Canada

This research focuses on improving the robustness of machine learning systems to natural variations and distribution shifts. A design trade space is presented, and various methods are compared, including adversarial training, data augmentation techniques, and novel approaches inspired by model-based robust optimization formulations.

AAAI 2024

Towards Robustness to Natural Variations and Distribution Shift (Student Abstract)

distribution-shift

generative ai

ai safety

robustness

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

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/)

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. 

Generative Flow Networks, known as GFlowNets, have been introduced in recent times, presenting an exciting possibility for neural networks to model distributions across various data structures. In this paper, we broaden their applicability to encompass scenarios where the data structures are optimal solutions of a combinatorial problem. Concretely, we propose the use of GFlowNets to learn the distribution of optimal solutions for kidney exchange problems (KEPs), a generalized form of matching problems involving cycles.

Learning to Build Solutions in Stochastic Matching Problems Using Flows (Student Abstract)

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) challenge reinforcement learning agents due to incomplete knowledge of the environment. Even assuming monotonicity in uncertainty, it is difficult for an agent to know how and when to stop exploring for a given task. In this abstract, we discuss how to use hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and AI Planning (AIP) to improve exploration when the agent knows possible valuations of unknown predicates and how to discover them. By encoding the uncertainty in an abstract planning model, the agent can derive a high-level plan which is then used to decompose the overall POMDP into a tree of semi-POMDPs for training. We evaluate our agent's performance on the MiniGrid domain and show how guided exploration may improve agent performance.

Partially Observable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with AI Planning (Student Abstract)

Topological and node noise filtration are typically considered separately. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are commonly used for node noise filtration, as they offer high efficiency and low exploitation costs. This paper explores the solution of joint node and topological noise filtration through the use of graph neural networks. Since treating a 3D mesh as a graph is challenging, an indicator function grid representation is employed as input for GNNs to perform the joint filtering. The resulting machine learning model is inspired by point cloud to mesh reconstruction algorithms and demonstrates low computational requirements during inference, producing successful results for smooth, watertight 3D models. The demo and code is available on Hugging Face.

Topological and Node Noise Filtering on 3D Meshes Using Graph Neural Networks (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

The Ramsey problem R(3,8) asks for the smallest n such that every red/blue coloring of the complete graph on n vertices must contain either a blue triangle or a red 8-clique. We provide the first certifiable proof that R(3,8) = 28, automatically generated by a combination of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver and a computer algebra system (CAS). This SAT+CAS combination is significantly faster than a SAT-only approach. While the R(3,8) problem was first computationally solved by McKay and Min in 1992, it was not a verifiable proof. The SAT+CAS method that we use for our proof is very general and can be applied to a wide variety of combinatorial problems.

A SAT + Computer Algebra System Verification of the Ramsey Problem R(3, 8) (Student Abstract)

We develop a method of adapting the AlphaZero model to General Game Playing (GGP) that focuses on faster model generation and requires less knowledge to be extracted from the game rules. The dataset generation uses MCTS playing instead of self-play; only the value network is used, and attention layers replace the convolutional ones. This allows us to abandon any assumptions about the action space and board topology. We implement the method within the Regular Boardgames GGP system and show that we can build models outperforming the UCT baseline for most games efficiently.

Fast and Knowledge-Free Deep Learning for General Game Playing (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

On 15 January 2022, noted tennis player Novak Djokovic was deported from Australia due to his unvaccinated status for the COVID-19 vaccine. This paper presents a stance classifier and evaluates public reaction to this episode and the impact of this behavior on social media discourse on YouTube. We observed a significant spike of individuals who supported and opposed his behavior at the time of the episode. Supporters outnumbered those who opposed this behavior by over 4x. Our study reports a disturbing trend that following every major Djokovic win, even now, vaccine skeptics often conflate his tennis success as a fitting reply to vaccine mandates.

Novax or Novak? Estimating Social Media Stance towards Celebrity Vaccine Hesitancy (Student Abstract)

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks. We substitute key elements of the attention mechanism in the Transformer with simple feed-forward networks, trained using the original components via knowledge distillation. Our experiments, conducted on the IWSLT2017 dataset, reveal the capacity of these ”attentionless Transformers” to rival the performance of the original architecture. Through rigorous ablation studies, and experimenting with various replacement network types and sizes, we offer insights that support the viability of our approach. This not only sheds light on the adaptability of shallow feed-forward
networks in emulating attention mechanisms but also underscores their potential to streamline complex architectures for sequence-to-sequence tasks.

Rethinking Attention: Exploring Shallow Feed-Forward Neural Networks as an Alternative to Attention Layers in Transformers (Student Abstract)

Can advanced AI-driven technologies transform the traditionally arduous educational process in medicine? This study takes a deep dive into how the publicly available OpenAI ChatGPT-3.5 performs in answering board-style questions designed for physicians training to become pathologists. Correctly answering 75% of 543 questions using an engaging and fast-paced format was an impressive performance. It underscores the potential as well as improvement opportunities of using interactive AI in future medical training.

Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Medical Education (Student Abstract)

This work proposes and analyzes IncepSeqNet which is a new model combining the Inception Module with the innovative Multi-Shape Augmentation technique. IncepSeqNet excels in feature extraction from sequence signal data consisting of a number of complex numbers to achieve superior classification accuracy across various SNR(Signal-to-Noise Ratio) environments. Experimental results demonstrate IncepSeqNet’s outperformance of existing models, particularly at low SNR levels. Furthermore, we have confirmed its applicability in practical 5G systems by using real-world signal data.

IncepSeqNet: Advancing Signal Classification with Multi-Shape Augmentation (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

Time-series and text data are prevalent in healthcare and frequently co-exist, yet they are typically modeled in isolation. Even studies that jointly model time-series and text, do so by converting time-series to images or graphs. We hypothesize that explicitly modeling time-series jointly with text can improve tasks such as summarization and question answering for time-series data, which have received little attention so far. To address this gap, we introduce JoLT to jointly learn desired representations from pre-trained time-series and text models. JoLT utilizes a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to align the time-series and text representations. Our experiments on a large real-world electrocardiography dataset for medical time-series summarization show that JoLT outperforms state-of-the-art image captioning approaches.

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