Canada

The ability of humans to understand the world in terms of cause and effect relationships, as well as their ability to compress information into abstract concepts, are two hallmark features of human intelligence. These two topics have been studied in tandem under the theory of causal abstractions, but it is an open problem how to best leverage abstraction theory in real-world causal inference tasks, where the true model is not known, and limited data is available in most practical settings. In this paper, we focus on a family of causal abstractions constructed by clustering variables and their domains, redefining abstractions to be amenable to individual causal distributions. We show that such abstractions can be learned in practice using Neural Causal Models (Xia et al. (2021)), allowing us to utilize the deep learning toolkit to solve causal tasks (identification, estimation, sampling) at different levels of abstraction granularity. Finally, we show how representation learning can be used to learn abstractions, which we apply in our experiments to scale causal inferences to high dimensional settings such as with image data.

AAAI 2024

Neural Causal Abstractions | VIDEO

ru: causality

ml: representation learning

ml: deep neural network algorithms

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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. 

In content-based video retrieval (CBVR), dealing with large-scale collections, efficiency is as important as accuracy; thus, several video-level feature-based studies have actively been conducted. Nevertheless, owing to the severe difficulty of embedding a lengthy and untrimmed video into a single feature, these studies have been insufficient for accurate retrieval compared to frame-level feature-based studies. In this paper, we show that appropriate suppression of irrelevant frames can provide insight into the current obstacles of the video-level approaches. Furthermore, we propose a Video-to-Video Suppression network (VVS) as a solution. VVS is an end-to-end framework that consists of an easy distractor elimination stage to identify which frames to remove and a suppression weight generation stage to determine the extent to suppress the remaining frames. This structure is intended to effectively describe an untrimmed video with varying content and meaningless information. Its efficacy is proved via extensive experiments, and we show that our approach is not only state-of-the-art in video-level approaches but also has a fast inference time despite possessing retrieval capabilities close to those of frame-level approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/sejong-rcv/VVS

VVS: Video-to-Video Retrieval with Irrelevant Frame Suppression

Personality detection is a fundamental task for user psychology research. One of the biggest challenges in personality detection lies in the quantitative limitation of labeled data collected by completing the personality questionnaire, which is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Most of the existing works are mainly devoted to learning the rich representations of posts based on labeled data. However, they still suffer from the inherent weakness of the amount limitation of labels, which potentially restricts the capability of the model to deal with unseen data. In this paper, we construct a heterogeneous personality graph for each labeled and unlabeled user and develop a novel psycholinguistic augmented graph neural network to detect personality in a semi-supervised manner, namely Semi-PerGCN. Specifically,  our model first explores a supervised Personality Graph Neural Network (PGNN) to refine labeled user representation on the heterogeneous graph. For the remaining massive unlabeled users, we utilize the empirical psychological knowledge of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon for multi-view graph augmentation and perform unsupervised graph consistent constraints on the parameters shared PGNN.  During the learning process of finite labeled users, noise-invariant learning on a large scale of unlabeled users is combined to enhance the generalization ability. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, Youtube, PAN2015, and MyPersonality demonstrate the effectiveness of our Semi-PerGCN in personality detection, especially in scenarios with limited labeled users.

Data Augmented Graph Neural Networks for Personality Detection | VIDEO

Zero-shot multi-speaker TTS aims to synthesize speech with the voice of a chosen target speaker without any fine-tuning. Prevailing methods, however, encounter limitations at adapting to new speakers of out-of-domain settings, primarily due to inadequate speaker disentanglement and content leakage. To overcome these constraints, we propose an innovative negation feature learning paradigm that models decoupled speaker attributes as deviations from the complete audio representation by utilizing the subtraction operation. By eliminating superfluous content information from the speaker representation, our negation scheme not only mitigates content leakage, thereby enhancing synthesis robustness, but also improves speaker fidelity. In addition, to facilitate the learning of diverse speaker attributes, we leverage multi-stream Transformers, which retain multiple hypotheses and instigate a training paradigm akin to ensemble learning. To unify these hypotheses and realize the final speaker representation, we employ attention pooling. Finally, in light of the imperative to generate target text utterances in the desired voice, we adopt adaptive layer normalizations to effectively fuse the previously generated speaker representation with the target text representations, as opposed to mere concatenation of the text and audio modalities. Extensive experiments and validations substantiate the efficacy of our proposed approach in preserving and harnessing speaker-specific attributes vis-à-vis alternative baseline models.

Enhancing Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS with Negated Speaker Representations | VIDEO

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become mainstream methods for solving the semi-supervised node classification problem. However, due to the uneven location distribution of labeled nodes in the graph, labeled nodes are only accessible to a small portion of unlabeled nodes, leading to the under-reaching issue. In this study, we firstly reveal under-reaching by conducting an empirical investigation on various well-known graphs. Then, we demonstrate that under-reaching results in unsatisfactory distribution alignment between labeled and unlabeled nodes through systematic experimental analysis, significantly degrading GNNs' performance. To tackle under-reaching for GNNs, we propose an architecture-agnostic method dubbed NodeMixup. The fundamental idea is to (1) increase the reachability of labeled nodes by labeled-unlabeled pairs mixup, (2) leverage graph structures via fusing the neighbor connections of intra-class node pairs to improve performance gains of mixup, and (3) use neighbor label distribution similarity incorporating node degrees to determine sampling weights for node mixup. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of NodeMixup in assisting GNNs in handling under-reaching. The source code is available at https://github.com/WeigangLu/NodeMixup.

NodeMixup: Tackling Under-Reaching for Graph Neural Networks

Pre-trained encoder-decoder models are widely applied in Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) systems on the session level, mainly focusing on modeling the dialog semantic information. Dialogs imply structural information indicating the interaction among user utterances, belief states, database search results, system acts and responses, which is also crucial for TOD systems. In addition, for the system acts,  additional pre-training and datasets are considered to improve their accuracies, undoubtedly introducing a burden. Therefore, a novel end-to-end TOD system named Winnie is proposed in this paper to improve the TOD performance. First, to make full use of the intrinsic structural information, supervised contrastive learning is adopted to narrow the gap in the representation space between text representations of the same category and enlarge the overall continuous representation margin between text representations of different categories in dialog context. Then, a system act classification task is introduced for policy optimization during fine-tuning. Empirical results show that Winnie substantially improves the performance of the TOD system. By introducing the supervised contrastive and system act classification losses, Winnie achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets, including MultiWOZ2.2, In-Car, and Camrest676. Their end-to-end combined scores are improved by 3.2, 1.9, and 1.1 points, respectively.

Winnie: Task-Oriented Dialog System with Structure-Aware Contrastive Learning and Enhanced Policy Planning | VIDEO

We present DanceAnyWay, a generative learning method to synthesize beat-guided dances of 3D human characters synchronized with music. Our method learns to disentangle the dance movements at the beat frames from the dance movements at all the remaining frames by operating at two hierarchical levels. At the coarser "beat" level, it encodes the rhythm, pitch, and melody information of the input music via dedicated feature representations only at the beat frames. It leverages them to synthesize the beat poses of the target dances using a sequence-to-sequence learning framework. At the finer "repletion" level, our method encodes similar rhythm, pitch, and melody information from all the frames of the input music via dedicated feature representations. It generates the full dance sequences by combining the synthesized beat and repletion poses and enforcing plausibility through an adversarial learning framework. Our training paradigm also enforces fine-grained diversity in the synthesized dances through a randomized temporal contrastive loss, which ensures different segments of the dance sequences have different movements and avoids motion freezing or collapsing to repetitive movements. We evaluate the performance of our approach through extensive experiments on the benchmark AIST++ dataset and observe improvements of about 7%-12% in motion quality metrics and 1.5%-4% in motion diversity metrics over the current baselines respectively. We also conducted a user study to evaluate the visual quality of our synthesized dances. We noted that, on average, the samples generated by our method were about 9-48% more preferred by the participants and had a 4-27% better five-point Likert-scale score over the best available current baseline in terms of motion quality and synchronization.

DanceAnyWay: Synthesizing Beat-Guided 3D Dances with Randomized Temporal Contrastive Learning | VIDEO

Generative models (GMs) have received increasing research interest for their remarkable capacity to achieve comprehensive understanding. However, their potential application in the domain of multi-modal tracking has remained unexplored. In this context, we seek to uncover the potential of harnessing generative techniques to address the critical challenge, information fusion, in multi-modal tracking. In this paper, we delve into two prominent GM techniques, namely, Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). Different from the standard fusion process where the features from each modality are directly fed into the fusion block, we combine these multi-modal features with random noise in the GM framework, effectively transforming the original training samples into harder instances. This design excels at extracting discriminative clues from the features, enhancing the ultimate tracking performance. Based on this, we conduct extensive experiments across two multi-modal tracking tasks, three baseline methods, and four challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed generative-based fusion mechanism achieves state-of-the-art performance by setting new records on GTOT, LasHeR and RGBD1K. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/GMMT.

Generative-Based Fusion Mechanism for Multi-Modal Tracking | VIDEO

Epistemic planning is useful in situations where multiple agents have different knowledge and beliefs about the world, such as in robot-human interaction. One aspect that has been largely neglected in the literature is planning with observations in the presence of false beliefs. This is a particularly challenging problem because it requires belief revision. We introduce a simple specification language for reasoning about actions with knowledge and belief. We demonstrate our approach on well-known false-belief tasks such as the Sally-Anne Task and compare it to other action languages. Our logic leads to an epistemic planning formalism that is expressive enough to model second-order false-belief tasks, yet has the same computational complexity as classical planning.

Towards Epistemic-Doxastic Planning with Observation and Revision | VIDEO

Open-Set Recognition (OSR) aims to accurately identify known classes while effectively rejecting unknown classes to guarantee the reliability. Most existing OSR methods focus on learning in the spatial domain, where subtle texture and global structure are potentially intertwined. Empirical studies have shown that DNNs trained in the original spatial domain are inclined to over-perceive subtle texture. The biased semantic perception could leads to catastrophic over-confidence when predicting both known and unknown classes. To this end, we propose an innovative approach by decomposing the spatial domain to the frequency domain to separately consider global (low-frequency) and subtle (high-frequency) information, named \textbf{Fre}quency \textbf{S}huffling and En\textbf{h}ancement (FreSH). To alleviate the overfitting of subtle texture, we introduce the High-Frequency Shuffling (HFS) strategy that generates diverse high-frequency information and promotes the capture of low-frequency invariance. Moreover, to enhance the perception of global structure, we propose the Low-Frequency Residual (LFR) learning procedure that constructs a composite feature space, integrating low-frequency and original spatial features. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed FreSH consistently trumps the state-of-the-arts by a considerable margin.

Frequency Shuffling and Enhancement for Open Set Recognition | VIDEO

Generative models can produce synthetic patient records for analytical tasks when real data is unavailable or limited. However, current methods struggle with adhering to domain-specific knowledge and removing invalid data. We present ConSequence, an effective approach to integrating domain knowledge into sequential generative neural network outputs. Our rule-based formulation includes temporal aggregation and antecedent evaluation modules, ensured by an efficient matrix multiplication formulation, to satisfy hard and soft logical constraints across time steps. Existing constraint methods often fail to guarantee constraint satisfaction, lack the ability to handle temporal constraints, and hinder the learning and computational efficiency of the model. In contrast, our approach efficiently handles all types of constraints with guaranteed logical coherence. We demonstrate ConSequence's effectiveness in generating electronic health records, outperforming competitors in achieving complete temporal and spatial constraint satisfaction without compromising runtime performance or generative quality. Specifically, ConSequence successfully prevents all rule violations while improving the model quality in reducing its test perplexity by 5% and incurring less than a 13% slowdown in generation speed compared to an unconstrained model.

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