IJCAI 2022 Papers

To best assist human designers with different styles, Machine Learning (ML) systems need to be able to adapt to them. However, there has been relatively little prior work on how and when to best adapt an ML system to a co-designer. In this paper we present threshold designer adaptation: a novel method for adapting a creative ML model to an individual designer. We evaluate our approach with a human subject study using a co-creative rhythm game design tool. We find that designers prefer our proposed method and produce higher quality content in comparison to an existing baseline.

The problem of two-sided matching markets has a wide range of real-world applications and has been extensively studied in the literature. A line of recent works have focused on the problem setting where the preferences of one-side market participants are unknown a priori and are learned by iteratively interacting with the other side of participants. All these works are based on explore-then-commit (ETC) and upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, two common strategies in multi-armed bandits (MAB). Thompson sampling (TS) is another popular approach, which attracts lots of attention due to its easier implementation and better empirical performances. In many problems, even when UCB and ETC-type algorithms have already been analyzed, researchers are still trying to study TS for its benefits. However, the convergence analysis of TS is much more challenging and remains open in many problem settings. In this paper, we provide the first regret analysis for TS in the new setting of iterative matching markets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the practical advantages of the TS-type algorithm over the ETC and UCB-type baselines.

Over the last few years, the Shapley value, a solution concept from cooperative game theory, has found numerous applications in machine learning. In this paper, we first discuss fundamental concepts of cooperative game theory and axiomatic properties of the Shapley value. Then we give an overview of the most important applications of the Shapley value in machine learning: feature selection, explainability, multi-agent reinforcement learning, ensemble pruning, and data valuation. We examine the most crucial limitations of the Shapley value and point out directions for future research.

The increasing competition in digital advertising induced a proliferation of media agencies playing the role of intermediaries between advertisers and platforms selling ad slots. When a group of competing advertisers is managed by a common agency, many forms of collusion, such as bid rigging, can be implemented by coordinating bidding strategies, dramatically increasing advertisers' value. We study the problem of finding bids and monetary transfers maximizing the utility of a group of colluders, under GSP and VCG mechanisms. First, we introduce an abstract bid optimization problem---called weighted utility problem (WUP)---, which is useful in proving our results. We show that the utilities of bidding strategies are related to the length of paths in a directed acyclic weighted graph, whose structure and weights depend on the mechanism under study. This allows us to solve WUP in polynomial time by finding a shortest path of the graph. Next, we switch to our original problem, focusing on two settings that differ for the incentives they allow for. Incentive constraints ensure that colluders do not leave the agency, and they can be enforced by implementing monetary transfers between the agency and the advertisers. In particular, we study the arbitrary transfers setting, where any kind of monetary transfer to and from the advertisers is allowed, and the more realistic limited liability setting, in which no advertiser can be paid by the agency. In the former, we cast the problem as a WUP instance and solve it by our graph-based algorithm, while, in the latter, we formulate it as a linear program with exponentially-many variables efficiently solvable by applying the ellipsoid algorithm to its dual. This requires to solve a suitable separation problem in polynomial time, which can be done by reducing it to the weighted utility problem a WUP instance.

We resolve the min-max complexity of distributed stochastic convex optimization (up to a log factor) in the intermittent communication setting, where M machines work in parallel over the course of R rounds of communication to optimize the objective, and during each round of communication, each machine may sequentially compute K stochastic gradient estimates. We present a novel lower bound with a matching upper bound that establishes an optimal algorithm.

An agent, or a coalition of agents, is blameable for an outcome if she had a strategy to prevent it. In this paper we introduce a notion of limited blameworthiness, with a constraint on the amount of sacrifice required to prevent the outcome. The main technical contribution is a sound and complete logical system for reasoning about limited blameworthiness in the strategic game setting.

In the last few years, we have been witnessing the increasing deployment of machine learning-based systems, which act as black boxes whose behaviour is hidden to end-users. As a side-effect, this contributes to increasing the need for explainable methods and tools to support the coordination between humans and ML models towards collaborative decision-making. In this paper, we demonstrate ContrXT, a novel tool that computes the differences in the classification logic of two distinct trained models, reasoning on their symbolic representation through Binary Decision Diagrams. ContrXT is available as a pip package and API.

The paper studies preferences of agents about other agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures the properties of such preferences, called "likes". The system can express nested constructions "agent likes humbled people", "agent likes those who like humbled people", etc. The main technical results are a model checking algorithm and a sound, complete, and decidable axiomatization of the proposed system.

While the stable marriage problem and its variants model a vast range of matching markets, they fail to capture complex agent relationships, such as the affiliation of applicants and employers in an interview marketplace. To model this problem, the existing literature on matching with externalities permits agents to provide complete and total rankings over matchings based off of both their own and their affiliates' matches. This complete ordering restriction is unrealistic, and further the model may have an empty core. To address this, we introduce the Dichotomous Affiliate Stable Matching (DASM) Problem, where agents' preferences indicate dichotomous acceptance or rejection of another agent in the marketplace, both for themselves and their affiliates. We also assume the agent's preferences over entire matchings are determined by a general weighted valuation function of their (and their affiliates') matches. Our results are threefold: (1) we use a human study to show that real-world matching rankings follow our assumed valuation function; (2) we prove that there always exists a stable solution by providing an efficient, easily-implementable algorithm that finds such a solution; and (3) we experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithm versus a linear-programming-based approach.

We consider the problem of fairly dividing a set of heterogeneous divisible resources among agents with different preferences. We focus on the setting where the resources correspond to the edges of a connected graph, every agent must be assigned a connected piece of this graph, and the fairness notion considered is the classical envy freeness. The problem is NP-complete, and we analyze its complexity with respect to two natural complexity measures: the number of agents and the number of edges in the graph. While the problem remains NP-hard even for instances with 2 agents, we provide a dichotomy characterizing the complexity of the problem when the number of agents is constant based on structural properties of the graph. For the latter case, we design a polynomial-time algorithm when the graph has a constant number of edges.

Due to the increasing demand in films and games, synthesizing 3D avatar animation has attracted much attention recently. In this work, we present a production-ready text/speech-driven full-body animation synthesis system. Given the text and corresponding speech, our system synthesizes face and body animations simultaneously, which are then skinned and rendered to obtain a video stream output. We adopt a learning-based approach for synthesizing facial animation and a graph-based approach to animate the body, which generates high-quality avatar animation efficiently and robustly. Our results demonstrate the generated avatar animations are realistic, diverse and highly text/speech-correlated.

Contrastive self-supervised learning has become a prominent technique in representation learning. The main step in these methods is to contrast semantically similar and dissimilar pairs of samples. However, in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the augmentation methods used in creating similar pairs with regard to contrastive learning (CL) assumptions are challenging. This is because, even simply modifying a word in the input might change the semantic meaning of the sentence, and hence, would violate the distributional hypothesis. In this review paper, we formalize the contrastive learning framework, emphasize the considerations that need to be addressed in the data transformation step, and review the state-of-the-art methods and evaluations for contrastive representation learning in NLP. Finally, we describe some challenges and potential directions for learning better text representations using contrastive methods.

The topic of generalizing machine learning models learned on a collection of source domains to unknown target domains is challenging. While many domain generalization (DG) methods have achieved promising results, they primarily rely on the source domains at train-time without manipulating the target domains at test-time. Thus, it is still possible that those methods can overfit to source domains and perform poorly on target domains. Driven by the observation that domains are strongly related to styles, we argue that reducing the gap between source and target styles can boost models’ generalizability. To solve the dilemma of having no access to the target domain during training, we introduce Test-time Fourier Style Calibration (TF-Cal) for calibrating the target domain style on the fly during testing. To access styles, we utilize Fourier transformation to decompose features into amplitude (style) features and phase (semantic) features. Furthermore, we present an effective technique to Augment Amplitude Features (AAF) to complement TF-Cal. Extensive experiments on several popular DG benchmarks and a segmentation dataset for medical images demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

We identify tessellation-filtering ReLU neural networks that, when composed with another ReLU network, keep its non-redundant tessellation unchanged or reduce it.The additional network complexity modifies the shape of the decision surface without increasing the number of linear regions. We provide a mathematical understanding of the related additional expressiveness by means of a novel measure of shape complexity by counting deviations from convexity which results in a Boolean algebraic characterization of this special class. A local representation theorem gives rise to novel approaches for pruning and decision surface analysis.

Time-travelling visualization answers how the predictions of a deep classifier are formed during the training. It visualizes in two or three dimensional space how the classification boundaries and sample embeddings are evolved during training. In this work, we propose TimeVis, a novel time-travelling visualization solution for deep classifiers. Comparing to the state-of-the-art solution DeepVisualInsight (DVI), TimeVis can significantly (1) reduce visualization errors for rendering samples’ travel across different training epochs, and (2) improve the visualization efficiency. To this end, we design a technique called temporality spatialization, which unifies the spatial relation (e.g., neighbouring samples in single epoch) and temporal relation (e.g., one identical sample in neighbouring training epochs) into one high-dimensional topological complex. Such spatio-temporal complex can be used to efficiently train one visualization model to accurately project and inverse-project any high and low dimensional data across epochs. Our extensive experiment shows that, in comparison to DVI, TimeVis not only is more accurate to preserve the visualized time-travelling semantics, but 15X faster in visualization efficiency, achieving a new state-of-the-art in time-travelling visualization.

Linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTLf) satisfiability checking is a fundamental and hard (PSPACE-complete) problem in the artificial intelligence community. We explore teaching end-to-end neural networks to check satisfiability in polynomial time. It is a challenge to characterize the syntactic and semantic features of LTLf via neural networks. To tackle this challenge, we propose LTLfNet, a recursive neural network that captures syntactic features of LTLf by recursively combining the embeddings of sub-formulae. LTLfNet models permutation invariance and sequentiality in the semantics of LTLf through different aggregation mechanisms of sub-formulae. Experimental results demonstrate that LTLfNet achieves good performance in synthetic datasets and generalizes across large-scale datasets. They also show that LTLfNet is competitive with state-of-the-art symbolic approaches such as nuXmv and CDLSC.

Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) -- parametrizations of differential equations using neural networks -- have shown tremendous promise in learning models of unknown continuous-time dynamical systems from data. However, every forward evaluation of a NODE requires numerical integration of the neural network used to capture the system dynamics, making their training prohibitively expensive. Existing works rely on off-the-shelf adaptive step-size numerical integration schemes, which often require an excessive number of evaluations of the underlying dynamics network to obtain sufficient accuracy for training. By contrast, we accelerate the evaluation and the training of NODEs by proposing a data-driven approach to their numerical integration. The proposed Taylor-Lagrange NODEs (TL-NODEs) use a fixed-order Taylor expansion for numerical integration, while also learning to estimate the expansion's approximation error. As a result, the proposed approach achieves the same accuracy as adaptive step-size schemes while employing only low-order Taylor expansions, thus greatly reducing the computational cost necessary to integrate the NODE. A suite of numerical experiments, including modeling dynamical systems, image classification, and density estimation, demonstrate that TL-NODEs can be trained more than an order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art approaches, without any loss in performance.

While the deep learning techniques promote the rapid development of the speech enhancement (SE) community, most schemes only pursue the performance in a black-box manner and lack adequate model interpretability. Inspired by Taylor's approximation theory, we propose an interpretable decoupling-style SE framework, which disentangles the complex spectrum recovery into two separate optimization problems i.e., magnitude and complex residual estimation. Specifically, serving as the 0th-order term in Taylor's series, a filter network is delicately devised to suppress the noise component only in the magnitude domain and obtain a coarse spectrum. To refine the phase distribution, we estimate the sparse complex residual, which is defined as the difference between target and coarse spectra, and measures the phase gap. In this study, we formulate the residual component as the combination of various high-order Taylor terms and propose a lightweight trainable module to replace the complicated derivative operator between adjacent terms. Finally, following Taylor's formula, we can reconstruct the target spectrum by the superimposition between 0th-order and high-order terms. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance over previous competing baselines in various evaluation metrics. The source code is available at https://github.com/Andong-Li-speech/TaylorSENet.

Taxonomies are hierarchical classifications widely exploited to facilitate downstream natural language processing tasks. The taxonomy expansion task aims to incorporate emergent concepts into the existing taxonomies. Prior works focus on modeling the local substructure of taxonomies but neglect the global structure. In this paper, we propose TaxoPrompt, a framework that learns the global structure by prompt tuning with taxonomic context. Prompt tuning leverages a template to formulate downstream tasks into masked language model form for better distributed semantic knowledge use. To further infuse global structure knowledge into language models, we enhance the prompt template by exploiting the taxonomic context constructed by a variant of the random walk algorithm. Experiments on seven public benchmarks show that our proposed TaxoPrompt is effective and efficient in automatically expanding taxonomies and achieves state-of-the-art performance.