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A {\em knockout (or single-elimination) tournament} is a format of a competition that is very popular in practice (particularly in sports, elections and decision making), and which has been extensively and intensively studied from a theoretical point of view for more than a decade. Particular attention has been devoted to the {\sc Tournament Fixing} problem, where, roughly speaking, the objective is to determine whether we can conduct the knockout tournament in a way that makes our favorite player win. Here, part of the input is a tournament graph $D$ that encodes the winner of each possible match. A sequence of papers has studied the parameterized complexity of {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to the {\em feedback arc set number} ($\mathbf{fas}$) of $D$. Given that this parameter yielded tractability (specifically, solvability in time  $\mathbf{fas}^{\OO(\mathbf{fas})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$), it has been asked explicitly and repeatedly whether {\sc Tournament Fixing} is FPT also with respect to the {\em feedback vertex set number} ($\mathbf{fvs}$) of $D$ [Ramanujan and Szeider, AAAI&#39;17; Gupta et al., IJCAI&#39;18; Gupta et al., IJCAI&#39;19; Roy, PhD Thesis, 2021; Suksompong, IJCAI&#39;21]. We answer this question positively. In fact, although $\mathbf{fvs}$ can be {\em arbitrarily smaller} than $\mathbf{fas}$, we attain a runtime of $\mathbf{fvs}^{\OO(\mathbf{fvs})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$. So, additionally, our work subsumes the best known algorithm for {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to $\mathbf{fas}$.

AAAI 2023

Tournament Fixing Parameterized by Feedback Vertex Set Number Is FPT

feedback vertex set

tournament fixing

knockout tournament

parameterized complexity

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

A {\em knockout (or single-elimination) tournament} is a format of a competition that is very popular in practice (particularly in sports, elections and decision making), and which has been extensively and intensively studied from a theoretical point of view for more than a decade. Particular attention has been devoted to the {\sc Tournament Fixing} problem, where, roughly speaking, the objective is to determine whether we can conduct the knockout tournament in a way that makes our favorite player win. Here, part of the input is a tournament graph $D$ that encodes the winner of each possible match. A sequence of papers has studied the parameterized complexity of {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to the {\em feedback arc set number} ($\mathbf{fas}$) of $D$. Given that this parameter yielded tractability (specifically, solvability in time  $\mathbf{fas}^{\OO(\mathbf{fas})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$), it has been asked explicitly and repeatedly whether {\sc Tournament Fixing} is FPT also with respect to the {\em feedback vertex set number} ($\mathbf{fvs}$) of $D$ [Ramanujan and Szeider, AAAI'17; Gupta et al., IJCAI'18; Gupta et al., IJCAI'19; Roy, PhD Thesis, 2021; Suksompong, IJCAI'21]. We answer this question positively. In fact, although $\mathbf{fvs}$ can be {\em arbitrarily smaller} than $\mathbf{fas}$, we attain a runtime of $\mathbf{fvs}^{\OO(\mathbf{fvs})}\cdot n^{\OO(1)}$. So, additionally, our work subsumes the best known algorithm for {\sc Tournament Fixing} with respect to $\mathbf{fas}$.

poster

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. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/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.

Discriminative pre-trained language models (PrLMs) learn to predict original texts from intentionally corrupted ones. Taking the former text as positive and the latter as negative samples, the PrLM can be trained effectively for contextualized representation. However, the training of such a type of PrLMs highly relies on the quality of the automatically constructed samples. Existing PrLMs simply treat all corrupted texts as equal negative without any examination, which actually lets the resulting model inevitably suffer from the false negative issue where training is carried out on pseudo-negative data and leads to less efficiency and less robustness in the resulting PrLMs. In this work, on the basis of defining the false negative issue in discriminative PrLMs that has been ignored for a long time, we design enhanced pre-training methods to counteract false negative predictions and encourage pre-training language models on true negatives by correcting the harmful gradient updates subject to false negative predictions. Experimental results on GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks show that our counter-false-negative pre-training methods indeed bring about better performance together with stronger robustness.

Language Model Pre-training on True Negatives

Multispectral object detection plays a vital role in safety-critical vision systems that require an around-the-clock operation and encounter dynamic real-world situations(e.g., self-driving cars and autonomous surveillance systems). Despite its crucial competence in safety-related applications, its security against physical attacks is severely understudied. We investigate the vulnerability of multispectral detectors against physical attacks by proposing a new physical method: Multispectral Invisible Coating. Utilizing transparent Low-e films, we realize a laminated visible-thermal physical attack by attaching Low-e films over a visible attack printing. Moreover, we apply our physical method to manufacture a Multispectral Invisible Suit that hides persons from the multiple view angles of Multispectral detectors. To simulate our attack under various surveillance scenes, we constructed a large-scale multispectral pedestrian dataset which we will release in public. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method effectively attacks the state-of-the-art multispectral detector both in the digital space and the physical world.

Multispectral Invisible Coating: Laminated Visible-Thermal Physical Attack against Multispectral Object Detectors using Transparent Low-e films

We study a fully online matching problem with stochastic arrivals and departures. In this model, each online arrival follows a known identical and independent distribution over a fixed set of agent types. Its sojourn time is unknown in advance and follows type-specific distributions with known expectations. The goal is to maximize the weighted reward from successful matches. To solve this problem, we first propose a linear program (LP)-based algorithm whose competitive ratio is lower bounded by 0.155 under mild conditions. We further achieve better ratios in some special cases. To demonstrate the challenges of the problem, we further establish several hardness results. In particular, we show that no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than 2/3 in this model and there is no LP-based algorithm (with respect to our proposed LP) with a competitive ratio better than 1/3. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm  numerically. 

Fully Online Matching with Stochastic Arrivals and Departures

As a representative of public transportation, the fundamental issue of managing bike-sharing systems is bike flow prediction. Recent methods overemphasize the spatio-temporal correlations in the data, ignoring the effects of contextual conditions on the transportation system and the inter-regional time-varying causality. In addition, due to the disturbance of incomplete observations in the data, random contextual conditions lead to spurious correlations between data and features, making the prediction of the model ineffective in special scenarios. To overcome this issue, we propose a Spatio-temporal Neural Structure Causal Model(STNSCM) from the perspective of causality. First, we build a causal graph to describe the traffic prediction, and further analyze the causal relationship between the input data, contextual conditions, spatio-temporal states, and prediction results. Second, we propose to apply the frontdoor criterion to eliminate confounding biases in the feature extraction process. Finally, we propose a counterfactual representation reasoning module to extrapolate the spatio-temporal state under the factual scenario to future counterfactual scenarios to improve the prediction performance. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model, especially its resistance to fluctuations caused by the external environment. The source code and data will be released.

Spatio-temporal Neural Structural Causal Models for Bike Flow Prediction

Script is a kind of structured knowledge extracted from texts, which contains a sequence of events. Based on such knowledge, script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event. To do so, two aspects should be considered for events, namely, event description (i.e., what the events should contain) and event encoding (i.e., how they should be encoded). Most existing methods describe an event by a verb together with a few core arguments (i.e., subject, object, and indirect object), which are not precise enough. In addition, existing event encoders are limited to a fixed number of arguments, which are not flexible enough to deal with extra information. Thus, in this paper, we propose the Rich Event Prediction (REP) framework for script event prediction. Fundamentally, it is based on the proposed rich event description, which enriches the existing ones with three kinds of important information, namely, the senses of verbs, extra semantic roles, and types of participants. REP contains an event extractor to extract such information from texts. Based on the extracted rich information, a predictor then selects the most probable subsequent event. The core component of the predictor is a transformer-based event encoder that integrates the above information flexibly. Experimental results on the widely used Gigaword Corpus show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Rich Event Modeling for Script Event Prediction

We study the problem of semantically annotating textual documents that are complex in the sense that the documents are long, feature rich, and domain specific. Due to their complexity, such annotation tasks require trained human workers, which are very expensive in both time and money. We propose CEMA, a method for deploying machine learning to assist humans in complex document annotation. CEMA employs a number of components to estimate the human cost of annotating each document and to select the set of documents to be annotated that strike the best balance between model accuracy and human cost. We conduct experiments on complex annotation tasks in which we compare CEMA against other document selection and annotation strategies. Our results show that CEMA is the most cost-efficient solution for those tasks.

CEMA – Cost-Efficient Machine-Assisted Document Annotations

One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) substantially improves the search efficiency by training one supernet to estimate the performance of every possible child architecture (i.e., subnet). However, the inconsistency of characteristics among subnets incurs serious interference in the optimization, resulting in poor performance ranking correlation of subnets. Subsequent explorations decompose supernet weights via a particular criterion, e.g., gradient matching, to reduce the interference; yet they suffer from huge computational cost and low space separability. In this work, we propose a lightweight and effective local intrinsic dimension (LID)-based method NAS-LID. NAS-LID evaluates the geometrical properties of architectures by calculating the low-cost LID features layer-by-layer, and the similarity characterized by LID enjoys better separability compared with gradients, which thus effectively reduces the interference among subnets. Extensive experiments on NASBench-201 indicate that NAS-LID achieves superior performance with better efficiency. Specifically, compared to the gradient-driven method, NAS-LID can save up to 86% of GPU memory overhead when searching on NASBench-201. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of NAS-LID on ProxylessNAS and OFA spaces. Source code:https://github.com/marsggbo/NAS-LID.

NAS-LID: Efficient Neural Architecture Search with Local Intrinsic Dimension

Photo-realistic style transfer aims at migrating the artistic style from an exemplar style image to a content image, producing a result image without spatial distortions or unrealistic artifacts. Impressive results have been achieved by recent deep models. However, deep neural network based methods are too expensive to run in real-time. Meanwhile, bilateral grid based methods are much faster but still contain artifacts like overexposure. In this work, we propose the Adaptive ColorMLP (AdaCM), an effective and efficient framework for universal photo-realistic style transfer. First, we find the complex non-linear color mapping between input and target domain can be efficiently modeled by a small multi-layer perceptron (ColorMLP) model. Then, in AdaCM, we adopt a CNN encoder to adaptively predict all parameters for the ColorMLP conditioned on each input content and style image pair. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaCM can generate vivid and high-quality stylization results. Meanwhile, our AdaCM is ultrafast and can process a 4K resolution image in 6ms on one V100 GPU.

AdaCM: Adaptive ColorMLP for Real-Time Universal Photo-realistic Style Transfer

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) in the wild has been shown to be beneficial to support improved vision-based text recognition from low-resolution imagery. An intuitive way to enhance STISR performance is to explore the well-structured and repetitive layout characteristics of text and exploit these as prior knowledge to guide model convergence. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based graph attention method to embed patch-wise text layout contexts into image feature representations for high-resolution text image reconstruction in an implicit and elegant manner. We introduce a non-local group-wise attention module to extract text features which are then enhanced by a cascaded channel attention module and a novel gradient-based graph attention module in order to obtain more effective representations by exploring correlations of regional and local patch-wise text layout properties. Extensive experiments on the benchmark TextZoom dataset convincingly demonstrate that our method supports excellent text recognition and outperforms the current state-of-the-art in STISR. The source code is available at https://github.com/xyzhu1/TSAN.

Gradient-Based Graph Attention for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Fair classification is an emerging and important research topic in machine learning community. Existing methods usually formulate the fairness metrics as additional inequality constraints, and then embed them into the original objective. This makes fair classification problems unable to be effectively tackled by some solvers specific to unconstrained optimization. Although many new tailored algorithms have been designed to attempt to overcome this limitation, they often increase additional computation burden and cannot cope with all types of fairness metrics. To address these challenging issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method for fair classification. 
Specifically, we theoretically
demonstrate that all types of fairness with linear and non-linear covariance functions can be transferred to two virtual samples, which makes the existing state-of-the-art classification solvers be applicable to these cases. Meanwhile, we  generalize the proposed method to multiple fairness constraints. We take SVM as an example to show the effectiveness of our new idea. 
Empirically, we test the proposed method on real-world datasets and all results confirm its excellent performance.

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