Canada

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we further explore this line of research by investigating how reward shaping under budget constraints can improve the principal&#39;s utility. We study a two-player Stackelberg game where the principal and the agent have different reward functions, and the agent chooses an MDP policy for both players. The principal offers an additional reward to the agent, and the agent picks their policy selfishly to maximize their reward, which is the sum of the original and the offered reward. Our results establish the NP-hardness of the problem and offer polynomial approximation algorithms for two classes of instances: Stochastic trees and deterministic decision processes with a finite horizon.

AAAI 2024

Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

prs: planning with markov models

cso: constraint optimization

gtep: equilibrium

gtep: game theory

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we further explore this line of research by investigating how reward shaping under budget constraints can improve the principal's utility. We study a two-player Stackelberg game where the principal and the agent have different reward functions, and the agent chooses an MDP policy for both players. The principal offers an additional reward to the agent, and the agent picks their policy selfishly to maximize their reward, which is the sum of the original and the offered reward. Our results establish the NP-hardness of the problem and offer polynomial approximation algorithms for two classes of instances: Stochastic trees and deterministic decision processes with a finite horizon.

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. 

Feature visualization is one of the most popular techniques used to interpret the internal behavior of individual units of trained deep neural networks. Based on activation maximization, they consist of finding \textit{synthetic} or \textit{natural} inputs that maximize neuron activations. This paper introduces an optimization framework that aims to deceive feature visualization through adversarial model manipulation. It consists of finetuning a pre-trained model with a specifically introduced loss that aims to maintain model performance, while also significantly changing feature visualization. We provide evidence of the success of this manipulation on several pre-trained models for the classification task with ImageNet.

Adversarial Attacks on the Interpretation of Neuron Activation Maximization

We address the Individualized continuous treatment effect
(ICTE) estimation problem where we predict the effect of
any continuous valued treatment on an individual using ob-
servational data. The main challenge in this estimation task
is the potential confounding of treatment assignment with in-
dividual’s covariates in the training data, whereas during in-
ference ICTE requires prediction on independently sampled
treatments. In contrast to prior work that relied on regularizers
or unstable GAN training, we advocate the direct approach
of augmenting training individuals with independently sam-
pled treatments and inferred counterfactual outcomes. We in-
fer counterfactual outcomes using a two-pronged strategy: a
Gradient Interpolation for close-to-observed treatments, and
a Gaussian Process based Kernel Smoothing which allows
us to down weigh high variance inferences. We evaluate our
method on five benchmarks and show that our method out-
performs six state-of-the-art methods on the counterfactual
estimation error. We analyze the superior performance of our
method by showing that (1) our inferred counterfactual re-
sponses are more accurate, and (2) adding them to the train-
ing data reduces the distributional distance between the con-
founded training distribution and test distribution where treat-
ment is independent of covariates. Our proposed method is
model-agnostic and we show that it improves ICTE accuracy
of several existing models.

Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation Using Gradient Interpolation and Kernel Smoothing

The generation of logically coherent dialogues by humans relies on underlying cognitive abilities. Based on this, we redefine the dialogue coherence evaluation process, combining cognitive judgment with the basic text to achieve a more human-like evaluation. We propose a novel dialogue evaluation framework based on Dialogue Cognition Graph (DCGEval) to implement the fusion by in-depth interaction between cognition modeling and text modeling. The proposed Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) based graph structure called DCG aims to uniformly model four dialogue cognitive abilities. Specifically, core-semantic cognition is modeled by converting the utterance into an AMR graph, which can extract essential semantic information without redundancy. The temporal and role cognition are modeled by establishing logical relationships among the different AMR graphs. Finally, the commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet is fused to express commonsense cognition. Experiments demonstrate the necessity of modeling human cognition for
dialogue evaluation, and our DCGEval presents stronger correlations with human judgments compared to other state-of-the-art evaluation metrics.

Dialogues Are Not Just Text: Modeling Cognition for Dialogue Coherence Evaluation | VIDEO

Optimal transport is a fundamental topic that has attracted a great amount of attention from the optimization community in the past decades. In this paper, we consider an interesting discrete dynamic optimal transport problem: can we efficiently update the optimal transport plan when the weights or the locations of the data points change? This problem is naturally motivated by several applications in machine learning. For example, we often need to compute the optimal transport cost between two different data sets; if some changes happen to a few data points, should we re-compute the high complexity cost function or update the cost by some efficient dynamic data structure? We are aware that several dynamic maximum flow algorithms have been proposed before, however, the research on dynamic minimum cost flow problem is still quite limited, to the best of our knowledge. We propose a novel 2D Skip Orthogonal List together with some dynamic tree techniques. Although our algorithm is based on the conventional simplex method, it can efficiently find the variable to pivot within expected O(1) time, and complete each pivoting operation within expected O(|V|) time where V is the set of all supply and demand nodes. Since dynamic modifications typically do not introduce significant changes, our algorithm requires only a few simplex iterations in practice. So our algorithm is more efficient than re-computing the optimal transport cost that needs at least one traversal over all |E|=O(|V|^2) variables, where |E| denotes the number of edges in the network. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing algorithms in the dynamic scenarios.

A Novel Skip Orthogonal List for Dynamic Optimal Transport Problem

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have become a leading paradigm for establishing near-term quantum applications in recent years. The trainability issue of QNNs has garnered extensive attention, spurring demand for a comprehensive analysis of QNNs in order to identify viable solutions. In this work, we propose a perspective that characterizes the trainability of QNNs based on their locality. We prove that the entire variation range of the loss function via adjusting any local quantum gate vanishes exponentially in the number of qubits with a high probability for a broad class of QNNs. This result reveals extra harsh constraints independent of gradients and unifies the restrictions on gradient-based and gradient-free optimizations naturally. We showcase the validity of our results with numerical simulations of representative models and examples. Our findings, as a fundamental property of random quantum circuits, deepen the understanding of the role of locality in QNNs and serve as a guideline for assessing the effectiveness of diverse training strategies for quantum neural networks.

Exponential Hardness of Optimization from the Locality in Quantum Neural Networks

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to align the positive features while differentiating the negative features in the latent space by minimizing a pair-wise contrastive loss. As the embodiment of an outstanding discriminative unsupervised graph representation learning approach, GCL achieves impressive successes in various graph benchmarks. However, such an approach falls short of recognizing the topology isomorphism of graphs, resulting in that graphs with relatively homogeneous node features cannot be sufficiently discriminated. By revisiting classic graph topology recognition works, we disclose that the corresponding expertise intuitively complements GCL methods. To this end, we propose a novel hierarchical topology isomorphism expertise embedded graph contrastive learning, which introduces knowledge distillations to empower GCL models to learn the hierarchical topology isomorphism expertise, including the graph-tier and subgraph-tier. On top of this, the proposed method holds the feature of plug-and-play, and we empirically demonstrate that the proposed method is universal to multiple state-of-the-art GCL models. The solid theoretical analyses are further provided to prove that compared with conventional GCL methods, our method acquires the tighter upper bound of Bayes classification error. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks to exhibit the performance superiority of our method over candidate GCL methods, e.g., for the real-world graph representation learning experiments, the proposed method beats the state-of-the-art method by 0.23% on unsupervised representation learning setting, 0.43% on transfer learning setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/jyf123/HTML.

Hierarchical Topology Isomorphism Expertise Embedded Graph Contrastive Learning | VIDEO

We use the maximum a posteriori estimation principle for learning representations distributed on the unit sphere. We propose to use the angular Gaussian distribution, which corresponds to a Gaussian projected on the unit-sphere and derive the associated loss function. We also consider the von Mises-Fisher distribution, which is the conditional of a Gaussian in the unit-sphere. The learned representations are pushed toward fixed directions, which are the prior means of the Gaussians; allowing for a learning strategy that is resilient to data drift. This makes it suitable for online continual learning, which is the problem of training neural networks on a continuous data stream, where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially so that data from past tasks are no longer accessible, and data from the current task can be seen only once. 
To address this challenging scenario, we propose a memory-based representation learning technique equipped with our new loss functions. Our approach does not require negative data or knowledge of task boundaries and performs well with smaller batch sizes while being computationally efficient. 
We demonstrate with extensive experiments that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on both standard evaluation scenarios and realistic scenarios with blurry task boundaries. For reproducibility, we use the same training pipeline for every compared method and share the code at https://t.ly/SQTj.

Learning Representations on the Unit Sphere: Investigating Angular Gaussian and Von Mises-Fisher Distributions for Online Continual Learning

Adversarial attacks against stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been extensively studied in the literature. In this work, we focus on reward poisoning attacks and find most existing attacks can be easily detected by our proposed detection method based on the test of homogeneity, due to their aggressive nature in reward manipulations. This motivates us to study the notion of stealthy attack against stochastic MABs and investigate the resulting attackability. Our analysis shows that against two popularly employed MAB algorithms, UCB1 and $\epsilon$-greedy, the success of a stealthy attack depends on the environmental conditions and the realized reward of the arm pulled in the first round. We also analyze the situation for general MAB algorithms equipped with our attack detection method and find that it is possible to have a stealthy attack that almost always succeeds. This brings new insights into the security risks of MAB algorithms.

Stealthy Adversarial Attacks on Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits

Point cloud registration is a crucial technique in 3D computer vision with a wide range of applications. However, this task can be challenging, particularly in large fields of view with dynamic objects, environmental noise, or other perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose a model called PosDiffNet. Our approach performs hierarchical registration based on window-level, patch-level, and point-level correspondence. We leverage a graph neural partial differential equation (PDE) based on Beltrami flow to obtain high-dimensional features and position embeddings for point clouds. We incorporate position embeddings into a Transformer module based on a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) to efficiently represent patches within points. We employ the multi-level correspondence derived from the high feature similarity scores to facilitate alignment between point clouds. Subsequently, we use registration methods such as SVD-based algorithms to predict the transformation using corresponding point pairs. We evaluate PosDiffNet on several 3D point cloud datasets, verifying that it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for point cloud registration in large fields of view with perturbations. The implementation code of experiments is available at https://github.com/AI-IT-AVs/PosDiffNet.

PosDiffNet: Positional Neural Diffusion for Point Cloud Registration in a Large Field of View with Perturbations | VIDEO

One of the ultimate goals of representation learning is to achieve compactness within a class and well-separability between classes. Many outstanding metric-based and prototype-based methods following the Expectation-Maximization paradigm, have been proposed for this objective. However, they inevitably introduce biases into the learning process, particularly with long-tail distributed training data. In this paper, we reveal that the class prototype is not necessarily to be derived from training features and propose a novel perspective to use pre-defined class anchors serving as feature centroid to unidirectionally guide feature learning. However, the pre-defined anchors may have a large semantic distance from the pixel features, which prevents them from being directly applied. To address this issue and generate feature centroid independent from feature learning, a simple yet effective Semantic Anchor Regularization (SAR) is proposed. SAR ensures the inter-class separability of semantic anchors in the semantic space by employing a classifier-aware auxiliary cross-entropy loss during training via disentanglement learning. By pulling the learned features to these semantic anchors, several advantages can be attained: 1) the intra-class compactness and naturally inter-class separability, 2) induced bias or errors from feature learning can be avoided, and 3) robustness to the long-tailed problem. The proposed SAR can be used in a plug-and-play manner in the existing models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SAR performs better than previous sophisticated prototype-based methods.  The implementation is available at https://github.com/geyanqi/SAR.

Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

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Adversarial Attacks on the Interpretation of Neuron Activation Maximization

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Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

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Adversarial Attacks on the Interpretation of Neuron Activation Maximization

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