AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award: T(w)eaching AI in the Age of LLMs

Mechanistic interpretability is one of the most exciting and important research programs in current AI. My aim is to build some philosophical foundations for the program, along with setting out some concrete challenges and assessing progress to date. I will argue for the importance of propositional interpretability, which involves interpreting a system’s mechanisms and behavior in terms of propositional attitudes: attitudes (such as belief, desire, or subjective probability) to propositions (e.g. the proposition that it is hot outside). Propositional attitudes are the central way that we interpret and explain human beings and they are likely to be central in AI too. A central challenge is what I call thought logging: creating systems log all of the relevant propositional attitudes in an AI system over time. I will examine currently popular methods of interpretability (such as probing, sparse auto-encoders, and chain of thought methods) as well as philosophical methods of interpretation (including psychosemantics and representation theorems) to assess their strengths and weaknesses as methods of propositional interpretability.

Propositional Interpretability in Humans and AI Systems

Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) solvers are mostly built upon a Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithm, where the efficiency of traditional solvers heavily depends on hand-crafted heuristics for branching. The past few years have witnessed the increasing popularity of data-driven approaches to learn these heuristics automatically. However, the success of these methods heavily relies on the availability of high-quality demonstrations, which requires either the development of near-optimal heuristics or a time-consuming sampling process. This paper averts this challenge by proposing Suboptimal-Demonstration-Guided Reinforcement Learning (SORREL) for learning to branch. SORREL selectively learns from suboptimal demonstrations based on value estimation. It utilizes suboptimal demonstrations through both offline reinforcement learning on the demonstrations generated by suboptimal heuristics and self-imitation learning on past good experiences sampled by itself. Our experiments demonstrate its advanced performance in both branching quality and training efficiency over previous methods for various MILP problems.

SORREL: Suboptimal-Demonstration-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Learning to Branch

Multi-modality pre-training paradigm that aligns protein sequences and biological descriptions has learned general protein representations and achieved promising performance in various downstream applications. However, these works were still unable to replicate the extraordinary success of language-supervised visual foundation models due to the ineffective usage of aligned protein-text paired data and the lack of an effective function-informed pre-training paradigm. To address these issues, this paper curates a large-scale protein-text paired dataset called ProtAnno with a property-driven sampling strategy, and introduces a novel function-informed protein pre-training paradigm. Specifically, the sampling strategy determines sampling probability based on the confidence and coverage of property annotations, balancing the data quality and data quantity in face of large-scale noisy data. Furthermore, motivated by significance of the protein specific functional mechanism, the proposed paradigm explicitly model protein static and dynamic functional segments by two segment-wise pre-training objectives, injecting fine-grained information in a function-informed manner. Leveraging all these innovations, we develop ProtCLIP, a multi-modality foundational model that comprehensively represents function-aware protein embeddings. On 22 different protein benchmarks within 5 types, including protein functionality classification, mutation effect prediction, cross-modality transformation, and protein-protein interaction prediction, our ProtCLIP consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance, with remarkable improvements of 75% on average in five cross-modality transformation tasks, 59.9% in GO-CC and 39.7% in GO-BP protein function prediction. The experimental results demonstrate the extraordinary potential of ProtCLIP serving as the protein multi-modality foundation model.

ProtCLIP: Function-Informed Protein Multi-Modal Learning

Neural video compression has recently demonstrated significant potential to compete with conventional video codecs in terms of rate-quality performance. These learned video codecs are however associated with various issues related to decoding complexity (for autoencoder-based methods) and/or system delays (for implicit neural representation (INR) based models), which currently prevent them from being deployed in practical applications. In this paper, targeting a practical neural video codec, we propose a novel INR-based coding framework, PNVC, which innovatively combines autoencoder-based and overfitted solutions. Our approach benefits from several design innovations, including a new structural reparameterization-based architecture, hierarchical quality control, modulation-based entropy modeling, and scale-aware positional embedding. Supporting both low delay (LD) and random access (RA) configurations, PNVC outperforms existing INR-based codecs, achieving nearly 35\%+ BD-rate savings against HEVC HM 18.0 (LD) - almost 10\% more compared to one of the state-of-the-art INR-based codecs, HiNeRV and 5\% more over VTM 20.0 (LD), while maintaining 20+ FPS decoding speeds for 1080p content. This represents an important step forward for INR-based video coding, moving it towards practical deployment. The source code will be available for public evaluation.

PNVC: Towards Practical INR-based Video Compression

Next POI recommendation aids users in predicting their destinations of interest and plays an increasingly vital role in location-based social services. Recent works focus on analyzing both long-term and short-term interests in POI recommendation to gain a deeper understanding of user profiles. However, these methods for modeling long-term user's sequences primarily rely on the Transformer model, which functions as a low-pass filter, often leading to the loss of high-frequency information. Additionally, long-term and short-term sequences are typically modeled independently, with short-term sequences often defined solely by the most recent check-ins, overlooking their interactions and dependencies. Therefore, we propose Enhancing Long- and Short-Term Representations for Next POI Recommendations via \textbf{F}requency and \textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{C}ontrastive Learning (FHCRec). FHCRec captures both high-frequency and low-frequency information in long-term sequences to model richer long-term user's preference representations. Moreover, it harnesses the characteristics of the short-term subsequences embedded within long-term sequences to enhance short-term preference characterization via local and global hierarchical contrastive learning, resulting in more personalized short-term preferences. The enhanced long-term and short-term preferences are integrated to improve model recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Ehancing Long- and Short-Term Representations for Next POI Recommendations via Frequency and Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

We focus on the medication recommendation problem aiming to recommend accurate medications for a patient’s current visit. Most existing methods for this problem utilize the patient’s current health status, medications prescribed at her past visits, and an Electronic Health Records (EHR) graph which represents whether medications have been co-prescribed. However, we point out their two limitations: (1) they have difficulty in utilizing only the medications which have been prescribed in health status similar to the patient’s current health status, regardless of whether they are prescribed at her past visits or at other patients’ visits; (2) for two medications that have ever been co-prescribed, their EHR graph does not consider the degree to which one medication is prescribed together when the other is prescribed. To address these two limitations, we propose a novel medication recommendation framework, named HI-DR (pronounced as ‘Hi Doctor’), composed of following two core ideas: (Idea 1) Health status-aware attentIon; (Idea 2) an electronic health recorDs gRaph+. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of HI-DR (up to 18.69% higher accuracy than the best competitor) and the effectiveness of two core ideas in HI-DR.

HI-DR: Exploiting Health Status-Aware Attention and an EHR Graph+ for Effective Medication Recommendation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) for medical applications, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of these models in clinical settings is paramount. Existing benchmarks often focus on fixed-format tasks like multiple-choice QA, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnostics. Moreover, traditional evaluation metrics and LLM-based evaluators struggle with misalignment, often providing oversimplified assessments that do not adequately reflect human judgment. To address these challenges, we introduce HDCEval, a **H**ierarchical **D**ivide-and-**C**onquer **Eval**uation framework tailored for fine-grained alignment in medical evaluation. HDCEval is built on a set of fine-grained medical evaluation guidelines developed in collaboration with professional doctors, encompassing Patient Question Relevance, Medical Knowledge Correctness, and Expression. The framework decomposes complex evaluation tasks into specialized subtasks, each evaluated by expert models trained through Attribute-Driven Token Optimization (ADTO) on a meticulously curated preference dataset. This hierarchical approach ensures that each aspect of the evaluation is handled with expert precision, leading to a significant improvement in alignment with human evaluators.

Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer for Fine-Grained Alignment in LLM-Based Medical Evaluation

Understanding how humans cooperatively utilize semantic knowledge to explore unfamiliar environments and decide on navigation directions is critical for house service multi-robot systems. Previous methods primarily focused on single-robot centralized planning strategies, which severely limited exploration efficiency. Recent research has considered decentralized planning strategies for multiple robots, assigning separate planning models to each robot, but these approaches often overlook communication costs. In this work, we propose Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Co-Navigation (MCoCoNav), a modular approach that utilizes multimodal Chain-of-Thought to plan collaborative semantic navigation for multiple robots. MCoCoNav combines visual perception with Vision Language Models (VLMs) to evaluate exploration value through probabilistic scoring, thus reducing time costs and achieving stable outputs. Additionally, a global semantic map is used as a communication bridge, minimizing communication overhead while integrating observational results. Guided by scores that reflect exploration trends, robots utilize this map to assess whether to explore new frontier points or revisit history nodes. Experiments on HM3D_v0.2 and MP3D demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Enhancing Multi-Robot Semantic Navigation Through Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Score Collaboration

Beginning with Witkowski et al. (2021), recent work on forecasting competitions has addressed incentive problems with the common winner-take-all mechanism. Frongillo et al. (2021) propose a competition mechanism based on Multiplicative Weights, an online learning algorithm. They show that their mechanism selects an $\epsilon$-optimal forecaster with high probability using only $O(\log(n)/\epsilon^2)$ events. These works, together with all prior work on this problem thus far, assume that events are independent. We prove the first accuracy and approximate truthfulness guarantees for forecasting competitions with correlated events. To quantify correlation, we introduce a notion of block correlation, which allows each event to be strongly correlated with up to $b$ others and weakly correlated with the rest. We show that under distributions with this correlation, the Multiplicative Weights mechanism retains its $\epsilon$-optimal guarantee using $O(b^2 \log(n)/\epsilon^2)$ events. Our proof involves a novel concentration bound for correlated random variables which may be of broader interest.

Forecasting Competitions with Correlated Events

Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each agent completing each task, polynomial-time algorithms exist to solve a single assignment problem in its simplest form. However, in many modern-day applications such as satellite constellations, power grids, and mobile robot scheduling, assignment problems unfold over time, with the utility for a given assignment depending heavily on the state of the system. We apply multi-agent reinforcement learning to this problem, learning the value of assignments by bootstrapping from the known polynomial-time greedy solver and then learning from further experience. We then choose assignments using a distributed optimal assignment mechanism rather than by selecting them directly. We demonstrate that this algorithm is theoretically justified and avoids pitfalls experienced by other RL algorithms in this setting. Finally, we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other methods in the literature, even while scaling to realistic scenarios with hundreds of agents and tasks.

Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Satellite Assignment Problems

The primary objective of Optical Chemical Structure Recognition is to identify chemical structure images into corresponding markup sequences. However, the complex two-dimensional structures of molecules, particularly those with rings and multiple branches, present significant challenges for current end-to-end methods to learn one-dimensional markup directly. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Ring-Free Language (RFL), which utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy to describe chemical structures in a hierarchical form. RFL allows complex molecular structures to be decomposed into multiple parts, ensuring both uniqueness and conciseness while enhancing readability. This approach significantly reduces the learning difficulty for recognition models. Leveraging RFL, we propose a universal Molecular Skeleton Decoder (MSD), which comprises a skeleton generation module that progressively predicts the molecular skeleton and individual rings, along with a branch classification module for predicting branch information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RFL and MSD can be applied to various mainstream methods, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in both printed and handwritten scenarios. The code will be made publicly available.

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AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award: T(w)eaching AI in the Age of LLMs

Propositional Interpretability in Humans and AI Systems

SORREL: Suboptimal-Demonstration-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Learning to Branch

ProtCLIP: Function-Informed Protein Multi-Modal Learning

PNVC: Towards Practical INR-based Video Compression

Ehancing Long- and Short-Term Representations for Next POI Recommendations via Frequency and Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

HI-DR: Exploiting Health Status-Aware Attention and an EHR Graph+ for Effective Medication Recommendation

Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer for Fine-Grained Alignment in LLM-Based Medical Evaluation

Enhancing Multi-Robot Semantic Navigation Through Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Score Collaboration

Forecasting Competitions with Correlated Events

Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Satellite Assignment Problems

RFL: Simplifying Chemical Structure Recognition with Ring-Free Language

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