-Aware Domain Randomization (FADR) module to randomize domain-variant low- and high-range frequency components and a Frequency-Augmented Contrastive Learning (FACL) module to effectively separate domain-invariant mid-frequency features of clean and perturbed image. We demonstrate strong transferability of our generated adversarial perturbations through extensive cross-domain and cross-model experiments, while keeping the inference time complexity.

FACL-Attack: Frequency-Aware Contrastive Learning for Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Document layout analysis is a crucial step for intelligent document understanding. However, many existing methods primarily focus on the visual aspects and overlook the textual features of documents. Although document pre-trained models utilize multi-modal features during the pre-training phase, they tend to operate as a unimodal pipeline when it comes to layout analysis tasks. Furthermore, current multi-modal methods perform worse than unimodal detectors on complex layout analysis datasets. To address these limitations, we propose an effective and pluggable multi-modal fusion approach named M2Doc, which fuses visual and textual features for better layout detection. M2Doc contains two pluggable multi-modal fusion modules, early-fusion and late-fusion, which align and fuse visual and textual features at the pixel level and block level. The early-fusion module leverages a gate-like mechanism to fuse visual and textual features extracted by the backbone, while the late-fusion module uses simple summation to fuse visual and textual features attributed to the candidate bounding boxes. Benefitting from the concision and effectiveness of M2Doc, it can be easily applied to various detectors for better layout detection, including two-stage and end-to-end object detectors. Our experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements in detectors equipped with M2Doc on datasets such as DocLayNet (+11.3\% mAP) and M$^6$Doc (+1.9\% mAP). Furthermore, through the integration of the DINO detector with M2Doc, we achieve state-of-the-art results on DocLayNet (89.0\% mAP), M$^6$Doc (69.9\% mAP), and PubLayNet (95.5\% mAP). The code will be publicly released at https://github.com/johnning2333/M2Doc.

Identification for Tree-Shaped Structural Causal Models in Polynomial Time

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Generative Calibration of Inaccurate Annotation for Label Distribution Learning | VIDEO

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