Canada

Most countries provide veterans with various benefits to reward their sacrifice. Unfortunately, many veterans have failed to prove their status due to loss of military records. Thus, some governments allow the verification of those veterans through &quot;buddy statements&quot; obtained from the people who can vouch for the buddy&#39;s participation in the war. However, it is still challenging for veterans to find guarantors directly. With this background, we suggest to utilizing historical war records of combined operations to increase the pool of potential guarantors for the buddy statements. However, a combined operation network among troops can have missing edges and perturbations on attributes of the troop due to inaccurate information. In this study, we learn from some recorded interactions which might be incomplete and noisy, and predict missing linkages among the troops that might have interacted together in the war, by proposing Robust-SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction). It combines two Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures: robust Graph Convolutional Network which considers the uncertainty of node attributes with a probabilistic approach, and SEAL which improves the expressive power of the GNN with a labeling trick. Our proposed approach was applied to Korean War data with perturbations. For experimentations, we hid some actual interactions and found that Robust-SEAL restores missing interactions better than other GNN-based baselines.

AAAI 2024

Identifying Guarantors of War Veterans Using Robust-SEAL: A Case of the Korean War | VIDEO

app: humanities & computational social science

dmkm: web search & information retrieval

dmkm: recommender systems

Congratulations to all the researchers who have qualified for the AMA Research Challenge virtual poster symposium and semifinals!

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AMA Research Challenge 2025 

Join the AMA Research Challenge poster symposium and semifinals to explore top research posters and score posters in the semifinals (an AMA member exclusive opportunity).

Most countries provide veterans with various benefits to reward their sacrifice. Unfortunately, many veterans have failed to prove their status due to loss of military records. Thus, some governments allow the verification of those veterans through "buddy statements" obtained from the people who can vouch for the buddy's participation in the war. However, it is still challenging for veterans to find guarantors directly. With this background, we suggest to utilizing historical war records of combined operations to increase the pool of potential guarantors for the buddy statements. However, a combined operation network among troops can have missing edges and perturbations on attributes of the troop due to inaccurate information. In this study, we learn from some recorded interactions which might be incomplete and noisy, and predict missing linkages among the troops that might have interacted together in the war, by proposing Robust-SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction). It combines two Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures: robust Graph Convolutional Network which considers the uncertainty of node attributes with a probabilistic approach, and SEAL which improves the expressive power of the GNN with a labeling trick. Our proposed approach was applied to Korean War data with perturbations. For experimentations, we hid some actual interactions and found that Robust-SEAL restores missing interactions better than other GNN-based baselines.

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.

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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. 

Optimizing the configuration and placement of sensors is crucial for reliable fall detection, indoor localization, and activity recognition in assisted living spaces. We propose a novel, sample-efficient approach to find a high-quality sensor placement in an arbitrary indoor space based on grey-box Bayesian optimization and simulation-based evaluation. Our key technical contribution lies in capturing domain-specific knowledge about the spatial distribution of activities and incorporating it into the iterative selection of query points in Bayesian optimization. Considering two simulated indoor environments and a real-world dataset containing human activities and sensor triggers, we show that our proposed method performs better compared to state-of-the-art black-box optimization techniques in identifying high-quality sensor placements, leading to an accurate activity recognition model in terms of F1-score, while also requiring a significantly lower (51.3% on average) number of expensive function queries.

Grey-Box Bayesian Optimization for Sensor Placement in Assisted Living Environments

Emergency and non-emergency response systems are essential services provided by local governments and critical to protecting lives, the environment, and property. The effective handling of (non-)emergency calls is critical for public safety and well-being. By reducing the burden through non-emergency callers, residents in critical need of assistance through 911 will receive a fast and effective response. Collaborating with the Department of Emergency Communications (DEC) in Nashville, we analyzed 11,796 non-emergency call recordings and developed Auto311, the first automated system to handle 311 non-emergency calls, which (1) effectively and dynamically predicts ongoing non-emergency incident types to generate tailored case reports during the call; (2) itemizes essential information from dialogue contexts to complete the generated reports; and (3) strategically structures system-caller dialogues with optimized confidence. We used real-world data to evaluate the system's effectiveness and deployability. The experimental results indicate that the system effectively predicts incident type with an average F-1 score of 92.54%. Moreover, the system successfully itemizes critical information from relevant contexts to complete reports, evincing a 0.93 average consistency score compared to the ground truth. Additionally, emulations demonstrate that the system effectively decreases conversation turns as the utterance size gets more extensive and categorizes the ongoing call with 94.49% mean accuracy.

Auto311: A Confidence-Guided Automated System for Non-emergency Call | VIDEO

Confidence calibration in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) aims to align a model's predicted confidence with its actual accuracy. Recent studies have indicated that GNNs exhibit an under-confidence bias, which contrasts the over-confidence bias commonly observed in deep neural networks. However, our deeper investigation into this topic reveals that not all GNNs exhibit this behavior. Upon closer examination of message passing in GNNs, we found a clear link between message aggregation and confidence levels. Specifically, GNNs with extensive message aggregation, often seen in deep architectures or when leveraging large amounts of labeled data, tend to exhibit overconfidence. This overconfidence can be attributed to factors like over-learning and over-smoothing. Conversely, GNNs with fewer layers, known for their balanced message passing and superior node representation, may exhibit under-confidence. To counter these confidence biases, we introduce the Adaptive Unified Label Smoothing (AU-LS) technique. Our experiments show that AU-LS outperforms existing methods, addressing both over and under-confidence in various GNN scenarios.

Moderate Message Passing Improves Calibration: A Universal Way to Mitigate Confidence Bias in Graph Neural Networks

Robust autonomous driving requires agents to accurately identify unexpected areas (anomalies) in urban scenes. To this end, some critical issues remain open: how to design advisable metric to measure anomalies, and how to properly generate training samples of anomaly data? Classical effort in anomaly detection usually resorts to pixel-wise uncertainty or sample synthesis, which ignores the contextual information and sometimes requires auxiliary data with fine-grained annotations. On the contrary, in this paper, we exploit the strong context-dependent nature of segmentation task and design an energy-guided self-supervised frameworks for anomaly segmentation, which optimizes an anomaly head by maximizing likelihood of self-generated anomaly pixels. For this purpose, we design two estimators to model anomaly likelihood, one is a task-agnostic binary estimator and the other depicts the likelihood as residual of task-oriented joint energy. Based on proposed estimators, we devise an adaptive self-supervised training framework, which exploits the contextual reliance and estimated likelihood to refine mask annotations in anomaly areas. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging Fishyscapes and Road Anomaly benchmarks, demonstrating that without any auxiliary data or synthetic models, our method can still achieves comparable performance to supervised competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/yuanpengtu/SLEEG.

Self-Supervised Likelihood Estimation with Energy Guidance for Anomaly Segmentation in Urban Scenes | VIDEO

This paper reveals a data bias issue that can profoundly hinder the performance of machine learning models in malicious URL detection. We describe how such bias can be diagnosed using interpretable machine learning techniques and further argue that such biases naturally exist in the real world security data for training a classification model. To counteract these challenges, we propose a debiased training strategy that can be applied to most deep-learning based models to alleviate the negative effects of the biased features. The solution is based on the technique of adversarial training to train deep neural networks learning invariant embedding from biased data. Through extensive experimentation, we substantiate that our innovative strategy fosters superior generalization capabilities across both CNN-based and RNN-based detection models. The findings presented in this work not only expose a latent issue in the field but also provide an actionable remedy, marking a significant step forward in the pursuit of more reliable and robust malicious URL detection.

Toward More Generalized Malicious URL Detection Models

Adversarial attacks, \ie generating adversarial perturbations with a small magnitude to deceive deep neural networks, are important for investigating and improving model trustworthiness. Traditionally, the topic was scoped within 2D images without considering 3D multiview information. Benefiting from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), one can easily reconstruct a 3D scene with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) from given 2D views and synthesize photo-realistic renderings of novel vantages. This opens up a door to discussing the possibility of undertaking to attack multiview NeRF network with downstream tasks from different rendering angles, which we denote Neural Radiance Fiels-based multiview adversarial Attack (NeRFail). The goal is, given one scene and a subset of views, to deceive the recognition results of agnostic view angles as well as given views. To do so, we propose a transformation mapping from pixels to 3D points such that our attack generates multiview adversarial perturbations by attacking a subset of images with different views, intending to prevent the downstream classifier from correctly predicting images rendered by NeRF from other views. Experiments show that our multiview adversarial perturbations successfully obfuscate the downstream classifier at both known and unknown views. Notably, when retraining another NeRF on the perturbed training data, we show that the perturbation can be inherited and reproduced. The code can be found at https://github.com/jiang-wenxiang/NeRFail.

NeRFail: Neural Radiance Fields-Based Multiview Adversarial Attack

Recent research has introduced several approaches to formally verify the robustness of neural network models against perturbations in their inputs, such as the ones that occur in adversarial attacks. At the same time, this particular verification task is known to be computationally challenging. More specifically, assessing the robustness of a neural network against input perturbations can easily take several hours of compute time per input vector, even when using state-of-the-art verification approaches. In light of this, it becomes challenging to select from a given set of neural network models the one that is best in terms of robust accuracy, i.e., the fraction of instances for which the model is known to be robust against adversarial perturbations, especially when given limited computing resources.
To tackle this problem, we propose a racing method specifically adapted to the domain of robustness verification. This racing method utilises Delta-values, which can be seen as an efficiently computable proxy for the distance of a given input to a neural network model to the decision boundary. We present statistical evidence indicating significant differences in the empirical cumulative distribution between robust and non-robust inputs as a function of Delta-values. Using this information, we show that it is possible to reliably expose vulnerabilities in the model with relatively few input iterations. Overall, when applied to selecting the most robust network from sets of 31 MNIST and 27 CIFAR-10 networks, our proposed method achieves speedups of a factor of 108 and 42, respectively, in terms of cumulative running time compared to standard local robustness verification on the complete testing sets.

Accelerating Adversarially Robust Model Selection for Deep Neural Networks via Racing

Decision trees are widely used for addressing learning tasks involving tabular data. Yet, they are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we present Tree Test Time Simulation (TTTS), a novel inference-time methodology that incorporates Monte Carlo simulations into decision trees to enhance their robustness. TTTS introduces a probabilistic modification to the decision path, without altering the underlying tree structure. Our comprehensive empirical analysis of 50 datasets yields promising results. Without the presence of any attacks, TTTS has successfully improved model performance from an AUC of 0.714 to 0.773. Under the challenging conditions of white-box attacks, TTTS demonstrated its robustness by boosting performance from an AUC of 0.337 to 0.680. Even when subjected to black-box attacks, TTTS maintains high accuracy and enhances the model's performance from an AUC of 0.628 to 0.719. Compared to defenses such as Feature Squeezing, TTTS proves to be much more effective. We also found that TTTS exhibits similar robustness in decision forest settings across different attacks.

TTTS: Tree Test Time Simulation for Enhancing Decision Tree Robustness against Adversarial Examples

Conformal prediction is a statistical tool for producing prediction regions of machine learning models that are valid with high probability. However, applying conformal prediction to  time series data leads to  conservative prediction regions. In fact,  to obtain prediction regions over $T$ time steps with confidence $1-\delta$, {previous works require that each individual prediction region is valid} with confidence $1-\delta/T$. We propose an optimization-based method for  reducing this conservatism to enable long horizon planning and verification when using learning-enabled time series predictors. Instead of considering prediction errors individually at each time step, we consider a parameterized prediction error over multiple time steps. By optimizing the parameters over an additional dataset, we find  prediction regions that are not conservative. We show that this problem can be cast as a mixed integer linear complementarity program (MILCP), which we then relax into a linear complementarity program (LCP). Additionally, we prove that the relaxed LP has the same optimal cost as the original MILCP. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on case studies using pedestrian trajectory predictors and F16 fighter jet altitude predictors.

Conformal Prediction Regions for Time Series Using Linear Complementarity Programming

Multi-label classification poses challenges due to imbalanced and noisy labels in training data. In this paper, we propose a unified data augmentation method, named BalanceMix, to address these challenges. Our approach includes two samplers for imbalanced labels, generating minority-augmented instances with high diversity. It also refines multi-labels at the label-wise granularity, categorizing noisy labels as clean, re-labeled, or ambiguous for robust optimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that BalanceMix outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. We release the code at https://github.com/DISL-Lab/BalanceMix.

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Grey-Box Bayesian Optimization for Sensor Placement in Assisted Living Environments

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