Canada

The selection of the assumed effect size (AES) critically determines the duration of an experiment, and hence its accuracy and efficiency. Traditionally, experimenters determine AES based on domain knowledge. However, this method becomes impractical for online experimentation services managing numerous experiments, and  a more automated approach is hence of great  demand. We initiate the study of data-driven AES selection in for online experimentation services by introducing two  solutions. The first employs a three-layer Gaussian Mixture Model considering the heteroskedasticity across experiments, and it seeks to estimate the true expected effect size among  positive experiments. The second method, grounded in utility theory, aims to determine the optimal effect size by striking a balance between the experiment&#39;s cost and the precision of decision-making. Through comparisons with baseline methods using both simulated and real data, we showcase the superior performance of the proposed approaches.

AAAI 2024

Effect Size Estimation for Duration Recommendation in Online Experiments: Leveraging Hierarchical Models and Objective Utility Approaches | VIDEO

ru: decision/utility theory

ml: clustering

ml: applications

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

The selection of the assumed effect size (AES) critically determines the duration of an experiment, and hence its accuracy and efficiency. Traditionally, experimenters determine AES based on domain knowledge. However, this method becomes impractical for online experimentation services managing numerous experiments, and  a more automated approach is hence of great  demand. We initiate the study of data-driven AES selection in for online experimentation services by introducing two  solutions. The first employs a three-layer Gaussian Mixture Model considering the heteroskedasticity across experiments, and it seeks to estimate the true expected effect size among  positive experiments. The second method, grounded in utility theory, aims to determine the optimal effect size by striking a balance between the experiment's cost and the precision of decision-making. Through comparisons with baseline methods using both simulated and real data, we showcase the superior performance of the proposed approaches.

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. 

Deep learning-based surrogate models have demonstrated remarkable advantages over classical solvers in terms of speed, often achieving speedups of 10 to 1000 times over traditional partial differential equation (PDE) solvers. However, a significant challenge hindering their widespread adoption in both scientific and industrial domains is the lack of understanding about their prediction uncertainties, particularly in scenarios that involve critical decision making. To address this limitation, we propose a method that integrates efficient and precise uncertainty quantification into a deep learning-based surrogate model. Our method, termed Latent Evolution of PDEs with Uncertainty Quantification (LE-PDE-UQ), endows deep learning-based surrogate models with robust and efficient uncertainty quantification capabilities for both forward and inverse problems. LE-PDE-UQ leverages latent vectors within a latent space to evolve both the system's state and its corresponding uncertainty estimation. The latent vectors are decoded to provide predictions for the system's state as well as estimates of its uncertainty. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the accurate uncertainty quantification performance of our approach, surpassing that of strong baselines including deep ensembles, Bayesian neural network layers, and dropout. Our method excels at propagating uncertainty over extended auto-regressive rollouts, making it suitable for scenarios involving long-term predictions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/le-pde-uq.

Uncertainty Quantification for Forward and Inverse Problems of PDEs via Latent Global Evolution

This work tackles the important task of understanding out-of-distribution behavior in two prominent types of generative models, i.e., GANs and Diffusion models. Understanding this behavior is crucial in understanding their broader utility and risks as these systems are increasingly deployed in our daily lives. Our first contribution is demonstrating that diffusion spaces outperform GANs' latent spaces in inverting high-quality OOD images. We also provide a theoretical analysis attributing this to the lack of prior holes in diffusion spaces. Our second significant contribution is to provide a theoretical hypothesis that diffusion spaces can be projected onto a bounded hypersphere, enabling image manipulation through geodesic traversal between inverted images. Our analysis shows that different geodesics share common attributes for the same manipulation, which we leverage to perform various image manipulations. We conduct thorough empirical evaluations to support and validate our claims. Finally, our third and final contribution introduces a novel approach to the few-shot sampling for out-of-distribution data by inverting a few images to sample from the cluster formed by the inverted latents. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results for the few-shot generation task in terms of image quality. The effectiveness of the generated samples is further validated when used to augment data for underrepresented classes in a classification task, leading to improved performance. Our research underscores the promise of diffusion spaces in out-of-distribution imaging and offers avenues for further exploration.

Understanding the Generalization of Pretrained Diffusion Models on Out-of-Distribution Data

The pretrain-finetune paradigm has achieved great success in NLP and 2D image fields because of the high-quality representation ability and transferability of their pretrained models. However, pretraining such a strong model is difficult in the 3D point cloud field due to the limited amount of point cloud sequences. This paper introduces \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{P}oint \textbf{C}loud \textbf{L}earning (EPCL), an effective and efficient point cloud learner for directly training high-quality point cloud models with a frozen CLIP transformer. Our EPCL connects the 2D and 3D modalities by semantically aligning the image features and point cloud features without paired 2D-3D data.  Specifically, the input point cloud is divided into a series of local patches, which are converted to token embeddings by the designed point cloud tokenizer. These token embeddings are concatenated with a task token and fed into the frozen CLIP transformer to learn point cloud representation. The intuition is that the proposed point cloud tokenizer projects the input point cloud into a unified token space that is similar to the 2D images.  Comprehensive experiments on 3D detection, semantic segmentation, classification and few-shot learning demonstrate that the CLIP transformer can serve as an efficient point cloud encoder and our method achieves promising performance on both indoor and outdoor benchmarks. In particular, performance gains brought by our EPCL are $\textbf{19.7}$ AP$_{50}$ on ScanNet V2 detection, $\textbf{4.4}$ mIoU on S3DIS segmentation and $\textbf{1.2}$ mIoU on SemanticKITTI segmentation compared to contemporary pretrained models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/XiaoshuiHuang/EPCL}.

Frozen CLIP Transformer Is an Efficient Point Cloud Encoder

Sketch-based terrain generation seeks to create realistic landscapes for virtual environments in various applications such as computer games, animation and virtual reality. Recently, deep learning based terrain generation has emerged, notably the ones based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods often struggle to fulfill the requirements of flexible user control and maintain generative diversity for realistic terrain. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, namely terrain diffusion network (TDN), which actively incorporates user guidance for enhanced controllability, taking into account terrain features like rivers, ridges, basins, and peaks. Instead of adhering to a conventional monolithic denoising process, which often compromises the fidelity of terrain details or the alignment with user control, a multi-level denoising scheme is proposed to generate more realistic terrains by taking into account fine-grained details, particularly those related to climatic patterns influenced by erosion and tectonic activities. Specifically, three terrain synthesisers are designed for structural, intermediate, and fine-grained level denoising purposes, which allow each synthesiser concentrate on a distinct terrain aspect. Moreover, to maximise the efficiency of our TDN, we further introduce terrain and sketch latent spaces for the synthesizers with pre-trained terrain autoencoders. Comprehensive experiments on a new dataset constructed from NASA Topology Images clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/TDNResearch/TDN.

Terrain Diffusion Network: Climatic-Aware Terrain Generation with Geological Sketch Guidance

Numerous methods are proposed for the Traffic Signal Control (TSC) tasks aiming to provide efficient transportation and mitigate congestion waste. In recent, promising results have been attained by Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods through trial and error in simulators, bringing confidence in solving cities' congestion headaches. However, there still exist performance gaps when simulator-trained policies are deployed to the real world. This issue is mainly introduced by the system dynamic difference between the training simulator and the real-world environments. The Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on mass knowledge and proved to be equipped with astonishing inference abilities.
In this work, we leverage LLMs to understand and profile the system dynamics by a prompt-based grounded action transformation. Accepting the cloze prompt template, then filling in the answer based on accessible context, the pre-trained LLM's inference ability is exploited and applied to understand how weather conditions, traffic states, and road types influence traffic dynamics, being aware of this, the policies' action is taken and grounded based on realistic dynamics, thus help the agent learn a more realistic policy. We conduct experiments using DQN to show the effectiveness of the proposed PromptGAT's ability in mitigating the performance gap from simulation to reality (sim-to-real).

Prompt to Transfer: Sim-to-Real Transfer for Traffic Signal Control with Prompt Learning

Training deep learning models and performing hyperparameter tuning can be computationally demanding and time-consuming. Meanwhile, traditional machine learning methods like gradient-boosting algorithms remain the preferred choice for most tabular data applications, while neural network alternatives require extensive hyperparameter tuning or work only in toy datasets under limited settings. In this paper, we introduce HyperFast, a meta-trained hypernetwork designed for instant classification of tabular data in a single forward pass. HyperFast generates a task-specific neural network tailored to an unseen dataset that can be directly used for classification inference, removing the need for training a model. We report extensive experiments with OpenML and genomic data, comparing HyperFast to competing tabular data neural networks, traditional ML methods, AutoML systems, and boosting machines. HyperFast shows highly competitive results, while being significantly faster. Additionally, our approach demonstrates robust adaptability across a variety of classification tasks with little to no fine-tuning, positioning HyperFast as a strong solution for numerous applications and rapid model deployment. HyperFast introduces a promising paradigm for fast classification, with the potential to substantially decrease the computational burden of deep learning. Our code, which offers a scikit-learn-like interface, along with the trained HyperFast model, can be found at https://github.com/AI-sandbox/HyperFast.

HyperFast: Instant Classification for Tabular Data

To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's interaction with the environment. We study the full class of online manipulation attacks, which include (i) state attacks, (ii) observation attacks (which are a generalization of perceived-state attacks), (iii) action attacks, and (iv) reward attacks. We show the attacker's problem of designing a stealthy attack that maximizes its own expected reward, which often corresponds to minimizing the victim's value, is captured by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that we call a meta-MDP since it is not the true environment but a higher level environment induced by the attacked interaction. We show that the attacker can derive optimal attacks by planning in polynomial time or learning with polynomial sample complexity using standard RL techniques. We argue that the optimal defense policy for the victim can be computed as the solution to a stochastic Stackelberg game, which can be further simplified into a partially-observable turn-based stochastic game (POTBSG). Neither the attacker nor the victim would benefit from deviating from their respective optimal policies, thus such solutions are truly robust. Although the defense problem is NP-hard, we show that optimal Markovian defenses can be computed (learned) in polynomial time (sample complexity) in many scenarios.

Optimal Attack and Defense for Reinforcement Learning

A 360-degree (omni-directional) image provides an all-encompassing spherical view of a scene. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in synthesising 360-degree images from conventional narrow field of view (NFoV) images captured by digital cameras and smartphones, for providing immersive experiences in various scenarios such as virtual reality. Yet, existing methods typically fall short in synthesizing intricate visual details or ensure the generated images align consistently with user-provided prompts. In this study, autoregressive omni-aware generative network (AOG-Net) is proposed for 360-degree image generation by outpainting an incomplete 360-degree image progressively with NFoV and text guidances joinly or individually. This autoregressive scheme not only allows for deriving finer-grained and text-consistent patterns by dynamically generating and adjusting the process but also offers users greater flexibility to edit their conditions throughout the generation process. A global-local conditioning mechanism is devised to comprehensively formulate the outpainting guidance in each autoregressive step. Text guidances, omni-visual cues, NFoV inputs and omni-geometry are encoded and further formulated with cross-attention based transformers into a global stream and a local stream into a conditioned generative backbone model. As AOG-Net is compatible to leverage large-scale models for the conditional encoder and the generative prior, it enables the generation to use extensive open-vocabulary text guidances. Comprehensive experiments on two commonly used 360-degree image datasets for both indoor and outdoor settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuqiangLu/AOG-NET-360.

Autoregressive Omni-Aware Outpainting for Open-Vocabulary 360-Degree Image Generation | VIDEO

Removing shadows requires an understanding of both lighting conditions and object textures in a scene. Existing methods typically learn pixel-level color mappings between
shadow and non-shadow images, in which the joint modeling of lighting and object textures is implicit and inadequate. We observe that in a shadow region, the degradation degree of object textures depends on the local illumination, while simply enhancing the local illumination cannot fully recover the attenuated textures. Based on this observation, we propose to condition the restoration of attenuated textures on the corrected local lighting in the shadow region. Specifically, We first design a shadow-aware decomposition network to estimate the illumination and reflectance layers of shadow regions explicitly. We then propose a novel bilateral correction network to recast the lighting of shadow regions in the illumination layer via a novel local lighting correction module, and to restore the textures conditioned on the corrected illumination layer via a novel illumination-guided texture restoration module. We further annotate pixel-wise shadow masks for the public SRD dataset, which originally contains only image pairs. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art shadow removal methods.  Project page in: yuhaoliu7456.github.io/RRL-Net.

Recasting Regional Lighting for Shadow Removal

We consider a federated learning (FL) system consisting of multiple clients and a server, where the clients aim to collaboratively learn a common decision model from their distributed data. Unlike the conventional FL framework that assumes the client's data is static, we consider scenarios where the clients' data distributions may be reshaped by the deployed decision model. In this work, we leverage the idea of distribution shift mappings in performative prediction to formalize this model-dependent data distribution shift and propose a performative FL framework. 
We first introduce necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique performative stable solution  and characterize its distance to the performative optimal solution. Then we propose the performative FedAvg algorithm and show that it converges to the performative stable solution at a rate of  O(1/T) under both full and partial participation schemes.
In particular, we use novel proof techniques and show how the clients' heterogeneity influences the convergence. Numerical results validate our analysis and provide valuable insights into real-world applications.

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