United States

We propose an end-to-end learning framework based on hierarchical reinforcement learning, called H-TSP, for addressing the large-scale Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed H-TSP constructs a solution of a TSP instance starting from the scratch relying on two components: the upper-level policy chooses a small subset of nodes (up to 200 in our experiment) from all nodes that are to be traversed, while the lower-level policy takes the chosen nodes as input and outputs a tour connecting them to the existing partial route (initially only containing the depot). After jointly training the upper-level and lower-level policies, our approach can directly generate solutions for the given TSP instances without relying on any time-consuming search procedures. To demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have conducted extensive experiments on randomly generated TSP instances with different numbers of nodes. We show that H-TSP can achieve comparable results (gap 3.42% vs. 7.32%) as SOTA search-based approaches, and more importantly, we reduce the time consumption up to two orders of magnitude (3.32s vs. 395.85s). To the best of our knowledge, H-TSP is the first end-to-end deep reinforcement learning approach that can scale to TSP instances of up to 10000 nodes. Although there are still gaps to SOTA results with respect to solution quality, we believe that H-TSP will be useful for practical applications, particularly those that are time-sensitive e.g., on-call routing and ride hailing service.

AAAI 2023

H-TSP: Hierarchically Solving the Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problem

reinforcement learning algorithms

deep neural architectures

routing

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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

This paper studies learning meaningful node representations for signed graphs, where both positive and negative links exist. This problem has been widely studied by meticulously designing expressive signed graph neural networks, as well as capturing the structural information of the signed graph through traditional structure decomposition methods, e.g., spectral graph theory. In this paper, we propose a novel signed graph representation learning framework, called Signed Laplacian Graph Neural Network (SLGNN), which combines the advantages of both. Specifically, based on spectral graph theory and graph signal processing, we first design different low-pass and high-pass graph convolution filters to extract low-frequency and high-frequency information on positive and negative links, respectively, and then combine them into a unified message passing framework. To effectively model signed graphs, we further propose a self-gating mechanism to estimate the impacts of low-frequency and high-frequency information during message passing. We mathematically establish the relationship between the aggregation process in SLGNN and signed Laplacian regularization in signed graphs, and theoretically analyze the expressiveness of SLGNN. Experimental results demonstrate that SLGNN outperforms various competitive baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Signed Laplacian Graph Neural Networks

This paper presents Uncertainty-aware Contrastive Learning (UCoL): a fully unsupervised framework for discriminative facial representation learning. Our UCoL is built upon a momentum contrastive network, referred to as Dual-path Momentum Network. Specifically, two flows of pairwise contrastive training are conducted simultaneously:  one is formed with intra-instance self augmentation, and the other is to identify positive pairs collected by online pairwise prediction. We introduce a novel uncertainty-aware consistency K-nearest neighbors algorithm to generate predicted positive pairs, which enables efficient discriminative learning from large-scale open-world unlabeled data. Experiments show that UCoL significantly improves the baselines of unsupervised models and performs on par with the semi-supervised and supervised face representation learning methods. 

UCoL: Unsupervised Learning of Discriminative Facial Representations via Uncertainty-aware Constrast

The advent of the big data era brought new opportunities and challenges to draw treatment effect in data fusion, that is, a mixed dataset collected from multiple sources (each source with an independent treatment assignment mechanism). Due to possibly omitted source labels and unmeasured confounders, traditional methods cannot estimate individual treatment assignment probability and infer treatment effect effectively. Therefore, we propose to reconstruct the source label and model it as a Group Instrumental Variable (GIV) to implement IV-based Regression for treatment effect estimation. In this paper, we conceptualize this line of thought and develop a unified framework (Meta-EM) to (1) map the raw data into a representation space to construct Linear Mixed Models for the assigned treatment variable; (2) estimate the distribution differences and model the GIV for the different treatment assignment mechanisms; and (3) adopt an alternating training strategy to iteratively optimize the representations and the joint distribution to model GIV for IV regression. Empirical results demonstrate the advantages of our Meta-EM compared with state-of-the-art methods. The project page with the code and the Supplementary materials is available at https://github.com/causal-machine-learning-lab/meta-em.

Learning Instrumental Variable from Data Fusion for Treatment Effect Estimation

Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a novel and more complex scenario of SLU, is attracting increasing attention. Unlike traditional SLU, each intent in this scenario has its specific scope. Semantic information outside the scope even hinders the prediction, which tremendously increases the difficulty of intent detection. More seriously, guiding slot filling with these inaccurate intent labels suffers error propagation problems, resulting in unsatisfied overall performance. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Scope-Sensitive Result Attention Network (SSRAN) based on Transformer, which contains a Scope Recognizer (SR) and a Result Attention Network (RAN). SR assignments scope information to each token, reducing the distraction of out-of-scope tokens. RAN effectively utilizes the bidirectional interaction between SF and ID results, mitigating the error propagation problem. Experiments on two public datasets indicate that our model significantly improves SLU performance (5.4% and 2.1% on Overall accuracy) over the state-of-the-art baseline.

A Scope Sensitive and Result Attentive model for Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding

Schedules define how resources process jobs in diverse domains, reaching from healthcare to transportation, and, therefore, denote a valuable starting point for analysis of the underlying system. However, publishing a schedule may disclose private information on the considered jobs. In this paper, we provide a first threat model for published schedules, thereby defining a completely new class of data privacy problems. We then propose distance-based measures to assess the privacy loss incurred by a published schedule, and show their theoretical properties for an uninformed adversary, which can be used as a benchmark for informed attacks. We show how an informed attack on a published schedule can be phrased as an inverse scheduling problem. We instantiate this idea by formulating the inverse of a well-studied single-machine scheduling problem, namely minimizing the total weighted completion times. An empirical evaluation for synthetic scheduling problems shows the effectiveness of informed privacy attacks and compares the results to theoretical bounds on uninformed attacks. 

Privacy Attacks on Schedule-Driven Data

Domain shift across crowd data severely hinders crowd counting models to generalize to unseen scenarios. Although domain adaptive crowd counting approaches close this gap to a certain extent, they are still dependent on the target domain data to adapt (e.g. finetune) their models to the specific domain. In this paper, we instead target to train a model based on a single source domain which can generalize well on any unseen domain. This falls into the realm of domain generalization that remains unexplored in crowd counting. We first introduce a dynamic sub-domain division scheme which divides the source domain into multiple sub-domains such that we can initiate a meta-learning framework for domain generalization. The sub-domain division is dynamically refined during the meta-learning. Next, in order to disentangle domain-invariant information from domain-specific information in image features, we design the domain-invariant and -specific crowd memory modules to re-encode image features. Two types of losses, i.e. feature reconstruction and orthogonal losses, are devised to enable this disentanglement. Extensive experiments on several standard crowd counting benchmarks i.e. SHA, SHB, QNRF, and NWPU, show the strong generalizability of our method. 

Domain-general Crowd Counting in Unseen Scenarios

Peer grading systems aggregate noisy reports from multiple students to approximate a "true" grade as closely as possible. Most current systems either take the mean or median of reported grades; others aim to estimate students’ grading accuracy under a probabilistic model. This paper extends the state of the art in the latter approach in three key ways: 
(1) recognizing that students can behave strategically (e.g., reporting grades close to the class average without doing the work); (2) appropriately handling censored data that arises from discrete-valued grading rubrics; and (3) using mixed integer programming to improve the interpretability of the grades assigned to students. We demonstrate how to make Bayesian inference practical in this model and evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world data obtained by using our implemented system in four large classes. These extensive experiments show that grade aggregation using our model accurately estimates true grades, students' likelihood of submitting uninformative grades, and the variation in their inherent grading error; we also characterize our models' robustness.

Better Peer Grading through Bayesian Inference

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is a prototypical constraint optimization problem, and its generalized version is the (Weighted) Partial MaxSAT problem, denoted as (W)PMS, which deals with hard and soft clauses. Considerable progress has been made on stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms for solving (W)PMS, which mainly focus on clause weighting techniques. In this work, we identify two issues of existing clause weighting techniques for (W)PMS, and propose two ideas correspondingly. First, we observe that the initial values of soft clause weights have a big effect on the performance of the SLS solver for solving (W)PMS, and propose a weight initialization method. Second, we propose a new clause weighting scheme that for the first time employs different conditions for updating hard and soft clause weights. Based on these two ideas, we develop a new SLS solver for (W)PMS named NuWLS. Through extensive experiments, NuWLS performs much better than existing SLS solvers on all 6 benchmarks from the incomplete tracks of MaxSAT Evaluations (MSEs) 2019, 2020, and 2021. In terms of the number of winning instances, NuWLS outperforms state-of-the-art SAT-based incomplete solvers on all the 6 benchmarks. More encouragingly, a hybrid solver that combines NuWLS and an SAT-based solver won all four categories in the incomplete track of the MaxSAT Evaluation 2022.

NuWLS: Improving Local Search for (Weighted) Partial MaxSAT by New Weighting Techniques

Capturing uncertainty in models of complex dynamical systems is crucial to designing safe controllers. Stochastic noise causes aleatoric uncertainty, whereas imprecise knowledge of model parameters leads to epistemic uncertainty. Several approaches use formal abstractions to synthesize policies that satisfy temporal specifications related to safety and reachability. However, the underlying models exclusively capture aleatoric but not epistemic uncertainty, and thus require that model parameters are known precisely. Our contribution to overcoming this restriction is a novel abstraction-based controller synthesis method for continuous-state models with stochastic noise and uncertain parameters. By sampling techniques and robust analysis, we capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, with a user-specified confidence level, in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). We synthesize an optimal policy on this iMDP, which translates (with the specified confidence level) to a feedback controller for the continuous model with the same performance guarantees. Our experimental benchmarks confirm that accounting for epistemic uncertainty leads to controllers that are more robust against variations in parameter values.

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