United States

For artificially intelligent learning systems to have widespread applicability in real-world settings, it is important that they be able to operate decentrally.
Unfortunately, decentralized control is difficult---computing even an epsilon-optimal joint policy is a NEXP complete problem.
Nevertheless, a recently rediscovered insight---that a team of agents can coordinate via common knowledge---has given rise to algorithms capable of finding optimal joint policies in small common-payoff games.
The Bayesian action decoder (BAD) leverages this insight and deep reinforcement learning to scale to games as large as two-player Hanabi.
However, the approximations it uses to do so prevent it from discovering optimal joint policies even in games small enough to brute force optimal solutions.
This work proposes CAPI, a novel algorithm which, like BAD, combines common knowledge with deep reinforcement learning.
However, unlike BAD, CAPI prioritizes the propensity to discover optimal joint policies over scalability.
While this choice precludes CAPI from scaling to games as large as Hanabi, empirical results demonstrate that, on the games to which CAPI does scale, it is capable of discovering optimal joint policies even when other modern multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms are unable to do so.

AAAI 2021

Solving Common-Payoff Games with Approximate Policy Iteration

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/)

AAAI 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.



technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

We extend the expressivity of classical conditional reasoning by introducing context as a new parameter. The enriched conditional logic generalises the defeasible setting in the style of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor, and allows for a more refined representation of an agentâ€™s epistemic state, distinguishing, for example, between expectations and counterfactuals. In this paper we introduce the language for the enriched logic, and define an appropriate semantic framework for it. We analyse which properties generally associated with conditional reasoning are still satisfied by the new semantic framework, provide an appropriate representation result, and define an entailment relation based on Lehmann and Magidorâ€™s notion of Rational Closure.

Contextual Conditional Reasoning

We address the challenging problem of semi-supervised learning in the context of multiple visual interpretations of the world by finding consensus in a graph of neural networks. Each graph node is a scene interpretation layer, while each edge is a deep net that transforms one layer at one node into another from a different node. During the supervised phase edge networks are trained independently. During the next unsupervised stage edge nets are trained on the pseudo-ground truth provided by consensus among multiple paths that reach the nets' start and end nodes. These paths act as ensemble teachers for any given edge and strong consensus is used for high-confidence supervisory signal. The unsupervised learning process is repeated over several generations, in which each edge becomes a "student" and also part of different ensemble "teachers" for training other students. By optimizing such consensus between different paths, the graph reaches consistency and robustness over multiple interpretations and generations, in the face of unknown labels. We give theoretical justifications of the proposed idea and validate it on a large dataset. We show how prediction of different representations such as depth, semantic segmentation, surface normals and pose from RGB input could be effectively learned through self-supervised consensus in our graph. We also compare to state-of-the-art methods for multi-task and semi-supervised learning and show superior performance.

Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Task Scene Understanding by Neural Graph Consensus

Computing goal-directed behavior is essential to designing efficient AI systems. Due to the computational complexity of planning, current approaches rely primarily upon hand-coded symbolic action models and hand-coded heuristic function generators for efficiency. Learned heuristics for such problems have been of limited utility as they are difficult to apply to problems with objects and object quantities that are significantly different from those in the training data. This paper develops a new approach for learning generalized heuristics in the absence of symbolic action models using deep neural networks that utilize an input predicate vocabulary but are agnostic to object names and quantities.  It uses an abstract state representation to facilitate data-efficient, generalizable learning. Empirical evaluation on a range of benchmark domains shows that in contrast to prior approaches, generalized heuristics computed by this method can be transferred easily to problems with different objects and with object quantities much larger than those in the training data.

Learning Generalized Relational Heuristic Networks for Model-Agnostic Planning

Post-processing immunity is a fundamental property of differential
privacy: it enables the application of arbitrary data-independent 
transformations to the results of differentially private outputs 
without affecting their privacy guarantees. 
When query outputs must satisfy domain constraints, post-processing 
can be used to project them back onto the feasibility region. 
Moreover, when the feasible region is convex, a widely adopted class of post-processing steps is also guaranteed to improve accuracy. Post-processing has 
been applied successfully in many applications including census 
data, energy systems, and mobility. However, its effects on the 
noise distribution is poorly understood: It is often argued that 
post-processing may introduce bias and increase variance. This paper 
takes a first step towards understanding the properties of 
post-processing. It considers the release of census data and 
examines, both empirically and theoretically, the behavior of a 
widely adopted class of post-processing functions.

Bias and Variance of Post-Processing in Differential Privacy

A music mashup combines audio elements from two or more songs to create a new work. To reduce the time and effort required to make them, researchers have developed algorithms that predict the compatibility of audio elements. Prior work has focused on mixing unaltered excerpts, but advances in source separation enable the creation of mashups from isolated stems (e.g., vocals, drums, bass, etc.). In this work, we take advantage of separated stems not just for creating mashups, but for training a model that predicts the mutual compatibility of groups of excerpts, using self-supervised and semi-supervised methods. Specifically, we first produce a random mashup creation pipeline that combines stem tracks obtained via source separation, with key and tempo automatically adjusted to match, since these are prerequisites for high-quality mashups. To train a model to predict compatibility, we use stem tracks obtained from the same song as positive examples, and random combinations of stems with key and/or tempo unadjusted as negative examples. To improve the model and use more data, we also train on "average" examples: random combinations with matching key and tempo, where we treat them as unlabeled data as their true compatibility is unknown. To determine whether the combined signal or the set of stem signals is more indicative of the quality of the result, we experiment on two model architectures and train them using semi-supervised learning technique. Finally, we conduct objective and subjective evaluations of the system, comparing them to a standard rule-based system.

Modeling the Compatibility of Stem Tracks to Generate Music Mashups

Automatic evaluation for open-ended natural language generation tasks remains a challenge. We propose a learned evaluation metric: Perception Score. It utilizes a pre-trained model and considers context information for conditional generation. Perception Score assigns a holistic score along with the uncertainty measurement. We conduct experiments on three open-ended conditional generation tasks and two open-ended unconditional generation tasks. Perception Score achieves state-of-the-art results on all the tasks consistently in terms of correlation with human evaluation scores.

Perception Score: A Learned Metric for Open-Ended Text Generation Evaluation

Given the widespread deployment of black box deep neural networks in computer vision applications, the interpretability aspect of these black box systems has recently gained traction. Various methods have been proposed to explain the results of such deep neural networks. However, some recent works have shown that such explanation methods are biased and do not produce consistent interpretations. Hence, rather than introducing a novel explanation method, we learn models that are encouraged to be interpretable given an explanation method. We use Grad-CAM as the explanation algorithm and encourage the network to learn consistent interpretations along with maximizing the log-likelihood of the correct class. We show that our method outperforms the baseline on the pointing game evaluation on ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets respectively. We also introduce new evaluation metrics that penalize the saliency map if it lies outside the ground truth bounding box or segmentation mask, and show that our method outperforms the baseline on these metrics as well. Moreover, our model trained with interpretation consistency generalizes to other explanation algorithms on all the evaluation metrics. The code and models are publicly available.

Explainable Models with Consistent Interpretations

Bayesian persuasion, as introduced by Kamenica and Gentzkow in 2011, is the study of information sharing policies among strategic agents. A prime example is signaling in online ad auctions: what information should a platform signal to an advertiser regarding a user when selling the opportunity to advertise to her? Practical considerations such as preventing discrimination, protecting privacy or acknowledging limited attention of the information receiver impose constraints on information sharing. We propose a simple way to mathematically model such constraints as restrictions on Receiver's admissible posterior beliefs. We consider two families of constraints - ex ante and ex post; the latter limits each instance of Sender-Receiver communication, while the former more general family can also pose restrictions in expectation. For the ex ante family, a result of Doval and Skreta (2018) establishes the existence of an optimal signaling scheme with a small number of signals - at most the number of constraints plus the number of states of nature - and we show this result is tight. For the ex post family, we tighten the previous bound of VÃ¸lund (2018), showing that the required number of signals is at most the number of states of nature, as in the original Kamenica-Gentzkow setting. As our main algorithmic result, we provide an additive bi-criteria FPTAS for an optimal constrained signaling scheme assuming a constant number of states of nature; we improve the approximation to single-criteria under a Slater-like regularity condition. The FPTAS holds under standard assumptions, and more relaxed assumptions yield a PTAS. We then establish a bound on the ratio between Sender's optimal utility under convex ex ante constraints and the corresponding ex post constraints. We demonstrate how this result can be applied to find an approximately welfare-maximizing constrained signaling scheme in ad auctions.

Bayesian Persuasion under Ex Ante and Ex Post Constraints

SHAP explanations are a popular feature-attribution mechanism for explainable AI. They use game-theoretic notions to measure the influence of individual features on the prediction of a machine learning model. Despite a lot of recent interest from both academia and industry, it is not known whether SHAP explanations of common machine learning models can be computed efficiently. In this paper, we establish the complexity of computing the SHAP explanation in three important settings. First, we consider fully-factorized data distributions, and show that the complexity of computing the SHAP explanation is the same as the complexity of computing the expected value of the model. This fully-factorized setting is often used to simplify the SHAP computation, yet our results show that the computation can be intractable for commonly used models such as logistic regression. Going beyond fully-factorized distributions, we show that computing SHAP explanations is already intractable for a very simple setting: computing SHAP explanations of trivial classifiers over naive Bayes distributions. Finally, we show that even computing SHAP over the empirical distribution is #P-hard.

On the Tractability of SHAP Explanations

For time series data, certain types of outliers are intrinsically more harmful for parameter estimation and future predictions than others, irrespective of their frequency. In this paper, for the first time, we study the characteristics of such outliers through the lens of the influence functional from robust statistics. In particular, we consider the input time series as a contaminated process, with the recurring outliers generated from an unknown contaminating process. Then we leverage the influence functional to understand the impact of the contaminating process on parameter estimation. The influence functional results in a multi-dimensional vector that measures the sensitivity of the predictive model to the contaminating process, which can be challenging to interpret especially for models with a large number of parameters. To this end, we further propose a comprehensive single-valued metric (the SIF) to measure outlier impacts on future predictions. It provides a quantitative measure regarding the outlier impacts, which can be used in a variety of scenarios, such as the evaluation of outlier detection methods, the creation of more harmful outliers, etc. The empirical results on multiple real data sets demonstrate the effectivenss of the proposed SIF metric.

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