United States

Personalized federated learning (PFL) on graphs is an emerging field focusing on collaborative model development across multiple clients, where each client has distinct graph data distribution while adhering to strict privacy standards. PFL often requires intensive manual intervention with domain knowledge during model design, which hiders the applications of PFL. Recent advances in AutoML and LLMs enable the automatic design of graph neural network architectures by leveraging the power of neural architecture search and the language generation capability of LLMs. However, several technical challenges persist. First, although LLMs are successful in natural language processing, whether they can be used in graph neural architecture search (GNAS) has not been fully explored. Second, while LLMs can guide graph neural architecture search, they do not directly solve the issue of client drift due to heterogeneous data distributions in federated learning. To address these challenges, we introduce a new method, Personalized Federated Graph Neural Architecture Search (PFGNAS). Our approach uses a new set of task-specific prompts to generate and improve the GNN architectures continuously. To solve client drift, PFGNAS uses a weight-sharing strategy of supernet, which can improve the accuracy of each local graph architecture while ensuring local personalization. Extensive evaluations show that PFGNAS significantly outperforms traditional PFL methods, assuring the benefit of integrating LLMs into personalized federated learning. All materials are accessible through https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PFGNAS-07EE.

AAAI 2025

Large Language Models Enhanced Personalized Graph Neural Architecture Search in Federated Learning

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/)

AAAI 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. 

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/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. AAAI-25 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.



In recent years, applying multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in various fields has achieved remarkable success. However, as the foundation model for many downstream tasks, MLLMs comprise the well-known Transformer network, which has a less efficient quadratic computation complexity. In this study, we introduce Cobra, a multi-modal large-scale language model built upon a state-space model, which has demonstrated significant potential in efficiently handling long sequences with fast inference and linear scalability concerning sequence length. Specifically, Cobra involves replacing Transformer-based backbone models (e.g., LLaMA or Phi) with pre-trained Mamba language models. We then empirically explore effective strategies for aligning visual and textual modalities and integrating various pre-trained Mamba model variants with visual encoders. Experiments across various multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate that: (i) Cobra performs 3× ∼ 4× faster than the most computationally efficient state-of-the-art methods, e.g., LLaVA-Phi and MobileVLM v2. Additionally, its performance is significantly enhanced thanks to the implementation of linear sequential modeling. (ii) Cobra fine-tunes a small parameter (∼48% of model parameters), leading to a significant improvement in overall performance compared to LLaVA.

Cobra: Extending Mamba to Multi-Modal Large Language Model for Efficient Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination with non-factual or unfaithful statements, which undermines the applications in real-world scenarios. Recent researches focus on uncertainty-based hallucination detection, which utilizes the output probability of LLMs for uncertainty calculation and does not rely on external knowledge or frequent sampling from LLMs. Whereas, most approaches merely
consider the uncertainty of each independent token, while the intricate semantic relations among tokens and sentences are not well studied, which limits the detection of hallucination that spans over multiple tokens and sentences in the passage. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance uncertainty modeling with semantic graph for hallucination detection. Specifically, we first construct a semantic graph that well captures the relations among entity tokens and sentences. Then, we incorporate the relations between two entities for uncertainty propagation to enhance sentence-level hallucination detection. Given that hallucination occurs due to the conflict between sentences, we further present a graph-based uncertainty calibration method that integrates the contradiction probability of the sentence with its neighbors in the semantic graph for uncertainty calculation. Extensive experiments on two datasets show the great advantages of our proposed approach. In particular, we obtain substantial improvements with 19.78% in passage-level hallucination detection.

Enhancing Uncertainty Modeling with Semantic Graph for Hallucination Detection

Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a crucial task for achieving fine-grained visual understanding, matching objects within images (visual mentions) to entities in a knowledge base. Previous VEL tasks rely on textual inputs, but writing queries for complex scenes can be challenging. Visual inputs like clicks or bounding boxes offer a more convenient alternative. Therefore, we propose a new task, Pixel-Level Visual Entity Linking (PL-VEL), which uses pixel masks from visual inputs to refer to objects, complementing previous textual methods for VEL. To facilitate research on this task, we have constructed the MaskOven-Wiki dataset through an entirely automatic reverse region-entity annotation framework. This dataset contains more than 5 million annotations. As far as we know, this dataset is the first multimodal dataset that aligns pixel-level regions with entity-level labels, which will advance visual understanding towards fine-grained. Moreover, as pixel masks correspond to semantic regions in an image, we enhance previous patch-interacted attention with region-interacted attention by a visual semantic tokenization approach. Manual evaluation results indicate that the reverse annotation framework achieved a 94.8% annotation success rate. Experimental results show that models trained on this dataset improved accuracy by 18 points compared to zero-shot models. Additionally, the semantic tokenization method demonstrated a 5-point accuracy improvement over the trained baseline. The MaskOven-Wiki dataset will be available at https://github.com/xxx/xxx.

Reverse Region-to-Entity Annotation for Pixel-Level Visual Entity Linking

Split Federated Learning (SFL) splits and collaboratively trains a shared model between clients and server, where clients transmit activations and client-side models to server for updates. Recent SFL studies assume synchronous transmission of activations and client-side models from clients to server. However, due to significant variations in computational and communication capabilities among clients, activations and client-side models arrive at server asynchronously. The delay caused by asynchrony significantly degrades the performance of SFL. To address this issue, we consider an asynchronous SFL framework, where an activation buffer and a model buffer are embedded on the server to manage the asynchronously transmitted activations and client-side models, respectively. Furthermore, as asynchronous activation transmissions cause the buffer to frequently receive activations from resource-rich clients, leading to biased updates of the server-side model, we propose Generative activations-aided Asynchronous SFL (GAS). In GAS, the server maintains an activation distribution for each label based on received activations and generates activations from these distributions according to the degree of bias. These generative activations are then used to assist in updating the server-side model, ensuring more accurate updates. We derive a tighter convergence bound, and our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

GAS: Generative Activation-Aided Asynchronous Split Federated Learning

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) mainly enhance their performance by improving the image resolution, which not only adds to the already high computational overhead, but also significantly increases the number of redundant tokens.Traditional pruning methods typically focus on foreground elements, making them unsuitable for MLLMs where some questions also involve background context.To address this challenge, in this paper, we introduce OncePrune, an innovative, training-free approach for adaptive visual token pruning in MLLMs. This method strategically eliminates redundant tokens by framing the pruning process as a connected component. The aim is to identify and retain the most significant token for each visual element, whether located in the foreground or background.In practice, OncePrune constructs an adjacency matrix from visual token similarities, and obtains the most significant tokens for each component by iterating the potential information flow.To validate OncePrune, we apply it to a set of commonly used MLLMs, including LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of vision-language benchmarks.The experiment results demonstrate that OncePrune significantly reduces computation overhead, especially in the fine-grained tasks. For instance, OncePrune reduces 63.57% FLOPs on LLaVA-NeXT for TextVQA with only 2% accuracy drop. Our code is provided in the appendix.

What kind of visual tokens do we need? Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models from the Perspective of Graph

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts exhibit recognition errors and various spoken language phenomena such as disfluencies, ungrammatical sentences, and incomplete sentences, hence suffering from poor readability. To improve readability, we propose a Contextualized Spoken-to-Written conversion (CoS2W) task to address ASR and grammar errors and also transfer the informal text into the formal style with content preserved, utilizing contexts and auxiliary information. This task naturally matches the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate comprehensive comparisons of various LLMs, we construct a document-level Spoken-to-Written conversion of ASR Transcripts Benchmark (SWAB) dataset. Using SWAB, we study the impact of different granularity levels on the CoS2W performance, and propose methods to exploit contexts and auxiliary information to enhance the outputs. Experimental results reveal that LLMs have the potential to excel in the CoS2W task, particularly in grammaticality and formality, our methods achieve effective understanding of contexts and auxiliary information by LLMs. We further investigate the effectiveness of using LLMs as evaluators and find that LLM evaluators show strong correlations with human evaluations on rankings of faithfulness and formality, which validates the reliability of LLM evaluators for the CoS2W task.

Recording for Eyes, Not Echoing to Ears: Contextualized Spoken-to-Written Conversion of ASR Transcripts

We initiate the study of computing envy-free allocations of indivisible items in the extension setting, i.e., when some part of the allocation is fixed and the task is to allocate the remaining items. In view of the NP-hardness of the problem, we investigate whether - and under which conditions - one can obtain fixed-parameter algorithms for computing a solution in settings where most of the allocation is already fixed. Our results provide a broad complexity-theoretic classification of the problem which includes: (a) fixed-parameter algorithms tailored to settings with few distinct types of agents or items; (b) lower bounds which exclude the generalization of these positive results to more general settings. We conclude by showing that - unlike when computing allocations from scratch - the non-algorithmic question of whether more relaxed EF1 or EFX allocations exist can be completely resolved in the extension setting.

The Complexity of Extending Fair Allocations of Indivisible Goods

Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) has shown promising performance on various expensive multi-objective optimization problems (EMOPs). However, effectively modeling complex distributions of the Pareto optimal solutions is difficult with limited function evaluations. Existing Pareto set learning algorithms may exhibit considerable instability in such expensive scenarios, leading to significant deviations between the obtained solution set and the Pareto set (PS). In this paper, we propose a novel Composite Diffusion Model based Pareto Set Learning algorithm, namely CDM-PSL, for expensive MOBO. CDM-PSL includes both unconditional and conditional diffusion model for generating high-quality samples efficiently. Besides, we introduce a weighting method based on information entropy to balance different objectives. This method is integrated with the guiding strategy, ensuring that all the objectives are appropriately balanced and given due consideration during the optimization process. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world problems demonstrates that CDM-PSL attains superior performance compared with various state-of-the-art MOBO algorithms.

Expensive Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization Based on Diffusion Models

Graph similarity computation (GSC) is to calculate the similarity between one pair of graphs, which is a fundamental problem with fruitful applications in the graph community. In GSC, graph edit distance (GED) and maximum common subgraph (MCS) are the two most adopted similarity metrics, both of which are NP-hard to compute. Instead of calculating the exact values, state-of-the-art solutions resort to leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn data-driven models for the estimation of GED and MCS. Most of them are built on components involving node-level interactions crossing graphs, which engender vast computation overhead but are of little avail in effectiveness. Motivated by this, in the paper, we present GraSP, a simple yet effective GSC approach for GED and MCS prediction. More concretely, GraSP achieves high result efficacy through several key instruments: enhanced node features via positional encoding and a GNN model augmented by a gating mechanism, residual connections, as well as multi-scale pooling. Theoretically, GraSP can surpass the 1-WL test, indicating its high expressiveness. Empirically, extensive experiments comparing GraSP against 10 competitors on multiple widely adopted benchmark datasets showcase the superiority of GraSP over prior arts in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GraSP-2024.

GraSP: Simple yet Effective Graph Similarity Predictions

Following natural instructions is crucial for the effective application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), research on assessing and improving instruction-following (IF) alignment within the RAG domain remains limited. To address this issue, we propose VIF-RAG, the first automated, scalable, and verifiable synthetic pipeline for instruction-following alignment in RAG systems. We start by manually crafting a minimal set of atomic instructions ($<$100) and developing combination rules to synthesize and verify complex instructions for a seed set. We then use supervised models for instruction rewriting while simultaneously generating code to automate the verification of instruction quality via a Python executor. Finally, we integrate these instructions with extensive RAG and general data samples, scaling up to a high-quality VIF-RAG-QA dataset ($>$100k) through automated processes. To address the gap in instruction-following auto-evaluation for RAG systems, we introduce FollowRAG Benchmark, which includes approximately 3K test samples, covering 22 categories of general instruction constraints and 4 knowledge-intensive QA datasets. Due to its robust pipeline design, FollowRAG can seamlessly integrate with different RAG benchmarks. Using FollowRAG and 8 widely-used IF and foundational abilities benchmarks for LLMs, we demonstrate that VIF-RAG markedly enhances LLM performance across a broad range of general instruction constraints while effectively leveraging its capabilities in RAG scenarios. Further analysis offers practical insights for achieving IF alignment in RAG systems.

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